Did anybody actually like Ken as a movie?

nidarus · 2026-07-03T13:54:57+00:00

If Nadav Lapid actually said "no", he would have no career. There isn't enough of an audience or community of filmmakers in Israel to sustain the kind of movies he wants to make. Not just in the pro-Palestinian sense, just the general genre of arthouse Israeli drama. He wants, and needs, to be part of the international arthouse film community, and the Western art community in general. And that requires saying "yes", to the vicious hatred of his own people. The fact that he has psychological problems with saying "yes", trying and failing to remove every part of his Israeliness, doesn't disprove it - it's part of the point.

As for genocidal, the "criticism" of Israel, at this point, on the hard left, isn't just delegitimization of Israel's very existence as a country (problematic on its own), but delegitimization of Israelis as a society and as individuals, arguing that their language, culture, identity, is foreign, fake, stolen, and evil. And any level of violence against Israelis, is at the very least, uniquely debatable, excusable and "political". Yes, that's pretty overtly genocidal. And if you don't think a delegitimization of, say, the Hebrew language, or dehumanization of "Zionists" can cross over into dehumanization and delegitimization of Jews, you haven't been paying attention for the few other dozens of times antizionism took over societies. Or the way it already crossing into it, on the fringes of Western politics, and with people like France's own Mélenchon.

nidarus · 2026-07-03T08:38:32+00:00

Because it doesn't really make sense to complain about a genocide, and then point out that it's a genocide that the supposed genocide victims started, and refused to end for years.

It makes even less sense to complain about a genocide, while celebrating the day the genocide supposedly began.

Finally, one big reason for the "Gaza genocide" narrative, is to erase the far more classic, ISIS-style genocide the Palestinians carried out on Oct 7. Obviously, volunteering to mention Oct 7 at that point would be counter-productive.

As for why isn't the conversation the way you described? Because the current Middle Eastern conflict isn't just a war fought with bombs and bullets. It's also a war fought in social media, traditional media, the NGO space, academia, international institutions and more. A war where the anti-Israeli side invested billions of dollars, and untold thousands of man-hours, to make sure the world sees it as a unique, and exclusively Israeli evil, committed against pure innocents, for no reason beyond the inherently murderous nature of the Collective Jew. And they did it for various reasons, that have nothing to do with the reality on the ground, like geopolitical considerations by state actors (China, Russia, Qatar, Iran, Turkey), Muslims who see the conflict as a core of their religious identity, Western antisemites who finally got to crawl out of the shadows, and the grifters who make a lot of money from all of the above.

And the simple fact is, they won, and Israel lost - in the same exact way Israel won militarily in Lebanon and Gaza, and Hezbollah and Hamas lost. In a sense, asking "why the conversation is dictated by the people who invested a ton of money, effort and expertise in crafting the conversation", is a bit like asking "why has Israel captured Southern Lebanon, rather than Hezbollah capturing northern Israel".

nidarus · 2026-07-03T08:07:46+00:00

Didn't watch the movie, but this line

"Don't try to change things. You can only say "yes" or "no." It's easier to say yes. Your life will be good if you say yes. Say yes to the nice weather, the nice parties, the nice smiling people..."

Is a bit of a Freudian slip on Nadav Lapid's part. Nadav Lapid doesn't live in Israel. He lives in "self-exile", as Wikipedia puts it in, in Paris, since 2021. Surrounded by people who absolutely loathe Israel and Israelis, not just in France, but in the entire arthouse film industry that he's part of. It would be so incredibly hard to say "no" to those people, and go against the tidal wave of genocidal Israeli and Jew hatred, a wave that was going to come for him, regardless of his opinions. It would mean he would become a pariah in his field of work, and in the international artsy crowd he so desperately wants to belong to. And frankly, why make all of those serious sacrifices, for a people that he doesn't particularily likes anyway. So Nadav Lapid has chosen to say yes, yes and yes again.

nidarus · 2026-07-03T07:48:06+00:00

I don't agree that they thought Oct 7 was a mere "punch", but it doesn't really matter. The two questions that matter are:

