The Battle for Israel

Filmed in the months before the Gaza war broke out, this Finnish documentary from director Pertti Pesonen captures Israel at a moment of profound internal crisis. The country's most right-wing government in history had come to power with an agenda that alarmed many of its own citizens: far-right coalition parties pushing to expand illegal settlements in occupied Palestinian territory, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seeking to reshape the judiciary in ways that critics saw as a direct attack on the rule of law.

Racist violence was rising. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis had taken to the streets in one of the largest protest movements the country had ever seen, demanding that democratic institutions be defended.

Pesonen's film moves through this charged landscape with an analytical eye, examining the political forces driving the judicial overhaul, the settlers' ambitions, and the mass civic resistance that met them. What emerges is a portrait of a society pulled in sharply opposing directions, caught between democratic tradition and nationalist ideology.

Produced by Yle and broadcast in October 2023, the documentary arrived just as the conflict in Gaza erupted, giving it an immediacy and contextual weight that only deepened with time.