In Israel, we’re spoiled when it comes to good documentaries – films and TV series that are in-depth, provocative, well researched, entertaining, and often tell stories that have never been told before.
There’s no getting around the fact that a large number of the finest Israeli documentaries have been produced by KAN, Israel’s government-supported public broadcaster.
“The documentary division is definitely the jewel in the crown of KAN’s operations,” said Isri Halpern, who directed the new KAN documentary Proud Jewish Boy, about Herschel Grynszpan, a teen who killed a German diplomat in Paris in 1938. It will air on KAN 11 in the spring.
Under attack
But now that KAN has come under attack from the government, which is seeking to shut down its news operations and privatize the rest of it, including the documentary division, the future of this kind of high-quality documentary filmmaking is under threat.
Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi has openly opposed the current model of government support for KAN, arguing that public broadcasting is outdated, inefficient, and overly critical of the government.
“There is no place for public broadcasting in Israel,” Karhi was quoted in a report on Israel’s Channel 12 News as long ago as January 2023. There are now several bills before the Knesset. Some have passed their first reading, and are moving more slowly through the system, which would dismantle KAN in stages.
Fierce criticism
In recent months, Karhi’s criticism of KAN has grown fiercer, particularly following the channel’s screening of the documentary by Noa Shoshani 1948 – Remember, Remember Not, which is about Israel’s War of Independence.
Karhi and other critics are upset that the film looks at that war from both Israeli and Palestinian perspectives and that its Jewish and Arab interviewees discuss casualties and killings on both sides, supported by archival footage, much of which has never been screened in public before.
In a letter to KAN CEO Golan Yochpaz in September, Karhi wrote that “the film promotes a false and antisemitic narrative, and … it accuses IDF soldiers of committing massacres and rapes during the Independence War.”
But although 1948 may be the documentary that has drawn the most unequivocal condemnation from Karhi and his allies, it is far from the only KAN program that has been critical of the Israeli government.
October 7 stories
Throughout the two years since the war in Gaza began, KAN has provided an extremely valuable public service by screening documentaries that delve into the history behind the war and that look at the war itself.
These include Noa Aharoni’s film Eyes Wide Open, which tells the devastating story of the female border observers from the Nahal Oz IDF base, whose warnings about Hamas activity along the Gaza border were ignored, most of whom paid with their lives; Kfar Aza – 95% Heaven by Karen Kainer; Philadelphi by Itay Asher, about how Hamas managed to arm itself and build the tunnels; a new season of the TV series Enemies, by Danny Liber and Yaron Niski, which featured an in-depth portrait of the late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, and even examined excerpts of a novel he wrote while in prison in Israel; Prisoners by Duki Dror and Itai Landsberg, a six-part look at previous hostage crises and prisoner exchanges; The Day That Never Ends by Gilad Tocatly and Amnon Rabi, a five-part series featuring 100 interviews with residents of the Gaza border region; and The Gaza Syndrome by Dana Direktor, Hila Itzchaiki, and Duby Kroitoro, a series that looks back about a century into the history of the Gaza Strip
and offers fascinating insights into what led up to October 7.
But KAN’s documentary division is about much more than war, and its films go into the heart of what it means to be Israeli. David Deri-Barkai’s Families Project, inspired by the iconic British documentary series 7 Up, chronicles the lives of 10 Israeli families, which include haredim (ultra-Orthodox), Arab-Israelis, Orthodox Jews living on a West Bank outpost, immigrants from the former Soviet Union, Bedouin living in unlicensed housing, second-generation Moroccan immigrants, Iranians from development towns, and an LGBT family.
With a good documentary, viewers often go in without knowing much about a subject and come out fascinated by it. Many responded that way to The Atom and Me, a miniseries by Shany Haziza, about Benjamin Blumberg, the mastermind behind the (alleged) nuclear reactor in Dimona, and how he got many of the raw materials for it out of a small town in Pennsylvania.
Culture is another realm where KAN has made excellent documentaries, be it about popular culture, such as the recent three-part series Kaveret: I Gave Her My Life by musician Yoav Kutner, or more serious aspects of the arts.
Independent voices
Yair Qedar is an Israeli filmmaker who has made extraordinary literary and intellectual documentaries for KAN as both director and producer, such as Outsider, Freud, Spinoza: 6 Reasons for the Excommunication of the Philosopher, directed by David Ofek; The Last Chapter of A.B. Yehoshua; and The Fourth Window, a biography of author Amos Oz.
These are all part of The Hebrews Project, founded by Qedar, a series of biographical documentaries about Jewish and Hebrew literature that includes films about poets such as Lea Goldberg and Avraham Sutzkever. These films have won dozens of awards, but it’s hard to imagine a privatized television channel funding them.
Asked what working for KAN has meant to him, Qedar was passionate in his support: “KAN did not come into being overnight. It took years of public struggle, debate, and commitment to establish it as an independent public institution. Since its founding, it has proven itself as a vital force that nurtures creators, critical voices, and diverse cultural energies within Israeli society.”
He went on: “KAN has positioned itself as a leading platform for original Hebrew-language creation, achieving remarkable artistic and international success, and becoming a central cultural pillar in Israel.
“As someone who has been deeply involved in Hebrew documentary filmmaking for years – including The Hebrews, the largest documentary project ever devoted to the Hebrew language, now comprising 19 films – I can say clearly: KAN has been a key supporter and commissioner of most of these works,” Qedar continued.
“In practice, KAN provides a rare and irreplaceable home for television and documentary creations that simply have nowhere else to exist. It has become synonymous with quality, cultural depth, heritage, and meaning.”
The battle over KAN has become so contentious that official representatives of the channel preferred not to go on the record for this article. But one source close to KAN management said, “Israelis love KAN documentaries; they watch them, the numbers are very good, which is part of what bothers the government.”
The source mentioned another part of the battle that has been discussed very little up to now: “What will happen to the archives if the government closes KAN? They could just erase all the documentaries that criticize them.”
Qedar said that any threat to KAN was a genuine threat to Israeli and Jewish culture: “Weakening or dismantling KAN would deal a severe blow to Israeli cultural life, making it dramatically harder – if not impossible – for independent local creation to survive and flourish.
“Public broadcasting is not a luxury. It is an essential cultural infrastructure. Defending KAN means defending the future of Israeli creativity,” he asserted. ■