Mohammad Bakri, an acclaimed Palestinian actor and director whose harrowing documentary about a 2002 battle between Israeli forces and Palestinian militants was banned by the Israeli authorities and led to years of legal battles, died on Dec. 24 in Nahariya, in northern Israel. He was 72.
His death, in a hospital, was announced on Instagram by his sons Saleh and Adam Bakri, also noted Palestinian actors. His family told Agence France-Presse that he had been treated for heart disease.
Mr. Bakri, an Israeli who never renounced his citizenship, was one of the first Palestinians to work in the country’s film industry. He used his work to try to expose the often harsh realities of life for his fellow Arabs in Israel.
He was already an acclaimed actor when he made the 2002 documentary “Jenin, Jenin,” and the post-release struggles over the film were to define the latter part of his career.
The documentary relied on the testimony of residents of the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank to depict the brutality of a 10-day battle there between Palestinian militants and Israeli forces in the spring of 2002.
Israel killed 52 people in the fighting, as many as half of whom may have been civilians, according to a United Nations report. Twenty-three Israeli soldiers were also killed. A Human Rights Watch report concluded that Israeli forces had committed “unlawful or willful killings” and had used Palestinian civilians as human shields.
Critics of the film called it one-sided because only Palestinians were interviewed for it. It was banned by the Israeli Film and Theater Review Board as biased, though art-house theaters in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem screened it after the ban was put in place. In an interview at the time with the French newspaper Le Monde, Mr. Bakri called the board’s action “an insult to democracy, to citizens’ rights and to the intelligence of the Israeli public.”
The Israeli Supreme Court overturned the ban in 2003 and reaffirmed that decision the next year, though it said the film “includes lies.”
In 2008, five Israeli soldiers who had sued Mr. Bakri for defamation lost their suit. A judge said that while the film had slandered soldiers, the five men — who did not appear in the film and were not mentioned in it — did not have standing to sue.
Another soldier, who did appear briefly in the film, sued Mr. Bakri for defamation in 2016. In 2021, a court ruled in the soldier’s favor, reinstating the ban on screenings in Israel and ordering Mr. Bakri to pay $55,000 in damages. The Israeli Supreme Court upheld the ban in 2022, calling Mr. Bakri’s film “a fraud.”
“The film ‘Jenin, Jenin’ is a defiance to all the hits I took, an answer to their false narrative,” Mr. Bakri later said in an interview on the Palestinian digital platform YPlus. “I was labeled as the first enemy of culture in Israel.”
The film continues to be widely available online.
Mohammad Bakri was born on Nov. 27, 1953, in the village of Bi’ina, in northern Israel, the eldest of 12 children of Saleh and Sa’eeda Bakri. At the time, Bi’ina was under Israeli military occupation and had no roads or electricity, Mr. Bakri told the British Film Institute this year. His father ran a grocery store and served as head of the village council.
Mr. Bakri credited a gas-powered movie projector, which an electrical engineer had brought to town, with nurturing his early love of cinema. After attending secondary school in the nearby city of Acre, he enrolled in acting and Arabic literature courses at Tel Aviv University in 1973. He was one of the first Israeli Arabs to study acting at an Israeli university, graduating in 1976.
Afterward, he worked with the Habima national theater and other companies, sometimes performing in Hebrew. He later starred in one-man shows like “The Pessoptimist,” based on the work of the Palestinian author Emile Habibi and centered on the drama of the Palestinians at the time of Israel’s independence.
He got a film-acting break after the Greek-French director Costa-Gavras saw the young Mr. Bakri perform in a political cabaret production — staged by the American experimental theater director Joseph Chaikin — about the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Beirut in 1982 during the Lebanese civil war.
Costa-Gavras asked Mr. Bakri to audition for “Hanna K.,” a film starring Jill Clayburgh and Gabriel Byrne, and he got the part. The movie was released in 1983.
Reviews of the film in the United States were largely negative, though the literary critic Edward Said, writing in The Village Voice, praised it for its depiction of the “moral dilemma” embodied by Israel. It was one of the first mainstream cinematic treatments of the Palestinian issue.
His breakthrough in Israel came with the 1984 film “Beyond the Walls,” set in an Israeli prison, where Mr. Bakri, playing an imprisoned Fatah terrorist, eventually joins forces with an Israeli inmate.
Janet Maslin wrote in a review in The New York Times that Mr. Bakri and Arnon Zadok, as the Israeli prisoner, “perform with a quiet restraint that is unmatched by others in the cast.”
Mr. Bakri told Le Monde in 2005 that he had begun to “ask myself political questions” after the killing of Arab Israeli demonstrators during the so-called Land Day protests over Israeli expropriations in Galilee in 1976.
“The situation here has unfortunately condemned me to a political engagement in my professional choices,” he said.
In 2018, he told Le Monde: “To be a Palestinian artist in Israel, while trying to preserve your humanity, is extremely difficult. They want you to become a Jew, to shut your mouth and to very politely forget where you have come from.”
Throughout his career, Mr. Bakri espoused a commitment to nonviolence.
“The Palestinians should have renounced violence a long time ago,” he said in the 2005 interview with Le Monde. “I tell my children that resistance can come from cinema, dialogue, theater or in demonstrating.”
Those who knew him said that Mr. Bakri’s desire to bridge the divide was deeply felt.
“He was very connected to the Palestinian and Israeli worlds, and that is exceptional,” Raya Morag, a professor of cinema studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said in an interview. “He had a deep feeling for the suffering of the two peoples, and this also is exceptional.”
In the United States, he was best known for his roles on two TV series: as the vice president of Afghanistan in “Homeland” and as the prophet Samuel in “Of Kings and Prophets.”
In Annemarie Jacir’s 2017 film “Wajib,” Mr. Bakri and his son Saleh play characters depicting the intergenerational divide in a Palestinian family torn by history and diverging political commitments.
“The conflict between father and son covers the painful back and forth, almost Kafka-like, of Palestinians in Israel, who have made the choice to stay in a country where they are citizens, but in which they remain foreigners,” Jacques Mandelbaum wrote in Le Monde.
In addition to his sons Saleh and Adam, Mr. Bakri is survived by his wife, Leila; three other sons, Hassan, Ziad and Mahmoud; a daughter, Yafa Bakri; and seven grandchildren.
After Mr. Bakri’s death, the journalist Gideon Levy wrote in the newspaper Haaretz, “Israel crushed him for daring to express Palestinian pain as it is.” Palestinians in Israel’s film industry praised Mr. Bakri for his pioneering role.
“He opened the gate for a lot of people to practice art and to not be ashamed because you are in a minority,” the filmmaker Tawfik Abu Wael said in an interview. “There is a Palestinian culture. He represented it.”
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans and is now a writer on the Obituaries desk.
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