The Story of the Massacre at the Roadside Shelter on October 7, 2023

The Last Recording (Hebrew title: Death Shelter: The Last Recording), by Assaf Liberman and Nadav Ben Zur, is about a terrible massacre that occurred at a roadside shelter near Kibbutz Re’im on that terrible day, October 7^th, 2023.  A number of young adults in their 20s who had been at the Nova music festival, fleeing for their lives, took refuge in this shelter.  Of the 40 or 50 who took refuge there, only 11 survived, of whom 4 were taken hostage by Hamas terrorists. 

Viewers consider yourselves warned -- the film is shocking and difficult to watch.  It is based on a cellphone recording made by Ayelet, who was killed that day.  The sounds, the whisperings, the shooting are all authentic and so hard-hitting.  There is also visual footage of the young people all huddled together, all so very real.  The film includes interviews with the survivors, telling the story of what happened that day, and with the parents of those who were so brutally murdered.  The interviews are conducted, in an extremely sensitive manner, by Assaf Liberman, a radio talk show host for Reshet Bet.

Osama, a Bedouin man from the Negev who was working on the security team for the Nova festival, was trapped in the shelter with the others.  When he stepped out to try to reason with the terrorists, he was grabbed and killed. 

Here is the story that so many people have heard – the terrorists threw grenades into the shelter and Aner, who loved the dancing and was a soldier, bravely kept picking them up and throwing them back out.  He was a true hero.  The footage of the goings-on outside the shelter is from a dashcam, also so very real and authentic. From that footage we can see the grenades exploding outside.  Eventually, the terrorists threw a grenade deep inside and some people, including Aner, were killed.  This is when Hersh Goldberg-Polin lost his hand.  Then the terrorists grabbed four of the people inside and took them away as hostages.  Hersh was one of them (only to be executed later by the terrorists while in captivity).  Also, Alon, who loved to play piano, was taken hostage. 

Finally, the terrorists came back in and shot at everyone, just to be sure. 

The survivors, beautiful young people, today are dealing with the trauma of what they experienced and the fact that they survived. They laid there that day for hours, wounded and traumatized, weeping, waiting for help, waiting to be rescued.

The Last Recording (documentary, 60 minutes) is available from Go2Films. 

The Nova Rave

 I was very badly affected by the latest news.  Yesterday was the day that Shirel Golan committed suicide on her 22^nd birthday.  She was a survivor of the Nova festival and she had been suffering from post trauma. Even though I had been putting off watching the film about the Nova festival, I decided that this was the time to pay proper honor to those who died there and those who survived.

We Will Dance Again, directed by Yariv Mozer, is a highly effective and emotional documentary film which describes the trance festival that took place on Simchat Torah, Friday night, October 6^th, 2023. It portrays an event which was full of energy and full of life.  The festival was produced by a company from Brazil and the DJs came from all over the world. More than 3,500 young people attended in the fields outside of Kibbutz Re’im.  The next morning, October 7^th, about 400 of them were slaughtered by Hamas terrorists.

Some of them were artists, some were models ,others were university students, song writers, production staff. All of them were wonderful young adults who enjoyed dancing, loved to be together and celebrate life!  As the sun rose on the morning of October 7^th, they were hit by an attack of extreme evil, and their lives changed forever.  There were rockets everywhere, explosions, sirens, screaming, barrages of rockets, people running, nobody knowing what was happening.  The footage is comprised entirely of cellphone footage and Hamas body cams and even Hamas propaganda footage.  We watch as the bulldozers broke through the border fence in 60 different locations.

The young people tell stories of how they hid in the portable toilets, in refrigerated equipment, in garbage containers.  They were fleeing through the fields, watching their friends being slaughtered around them, bullets whizzing by, hiding in roadside shelters. 

The stories are so emotional.  In one roadside shelter, a local Bedouin goes out to talk to the terrorists and he is murdered right away.  Hersh Goldberg-Polin is in there with his friend Aner Shapiro.  The terrorists throw in a grenade and Aner picks it up and throws it back.  This happens a few times, until finally a grenade explodes inside. Hersh loses his hand and Aner is killed. We all know the story of Hersh, who is kidnapped and later executed by the Hamas in one of their underground tunnels.