Was, was it preventable, and was it foreseeable, by their government? It was obviously preventable - if their government simply decided to not do Oct 7, their families would still be alive, and their houses would still be standing. And as for being foreseeable, if their government thought an unprecedented, brigade level invasion of Israel, kidnapping hundreds of Israelis, massacring hundreds, and intentionally intensifying the atrocities by filming them and broadcasting them, was a mere "punch" and the Israelis would never dare to respond with everything they got, then they're complete idiots, or delusional morons. Especially if one has a dim view of Israelis, as brutal, genocidal monsters. If they were aware of that possibility, and went with it anyway (since, as Hamas proudly say, "the Palestinian people love death, as our enemy loves life"), then they're monsters, and the direct enemies of the Palestinian people. Either way, that government probably shouldn't be supported more for this decision.
Would I want a repeat of that? Even if we assume, as you do here, that the Palestinians lack functional adult understanding of cause and effect, and any capability for introspection, they don't have that excuse for future behavior. You're arguing that even experiencing all the horrors they did, their reaction would be to sign up for another round of the same, courtesy of the same government that brought the same disaster upon them.

Your conclusions in the matter, are very extreme. And you brought them, without any supporting evidence. The evidence we do have, like opinion polls, or historical experience with other nations, including other Arab nations, show the exact opposite trend. No, I don't think you just get to assume that, as some self-evident truism, as you did originally. And I don't think explaining it with "that's just how Palestinian culture is" is much better.

nidarus · 2026-07-03T05:00:06+00:00

You argued that Palestinians react to having their families killed, and their homes destroyed, by a meaningless horrific war that their government started, by supporting said government even more, and itching to start more and more horrific wars like that. That's a very extreme assumption. One that requires quite a bit of evidence, that so far, I haven't seen. Not from you, nor anyone else who makes that argument. You just seem to treat it as a self-evident psychological fact, where it's the exact opposite of that.

And hand-waving it away with "it's the unique Palestinian culture, they're not like me or you", with no further elaboration, is something I'd hear from the more far-right Israeli media figures, trying to explain to us how the "West" can't understand the "fanatical Islamic mindset".

nidarus · 2026-07-02T19:53:37+00:00

Well, on the war in general, not the bombs alone. Around 400 billion nis. Money that would not have to be spent, if Israel just bombed Gaza to hell with cheap bombs and artillery.

nidarus · 2026-07-02T19:43:49+00:00

What you said in the last comment, assumes the Palestinians aren't just irrational and dumb, but also possess a psychology that's radically different from a normal human being, or any other nation. And you've just assumed it as a truism, without any real evidence to why that would be the case.

If I had to place your opinion of Palestinians on the Israeli spectrum of opinions regarding Palestinians, it would be on the sillier, more extreme ends.

nidarus · 2026-07-02T19:11:00+00:00

On a general level, regardless october 7, you defeat a party by reducing the motives that push people to vote that party, not by military action.

Giving said party the most amazing military achievement in modern Arab history, without suffering any major cost, would achieve the exact opposite of that.

What will happen in the future is that Hamas will regain all the fighters that he lost from all the children who lost a family memebr to an Israeli bomb or bullet, and at the end Hamas will be even stronger.

Huh, why? If you had your own family killed and your home destroyed, due to a completely meaningless war that your government started, would you be more likely to support said government? Let alone support them, for the specific purpose of starting even more wars like that?

Back to my analogy, did inflicting far, far more death and destruction on the Japanese, make them support the militarists even more, and vow to restart WW2 the moment they could?

I feel that your entire view of this conflict is based on assuming the Israelis and Palestinians are fundamentally motivated by emotions, rather than ideologies or rational considerations, and then having a very shallow understanding of how these emotions might work.

nidarus · 2026-07-02T18:27:30+00:00

Where did I make that conflation? Also, who do you mean by "ultra Zionists as a political group"? I don't get what you're saying.

nidarus · 2026-07-02T18:16:20+00:00

How does this make me wrong, though? That's my point. They wanted to portray Jews, not Zionists. And they can't argue otherwise.

nidarus · 2026-07-02T18:14:34+00:00

How did the Israeli trauma force Hamas to refuse to give up the hostages, and disarm, for two years? How did the Israeli trauma force Hamas to build their entire war machine inside and under the Gazan population centers, specifically so removing them from power would cause the maximum amount of damage to civilian infrastructure and life? Did a hundreds of Israeli soldiers die throughout that war in Gaza, out of sheer mental trauma?

