Law and sedition in Israeli films from the assassination of Itzhak Rabin to the Hilltop Movement

In this article I analyze various Israeli films and documentaries, and in particular Rabin, the Last Day (Amos Gitai, 2015), to discuss political sedition in Israel in the mid-1990s. This period is characterized most prominently by the assassination of Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin, but also by the creation of the political climate that made the assassination possible, and which ultimately helped stall the peace process. I discuss to what extent fictional films (better than documentaries) can help the historian shed light on a particular historical period when primary sources are either unavailable or only partially available, and the relationship between primary sources and historically plausible fiction. In this framework I also consider how cinema can help construct a narrative, and ultimately a collective memory, that provides an alternative to the official one.