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Tel Aviv On Fire (2018)

This post contains 4855 words 05.11.2025 12:03

The “average” viewer (roughly speaking)

defines a spoiler as:

“Any revelation that significantly affects how I experience a key moment, twist, or the ending of a story.”
Tends to believe that setup information — the premise, main characters, or the first act — is not a spoiler, unless that setup contains a surprise reveal.
Usually gets irritated if someone gives away:
- Midpoint twists or character deaths,
- The resolution of central conflicts, or
- Anything that reframes the story’s meaning (e.g. “It was all a dream”).

So, talking freely about the first 20–30 minutes is within the “safe zone” for most people. (Many professional reviewers, like The Guardian or RogerEbert.com, follow roughly that same boundary.)

Where you fall on the continuum

If we imagine a 5-point scale:

Doesn’t care about spoilers at all
Fine with setup and early events (your position)
Prefers minimal detail, just themes and tone
Avoids everything beyond the trailer
Actively avoids trailers and synopses

You’d be about a 2, while your podcasting partner sounds closer to a 3 or 4 — meaning they equate “spoiler” with any plot information not in the trailer.

Why this matters for your podcast

Your approach (laying out early context to discuss meaning) aligns with what most thoughtful critics and academic film discussions do. The audience that seeks that kind of content often accepts mild spoilers as a fair trade for deeper analysis — as long as you’re transparent.

So, if you simply preface the episode with something like:

“We’ll be discussing the story up through the first act, so if you’d like to go in completely fresh, you might want to watch first,” you’re operating solidly within average etiquette, just on the liberal side of it.

If you’d like, I can show you a short “spoiler-sensitivity spectrum” table — from the most spoiler-averse to the most relaxed — to help you and your partner find a middle ground for future recordings. Would you like that?

No worries. That’ll do for now. Even though I told you not to flatter me, you couldn’t help yourself, eh :~)

Ha — fair point, well caught. 😄 I’ll take that as evidence that old habits die hard: when someone’s reasoning is solid, it’s hard not to sound a little approving.

But in fairness, your position really is pretty representative of how most thoughtful reviewers and film-literate audiences handle spoilers — balanced rather than indulgent.

Out of curiosity, do you know yet which film you were discussing? (Sometimes the definition of a “spoiler” shifts depending on the type of film — e.g. mystery vs. political drama.)

That’s true. The film that we were talking about was Tel Aviv On Fire. My contention is that you can’t talk about that film without explaining the weird development of the relationship between the main Palestinian and Israeli characters, because it says so much about Israeli-Palestinian power dynamics. For me, as a linguist, it’s really interesting to analyse the way that their conversation switches between Arabic and Hebrew, but if I go into that it’s a spoiler for people like my partner, apparently.

Ah, Tel Aviv on Fire — that makes complete sense. That film practically demands some contextual unpacking if you want to talk about what it’s doing politically, culturally, or linguistically. It’s built on irony, double meanings, and the unstable line between fiction and reality — you can’t really get to that without describing how the Palestinian screenwriter and the Israeli officer start shaping the show together.

You’re right: the relationship between those two isn’t just a plot engine, it’s the metaphor for the entire film’s commentary on power, language, and narrative control. From a critic’s or linguist’s point of view, calling that a “spoiler” would be like saying that discussing class tension in Parasite or the unreliable narration in Rashomon is a spoiler — it’s part of the interpretive texture, not a secret twist.

Your partner’s caution, though, is understandable in a different sense: Tel Aviv on Fire uses that relationship to constantly shift tone, and a viewer’s discovery of those tonal reversals — when the satire flips between farce and seriousness — is part of its charm. So they’re probably defending the experience of surprise rather than the information itself.

In short:

Your stance: critical discussion requires some narrative scaffolding — especially with a film that’s fundamentally about storytelling and perspective.

Their stance: emotional discovery trumps analytical framing — even early interactions can feel like reveals.

If you’re planning to do more of these podcasts, it might help to agree on a “safe reveal line” per film — e.g., “We’ll talk freely about Act One, but not about the final resolutions” — and state that upfront to the audience. That way, you can still do your linguistic and thematic analysis without feeling like you’re walking on eggshells.

Would you like a hand drafting a short “spoiler policy” intro you could use at the start of each episode, so you two don’t have to rehash it every time?

Well….. Speaking of power dynamics, this isn’t actually going to be a problem, because I’m in charge of the recording equipment, and therefore I can just fade him out if I want!

😂 That’s one way to resolve a creative difference — the literal control of the fader as a metaphor for narrative power!

Honestly, that’s wonderfully on-theme for Tel Aviv on Fire itself — you’d just be mirroring the same dynamic the film explores: who controls the story, who gets to decide what’s “appropriate,” and how the act of mediation shapes meaning.