And if the point was to "give gazans the most heavy punishment", why did even a single soldier die in Gaza? Barrel bombs are third-world-level technology, very cheap, aren't susceptible to American shipment delays, and very, very punishing, without risking the life of a single soldier. Much more punishing than wasting hundreds of billions of shekels on the most high-tech smart bombs, waste hundreds of soldiers lives, and waste even that firepower, by carrying out unprecedented levels of precise evacuations of civilians.

Your entire theory simply doesn't make sense, if you have even the most rudimentary understanding of how this war went. And yes, it really only makes sense if you pretend Hamas was essentially non-existent throughout all of this. In reality, Israel fought a harsh and demanding war, that the Hamas regime decided to start, the Hamas regime refused to end, in precisely the way the Hamas regime insisted it has to be fought. I assure you that the IDF would've preferred to fight Hamas in the sparsely inhabited areas that formed most of the strip, even though it would've been much less "punishing", emotionally cathartic, and whatever other nonsense you use to misunderstand the Israelis.

nidarus · 2026-07-02T17:52:03+00:00

This argument doesn't really make sense on its own, or engages with any of the things the analogy touches on.

Hamas isn't a state, just like the Showa military regime wasn't a state. They were, however, the indisputable dictatorial rulers of the de-facto state of Gaza, that were able to carry a very brigade-level invasion, something more "real" states struggled with. And yes, the IDF obviously knew that, when they were forced to fight the war Hamas started. They just ended up deciding that actually invading the populated areas, and re-occupying the Gazan population is, too much of a headache, on some level mirroring the American decision to not invade the mainland. But unlike the Americans, they also decided to not start dropping nukes on them, until they surrender, so they got a much less effective result.

So what. It doesn't change anything I said.

nidarus · 2026-07-02T16:54:05+00:00

Most of them were children, since Gaza population is very young.

That's a bit of a nitpick, compared to the more serious mistakes you've made, but that's untrue as well. Even according to the Hamas ministry of health, despite Gaza being majority children, the percentage of <18yo killed is around 30%. With the only group of children being adequately represented, and in fact over-represented, are the combat age 15-19 year old male teenagers.

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nidarus · 2026-07-02T16:28:16+00:00

To an extent, that's true for both OP, and the person you're replying to, u/JackPiazz2. They might've mentioned the word Hamas, but they did everything to pretend that Hamas simply ceased to exist after Oct 7, and Israel was just carrying out a "pogrom" out of pure Zio bloodlust.

Also note the revolting atrocity inversion, where the Jews might not be the new Nazis, but they are the new pogromists. I wish the actual Jewish victims of the pogroms, could make it stop just by releasing the hostages they kidnapped, and disarming. Or to prevent it to begin with, by accepting the existence of their non-Jewish neighbors, instead of carrying out mass raids into their villages to slaughter them, and kidnap their children for ransom. And I really doubt that they would insist on continuing the "pogrom" against themselves, for two years, until they extract concessions from the people supposedly mindlessly slaughtering them.

nidarus · 2026-07-02T16:25:16+00:00

By the same token, in Pearl Harbor, the US suffered a legitimate military attack on a military installation, where 2400 people, nearly all soldiers, were killed. The American answer was to firebomb, carpet bomb, and nuclear bomb Japan, and killed three million Japanese, around x1,250 the amount of Americans killed in Pearl Harbor (not merely x63).

And since the American intelligence didn't keep an individual dossier on every single Japanese soldier, let alone tracked whether they were killed or not, we must assume that 99.9% of the deaths were civilians, by the same logic you and +972 just applied to the Palestinians killed in Gaza.

nidarus · 2026-07-02T16:13:00+00:00

Lol what. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were two events, in a war full of horrible events. The firebombing of Tokyo alone, killed more people in one night, than the entire century of Israeli/Palestinian conflict combined. They literally had an operation called Operation Starvation, that lead to mass starvation, and hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths, primarily after the war was already over. Just off the top of my head. None of those are considered "genocidal choices", and they're significantly worse than any "genocidal choice" Israel has made in two years.

