‘Shema Yisrael!’ Footage of 7 October attack finally aired by BBC showed God at His finest and worst

Human error and evil being what they are, surely each and every day throughout the 365-day year must likely mark some terrible tragedy from the course of human history. Most of them, somewhat fortunately, if only for our sanity, are forgotten to the mists of the past. But not the date of 7 October, which joined the roster of unending tragedy last year, when Hamas launched its terror attack against Israel.

I remember the day well because the mind boggling horror of it occurred against the Christian joy to be had from pilgrimage’s end: that day a Catholic Herald pilgrimage arrived in Assisi, a few days after Saint Francis’s Feast Day on 4 October.

The night before, as Hamas were presumably putting the final touches to their plan and preparations, the usual Chaucerian gaggle of well-meaning misfits watched a wonderful sunset in the town of Foligno, nestling in the tranquil hills of Umbria, before our final push to Assisi.

What an awful and ridiculous contrast, as we arrived in the city of the saint associated with the most famous Christian prayer for peace, Lord, make me an instrument of your peace, while an event occurred that, in addition to the horror caused that day in Israel, unleashed the horror that has befallen Gaza, and now spreads out into Lebanon.

Indeed, all three of the great Abrahamic faiths are caught up in this one, though with Christianity wedged between Judaism and Islam as they clash.

After my forays into combat in the Middle Easy in Iraq, and then in Afghanistan, where our “Christian” nations didn’t do the best of jobs, among the lessons I had foisted upon me was the point raised by US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara, in analysing the Vietnam War, and which can be traced back to Chinese warrior philosopher Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, to always empathise with your enemy; don’t ignore or be oblivious to their mindset.

So whether you agree or don’t agree with how Israel has gone about things since 7 October, it’s important to understand where it is coming from.

For while we all know what happened on 7 October 2023, none of us really know or appreciate what happened that day.

It remains conceptual, abstract, numerical – which, of course, is the same risk of how what has happened in Gaza can be perceived. But today is about what happened in Isreal. That’s enough to bear.

After the BBC recently aired a documentary called Surviving October 7th: We Will Dance Again, a film by Yariv Mozer that focuses on the slaughter at the Nova music festival that was happening by the border when Hamas launched its raid, those who watched it now “know more than most the extent of atrocities carried out by the Palestine terrorists who invaded through the Gaza border”, Jonathan Sacerdoti writes for the Spectator.

I didn’t actually manage to watch the whole thing – a bit close to the bone after Iraq and Afghanistan, I guess, not to mention how this was a whole other magnitude – but I saw enough to appreciate that it offered “a searing testament to the brutality of that day” and that the film “urges us to bear witness to events that were carefully documented by both the victims and the perpetrators, in videos which until now were scarcely shown to a wider audience”.

The footage confronts us “with a chilling narrative of joy [on the part of the killers] shattered by terror and barbarity”, and in which we “actually get to see the face of evil up close and personal”.

The fact we have the astonishing footage is due to a strange conflation of both modern and historical trends.

“As young people do these days, the party goers filmed the unfolding horrors,” Sacerdoti says, while noting there is also the fact these were young Israelis, hence they filmed “to leave a record for their loved-ones” and to “record what they realise is a grim piece of history in the making”.

For “their ancestors were killed in the Holocaust only for future antisemites to deny it ever happened, but this time they all have phones with cameras to document the slaughter”.

Amongst the clips of young Israelis hiding in shelters, fridges, cupboards, rubbish tips or fleeing for their lives in cars getting shot up – Hamas make the Taliban appear pretty noble as far as adversarial conduct goes – many of them, who certainly don’t look particularly religious in their funky festival clothes, can be heard declaring “Shema Ysrael!’ a Jewish prayer that traditionally is expressed when one is facing death.

It’s a horrible and hauntingly personal moment that bridges time and distance, and puts you right in there with these young Israelis, at least I found that watching as a Catholic. Suffice to say, I’m pretty sure I would have been banging out a few Our Fathers in the same position, though this Jewish prayer seemed even more personal and powerful in the moment, as it addresses death, and these Israelis thought they were about to die.

As the Spectator article notes, the formula of the prayer, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord is One”, is matched in parallel by the Palestinian attackers’ cries of “Allahu Akbar” – “God is great” – in the images caught in the body cameras worn by the killers to record the next stage of the process that the Nazis took to such extremes.

Sacerdoti states: “We are left in no doubt about the cause for which they killed: ‘Even if 1,000 of us die for Islam, even if 2,000 of us die for Islam, the time of the Jihad nation has arrived,’ they sing with glee. No amount of commentary could better demonstrate the profound cultural and religious divide, where one side worships life and the other revels in death.”

The footage raises important questions about how these events have been covered by the media in the year since.

While “the BBC’s decision to broadcast this important film should be commended,” Sacerdoti writes, “it cannot excuse their editorial negligence over the past year, during which they failed to air the majority of the plentiful, real-time, first-hand footage in its regular new reports”.

I’m not sure the BBC could have aired much of it, so extreme and harrowing is the footage, but it could have selected carefully edited snippets which would have given whisper enough of the horror.

Enough to at least give Christians contending with how to square the circle of mediating between Israel and Palestine a better idea of what the Christian message of peace and forgiveness is up against.

Photo: Rudy Glazer, whose brother Ranani Glazer was killed during the 7 October attack, hugs a photo of his brother at a memorial established at the site of the Nova music festival in Re’im, Israel, 18 December 2023. The music festival was among the first sites attacked by Hamas militants, sparking the current war between Israel and Hamas. (Photo by Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images.)

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