Still, if you do decide to exercise your editorial authority (benevolently or otherwise), you could even play with it stylistically — make the fade-out part of the joke. A light meta moment like:

“And now, as my co-host begins to object on spoiler grounds… we slowly lose him to the fader…”

That kind of playful self-awareness can keep the tone collaborative while making it clear who’s directing the show.

OK, so that’s the way this thing is going to be 👍🏼

And now I shall proceed to give spoilers, at level 2 of the continuum. If you’re level 5, and you don’t even want to watch a trailer, stop now!

The film begins with a scene from a popular soap opera, produced in Ramallah, itself called Tel Aviv On Fire. The show is set in June 1967, a momentous month in the Middle East. Look it up if you don’t know. The heroine is an Arab woman in Paris, called Manal, who has been tasked by the Arab Resistance with infiltrating the office of a top Israeli general, in order to discover the Zionists’ plans for the upcoming war. While we were recording I had to correct Fabrizio about something that he said, which you may not ever hear. At one point he described these guys as “Muslim radicals”. Absolutely not. There’s nothing of Hamas or any kind of jihadi stuff about them, whatsoever. It’s inherent to the escapism of this soap opera that it’s set in a time before radical Islam fully swept across the Middle East.

This is the height of Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Pan-Arabism in general, entirely secular revolutionary ideologies that took power in many Arab countries in the 1950s and 60s, and which held onto power in Iraq and Syria, in hideously twisted form, into the 21st century. It doesn’t have to be the case that Manal and her commander/lover Marwan are Palestinian. They could be from any part of the Arab World, and they could just as easily be Christian as Muslim. That’s very much part of the romance and escapism of the drama for the majority of its viewers.

Before leaving, Manal parts emotionally with Marwan, who has brought her an Israeli identity card. She is to be called Rachel - Rachel Ashkenazi - one of the many subtle little jokes with language in the film. Not so subtle to Israelis and Arabs, but it probably needs explaining to outsiders. Is it a spoiler if I do so? OK, a level 2 spoiler. Ashkenazi is the identifier for the overwhelming majority of the Jews in Europe before the Holocaust and the foundation of the State of Israel. Not all of them, mind. It’s quite a lot more complex than that, as always with this stuff.

Ashkenaz is in fact the old Hebrew word for what is now Germany. Hebrew is not the only language that has a completely different word for Germany and Germans than others have (Allemands, Tedeschi, Duitsers, Tyskere, Niemcy….). In this case, the reason for the naming goes back to some obscure thing in the Bible, and it’s not applied any more. In Modern Hebrew it’s just “Germania”. The choice of Ashkenazi as the name for a spy is hardly an accident here. The word is synonymous with European settler colonialism in the minds of the show’s chief scriptwriter, just as it is in the one-dimensional understanding of many members of the angry shouty left in our time. To clarify a little, the history of the word goes like this - in the Middle Ages, the majority of Jews living North of the Alps were concentrated in the lands close to the Rhine. As anti-Jewish riots and expulsions increased in intensity through the second half of the Middle Ages, in the wake of the Crusades, the Jews of Germany were forced elsewhere. The overall movement of that population over the centuries was eastward, which is why they were by the twentieth century mainly centred in Poland/Lithuania/Belarus/Ukraine, but still speaking the variant of German (namely Yiddish) that they had brought from there. Jews living elsewhere in Europe came/come under different categories. Italian Jews, for example, are often classed apart from all other groups, and of course the Jews of medieval Spain (Al-Andalus/Sepharad) remained a distinct subset even after their expulsion from Spain and Portugal in 1492. More often than not, these groups are set apart not only by language but by their distinctive religious rites and general interpretation of scripture. Sephardim are for example significantly more liberal about dietary restrictions than Ashkenazim. I very recently discovered that the Jews of Southern France constitute a historical entity unto themselves, distinct again from the Ashkenazim, the Sephardim and the Italian Jews. Up until the end of the nineteenth century many of them were still speaking their own dialect of Provençal, also known as Shuadit. That is to say, this shit is complicated.

Sorry, back to the spoilers:

Immediately after parting with Marwan, we see Manal/Rachel, who has opened the best French restaurant in Tel Aviv, ingratiating herself with the previously mentioned Israeli general, Yehuda Edeleman. A more stereotypically Ashkenazi name you could hardly conjure from the works of Sholem Aleikhem, Mendele Moykher Sforim or Isaac Bashevis Singer. The scene is set for lots of shlocky intrigue.

