Yaron Zilberman’s Incitement begins with the words of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin announcing the 1993 Oslo Accords, posing with Bill Clinton and PLO head Yasser Arafat as he talks about the hope of a new era of peace between Israel and Palestine. In contrast to this news footage, however, are the faces of Israelis watching it as outrage blossoms at the proposed concessions to the Arabs. One man, Yigal Amir (Yehuda Nahari Halevi), is so incensed that he heads outside and joins a wrathful protest that gets so unruly so quickly that police shut it down. Some cops even detain Yigal, who protests that he would be thrown out of law school with an arrest on his record. When that fails to move the officers, he begs that his fiancée would leave him, prompting the police to reluctantly let him go. Setting off to class, Yigal gets barely out of reach of the cops before screaming “Death to Arabs!”
Yigal, a small, unassuming man, initially cuts a modest profile. He comes from a family far more moderate than himself; his mother, Geula (Anat Ravnitzki), is relatively sympathetic to her son’s views but also clearly wishes to discuss another subject whenever Yigal sets upon politics. His father, Shlomo (Amitai Yaish), is practically a pacifist, lamenting the violence of both sides in the constant skirmishes between Israelis and Palestinians. One never gets the sense that the young man was radicalized at home. Rather, the film shows how the constant buzz of anti-Arab sentiment that suffuses media, culture, even religious gatherings can create an atmosphere that normalizes hatred.
Zilberman’s film largely moves between scenes of meetings, not just secret, insurrectionary ones but chats in living rooms and at dinner tables, in homes and synagogues. The camera peeks in on discussions like someone at a party circling a conversation looking for a way to join, and the Academy aspect ratio leaves the frame cramped, further trapping the viewer in small spaces with these hateful talks. Circling the characters, one can see the range of people who are willing to hear out, and even agree, with Yigal’s reactionary zeal, from classmates to rabbis. Zilberman breaks up these scenes with archival footage of prominent political and religious figures on Israeli TV calling Rabin a traitor to the Jewish people, in some cases citing holy scripture as evidence of his unforgivable negotiations. In one eerie clip, a rabbi with a smile that stretches from ear to ear casually tells a television interviewer of his wish for Rabin’s death.
As much as the film is inculcated in the friends and media figures Yigal immerses himself with to amplify his views, Incitement does include perspectives from those who drift close to the man, only to be repelled by the force of his fury. His fiancée, Nava (Daniella Kertesz), shows increasing worry at Yigal’s choice of friends, who tend to show up to his family’s house packing Uzis like American guns rights activists. The same care that Zilberman takes to show how Yigal and others lean forward in eagerness to share their rage with comrades transfers over to the frozen smiles and nervous glances that Nava flashes around the men who congregate with Yigal.
Based on the events leading up to Rabin’s assassination, Incitement innately communicates doom, but it impressively does so as much from reflecting the open hostility in Israeli society as it does the particulars of the prime minister’s death. Zilberman generates tension through the insolubility of fractured Israeli identity, in which ethnic prejudices and philosophical debates undermine the seeming unity of a people who share the same faith. Zilberman films Israeli landscapes with a stark beauty that emphasizes both their cultivated vegetation and community and the arid desert that surrounds them, rendering Yigal’s uncompromising morals in the language of the western. Yet just as western heroes are so often consumed by the harsh physical and existential conditions that engulf them, so too is Yigal presented as a repository for his conditioning, unable to see another perspective until his behavior cannot be stopped or reversed.
The post Incitement appeared first on Spectrum Culture.