ABSTRACT
The beginning of Israeli cinema corresponds to the beginning of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine. This confluence of the national cinema with the nation-building process itself makes any historiography of Israeli cinema irremediably entangled with the history of Zionism. At the turn of the nineteenth century Jewish settlers in Palestine were forging a utopian venture: a new Jewish society founded on secular values totally divorced from traditional Jewish society in Eastern and Central Europe where the settlers originated. The local cinema emerged during World War I when the first filmmaker in Jewish Palestine, Ya’akov Ben-Dov, began turning his camera, for several years recording on film the realization of the Zionist project in Palestine. Ben-Dov’s silent films were targeted at Jewish audiences in Europe and North America. Quite often institutions of the Zionist movement, such as Jewish National Fund (JNF) and the Palestine Foundation Fund (PFF), financed and otherwise assisted the production of such films and newsreels. The films were widely used as propaganda promoting Jewish immigration to Palestine, for fund-raising among Jewish communities and for political lobbying in Europe and America.