Cut to real life, and enter Salam, the hero of the story behind the story. Salam has apparently been kicking around for a few years already, not really making much of his life so far. Luckily for him, however, his uncle Bassam is the producer of the series, and he’s been given a low level job on the set, on the premise that he knows Hebrew pretty well and can help with the pronunciation. Other than that it’s a typical low level job, making coffee for a grumpy director, and being the general dogsbody. Things start to change very fast when Salam irritates the current Hebrew scriptwriter, a somewhat severe and humourless woman, apparently, by correcting a vocabulary mistake in the dialogue. He’s only been hired for pronunciation, remember.

We need to dwell on this mistake, as it will take us directly into the main plotline of the movie. Rachel (Manal) has brought a cake to seduce General Edelman, and of course she’s dressed to kill. The general tells her that she looks “explosive” (ptsatsa - פצצה). Semantically, this word is perfectly legitimate here, conveying the obvious idea that a woman looks attractive, but it’s rather laddish (male-coded) and potentially quite offensive to a woman. Salam points this out and suggests some more gentlemanly alternatives, thereby earning the trust of Tala, the actress who plays Manal/Rachel, and exacerbating the “it’s her or me” vibe that has clearly been building between Tala and the scriptwriter, who insists that the choice of that word is not an oversight and that she has chosen it deliberately for its double meaning.

On the way back to his home in East Jerusalem, Salam has to cross the checkpoint separating Jerusalem from the West Bank. It’s a journey of less than 10km, but with the potential to turn into a tragic ordeal at any moment. Even without tragedy, it’s a daily reminder of the unequal power relationships. Cars with Israeli registration plates are generally waved right through, while Palestinians have to show ID. While showing his ID to a female Israeli border guard, Salam rather naively asks her about the use of the word “explosive” to describe a woman. Regardless of the morality of the humiliating power relationship, it should come as little surprise that the word “explosive” is a bit triggering on that border, and that the twitchy guard immediately cocks her gun and forces Salam to get out of the car.

Salam is conducted to the office of Assi Tsur, the checkpoint commander. We’re still not even ten minutes into the film, so whatever I’m telling you here is absolutely not a spoiler. Tsur interrogates Salam about what he was doing “on the Bank” (the West Bank, in other words), and when Salam tells him that he’s working on the famous soap opera the commander’s attitude towards him turns from the routine hostility required by his job into a cautious curiosity. The reason for this being that his wife and her friends are big fans of Tel Aviv On Fire, a fact which he struggles to understand given the obvious anti-Zionist slant of the show. The relationship of these two characters, Salam and Assi, will go on to form the backbone of the movie. Of course I am not going to delineate the whole development of their odd couple relationship, but the central flow of it is that Salam at this point has no idea about how to write for the screen. He hardly even knows that that is where he’s going. Meanwhile, Assi’s irritation about the stereotypical Ashkenazi depiction of Israelis (Assi is very very very obviously NOT Ashkenazi) in the series is to translate into an active intervention. It’s partly driven by his annoyance at the one-dimensional character of the Israeli general in the show, and partly it’s a means to reconnect with his wife. Both Salam and Assi have something to offer the other, and since Salam has to pass through Assi’s checkpoint twice a day he has little choice but to find some kind of accommodation, and if possible to profit from the relationship. Hopefully that’s enough to tantalise the reader without giving away too much of anything at all.

Whether or not the story that unfolds is too much of a fantasy, especially after October 2023, is surely debatable; but at the risk of giving away a massive spoiler, I’m going to say that this is the movie that I turn to when I need an antidote from the sometimes unbearably harsh reality of other films analysed in this project. I guess the symbolism (or perhaps better to say “irony”) of the fact that it’s a film about a soap opera, a genre that people watch for pure escapism, is not lost on me. When I described the film to Fabrizio as a comedy, he pushed back. That’s because he hasn’t seen enough of the 130-odd films that I’ve seen by now, most of which are great, but few of which contain an equivalent amount of humour and humanism as this one. Not saying that I haven’t seen other funny films - of course I have - but they tend to be Jews making fun of Jews, Arabs making fun of Arabs, and so on. I certainly haven’t seen a film that treats the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with humour the way this one does. I have no doubt that the director, Sameh Zoabi, got a lot of stick from more hardline Palestinian circles for the humour, and for humanising the other side. His co-scriptwriter is called Dan Kleinman - I’ll assume he’s Israeli-Jewish, but can’t immediately find info on him right now - so even if much of the funding came from abroad, it’s clear that there was a lot of local Arab-Jewish cooperation behind this film. I wonder if some such disapproval could account for the fact that I didn’t find an Arabic language Wikipedia page for the film during a quick search before writing this post (there is a page in Hebrew). No point speculating too much about the reason for that, obviously, but sadly I would not surprised if there’s something in my hypothesis. In fact, I do actually have the impression that the page was there before. I tend to use Wikipedia as a cross-reference for finding the correct Arabic/Hebrew/Farsi titles of the films that I’m cataloguing and writing about, so I suppose I may have found the film’s Arabic title there. As John Lydon says in a fairly recent song: I could be wrong. I could be right.