The survivors offer their testimonies against the up-close footage from cellphones of friends being slaughtered around them.  The survivors wonder what was happening to their families, thinking that perhaps the entire country was under siege, watching as their friends were kidnapped.  Hours go by and the police and the army don’t come.  There are burnt out cars and the piles of bodies are mounting up.

This is the story of close to 400 murdered, 44 kidnapped, hundreds wounded, and hundreds living with PTSD. This film provides the victims with individual names.  We hear the story of Shani Louk who was kidnapped and later murdered.  Eliyah Cohen who was taken hostage.  Ron Weinberg who was a tech genius and was killed.  And so many more – David Yair Shalom Newman, Gili, Shaked, Avraham, Uria, Forti, Ruth Peretz and her father Erick, Keshet, Sivan, Maayan, and so many more…

We Will Dance Again (90 minutes, documentary) is an extremely hard-hitting documentary film, which tells a story that needs to be told – a tale of those who were murdered, those who were taken hostage, and those who survived -- not a film for the light-hearted.  The film is available from Go2Films.

Prizewinning film, The Future, by Noam Kaplan

 The Future, written and directed by Noam Kaplan, was a prizewinner at the Tribeca Fim Festival, June 2023. 

Noam Kaplan’s previous feature film, Manpower, was about migrant workers living in South Tel Aviv. Check out what I wrote about it on this blog.

His new film, The Future, is a provocative film about women, about the Occupation, and about our future, here in Israel-Palestine.

A Palestinian young woman named Yaffa has been arrested for the assassination of the Minister of Space and Tourism. In fact, in the opening scene, Yaffa (played by a Palestinian actress named Samar Qupty) is brought by a police investigator to re-enact the scene in which she shot and killed the minister.  Later, the Security Services bring her to the clinic of Nurit (played by Reymonde Amsallem), a futuristic profiler who can supposedly identify potential terrorists and thereby prevent terrorist incidents. Since Nurit didn’t succeed in foretelling Yaffa’s attack on the minister, she is meant to interrogate her in order to better understand what went wrong. 

In her series of meetings with Yaffa, she tries to delve into what kind of relationship she had with her mother, what kind of childhood she had, what motivated her to acquire a gun and to decide to assassinate the minister.  At the same time, she is learning a lot about herself, about her relationship with her own mother and about her desire to have a child.

All of this is told on the background of the entire country waiting to learn of the success of an Israeli spaceship named “The Hope” on its way to the moon. 

Highly critical of the Occupation, The Future offers a shocking look at our future.  Can there be any hope? The film is available from GumFilms.

 

The Story of How Israel Became Embroiled in the Mud of Lebanon

My husband and I have been watching documentary films from DOCAVIV (via streaming) these past few days.  The festival is a wonderful Israeli film event that usually takes place in the springtime at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque, but this year, due to the pandemic, it is currently streaming till Sept. 13th.  In addition to some great international docs, we watched the premiere of the first two episodes of a five-part Israeli TV series called Lebanon: Borders of Blood, directed by the prolific Israeli documentary filmmaker, Duki Dror, and we also “participated” in a discussion with the filmmakers. 

This fascinating and extremely well-documented and well-researched TV series includes an historical chapter, and then delves into the complicated issues of modern Lebanon.  According to Duki Dror, Israelis are used to thinking about Lebanon purely as an issue of defending ourselves against terrorist attacks in the north, but through a TV series such as this one, we are able to see that it is much more complicated than that!  In a DOCAVIV interview after the screening, the filmmaker stated that the working assumption of those who conceived, produced and directed this film is that if we can understand Lebanon in all of its strange diverse components, then we can understand the Middle East, and perhaps even ourselves.

Episode 1, entitled the Lebanon Kaleidascope, offers an historical overview, beginning with the artificial creation of the country in the 1920s.  The country was made up of opposites and developed into a Western paradise quite quickly, offering extraordinary culture and exciting nightlife.  But things rapidly deteriorated in Lebanon after King Hussein drove  the PLO leadership from Jordan in 1970 during what became known as  “Black September”.  My husband and I were here in Israel as students that year, and we remember the news reports of this traumatic event.

