Review: Incitement Is a Potent J’accuse Directed at Israel’s Right Wing

Benjamin Netanyahu seems to be in the midst of a socio-cultural reckoning. Facing serious corruption charges and unable to form a government after several successive elections, the Israeli prime minister also appears as a nefarious key figure in the historical drama Incitement, which won best picture at the Ophir Awards (the “Israeli Oscars”) last year. Yaron Zilberman’s film concerns the Israeli right-wing furor of the ’90s—stoked by far-right rabbis, Netanyahu’s Likud party, and the future prime minister—which would culminate with the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by Israeli nationalist Yigal Amir, on November 4, 1995, and with Netanyahu’s first election to the post the next year.

Incitement is a volley directed at Israel’s still-dominant right wing, its stark thesis—that the right provoked a destabilizing political assassination—announced in its very title. Rabin and Netanyahu, along with other figures from the Rabin era like President Shimon Peres, appear in archival footage, while Amir, the narrative’s point-of-view character, is played by an actor (Yehuda Nahari Halevi), as are those in his family and social circle, who fill out the film’s main cast. Throughout, television footage from the era is interspersed with the scripted drama, which Zilberman shot in a claustrophobic 4:3 aspect ratio, effectively softening the seams between the documentary footage that he deploys and the performances of his actors.

Amir also witnesses many of the events that push him toward violence—from the Oslo Accords to the mass shooting of Muslims in Hebron and the retaliatory bus bombings in Tel Aviv—through his family’s cathode-ray TV set. There’s an implicit observation here, considering that the world of the film has the same dimensions as the Amir family’s TV, regarding the extent to which life is lived within the specific margins set by media. It’s perhaps the film’s most nuanced touch, a device that distinguishes it from other tales of radicalization.

Though whether Incitement actually depicts radicalization per se is debatable. When we meet Amir in the opening scene, he’s already a radical religious zealot, stopping traffic on a Tel Aviv freeway as part of a protest against the peace lately negotiated with PLO leader Yasser Arafat. As it will throughout the film, Zilberman’s handheld camera follows Amir tightly from behind as he’s rounded up by police and thrust against the hood of a cop car. He successfully begs his way out of arrest, claiming that he’s a law student engaged to be married. The cop tells him to get lost and stick to studying law, but at school Amir gravitates away from class and toward speeches by fascistic rabbis who reinforce his worldview; when Baruch Goldstein murders 29 Muslim worshippers in a mass shooting February of 1994, he feels encouraged to embrace Goldstein as a hero, and begins hatching a plan to assassinate Raobin.

Amir’s engagement, we quickly learn, is aspirational: He’s courting Nava (Daniella Kertesz), the daughter of a privileged Ashkenazi settler family. Amir comes from a Sephardic family with roots in Yemen, and his mother, Geula (Anat Ravnitzki), repeatedly predicts that Nava’s parents will never permit her to marry a Sephardim, though ultimately it appears to be more Amir’s rabid anti-Rabinism than his ethnic identity that leads Nava to reject his advances. Class- and ethnicity-based prejudices within Israel’s Jewish communities thus play a role in his resentment, which reaches full blossom early in the film, with Amir devising group religious retreats as a means of recruitment for a terrorist organization he plans to found.

From there, Amir gets stuck—as does the film, to an extent. In several scenes, Amir trots out the same rationalization for the planned assassination: that Rabin is both an “informer” and a “pursuer,” accusations founded on obscure Torah passages that, in Amir’s reading, mandate Rabin’s death. The screenplay, co-written by Zilberman and Ron Leshem and Yair Hizmi, tends to overexplain these concepts in its demonstration of the circular, self-justifying logic with which Amir convinces himself it is permitted to killing a fellow Jew: an explicit religious prohibition. The inevitable act of the murder itself appears to be set in place pretty early in Incitement, as does the psychology of the killer, who spends so much of the film clenching his jaw at the supposed weakness of Rabin and the center-left. Although it follows Rabin’s killer from the inception of his plan to murder Israel’s elected leader to its realization, Incitement tracks more as a political statement than as a political thriller, a j’accuse directed at the Likud party and their religious allies, who created an environment that enables killers.

Admirably, Incitement focuses on the cyclical nature of violence in this decades-old conflict, countering the demonization of Arabs and secular Jews but approaching Yigal Amir with a degree of empathy. The film lacks any significant Arab voice, but it articulates forcefully that extremists aren’t, by any stretch of the imagination, exclusively Muslim. Perhaps the most valuable thing about the film for a Western audience is its reminder that Israel is no monolithlic Jewish community, but instead is a complex, diverse, and often tumultuous society—that it has a too-often-overlooked history of internecine violence and political strife.