For years, Israel has fought a parallel war alongside its physical battles – a war over narrative, legitimacy, and perception. On this front, critics argue, Israel often finds itself trapped in a defensive posture, explaining, rebutting, and justifying its existence and actions against a relentless tide of disinformation.
A new documentary, Soul of a Nation (available on Apple TV), takes a radically different approach – one that may offer a blueprint for the future of Israel’s public diplomacy.
The film is shaped by its filmmaker, Jonathan Jakubowicz, a Venezuelan native whose previous work includes films with Robert De Niro, Jesse Eisenberg, Ed Harris, and Ana de Armas.
Having witnessed firsthand how extreme polarization and propaganda hollowed out Venezuela’s democratic discourse, Jakubowicz approaches Israel’s internal divide not as an outsider assigning blame, but as a storyteller alert to the dangers of flattening complex national struggles into slogans. That sensibility underpins the film’s belief that truth, nuance, and humanity can succeed where polemics fail.
However, in the process of presenting Israel in its darkest hour, the film accomplishes the unexpected. Rather than rebutting accusations point by point, Soul of a Nation dismantles anti-Israel propaganda by doing something far more disarming: telling the truth about Israel as it is – flawed, complex, democratic, diverse, and deeply human.
A different kind of response
Anti-Israel propaganda thrives on simplification. It reduces Israel to caricature – colonizer, apartheid state, aggressor. These narratives depend on erasing Israel’s internal debates, moral struggles, and social diversity. The more Israel is portrayed as uniform and ideologically rigid, the easier it becomes to demonize.
Soul of a Nation breaks that frame entirely.
The documentary, which won the Audience Award at the Miami Jewish Film Festival, chronicles Israel in 2023, from the judicial reform crisis through the months leading up to October 7 and its aftermath. Rather than presenting a sanitized image, the film plunges viewers into Israel’s internal arguments: Right and Left, secular and religious, Jewish and Arab, pro- and anti-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
It shows a society arguing loudly and passionately about its future.
The effect is striking. Israel emerges not as a talking point, but as a living democracy with all the virtues and dysfunction that implies.
The end of ‘hasbara’
The effectiveness of Soul of a Nation lies in its refusal to play the traditional hasbara game. Rather than explaining why Israel is right, the film shows how
Israel thinks, argues, fears, and hopes.
This distinction matters.
Propaganda collapses under complexity. Accusations of apartheid are not directly rebutted – they are rendered strange. The film reveals an Israeli right wing built not on European privilege but on the grievances of Mizrahi Jews, darker-skinned immigrants from Arab countries who spent decades feeling abandoned by the Ashkenazi Labor establishment that founded the state.
For viewers who arrived expecting a simple story of white colonizers and brown victims, this must be disorienting. At the same time, claims of fascism ring hollow when confronted with mass protests, Supreme Court battles, and a relentlessly critical press.
The image of a cold, militarized state falters when viewers encounter grieving families, anguished anti-government reservists, and activists across the political spectrum.
By presenting Israel honestly – including its flaws – the film paradoxically strengthens Israel’s moral credibility.
The perfect villain, the imperfect hero
At the Jerusalem Post Washington Conference, Jakubowicz made a disarmingly simple point: his film wasn’t meant to change minds about Israel. It was meant to portray reality, and reality is more compelling than a flawless narrative.
In storytelling, he argued, the quickest way to lose an audience is to present a perfect hero. Perfection reads as performance. It invites suspicion and creates distance. Only villains insist on their own righteousness, presenting themselves as polished, certain, and endlessly self-justifying.
That, Jakubowicz suggested, is the trap of traditional hasbara. In trying to prove Israel right at every turn, it often presents a version of the country that feels too controlled, too coherent – more similar to a cartoon than a real society. And that is ultimately unconvincing.
Soul of a Nation rejects that instinct. It does something riskier: it shows Israel not as a symbol, but a country marked by contradiction – shaped by trauma, fractured by internal conflict, and forced, at times, to act in ways that even its own citizens oppose. It is not always admirable. It is often uneasy with itself. And that is precisely the point.
Because audiences don’t connect with perfection – they question it. What they recognize, even when they resist it, is struggle.
The film doesn’t ask viewers to absolve Israel. It invites them to see it. And in a debate dominated by slogans, that shift alone can be more destabilizing than any argument.
A lesson for Israel’s future communications
At a time when Israel faces unprecedented hostility on campuses, social media, and international institutions, Soul of a Nation suggests that the most effective response to propaganda is not counter-propaganda, but authenticity.
Instead of explaining why accusations are wrong, the film renders them implausible. Instead of denying flaws, it acknowledges them – reframing them as evidence of democratic life rather than moral failure.
This approach invites an urgent shift in Israeli communications: from defense to narrative, from rebuttal to revelation. The most striking outcome of the film is that it allows viewers to see Israel – often for the first time – as a society rather than a symbol.
When viewers recognize Israelis as people wrestling with the same questions that define every democracy – justice, security, identity, power, and responsibility – the ground beneath extremist narratives begins to crumble.
Propaganda depends on distance. Humanity closes it.
Soul of a Nation does not claim to resolve Israel’s conflicts, internal or external. What it does – without making that its explicit aim – is more important: it restores proportion, context, and empathy to a conversation long dominated by absolutes.
For Israel’s future communicators, diplomats, and storytellers, the takeaway is clear: the world does not need Israel to be perfect. It needs Israel to be real.
In a debate dominated by certainty, the film offers a reason to hesitate, to reconsider, and to look more closely. That may not end the argument, but it changes its terms.