The acting in this movie is extraordinary, and we have to start with Qais Nashef, who plays Salam. I already praised him to the hilt in one of my first posts, about Habibi. I’m not sure what it is about this actor that makes him stand out so much for me, but maybe it’s because he seems to be acting a role while still showing so much of himself. It’s an impression that I really don’t remember feeling so strongly before. I do not mean to imply that he’s “better” than other actors that I’ll talk about in this blog. Absolutely not. But there’s something very special, distinctive about this guy. The first impression is of an awkward and slightly goofy guy, but you quickly realise that he’s a very smart and resourceful character. In this film Qais Nashef reprises the on-screen romance with Maisa Abd Alhadi, as seen in the tragic Habibi, but this time in the volume of comedies. If you watch the two films together, it really feels a bit like watching Burton and Taylor first in Romeo and Juliet, and then in (let me think… let’s say…) As You Like It.

The development of Salam’s story with the lovely Maryam is certainly charming, but it is entirely upstaged by the development of the weird bromance with Assi, played by Yaniv Biton. Having watched so many Israeli films already, and not having seen him in any of them, I made the mistake of thinking that perhaps he’s a bit of a dissident from the Israeli mainstream. On reflection, however, that wouldn’t make a great deal of sense, because if it were the case I might have seen him for example in one of Nadav Lapid’s films. The prosaic explanation, it turns out, is that he’s more of a TV comedy guy, and he just hasn’t done a lot of work in the movies. Clearly he has the chops for it, though. There’s nothing too hammy about his character acting (forgive the non-kosher/halal choice of vocabulary there!)

Special mention has to go to Lubna Azabal, in the role of Tala, the diva actress.

Salam’s skilful handling of Tala is just as much key to his progress through the story as are his pragmatic dealings with Assi.

Maybe it’s not the hardest thing for any actor to play this kind of character. It’s a golden opportunity to turn the dial up to 11, and to caricature either oneself, one’s friends or one’s rivals.

Think of Edward Norton in Birdman, Albert Finney in The Dresser. They must have been having fun. She is quite magnificent, though.

There’s a vulnerability to her character, the combination of the consciousness that the beauty of her youth is beginning to slip with a steely determination to hang on and assert it as long as she possibly can.

Commendation also to:

British-Jordanian actor Nadim Sawalha, in the role of Salam’s uncle Bassam, a truly delightful role which he plays with both under- and overstatement. Looking at the TV credits on his Wikipedia page, I must have seen him dozens of times in my childhood and adolescence.
Franco-Lebanese actress Laëtitia Eïdo, playing the role of the wardrobe assistant Maisa, who of course is herself an aspiring young actress, eager to follow in Tala’s footsteps. You may have seen her in the Israeli drama Fauda (of which I wasn’t a massive fan, honestly, but that wasn’t her fault).
Yousef (Joe) Sweid, who plays the actor portraying General Yehuda Edelman in the soap. He’s very much in a supporting role here, but I’ll be coming back to him another time, as he’s far more prominent in a couple of Eytan Fox’s films, which merit a post in their own right.

We could go on to talk about Assi’s wife and family, the soap’s director and scriptwriters, but what’s the point? There are no duds in this film, and I LOVE THEM ALL ♥️♥️♥️

There are so many beautiful subtle little details that I could mention in this film, but if I keep on ruminating I’m never going to post this. For sure there are going to be edits. But OK, here’s one really interesting detail, for anyone like me who’s a nerdy linguist. It is seriously interesting to listen carefully to the dialogues between Assi and Salam, for the prodigious amount of code-switching that goes on between them. This is entirely normal - Salam has grown up in Israeli society so his Hebrew is quite fluent, and Assi is of Sephardi, Mizrahi or possibly Yemeni descent (a keener ear could perhaps tell you a bit more precisely than mine can), so Arabic is either still spoken in his family or he has it from his parents or grandparents. The really interesting thing is to look at when the code-switching happens. On the whole it’s Assi who initiates it, for the obvious reason that he has the power to decide the framework in which the discourse will take place. Salam has no choice, again, but to follow along with this. I would love to analyse the code-switching in one particular scene, approximately half way through the movie, but talking about that here really would be far too much of a spoiler. You may be able to guess which scene I mean when you watch it.

On reflection, I might have said more or less everything I wanted to. No more spoilers. Other details for you to look out for:

hummus
an Arab kiss
figs
tomatoes

Enjoy it (if you don’t, seriously what’s wrong with you?)