For the young Orly Yadin, personal and national identity were one and the same. A native Israeli, or “Sabra,” born into a family of influential Zionists shortly after Israel’s founding in 1948, Yadin was raised amid the country’s elite. Her father, Yigael Yadin, was a prominent archaeologist who put his research on hold in the 1940s to become chief of operations for the Israel Defense Forces, the country’s nascent military. Her childhood apartment was across the street from the home of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, whom she met in her living room.
Reared in the upper echelon of Israeli society, Yadin was blithely unaware of her privilege. For 70 years, Hebrew and Arabic were Israel’s official languages, yet as a youth she had no Arab friends and never learned their language. Palestinians were referred to as “Israel’s Arabs,” and their nationality was treated as synonymous with “terrorist.”
Now 77, Yadin moved to Burlington from London in 2004 and became a U.S. citizen in 2012. The award-winning documentary filmmaker, archival film expert and teacher served as executive director of the Vermont International Film Foundation from 2012 to 2023. This week, VTIFF will host a sneak preview of what is arguably Yadin’s most personal and timely project to date. In the feature-length, first-person documentary Land, she returns to her homeland to examine how her Israeli identity was formed — and how a fierce national pride blinded her and generations of other Israelis to their own colonial mindset. Yadin intends to submit the documentary to film festivals later this year.
At a time when Israel’s government faces unprecedented international condemnation for its treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, Land asks difficult questions about Israeli nationalism. And those questions come from someone whom critics cannot simply dismiss as being antisemitic or anti-Israel.
Yadin said she approached the project, which had been germinating for more than 25 years, as if it were one of her late father’s archaeological digs, unearthing layers of her family’s history dating back to the late 18th century and her ancestors’ involvement in the earliest days of the Zionist movement. Using archival footage, home movies, family diaries, letters and memoirs, Yadin excavates what she calls the “four pillars” of modern Israeli identity: land, language, archaeology and the creation of a people’s army in which nearly all Israeli adults serve.
Yadin did her own military service in 1967, during which she was an officer in charge of an entertainment troupe of reservists who performed for Israeli soldiers in territories newly conquered during the Six-Day War, including the Golan Heights, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula. Yet, as she notes in the film, at the time she never considered what the Arabs of those occupied villages thought of her presence. As she puts it, “We saw but didn’t see.”
What gives Land an authoritative voice is that many of the ideological pillars of Israeli society were erected by Yadin’s own family members. She “interviews” several of her ancestors using a storytelling device that draws from their own writings to give voice to their worldviews.
Among them is Yadin’s great-grandfather Mordechai ben Hillel HaCohen, a 19th-century Zionist born in what was then called White Russia, now Belarus. In 1897, he addressed the first Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, in Hebrew, which few in the room could understand. After immigrating to Palestine in 1907, he became one of the founding Jewish patriarchs of the new town of Tel Aviv.
Yadin also “interviews” her paternal grandmother, Hassya Feinsod Sukenik, a Polish Jew who had a spiritual awakening upon visiting the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, then committed herself to teaching Hebrew to Jewish children. Her husband, Eleazar Sukenik, Yadin’s grandfather, was among the first archaeologists to recognize the antiquity and significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The film documents Yadin’s travels through Israel with her videographer and editor, Nora Jacobson of Norwich, who shot the entire documentary on a smartphone to avoid undue attention. They visit the childhood home of Arthur Ruppin, Yadin’s maternal grandfather and the father of the kibbutz movement, who instilled in young Jewish settlers a pride in working the land collectively and making the desert bloom.
Yadin asks him and her other ancestors the same question: “But what about the Palestinian population that was already there?”
For a time, Ruppin opposed the formation of an independent Jewish state, arguing in his diaries that it would provoke the resentment and hatred of their Arab neighbors, who vastly outnumbered them. He was one of the founders of the Covenant of Peace, a group that advocated for equal justice for Arabs and Jews. What he couldn’t predict was the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s, the Holocaust and its role in shaping the Israeli ethos of powerful Jews who would never again allow their people to be slaughtered.
“And so they developed a narrative,” Yadin explains in the film, “that spoke of a direct lineage to the biblical heroes of two and three thousand years ago, warriors and men of action such as Joshua and King David.”
Land also examines Yadin’s political awakening as an activist and her coming to terms with her upbringing. In January 1969, while studying at the Sorbonne in Paris, she struck up a spirited conversation with some well-educated Arabs in a café and “saw what had been hidden in plain sight all along,” she says in the film. In the early 1970s, Yadin made headlines when she was arrested and jailed for protesting the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land.
Taken as a whole, Land offers an intriguing insider’s look at how national mythmaking was used to justify colonialism — from the erasure of Palestinian settlements from maps to the renaming of Arab communities to the use of biblical archaeology to validate the Jews’ historical claim to the land.
“I tried to show, through my own family history, how national narratives are developed to excuse immoral deeds,” Yadin said in a recent interview, adding that the shapers of those narratives believed their actions were moral and just. “And that,” she emphasized, “is true of other countries as well.”
I tried to show, through my own family history, how national narratives are developed to excuse immoral deeds.
Orly Yadin
Some viewers may criticize Yadin for not going far enough in condemning her family’s culpability in the treatment of Palestinians. In 1948, her father oversaw a covert biological warfare operation called Cast Thy Bread, during which Israeli commandos poisoned Arabs’ wells with typhoid to prevent them from returning to their villages.
Yadin doesn’t mention that operation in the film. But while visiting the ruins of a Palestinian village, she muses: “I often wonder how a daughter is to come to terms with the fact that her father was chief of military operations of the IDF during the war of 1948 and that, regardless of who among his soldiers committed violence against the Palestinians, he was ultimately responsible.”
The omission of the well poisoning, she said, was a stylistic decision, not an ideological one.
“I felt that, through his words [in archival interviews], he condemned himself to a contemporary viewer,” Yadin explained of her father. “The purpose of my film is not to lay blame but to understand and learn from their deeds. And to not do the same.” ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “‘Hidden in Plain Sight’ | In Land, Israeli-born filmmaker Orly Yadin explores her identity along with that of the Jewish state”
This article appears in The Cartoon Issue • 2026.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