 The Lebanese were forced by the Arab world to provide a southern swath of territory to the armed PLO “freedom fighters”, which included  Palestinian refugees who arrived after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, and those who arrived following the outcome of the Six Day War. At this time, during the 1970s, the Christians living in Lebanon began to feel endangered, and this marked the beginning of the civil war.  It also marked the beginning of terrible terror attacks by the PLO against Israel, when a school bus on the northern border was hit by an RPG.  Prime Minister (at that time) Golda Meir demanded that Lebanon crack down on the terrorist groups, and thus things began to heat up within Lebanon. Palestinians massacred the Christians living in a village called Damour.  The Christians retaliated and killed literally thousands of Palestinians at Tel El-Zatar.  Then Syria entered the conflict by financing and arming the PLO.  The violence continued to escalate, and the cycle of civil war and killing got worse and worse.  Since the Christians felt that the entire Arab world was against them, they turned to the state of Israel for support and in 1976 then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin agreed to equip the Christian Phalangists, creating a new alliance, that eventually became stronger and stronger.

Episode 2 added much more to the viewer’s understanding of the complexity of Lebanon which at that time included Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims, many different sects of Christians, with the Maronite Phalangists being the most well  known, and then the PLO  fighters and Palestinian refugees are thrown into the mix.  Historically, the Maronite Christians ruled Lebanon and made up the elite with other Christian groups and Sunni Muslims.  The Shi’ite Muslims lived in the south and were humiliated, discriminated against, and even persecuted.  The Palestinian refugees who came to Lebanon from Israel are Sunnis and didn’t get along with the Shi’ites or the Christians in the south.  It was an anarchic situation for a long time, with one persecuted group hating another persecuted group, engaging in violent reprisals against each other constantly. Today, the Hizbollah, who are Shi’ite, are supported by Iran and Syria.  During the Civil War (which lasted 15 years approximately), Muslims killed Christians and Christians killed Muslims and Christians killed Christians.  And, eventually, it brought Israel into the “Lebanese Mud.”

As the citizens of Israel suffered  more and more terrorist attacks in the north of Israel, and the Phalangists, who became the Pro-Israel  SLA (South Lebanon Army) tried to protect their Christian villages in South Lebanon and to stop the PLO fighters from infiltrating into Israel, the situation went from bad to worse. The constant escalation catalyzed  then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin (who had just made peace with Egypt in 1979) to appoint a hawkish defense minister, Ariel Sharon, and, as they say, the rest is history!

The Israeli soldiers who were interviewed for this series who participated in the 1982 incursion into Lebanon admitted on camera that they had virtually no idea about the complex and diverse ethnic, political and religious divisions in Southern Lebanon.  In an attempt to be even-handed and to show both sides of the narrative, this excellent documentary series reminds us that the young Israeli soldiers who were fighting, suffered from the cruel and violent images of repeated terrorist attacks by the PLO at that time.  Similarly,  the  young Palestinian fighters were motivated by their perceptions of their people’s sufferings from 1948, 1967 and into the 1980s.

According to the filmmakers, there were more than 100 people interviewed for this series, including Israeli, PLO, Phalangist and American speakers, providing different points of view.  Due to the fact that the TV series is an Israeli-German-American co-production, with international crews, they were able to locate and interview people who would not usually cooperate with Israeli filmmakers.  This enabled the film to truly be a kaleidoscope of multiple contradictory points of view, helping the viewer to get a deeper understanding of the complexity of the situation in Lebanon that we still confront to this very day, as opposed to usual simplistic black and white, us vs. them view of this very messy situation on our northern border.

The TV series, Lebanon, Borders of Blood, is produced for broadcast on KAN, the Israeli public TV station, and we watched the Israeli version.  A different version will be edited for viewing abroad. 

Our Boys

Currently streaming on HBO in the USA is Our Boys, a series of 10 episodes, created by three filmmakers, Hagai Levi, Joseph Cedar and Tawfik Abu-Wael (two Jewish Israeli filmmakers and one Palestinian).  The series is an enormously impressive and hard-hitting historical re-enactment of terrible murders that took place in Israel-Palestine during the summer of 2014.

