The message to Israeli artists is clear: Uphold the reputation of our people or pay the price.

This isn’t the first time an Israeli official has called for a boycott of an Israeli cultural work in recent years. Miri Regev, the minister of culture, has a storied history of such attacks. In 2017, Israel boycotted the opening night of the Israeli Film Festival in Paris, which receives a stipend from the Israeli Foreign Ministry, for its decision to headline the Israeli film “Foxtrot.” The film follows three generations of Israeli soldiers and was Israel’s submission to the Academy Awards. Ms. Regev, who had urged the boycott, had deplored it for its “self-flagellation and cooperation with the anti-Israel narrative.”

Ms. Regev has a ttempted — and in some cases, succeeded — to censor Israeli film festivals showing work about subjects such as the Nakba, the Palestinian exodus of 1948, and the family of Yigal Amir, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin. Ms. Regev has also threatened to take funding away from Israeli cultural institutions if they plan to show work at all at odds with the government line.

Many Israelis have given up defending the artists’ right to free expression. Their strong reaction to criticism of their country tends to stem from a single, ever-present fear of perceived unequal treatment. Israelis of course fear for the murder of their children. But they also fear their murdered children will be devalued, their tragedies lost in criticism of their government. This is all a natural process for a society embroiled in the type of intractable, violent conflict that Israelis and Palestinians are trapped by. But it was Israel’s cultural response to this difficult situation that has always been unique, foremost in its capacity for self-reflection .

Around the time I immigrated to Israel in 2008, films such as “Beaufort,” also by Mr. Cedar, and “Waltz With Bashir,” by Ari Folman, held the country’s commanders and politicians to account for their actions, and while they naturally made Israelis uneasy, there were serious public attempts to wrestle with the films’ messages. These films reflected the capacity not just to survive national trauma, but also to heal from it. Cultural accomplishments like these are what drew me to immigrate to Israel in the first place; a country that takes its behavior seriously and strives for honest self-reflection despite the pain accompanying it is a nation that could survive anything.

In the years since then, attitudes have shifted. Three wars in Gaza drew condemnation from the international community, but the intervening years’ almost ceaseless rocket attacks from Gaza on civilian communities in Israel’s south were depicted in Israel as invisible to that same international community. Israelis felt as if the world ignored Israel’s tragedies because it didn’t approve of Israel’s methods to prevent them . They watched the Assad regime on their northern border torture people to death and burn the bodies in crematories, and drop barrel bombs on civilian communities and face no justice at the United Nations. They watched children starved in Yemen and Saudi Arabia facing no justice, either. And Israel’s right-wing politicians capitalized on the resentment many Israelis felt about the unfair focus on their country’s behavior. In the words of Naftali Bennett in his 2015 campaign for the Knesset, Israelis should stop apologizing.