The human face of Israel’s protest movement

“Israel is complicated, very complicated,” Hatikvah Australia president Nirit Eylon told a Melbourne audience after a screening of Rising: Voices of Protest and Hope. She was praising the film’s makers for demonstrating that complexity.

Director Esther Takac wrote, directed and produced the documentary. She is a psychologist specialising in trauma, and she builds the film around five people rather than a thesis. This includes bereaved father Eran Litman, Elana Kaminka, whose son was killed saving his comrades, choreographer Oded Ronen, tech entrepreneur Moshe Radman, and trauma psychologist Ayellet Wider Cohen.

It begins with the protests against the government’s judicial overhaul, which drew hundreds of thousands of people for 38 consecutive weeks. Then it turns to October 7.

Tatac explained that the idea for the film came after that day when she and her husband, both Hebrew-speaking psychologists, flew to Israel to help however they could. She began filming and met Wider Cohen and Litman early on.

“I saw these people themselves hurting and grieving, standing up to help each other,” she said. For Takac, they embody what Israel really is.

She had three audiences in mind. Non-Jewish viewers who see images of violence and destruction almost daily, Jews drifting away from Israel, and Israelis themselves, many of them exhausted. Those Israelis, she said, have told her the film helped them process events, something she had not set out to do.

The early reviews suggest it is landing with that last group.

Saloona’s Nira Perry called the film “a living, breathing, kicking and bleeding mirror” of the emotional reality Israelis have navigated in recent years. She praised the sensitivity Takac’s trauma background brings to her subjects, and the way protest networks became volunteer efforts after October 7.

Mokasini’s Lyn Salomon wrote about what the film declines to do. It does not reduce the period to slogans, she said, but asks viewers to listen before they form a view. Long before it tells the story of a country, she wrote, the film “reminds that country of its heart”.

That appetite for complexity carried into the panel discussion, which came to a head when Takac and Zionist Federation of Australia president Jeremy Leibler found themselves on either side of a question: is this moment different?

Takac said it is. The size of the protests, and of the rift in Israeli society, is something not seen since the state was established, she said. She believes her role is to support the Israelis fighting to safeguard the country’s moral and democratic foundations.

Leibler agreed that something has changed, but not that it is new. Israel has lived with serious rifts since before its founding, he said, citing the Altalena affair, and sometimes “a deep breath is helpful”. What he saw as different about this government was an absence of decency in how its positions were pursued. He also said that “Israel, as part of our identity, is far greater than the government of the day”.

Former Zionism Victoria president Yossi Goldfarb offered a way to hold both views. Pluralism underpins Zionism, he said, explaining there are usually “more than 200 opinions on any given Jewish topic”. The task, he said, is to keep “being able to criticise, being able to question”.

Regardless of the differences of opinion, Takac closed on hope, saying it’s the people in the film who kept protesting week after week, who provide it.