I couldn’t sit through Schindler’s List when the children were little and found even March of the Penguins, when an egg rolls from the snug of the daddy penguin’s crotch to freeze solid on the ice, a truly tough watch.
No way then could I sit through the 43 minutes spliced together by the Israeli state of the atrocities of 7/10 to provide real-time testimony of brutality and slaughter on a scale not seen since the Holocaust.
When I told LBC’s Nick Ferrari I couldn’t face going to the screening we’d been invited to, he said, “But that’s like saying you won’t watch the planes flying into the Twin Towers,” shaking his head. “This is history.”
He was right. All too quickly, 7/10 has become an argument about who was writing history and not what had happened, which was becoming a matter of opinion and not of fact.
The events of 7/10 were fake news, part and parcel of the perpetual, tentacular Zionist conspiracy, critics of the state of Israel claimed. As for the film — even if every frame of the so-called footage was released with the relatives’ consent, it was all unverified, as if that was somehow worse in our wonky moral metaverse than rape, murder, abduction and mutilation on an industrial scale.
We saw women with no underwear, with splayed legs and livid bruises to their necks and faces set in rictuses
The small private screening of the Hamas House of Horror film took place at RUSI, in Whitehall, in the institute’s dignified circular library, on a screen in front of mahogany shelves lined with military history and bronze busts of famous generals. I sat between my colleagues Nick and Tom Swarbrick, with Stephen Fry right behind, occasionally emitting a musical moan during a botched beheading, and Owen Jones in front.
After a few days, Owen Jones blessed us with his 25-minute analysis of the film. Though he asserted that what Hamas did were “war crimes” in the course of his hyper-articulate “thoughts” he says we, ie the audience, had been told by the various speakers who introduced it to justify Israel’s destruction of Gaza on the basis of what we saw; that the women with no underwear, with splayed legs and livid bruises to their necks and faces set in rictuses, didn’t provide conclusive evidence of rape; that no children were murdered in the course of making the film, and many other things.
Now, while I agreed when he said he refused to breakdown his empathy for the suffering of others — ie the many thousands killed in Gaza — by selectively focusing only suffering of some — ie the far fewer victims of the massacre — I disagreed with him on the following.
We were not there as part of a propaganda exercise but to “bear witness” (the title of the film). No instructions from the podium needed. The film spoke for itself.
We saw countless murdered children, including many burnt babies. Even though Jones is right to say we did not see live-streamed rape, if he genuinely doubts that countless women were violated cruelly I would direct him to the eyewitness account of Sheri Mendes, a volunteer who opened the women’s body bags in the morgue, some with their legs cut off and blood dripping from their ears with their lower garments soaked in blood, on the @israel feed on X. The last thing I would say about the film, in which the blue sky and golden sun of the Middle East shines pitilessly down on all the sons and daughters of Abraham alike, is this: it was 43 minutes I can never unsee — but important parts of it Owen Jones didn’t (or couldn’t) seem to see in the first place.
A couple of days later, I went on the anti antisemitism march. I’m not Jewish, I do have Jewish antecedents but I didn’t go for that.
I stood in the cold drizzle because callers to my show say they are frightened; they say they want to leave the capital, and they say they’d be safer in Israel than on the streets of London, clogged with righteous students in keffiyeh waving their Palestinian flags from Amazon and chanting “from the river to the sea”.
I went to stand in solidarity with them, with 80,000 strangers in London and with Jews around the world and to march in peace, and was surprised to find the only leader among us was the Chief Rabbi, and not a single member of the Cabinet or shadow cabinet appeared to be there.
To conclude. I didn’t want to see the film. I didn’t want to go on the march. I didn’t even want to write this.
Sometimes you have to show up, and this is one of those times.
