Jerusalem's Festival Director Asks Palestinian Filmmakers Back to the Room
The veteran producer running Israel's flagship film event has gone public with an appeal that runs against the prevailing mood in parts of the international festival circuit.
On 20 July 2026, Roni Mahadav-Levin, the founder and longtime director of the Jerusalem Film Festival, did something that would once have been unremarkable and now reads as a small act of political nerve. He published an open letter, addressed to filmmakers around the world and to Palestinian creators in particular, urging them to attend next year's edition and to keep showing their work in Israeli cinemas (Variety).
The appeal lands inside a culture-world argument that has hardened visibly since October 2023. A growing share of international festivals, juries and Western industry guilds have declined Israeli state funding, sponsorship or simply physical proximity to the country, citing the war in Gaza and the wider occupation. That boycott mood has not closed every door. But it has narrowed the road, particularly for Israeli and Palestinian artists who previously shared screenings, panels and post-production pipelines.
The letter, in its own words
Mahadav-Levin's case is the case an arts administrator makes when rooms start emptying. The Jerusalem Film Festival has programmed Palestinian work before, and Palestinian audiences have attended screenings in the city. That history is the letter's leverage. The argument it makes, in the fragments Variety published, runs roughly like this: the cinemas are filled with mixed crowds of Jewish and Arab, secular and religious citizens; that room is something that does not exist in many other places; withdrawing from it costs the people the festival was built to serve.
The letter is not a defence of Israeli policy, nor a renunciation of Palestinian critique. It is an invitation to keep the seats warm. In an industry that has grown fluent in political signals, that pitch is unfashionable: it asks artists to weigh what an audience hears against what an institution refuses to say.
The boycott mood, measured
The pressure Mahadav-Levin is pushing back against is concrete. It is not a media impression. It is a sequence of decisions by European and North American institutions to refuse Israeli state sponsorship or to hang Israeli flags from their stages. In country after country, municipal and regional funding mechanisms for cultural exchange have been paused or reviewed. Parallel to that, a number of high-profile international stars and directors have declined Israeli gig invitations, citing the war in Gaza.
The Israeli cultural establishment's response has split into two broad registers. The first is institutional and legalistic: ministers and embassy cultural attachés have argued that the boycott conflates government policy with artistic output and effectively penalises Israeli creators for the actions of a government many of them actively oppose. The second is the one Mahadav-Levin is now voicing: civic, almost local, focused on what a particular festival audience can do for a particular filmmaker's work.
What a Jerusalem screening actually offers
The structural point under the letter is geography. Jerusalem is one of the few cities in which a Palestinian filmmaker can address a Jewish Israeli audience inside the same room, in person, under conditions that include Palestinian press, Palestinian critics and a Palestinian crowd. Most other venues for that exchange are mediated: foreign festivals, pan-Arab platforms, diaspora screenings.
That asymmetry is the part of the argument that does not require the reader to take a position on the war. It is a logistics point. If Palestinian cinema withdraws from Jerusalem, the country that loses the most contact with Palestinian stories is Israel; the country that loses the fewest is Palestine. Reasonable people will weigh that point against the political cost of "normalisation," a term of art in this debate that covers everything from joint grants to attendance at premieres. The letter does not pretend the term does not exist. It simply enters the argument that the room in question is worth the cost.
What remains unresolved
Two things the letter does not settle. The first is whether Palestinian filmmakers and their representative bodies accept the framing. Palestine's official cultural institutions, where they function at all, are presently consumed by the war in Gaza and by questions of who speaks for whom. A coordinated cultural response, one way or another, has not materialised in the record Variety reported from. The second is whether Israeli state funding of the Jerusalem Film Festival is itself in play as a boycott target, separate from the question of Palestinian participation. The sources reviewed here do not specify any imminent cut to the festival's public funding.
What is clear is this: an administrator with three decades inside Israeli cinema has decided, on the record, that the cheaper thing to do this summer is to stay quiet. He has chosen not to. The full consequences of that choice, whether it ends in a fuller Jerusalem programme or in a quieter one next July, will be visible in the festival's line-up when it is announced.
Desk note: Monexus ran the Jerusalem Film Festival appeal against the boycott mood and let both stand; the structural argument is geographic, not partisan.