(ps. Machine translated from English)
Despite an Emmy, finding this documentary in Europe is quite a challenge.
And that’s why it’s worth seeing.
Focusing entirely on 7 October, We Will Dance Again is a chilling glimpse into the assault on the Nova Festival, which ended with 364 deaths and 44 abductions, through iPhone videos shot by those who were there dancing, and Hamas videos, with many scenes filmed from two opposing standing points. From inside and outside. From in front of and behind a Kalashnikov scope. But it calls Hamas militants: «terrorists.» And so, it has been blamed for conveying only the Israeli perspective and dismissed as propaganda.
But would you watch a movie about Russians to understand Ukrainians?
A movie about Labour to understand the Tories?
Yes, here there is the Israeli perspective, obviously. And nothing more. So what?
This documentary makes you think.
And as with every documentary, that’s what matters.
«Rockets! Rockets from Gaza! The party is over,» a DJ shouts from the stage, because many, drunk and high after a night of trance music, mistake the rockets for fireworks. And because in Israel, by the way, sometimes rockets rain down, it happens, and no one freaks out: the twenty-somethings at the rave are typical Tel Aviv twenty-somethings, grown up thinking that it is normal. And that, after all, there is the Iron Dome. There is the IDF. And they don’t see anything odd about dancing a stone’s throw from besieged Gaza. Not because «Jews are like that,» because «Jews only care about Jews,» as we hear more and more often in Europe, but because they are the children of the Oslo Accords: the children of thirty years of peace process, which built a Wall, instead of two states.
Because in the past, the country, somehow, was one, and despite the Occupation, from Tel Aviv you could go to Ramallah, to Jericho, Nablus, and even Gaza: for a dinner by the sea. Whereas now, there is a Wall in between. Now, if you’re twenty, you have probably never met a Palestinian, except at a checkpoint, with an M16 over your shoulder.
If, instead of Nova, it were about the settlers, or the pacifists, about those four pacifists who live together, Arabs and Jews, and who we all wish were the majority, but unfortunately, remain four, We Will Dance Again would be in every cinema. But it is about average Israelis—those who, on 7 October, didn’t even have an opinion on Gaza. Because Gaza was invisible to them, it was largely turned down.
But perhaps, it was turned down also because the Hamas that emerges from its own images does not look so much like the World War II partisans the Left often compares it to. Many of the videos are ones that Israel, to protect the victims, has long banned. Showing them only to the press. And only partially. And they are videos of gunmen shooting at the yellow mobile toilets like bowling pins, shooting at any door, any window, any closed thing that could be a shelter, a hiding place, shooting the wounded, shooting at everything, and when they realise the are at a rave, in front of nearly 4,000 Israelis stuck in the middle of nowhere, they exclaim enthusiastically: It’s our lucky day!
In the end, the survivors will be those shielded by the corpses.
And they walk home among miles and miles of bodies strewn on the ground.
«Rockets! Rockets from Gaza! The party is over,»
In We Will Dance Again, the Palestinian perspective is missing simply because, at dawn on 7 October, for young Israelis, Palestinians don’t exist. But that doesn’t mean everything is as it was. On the contrary. «I will never be the same again,» says one of the main characters in one of the opening scenes. «I am trying to figure out who I will be,» he says. But if, before 7 October, it was not allowed to talk of the Palestinians, now, it is the opposite: and it is not allowed to speak of the Israelis.
Trying to understand the Israelis is read as justifying Gaza.
As at first, trying to understand the Palestinians was read as justifying Hamas.
What’s the point?
Some of the characters are in one of the many rocket shelters that dot Israel. When they are spotted, Hamas militants begin throwing grenades in, and eight times, Aner Shapira catches the grenade as it is about to explode, and throws it back. On the ninth, the grenade blows up. But someone else immediately takes over. That’s why those who are alive are alive. Because of the many heroes of 7 October. Like the first one to appear: a Bedouin who works in a nearby kibbutz. When he realises that Hamas is outside, he does not hesitate: he gets out and tries to speak to the gunmen, Muslim to Muslim.
He is killed, of course.
But he tries to save everyone, man to man.
All is not lost.
