Barry Avrich’s documentary is a truly must-see film. First, it’s as engrossing a drama as any self-respecting novelist could devise. But mainly, it’s a unique and welcome alternative to the Jew-hating coverage of the Gaza war that our campuses, mass media and even governments have been promoting.
The film centers on one Israeli family’s experience when the Palestinians invaded their kibbutz on October 7, 2023. The central family, a couple and their two young girls, hide in their safe rooms while Hamas runs rampant outside. Retired Israeli General Noam Tibon rushes to their aid, pausing en route to save other Israeli civilians and soldiers.
The war is kept a backdrop to that action. Avrich includes attack footage taken by Hamas body cameras, clips of news coverage, and shots of the corpse-strewn roads. But we are spared the attack’s worst atrocities — the rapes, dismemberment, torture, infanticide and the Palestinians’ celebration of them.
Wisely, Avrich chose not to sensationalize the story with those atrocities. They would have made watching the film difficult for anyone not celebrating the Palestinian terrorism. Such an unbearable film wouldn’t hit the cinemas. I won’t even mention the popcorn sales.
Anyway, people who remember that recent history are thus spared the horror. Those already seduced by Palestinian propaganda would be unlikely to change their minds by being reminded of them. They are too eager to believe Hamas and to condemn the Jews’ existential self-defence. Even now, Israel is fighting — careful to minimize enemy civilian losses — to prevent Hamas’s promised repetition of that attack “throughout Israel and the West Bank.” But in the latest revival of that centuries-old mass pathology, the Jews ares considered the villain.
While the plot drives the film two serious distinctions are implicitly drawn between the Palestinian and the Israeli cultures. The first is the Jews’ commitment to their children, Noam and his wife risk their lives to rescue their adult son and grandchildren. The young family’s survival ultimately depends on the young girls mustering the heroic silence. This implicitly contrasts to the Palestinians’ willing sacrifice of their own children, as shields, suicide bombers, teenage soldiers, hungry for their martyrdom. Which they then bewail and blame on Israel.
The second emerges from all the scenes in the family’s safe room. Every house in the kibbutz has one, a concrete and metal check against Palestinian rockets, grenades and bombs. The construction is intended to survive.
In Gaza the government built a massive web of tunnels, dedicated to attacking Israeli civilians and to storing weapons, food and facilities just for their soldiers. Under Israeli fire, civilians were forbidden their security. Of course , those tunnels under hospitals, temples, schools, playgrounds, areas thus militarized, disqualified them from the “safety” promised in wartime. None of this has diminished the global condemnation of Israel’s war to survive,
The Edward Murrow frame provides the historical context of the Palestinians’ 75-year campaign to eliminate the Jews, rejecting all statehood offers that would deny that.
In addition to the emotional address, there is a lot of beauty and poetry here. For example, this one brief shot — a few ants scamper into a dark hole in concrete. It lasts but a few seconds but it could be the heart of the film. Life, in its simplest, smallest, most anonymous form, manages to find shelter, life, hope, in a dark hole in unfeeling, unyielding concrete. That shot embodies the contrast between the Jews’ dedication to life and the Palestinians’ embrace of death.