The TV series begins with the abduction and murder of three Jewish Israeli teenagers from the Gush Etzion junction, south of Jerusalem, during that summer. This incident brought deep sorrow and mourning to Israeli society.  But this is not the focus of the series. Rather, the filmmakers decided to examine the ethical and strategic issues involved in the senseless revenge murder of an innocent Palestinian teenager.

Seeking revenge for the murder of the three Israeli teens, Israeli right-wing ultra-orthodox extremists kidnapped, and while still alive, set fire to a Palestinian youth named Mohammed Abu Khdeir from Shuafat (a Palestinian neighborhood north of Jerusalem).  Following this heinous murder, extensive rioting broke out in the Palestinian community in Jerusalem and all over the West Bank, and missiles were shot from Palestinian militants in Gaza.  The film series reveals how much damage the murder of this Palestinian boy caused in Israel that summer.

All of this eventually led to the beginning of Operation Protective Edge, a military operation, that lasted for 50 days, against the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.

After the murder of Abu Khdeir, my husband, Ron, and my daughter Dahlia, went to pay their respects to the Abu Khdeir family at the tent of mourning in Shuafat, along with hundreds of other concerned Jews from all over Israel, on a solidarity visit organized by the Tag Meir Forum (see below).

Filmed on location in Jerusalem and surroundings, the TV series sets out to document how the Israeli police and Shabak (Shin Bet—Israeli internal security services) investigate the heinous murder of this Palestinian Arab teenager.  At first, the police were misled because they were so sure that such an atrocious murder of a Palestinian youth could not have been committed by Jews.  This sounds like a ridiculous assumption these days, but many people in Israel still believe that Palestinians are capable of terrible atrocities but that Jews would never do such things.  Even years after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, Israelis still refuse to believe that there is a violent right-wing extremist movement capable of such terrible deeds.

It is interesting to also note that the series deals frankly with this issue of “who is the victim?"  Both sides, Israelis and Palestinians, claim victimhood in this decades long conflict.  Palestinians feel that they are the underdog, treated very poorly as part of the occupation, and therefore they see themselves as the only victims.  On the other hand, Jewish Israelis feel that they have been the victim ever since the Holocaust, and that they are still victims of Palestinian terror all the time, and therefore they must never let down their guard.  These are two conflicting narratives – both of which are articulated in the TV series-- which attempts to follow the actual events and at the same time, to evoke empathy and understanding on both sides.

The series has two heroes – one is the father of Mohammed and the other is the Shabak investigator.  The father of Mohammed Abu Khdeir is seen as a rational and cool-headed figure who is able to resist the demands of the Palestinian Arab extremists who want to turn his son’s murder into a cause for rioting and revenge.  The credits at the end of each episode show that the real-life parents of Mohammed cooperated in the making of this series, which is quite amazing.

Our other hero, Simon, the Shabak investigator, is given the difficult job of finding Abu Khdeir’s murderers.  He begins by tracking some of the young men of the Hilltop Youth, a group of young Jewish anarchists and extremists, who remind me sometimes of white supremacists in the USA.   These youngsters operate freely throughout the West Bank and inside Israel, even though the Shabak is aware of them and constantly watching them on their security cameras.  They indulge in terrible acts of destruction of property and even sometimes in murder, in what they call Tag Mechir, price-tag revenge attacks.  They represent a horrible stain on Jewish society in Israel. In recent years, they have been opposed by the Tag Meir (Light Tag) Forum, which engages in solidarity visits and educational programs to combat Jewish racism.

This is a very courageous and compelling television series, produced by HBO and Keshet. I am still in the middle of viewing it together with my husband. One of the reasons we chose to see it is that Bibi denounced it calling it anti-Semitic and anti-Israel. The opposite is the case. It is a gripping portrayal of an issue at the heart of Jewish morality within Israel, and I applaud the directors for having taken such a bold step in forcing us to grapple with these issues.

We have more episodes to watch, and we plan to go to hear the directors of the film speak at the JCC on the Upper West Side in New York in a few weeks, at the preview screening of the tenth and final episode. After that, I will update you on the conclusion of this important series. Stay tuned.