JTA — In November 2023, as much of the Jewish world was still reeling from the October 7 massacres, a newly formed Israeli organization called The Civil Front released a hair-raising video.

The short film depicted rows of Israeli children singing an adaptation of “Hareut,” a 1949 poem by the influential Israeli poet Haim Gouri that commemorated Israel’s war of independence. The lyrics, however, had been changed: The children now sang about the Israeli military entering Gaza “to eliminate the swastika bearers.”

“In another year there will be nothing there,” they sing. “We will eliminate them all.”

The video was posted by Israeli public broadcaster Kan, which quickly deleted it amid outcry, including from Israelis, over lyrics widely viewed to be genocidal. It has been prominently resurrected in “Yes!,” a scathing new satirical film by Israeli provocateur Nadav Lapid, now in limited theatrical release in the United States nearly a year after its Cannes Film Festival premiere.

The movie takes direct aim at a nation that, as its director told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “is sinking into a deep moral abyss.”

In “Yes!,” a frustrated Israeli pianist (played by Ariel Bronz, an incendiary artist in his own right) is hired to compose music to accompany these same Gouri-inspired lyrics. In the film, we are told, they will form the basis of a new, post-October 7 national anthem. Instead of objecting, the musician, who goes by the Hebrew letter “yud” (styled in the English subtitles as “Y”), takes a radically different approach — hence, the film’s title.

“Give up, my son, as early as possible,” Y tells his infant son, as they bike along the Tel Aviv beach at sunset. “Submission is happiness.” Along with his partner, the dancer Yasmine (Efrat Dor), Y decides to lean in, waving away all moral convictions and allowing himself to be used as a pawn of the military and ruling elite — from literally prostituting himself at decadent parties to licking clean the boot of a pro-Israel Russian oligarch. A duck is involved at one point; so are sex toys. The film ends with the real video of the Israeli girls singing of Gaza’s annihilation.

This bleak depiction of Israel and its benefactors, which Lapid sees as a gilded, ethically bankrupt “society on the edge of collapse,” arrives in US theaters as the question of support for Israel — particularly amid the joint US-Israel war against Iran — occupies Jews and non-Jews alike.

Lapid, never shy about his own convictions, is well aware that his presentation of Israel could be a bitter........

© The Times of Israel