There was a time when American Jews did not first encounter Israel through demonization, campus protests, UN resolutions, casualty counts, or diplomatic talking points. They encountered it in the dark. They sat in movie theaters beside their parents and grandparents and watched Jewish history become flesh: refugees on ships, fighters in the desert, survivors becoming farmers, farmers becoming soldiers, soldiers becoming founders. They watched a people hunted across Europe stand up in their ancestral land and declare that Jewish history would no longer be written only by others.
That was the power of Zionist cinema.
Hollywood once understood something many Jewish institutions have forgotten: nations are not loved through briefing papers; they are loved through stories. For a generation of American Jews, Israel was not an abstraction. It had a soundtrack. It had faces: Paul Newman in Exodus, Kirk Douglas as Mickey Marcus in Cast a Giant Shadow, and Entebbe turned into a living-room drama — the Jewish state crossing continents to rescue Jews the world had previously abandoned. These films did not simply entertain; they translated Zionism into memory. They allowed Jews who had never picked oranges on a kibbutz, served in the Haganah, or stood upon the deck of an immigrant ship to feel that Israel’s story was somehow also their own.
Over time, that cinematic story receded. Israel became a headline, then a controversy, then a debate. Many young Jews were asked to defend Israel before they had learned to love it. That was more than a political failure; it was a failure of imagination. The Jewish story on screen did not disappear. It moved. It moved from Zionist epic to Holocaust memory. That shift preserved something sacred, but it also changed the emotional center of Jewish identity. For decades, many of the most serious Jewish films returned again and again to Europe: to ghettos, camps, hiding places, transports, collaborators, survivors, ghosts, and graves. Many were necessary, and some were masterpieces, but they gradually made Jewish suffering more cinematically familiar than Jewish sovereignty.
On screen, the Jew became, once again, the hunted Jew, the hidden Jew, the murdered Jew, the surviving Jew, the moral witness to someone else’s evil. Slowly, the other Jewish story — the story that begins after the ashes — lost its place in the imagination. That was the story of return, revolt, Hebrew, agriculture, arms, statehood, rescue, sovereignty, and rebirth. Its absence had consequences. A generation of Jews learned to remember Jewish death more fluently than Jewish power. They could picture the camps more easily than the kibbutz, the ghetto more easily than the Palmach, the yellow star more easily than the blue-and-white flag raised by exhausted young men and women who refused to let Jewish history end in smoke.
Holocaust memory is sacred. But Holocaust memory without Zionist rebirth leaves Jewish identity emotionally unfinished. It teaches what happened to us when we had no state, but not what we built so it would never happen again. It teaches the wound, but not the answer; the horror, but not the homecoming; the catastrophe, but not the civilization that rose from it.
This does not mean Zionist cinema must be simplistic. The best national stories are not cartoons. They contain fear, failure, burden, division, tragedy, contradiction, and moral cost. Israel’s story contains all of that. But complexity is not erasure. For too long, Israel on screen has meant ambiguity, trauma, occupation, espionage, guilt, or political anxiety. Those stories have their place, but they cannot be the only cinematic vocabulary.
Where are the films about the Hebrew revival? Where is the epic about the Yemenite airlift? Where is the sweeping film about Operation Solomon, with planes carrying Ethiopian Jews home? Where is the definitive Entebbe film — not as a procedural, but as a Jewish epic of memory, cabinet rooms, hostages, families, flight paths, and Yoni Netanyahu? Where is the film about Herzl and Nordau, Vienna and Basel, Dreyfus and the First Zionist Congress? Where is the serious Maccabees film — not a children’s cartoon, but a civilizational story of revolt, sovereignty, faith, and freedom?
Where is the Israeli 007?
And where, exactly, is the Israeli 007?
The question sounds unserious until its obviousness is considered. Britain gave the world James Bond. America gave the world Jason Bourne. The Cold War gave us gray men moving through Berlin, Moscow, and Vienna beneath a sky of paranoia. But Israel — the small state surrounded by enemies, born from catastrophe, forced into genius, operating in the shadows because Jewish life has so often required secrecy — has no global spy franchise.
The material is all there: Mossad operations, hostage rescues, nuclear sabotage, secret flights, Arab capitals, Iranian plots, European safe houses, cyberwarfare, Jewish refugees, assassins, diplomats, soldiers, pilots, mothers waiting, and prime ministers making impossible decisions. An Israeli spy thriller need not imitate Bond. The Israeli hero is not an aristocrat with a martini. He serves a people who know what happens when no one comes. His glamour is burden; his coolness comes from the intimacy of Jewish history. Each mission would ask a larger question: what must a people do, after Auschwitz, Munich, Entebbe, and October 7, to survive without losing its soul?
That is not propaganda. That is drama.
Before Israel can be defended, it must first be imagined. Cinema once gave Jews an emotional grammar. It taught them that Jewish history did not end at the gates of Europe. It crossed the sea. It revived Hebrew. It planted vineyards. It built cities. It trained pilots. It rescued hostages. It argued with itself, buried its dead, and kept going. If Jewish images only reinforce victimhood or moral accusation, Jewish strength will begin to feel foreign, Jewish sovereignty will feel unnatural, and Jewish soldiers will appear as a contradiction rather than a continuation.
The missed opportunity is not that we failed to explain Israel. It is that we failed to make people feel Israel. Israel’s survival requires more than arguments; it needs living stories, memories, heroes, beauty, tragedy, and courage. The next generation will not inherit Zionism through debate alone. They will inherit it through the emotional power of epic storytelling. Not because Israel is perfect. Not because every story must flatter the state. Not because art should become public relations. But because no people can survive if it allows others to tell the world only why it is guilty, while it forgets how to tell its own children why it is alive. Before Israel became a headline, it was an epic. It is time to make it one again.