Best Israeli history movies

Stronghold (2023)

Based on real events that took place in the "Mazakh" bastion, the Yom Kippur war, the Sinai front. After a surprise Egyptian attack, 42 soldiers under the command of a young lieutenant from the Seder yeshiva, struggle to repel the enemy attacks during which many of the fighters are injured or killed. At the same time in the TAGD bunker, the Tel Avivian reserve doctor is fighting for the lives of the wounded fighters and calls for urgent evacuations that do not come. After a week of siege and fighting, the soldiers will have to choose whether to continue fighting under the orders of their commander, or to follow the plan of the reserve doctor - a plan that may save their lives. Will they decide to give up the values they were raised on and surrender, or will they fight to the last bullet?

Victory (2024)

In the height of Israel's post-"Six-Day War" euphoria, an up-and-coming actress is torn between her new glistening career and her husband's post-trauma.

The Covenant (2013)

Experience the pain of Egyptian slavery through the eyes of Moses' mother as she sets down her baby in to the Nile, the loyalty of Ruth as she pledges herself to Naomi and her God, and the turmoil of the Jews in Babylonian exile. Face the challenge with Esther as she risks her life to plead for her people, and see the suffering of the Jews in Jerusalem under Roman occupation. In the dark centuries following, The Covenant brings you to Shabbat tables of the persecuted Jewish families in Diaspora, ending in the Warsaw ghetto, and culminating in the Holocaust and the promised rebirth of the Jewish State in 1948.

יהודים פעם שלישית (2017)

June Zero (2022)

Israel, 1961. Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, responsible for organizing the extermination of European Jews, is sentenced to death.

The Girl with the Instagram (2019)

Nagyvárad, Hungary, 1944. From February to June, Eva Heyman, a 13-year-old Jewish girl, wrote a diary describing the harsh conditions of her life under Nazi occupation. How would she have told her story if she had used Instagram?

The Cellar (1963)

About a year after the [Adolph] Eichmann trial, director and local industry pioneer, Natan Gross, explores the traumas of the Holocaust for the first time in Israeli film. Actor, Shimon Yisraeli, himself a pioneer of one-man shows on Israeli stages, wrote and spearheaded this one-man film which tells the story of Holocaust survivor, Emmanuel, who works as a security guard on a construction site where he grapples with all the memories of those dark times that come flooding back: the train journey, the Dachau death camp, his murdered paramour, and his former friend, Hans, who joined the Nazis and killed his father. He shows up at his childhood home where Hans now lives: following an encounter with a vicious dog, Emmanuel finds shelter in the house cellar where he bides his time – remembering, hallucinating, and working up an appetite for revenge. The Cellar won the Best Feature Film Suitable for Young People award at the Berlin International Film Festival.

The Man who Loves Hebrew (1991)

At the beginning of the 20th century, a language war raged in Palestine. The contenders: Yiddish, Russian, French, German, English, and Hebrew, a language barely spoken for 2000 years. This feature film tells the dramatic life story of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda who championed the cause of modern Hebrew.

42:6 - Ben Gurion (1969)

The title is a reference to the Book of Isaiah 42:6, “I, the LORD, have called thee in righteousness, and will hold thine hand, and will keep thee free, and give thee for a covenant of the people, for a light of the Gentiles.” The film is an episodic, cinematic biography of David Ben-Gurion, from his days as a youth in Poland when he met Herzl in the town of Plonsk, through his move to Palestine/Israel, becoming leader, the days of the Independence War and the establishing of the State of Israel, signing the reparations agreement with Germany, and all the way to the making of this film – in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. Perlov’s film highlights all the key milestones in the leader’s life which it goes about doing in the tradition of the reflexive documentary, through the creator’s subjective and artistic pov. The film goes back and forth between documentary and scripted scenes, black and white and technicolour, and even archival footage colourised in bold, artificial colours.