London, United Kingdom – The lights come up slowly inside a cinema in London’s buzzy Soho district, but nobody rushes for the exit.As the credits roll, one woman lowers her face into her hands. A couple sit motionless. In the row ahead, someone exhales and says “Free Palestine”.This screening of Planet Israel: A Cautionary Tale took place on the eve of Nakba Day, the annual commemoration of the 1948 forced displacement of more than 750,000 Palestinians and the killing of thousands more during the creation of the Israeli state.The documentary, which explores how trauma, nationalism and militarisation have shaped Israeli society after October 7, 2023 and during the genocide in Gaza, arrives as old political certainties around Israel are fracturing, increasingly among Jewish and Israeli intellectuals, artists, rabbis and historians themselves. In it, historians, experts and everyday Israelis are interviewed.“The media has not reported this,” the film’s director Gillian Mosely told Al Jazeera from her London home, days before the screening. “British Jews are being treated as a monolith, which I think is fuelling anti-Semitism.”According to polling from the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, which researches the state of contemporary Jewish life in the UK and across Europe, British Jewish opinion is divided over the war in Gaza and the direction of Israeli politics.Forty percent of British Jews said Israel’s conduct in the Strip had w …
