In ‘Yes!,’ Israeli director Nadav Lapid skewers the country’s ‘moral abyss’ after Oct. 7

JTA — In November 2023, as much of the Jewish world was still reeling from the October 7 massacres, a newly formed Israeli organization called The Civil Front released a hair-raising video.

The short film depicted rows of Israeli children singing an adaptation of “Hareut,” a 1949 poem by the influential Israeli poet Haim Gouri that commemorated Israel’s war of independence. The lyrics, however, had been changed: The children now sang about the Israeli military entering Gaza “to eliminate the swastika bearers.”

“In another year, there will be nothing there,” they sing. “We will eliminate them all.”

The video was posted by Israeli public broadcaster Kan, which quickly deleted it amid outcry, including from Israelis, over lyrics widely viewed to be genocidal. It has been prominently resurrected in “Yes!,” a scathing new satirical film by Israeli provocateur Nadav Lapid, now in limited theatrical release in the United States nearly a year after its Cannes Film Festival premiere.

The movie takes direct aim at a nation that, as its director told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “is sinking into a deep moral abyss.”

In “Yes!,” a frustrated Israeli pianist (played by Ariel Bronz, an incendiary artist in his own right) is hired to compose music to accompany these same Gouri-inspired lyrics. In the film, we are told, they will form the basis of a new, post-October 7 national anthem. Instead of objecting, the musician, who goes by the Hebrew letter “yud” (styled in the English subtitles as “Y”), takes a radically different approach — hence, the film’s title.

“Give up, my son, as early as possible,” Y tells his infant son, as they bike along the Tel Aviv beach at sunset. “Submission is happiness.” Along with his partner, the dancer Yasmine (Efrat Dor), Y decides to lean in, waving away all moral convictions and allowing himself to be used as a pawn of the military and ruling elite — from literally prostituting himself at decadent parties to licking clean the boot of a pro-Israel Russian oligarch. A duck is involved at one point; so are sex toys. The film ends with the real video of the Israeli girls singing of Gaza’s annihilation.

This bleak depiction of Israel and its benefactors, which Lapid sees as a gilded, ethically bankrupt “society on the edge of collapse,” arrives in US theaters as the question of support for Israel — particularly amid the joint US-Israel war against Iran — occupies Jews and non-Jews alike.

Lapid, never shy about his own convictions, is well aware that his presentation of Israel could be a bitter pill for many Diaspora Jews to swallow. He’s attended screenings with Jews where he’s witnessed “a real tension in the theater,” he said over Zoom.

“It was clear that it was very, very hard for them,” the director, who lives in Paris, recalled of one audience of Jews in France who objected to the film’s strong insinuation that there are no liberal strands of Israeli society left. “They had to give up at least a certain part of this utopian fantasy that they built in their heads for years and years.”

Still, all empathy for Israelis is not lost. In one of the film’s most disarming sequences, an old flame of Y’s (played by Naama Preis, Lapid’s wife), who reluctantly did hasbara, or public diplomacy, for the Israeli army, recites from memory some of the most brutal details from October 7, which saw some 1,200 people in southern Israel slaughtered and 251 taken hostage in the Gaza Strip amid widespread acts of torture and brutality. She performs her monologue with what appears to be genuine pain, all while also trying to deflect the hypothetical arguments of those who have downplayed or justified it.

Her grief doesn’t exist on its own terms, however. The scene is set (and was actually filmed) on the Gaza border, and the characters kiss while real Israeli bombs hit their targets.

Though October 7 is central to the film, the genesis for “Yes!” predated the attacks. “The script described a society worshiping money, power, combining vulgarity and hypernationalism slipping towards fascism, a society where people are not talking anymore in words and sentences but in propaganda slogans,” Lapid recalled. “All the conditions are already there, and the slightest event will bring about the final deterioration. In this sense, the only difference was that it truly happened.”

Lapid remains one of the most widely celebrated Israeli filmmakers, despite the fact that — or, perhaps, because — he left years ago out of what he readily acknowledges is his disgust with the country. His past films include “The Kindergarten Teacher,” which was remade in English with Maggie Gyllenhaal, and two recent prizewinning dramas, “Synonyms” and “Ahed’s Knee,” that both revolve around frustrated Israeli artists howling into a void.

He says he hopes to counterbalance many of his peers in Israeli cinema, who he feels don’t do enough in their own work to confront the real problems at the heart of their shared society.

“If somebody from Mars or the moon had watched Israeli fictional cinema in the last 10 years, I wonder to what extent he would have had a real familiarity with a society that either supported, or hadn’t shown any sign of real resistance to, what was done — for instance, in the Gaza war,” Lapid told JTA. “I don’t think that Israeli fictional cinema in general was courageous enough to look, to really put up a mirror.”

To that end, Lapid shot the film under the radar, often without permits. Though it was nominated for (and won a few of) Israel’s Oscar equivalent upon its release, Lapid’s usual Israeli distributor wouldn’t pick it up, leading him to distribute the film independently in the country.

When it was screened at the Jerusalem Cinematheque in late 2025, “a man in the audience called out that it was a disgusting film and left, as others shouted him down,” a Jerusalem Post critic in attendance recalled. (The same critic argued Lapid’s cynical vision of Israel was incomplete: “You would never guess from this movie that hundreds of thousands come out every Saturday night to call for the release of the hostages and for a ceasefire, some holding pictures of children killed in Gaza.”)

Criticism has come from all sides. Culture minister Miki Zohar, an ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has condemned the film as well, while some in the left-leaning global film community have criticized Lapid for receiving support from the Israel Film Fund. Last year, a petition circulated by activist group Film Workers For Palestine, and signed by major celebrities including Emma Stone and Javier Bardem, called for a boycott of all Israeli film institutions “that are implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people.”

Lapid didn’t sign it and seemed bemused that it existed.

“If someone thinks that by signing this petition, or giving a speech at the Oscars, he paid his tribute to the Palestinian cause, or imagines himself Che Guevara?” he said. “Boycotting culture, cinema, yes or no, it’s a complicated question. But I think what one can say, with total confidence, is that it’s totally ridiculous if the only ones who will be boycotted will be, I don’t know, filmmakers and choreographers and dancers.”

Most of the viewers of “Yes!” likely will already agree with its perspective, just as reviewers largely have. David Ehrlich, a Jewish film critic at Indiewire who has been harshly critical of Israel, praised “Yes!” as “‘The Zone of Interest’ without the need for a garden wall,” referencing the recent drama about Nazi officers living next door to Auschwitz — a quote that “Yes!” American distributor Kino Lorber included in the film’s trailer. (“Even the audience hates Israel,” one of the characters says at one point, turning to face the camera directly.)

Hounded to various degrees on all sides of the Israel debate, Lapid holds his ground. He insists the film, in all its outlandishness, matches the moment.

“I think that today it’s almost impossible to make an exaggerated film about Israel, because the situation is so extreme,” he said. “In a way, I feel that attempting to create a kind of well-tempered, moderate, realistic document would have totally missed the target.”