Where Have All the Palestinian Actors Gone?

Have you heard of the film The Voice of Hind Rajab? It shook the world and was nominated for an Academy Award in 2025. But if you get your culture news from the Israeli mainstream media, the answer is probably no.

The film is about the final hours of Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old Palestinian girl who was murdered by the IDF. It stirred strong emotions around the world because it depicted the mass killing in Gaza since October 2023 in a deeply chilling way. Yet despite its nomination for Best International Feature Film, in Israel there were those who  were hard at work to suppress its existence and make sure it never became a topic of conversation, whether negative or positive.

There were no reports calling the film "false," and no Israeli politicians calling for a boycott of the Oscars. Instead, it was met with total silence.

Odds are you also didn't know that two of the five nominees for Best Actor at the 2026 Ophir Awards [Israel's national film awards] are Palestinian: Ehab Salami, for his role in Where To?, and Ala Dakka, for his role in Many Waters.

When the Israeli Academy of Film and Television announced the Ophir nominees, headlines across the papers focused on Tell Me Everything, Moshe Rosenthal's new film starring Assi Cohen, which swept the awards season with a record 16 nominations. The leading news sites rushed to celebrate the achievement. But in the shadow of that celebration, a story no less dramatic or significant was pushed aside: two of this year's standout nominees are Palestinian actors, in films that tell a story of compassion, mutual responsibility, and humanity in the midst of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In Where To?, Ehab Salami plays Hassan, a Palestinian Uber driver in Berlin who picks up a lost Israeli teenager. What starts as a chance ride turns into a series of raw encounters between two people who left everything behind and lost their way in a foreign land.

In Many Waters, Ala Dakka plays Yosef, an orderly from Anata [a Palestinian town on the outskirts of Jerusalem] who cares for a severely injured young [Jewish-Israeli] woman. A deep, human bond develops between them, while the people around them try to keep them apart.

Both films approach the conflict with delicacy and authenticity. They portray human beings, humanity, and bridge-building that rises above social constructs, including the ones we've grown so used to that we no longer notice them. But instead of acknowledging these significant nominations, the media chose a simple and frightening method: ignore it, and it will go away. This isn't an accident, and it isn't a one-time mistake. It's a calculated tactic.

In the past, the government and its mouthpieces dealt loudly with works that present the Palestinian narrative in a humane light. We heard politicians rail against "leftist propaganda" and call for boycotts. Last year, we watched Minister Miki Zohar [Israel's Minister of Culture and Sport] lash out at the film The Sea after it won at the 2025 Ophir Awards. Zohar announced at the time that he was pulling funding, and he described the film as "a spit in the face of Israel's citizens." This year, the ceremony will go ahead as planned with outside financial support.

Compared with that, the current, elegant tactic of silencing through controlled indifference seems minor. In fact, it's far more dangerous.

If we don't hear about The Voice of Hind Rajab, we won't know about the film that shook the world while Israel was busy carrying out strikes in Gaza. We won't be exposed to the story, one of many, of an innocent girl murdered by the IDF. If Salami's and Dakka's nominations go unreported, we won't know how deep and rich Israeli-Palestinian filmmaking is.

From documentaries like No Other Land, which was blocked from screening in Israel, to feature films like In Between, this shared film industry shows how Israeli-Palestinian cooperation produces stunning work, with stories of peace, justice, and mutual responsibility.

These narratives and stories are usually hidden from the general public, and this erasure serves one purpose: dehumanization. When the average news consumer encounters Palestinians only through security bulletins, it's easy to ignore their human and cultural existence, and their very existence as human beings.

In a reality like this, our duty as citizens is to stop waiting for the media to hand us reality. It's time to seek out these works ourselves. We can go to plays with mixed [Jewish-Arab] casts, watch films that challenge our perceptions as Israelis, listen to Palestinian music that doesn't get played on the radio, and recognize the rich Palestinian culture and the shared cultural work of Israeli and Palestinian artists. Through all of this, we can also see past the framing the media and the government are trying to sell us. Then we can begin to know and understand the people who share this land with us.

Best of luck to Ehab Salami, Ala Dakka, and all the nominees at the 2026 Ophir Awards!

Editor's note: Since this article was first published, Ehab Salami won the Ophir Award for Best Actor for his role in Where To? at the ceremony on September 9, 2026.

Rom Levinhof is a social activist from Tel Aviv and a music student at Berklee College of Music.

Hebrew Editing: Shiraz Angert

Translated and edited for clarity by Yonatan Shargian To read the original Hebrew article click here. To support independent progressive journalism donate to Rosamedia