The truth never dies, but is made to live like a beggar: Yiddish proverb
People all seek to know what they do not know yet / they ought rather seek to know what they know already : Zhuang Zhou (369-286 BC)
What you run away from, runs after you: Roumanian proverb
There is a moment in 1948: Remember, Remember Not when the film’s basic wager becomes clear: if you stitch together the words people wrote while Israel’s formative history was taking place – brief unvarnished lines from letters and diaries, Jewish and Arab alike – partisan preconceptions about the period that developed later start to fray away. The film, directed by Neta Shoshani, is built as a diptych: a chronological braid of firsthand wartime writings and rare archival footage; and a present-day journey among those who curate, challenge, and contest how 1948 is officially remembered. The docu-essay is not an op-ed in images. It is a mirror held to memory – ours.
The film is divided into two intertwined temporal and thematic sections. Remember covers the tense months leading up to and following the UN’s partition resolution, pairing frontline diaries with scenes of the (pre-October 7, 2023) IDF’s missing-soldiers unit searching for fallen fighters from Israel’s early battles. Remember Not shifts into international war and its political entanglements: the UN’s mediation, invasions of Israeli territory, and continued efforts to declassify the long-buried Shapira Report, which investigated accusations of civilian harm by the IDF.
Rare, never-before-seen archival footage from Western newsreels and amateur color film gives visceral immediacy to the past, while the present-day scenes emphasize memory as a political battleground. The effect is cumulative and haunting, with memory acting not as a backdrop but the ground on which the story itself is fought.
Between reverence and remorse
Israel has tried not to look. The documentary was commissioned and funded by the public broadcaster Kan to mark 75 years since the 1948 war. It premiered at Docaviv 2023 and won the festival’s Research Award. But after festival acclaim came protests and official pressure, including a decision by Israel’s Film Council in November 2024 to halt a planned public screening, and threats by Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi to punish Kan if it aired the film. This week, after more than two years of battles, Kan finally broadcast it. The film’s journey has become a test of who gets to define collective memory.
Why did 1948 provoke such anxiety? Because, perhaps, it refuses to choose between reverence and remorse. It neither rescinds Jewish self-determination nor erases Palestinian catastrophe. Shoshani lingers on diary entries of Palmach fighters celebrating survival even as they describe emptying villages, and on letters from Arab families recounting hurried flight, abandoned homes, and orchards left untended. Archival footage shows deserted kitchens and half-set tables, daily life suspended in mid-breath. In another sequence, the camera follows archivists unsealing boxes of fragile reels, their discoveries set against the contemporary fight over how, and if, these images should be taught in schools.
The film also turns directly to the 2011 amendment to the Budget Foundations Law, known as the Nakba Law, which empowers the state to withhold funds from publicly funded bodies that mark Independence Day as a day of mourning. By weaving such intimate fragments together with state policy, Shoshani shows how remembrance is not only a matter of diaries and archives but also of legislation, budgets, and cultural gatekeepers.
Shoshani’s choice of style is both the film’s power and its limitation. By withholding a single narrator, she lets the diaries and footage generate their own dissonance, creating a space where competing truths collide. This formal restraint avoids didacticism and trusts viewers to sit with contradiction, which is rare in treatments of 1948. Yet the same restraint also leaves certain gaps: the absence of contextual scaffolding can disorient audiences unfamiliar with the finer points of the war or the subsequent political debates. What the film gains in honesty and immediacy, it sometimes sacrifices in accessibility. Still, the cumulative effect is striking, precisely because the fragments are not reconciled into a neat story.
Shaping the memory of a new generation
The film was made before October 7. But its delayed airing now forces parallels we cannot avoid. A theme that threads through Shoshani’s work is the sacred imperative to bring back missing soldiers and to account for those who never returned. Seen today, in the midst of the October 7 War and the ongoing captivity of Israeli hostages in Gaza, that motif echoes painfully. The diaries of 1948 speak of the anguish of unreturned bodies. Today’s headlines record the anguish of families demanding the return of their loved ones. The symmetry is haunting, and it indicts any attempt to dismiss the film as irrelevant history.
Seventy-five years after 1948, we are now in a conflict that will shape the memory of this generation. 1948 forces us to ask what will be remembered of the October 7 War in another seventy-five years? The abyssal cruelty of the Hamas attacks on October 7, the murdered and the kidnapped? The shock that shattered Israel’s self-image as impregnable? The mobilization of a nation, the unity that cracked, the rage that hardened? The bombardments and starvation alarms in Gaza? The tent cities and mass displacement? The grief that feels endless?
And what, precisely, will we try to forget?
Will we file away the contradictions the way we filed away so many contradictions of 1948, elevating one kind of pain into an anthem and relegating another to the footnotes? Will we memorialize our dead with unassailable clarity while refusing to look straight at what we did in their name? Will we sanctify heroism and redact hubris, enshrine our warnings and muffle our excesses? Will we remember the families of hostages demanding a different horizon of strategy, and the leaders who treated dissent as betrayal? Will we keep a ledger of enemy crimes while outsourcing the moral audit of our own?
Boxes of archives for the future
1948 offers a counternarrative practice. Its method – sourcing contemporaneous words and letting intimate documents carry the shock and shame, the pride and panic – suggests a way to write the memory of this war that neither collapses into advocacy nor freezes into denial.
When future curators of the October 7 War open the boxes of archives, what will they find? Telegrams from battalion commanders and WhatsApp threads from reservists. Video briefings and drone feeds. Hospital logs and UN spreadsheets. Transcripts of cabinet meetings and mothers’ group chats at 2 a.m. The raw material of memory will be vast and volatile. The temptation to curate away the dissonance will be irresistible.
That is the uncomfortable wisdom in Shoshani’s film. Memory can be postponed, suppressed, even legislated, but it cannot be erased. You can fund the museum and defund the counter exhibit. Yet the cuttings will sprout again, in contested anniversaries, in family stories told against the grain, in documentaries that refuse silence. 1948: Remember, Remember Not proves that history always returns – and it always demands to be seen.
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Israel’s Assassination of Memory
Gaza and the Death of Conscience
Pankaj Mishra: The Shoah after Gaza
Annie Lennox: ‘Why? – For Gaza’ – Together For Palestine
Israel’s War in Gaza Is Nothing but a War of Annihilation
Nation-states as national homes; and Sir Edwin Montagu’s views on Zionism (1917)
After the truth-shower 