The catastrophic horizon: Contemporaryy Israeli cinema'ss critiqueique of neo-liberal Israel

Abstract

In her article, Munk analyzes the gradual decline in social solidarity of the once-socialist Israeli society has become discernible in arts and society alike. This process has been voiced in films that described the dangers of a segregated society in a graphic manner, pointing an accusing finger at what Israeli society has become. In these films, the prolonged Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories considered by some as the source of all evil, has been removed from the intellectual foreground in order to provide by a deeper look into the catastrophic outcomes of the social dead end Zionism has reached. The article analyzes four feature films from four different Israeli male generations – Uri Barabash's The Salt of the Earth (2006), Yaki Yosha's Still Walking (2010), and Tom Shoval's Youth (2013) and Jonathan Gurfinkel's S#x Times (2013) in order to define the post-ideological shift that Israeli cinema has chosen. Through their representation of gratuitous violence, the four films selected reveal the unspoken social and political dead end that contemporary Israeli society has reached.