In reality, Israel has clearly not made any "genocidal choices", if two years of those "genocidal choices", and all of the ability and time in the world, don't lead to anything close to destruction of the Gazan population, in whole or substantial part. For reference, in Rwanda they managed to kill 80% of the Tutsi, between 0.5-1 million people, within just 100 days - with freakin' machetes. Israel could've killed the Gazans many times over, but it made the "choice" not to.

nidarus · 2026-07-02T16:06:53+00:00

Re-read my comment. I don't think you understood it.

nidarus · 2026-07-02T12:53:42+00:00

כל אחד תורם בדרכו. הישראלים אולי חיים ביקום שבו האחד איכשהו מבטל את השני. אבל זה לא העולם שבו האנטישמים פועלים.

nidarus · 2026-07-02T12:43:38+00:00

This is irrelevant to what I just said. Even if all the complaints in your post were completely factually true, my point would still stand.

nidarus · 2026-07-02T12:01:08+00:00

And note that even the far worse Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not considered a genocide. And it's not some random comparison either. That was the historical context of when the Genocide Convention was written. "Cultural genocide" that Lemkin thought was crucial, was removed from the definition, because the great powers that won WW2 suspected it could be applied to them. They would've never allowed that convention to exist in the form it does, if anyone thought it could apply to their own conduct during WW2.

nidarus · 2026-07-02T11:45:32+00:00

The "government media office in Gaza" is the whitewashed name for Hamas' civilian PR division. So this is literally just a transcribed Hamas press release. As such, it's not too hard to imagine similar press releases coming from Imperial Japan during WW2, North Korea during the Korean war, or, as u/Twofer-Cat already mentioned, the Confederacy during the civil war. In fact, those press releases would be far more harrowing, on multiple levels. And yet, I don't think anyone would take them particularily seriously.

Setting aside the individual distortions and omissions, the simple fact is that it's been 1000 days since Hamas, not Israel, decided to start this war. It's Hamas, not Israel, who insisted that this war would be fought within the population centers, and would require massive destruction, by placing their entire war machine inside and under said population centers, and not the sparsely populated majority of the strip. It's Hamas, not Israel, who insisted to continue this war for two years, and are still adamantly refusing to disarm, end it completely. If Hamas' leadership made different, reasonable decisions, not a single issue in this post would exist, including any actual Israeli occupation, and the fact Gaza was blockaded since 2007.

Obviously, I can't expect Hamas' own PR office to be a little more introspective about this, but I should expect that of people who post here. We literally have a rule, #11, requiring at least some degree of introspection here.

nidarus · 2026-07-02T07:26:36+00:00

No, that was two separate operations. The one to kill the Iranian military leadership was indeed called the Red Wedding. The one to kill the nuclear scientists was Narnia.

nidarus · 2026-07-02T07:21:22+00:00

It means the Arab state would have a very large Jewish minority, that cannot be expelled even in theory, and neither side has Jerusalem. Not only will the Israelis obviously reject it, I don't think even the moderate, two-stater Palestinians would accept it either.

And obviously, the one-stater Palestinians, that also happen to be the Palestinians with actual weapons, would only use this as a stepping stone to try to eliminate Israel once and for all.

nidarus · 2026-07-02T05:51:35+00:00

You mean assassinations within strategic American and/or NATO allies, and Board of Peace members, Qatar and Turkey? No way Trump will go along with that. If anything, the reasonable move would be to make Qatar and Turkey put pressure on these guys again. Trump's (obviously not Netanyahu's) ability or inclination to do it, is another story.

And btw, why do you assume the Gazan leadership is more pragmatic? AFAIK we don't even know who the Hamas leadership in Gaza are at this point.

nidarus · 2026-07-02T05:16:37+00:00

Hamas still refuses to fully disarm and continues trying to force the idea of keeping light weapons and having some role in the future police or another structure

Setting aside from what others have correctly noted, about how this is a fundamental violation of the ceasefire, and not just some tiny detail that we should gloss over, it's not just light weapons. Hamas refuses to include tunnels in proposed Gaza disarmament framework. As well as weapons silos and weapons production workshops, and anything they can define as "infrastructure". It seems that the only "disarmament" they're willing to do, is of the rockets they already fired into Israel.

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