‘We will dance again’ a harrowing documentary on the hell of 7 October

One of the challenges of showing sympathy towards any group in the Israel/Palestine conflict is that accusations of political bias are immediately thrown around. If I weep for murdered Israelis, I must be a colonial Zionist, a settler, and indifferent to the children of Palestine. If I roar at the injustice of the bombing of civilian targets in Gaza, I’m a supporter of terrorism or even an anti-Semite.

If you doubt me, spend some time on my social media accounts and you’ll realise the hideous authenticity of what I just said. Because I do care for all concerned in this truly terribly dispute. I am not naïve when it comes to the darkly complex realities of it all. I’ve visited the region many times, spent months living there, wrote my university thesis on pre-state Jewish terrorism in the 1940s, and have interviewed leaders on all sides.

Yet the more I learn, the less absolute I can be on the situation. If only I could be as wise as those instant experts and political fanatics who hold forth day after day about experiences and histories of which they have absolutely no knowledge.

Which brings me to the new BBC Storyville documentary Surviving October 7th: We Will Dance Again. It’s a 90-minute account of what happened on that gruesome day, and the sounds of the people crying around me when I attended a preview this week is testimony to the poignancy and power of the film.

Note: The below video contains footage some may find distressing

Part of that force, that sheer emotional scream, is that this isn’t a political statement but an intimate story of a human tragedy. We’re taken through the event in slow and deliberate detail, a strange flatness of an account which only goes to make the whole thing so much more agonizing. The banality, I suppose, of evil.

Because evil it was. This was no act of defiance against Israel but the systematic slaughter of more than a thousand people, murdered not because of what they believed – they were never asked – but because of who they were and what they were. And surely nobody could watch all this and not feel the shudders of pogrom, massacre, or even Shoah run through their bodies. Not that all of the victims were Jewish. There were a number of Arabs who were killed, and the documentary has one of the Israeli survivors explaining how a Bedouin who was hiding with them went outside of the shelter to try to reason with the Hamas killers. He was a Muslim, he spoke Arabic. They tortured and then murdered him.

CCTV, mobile phone footage, and GoPro film from Hamas who were live-streaming their murders is interwoven with testimonies from young Israelis – young because they were, after all, gathered close to Gaza for a party, a rave of love, for sheer fun. It’s one of the obscene ironies of the whole thing that the emphasis of the Nova Festival was peace and inclusion, and a number of those present were active in the peace movement.

You may cry, you may turn away…But you will also learn about the human spirit, and the bonds of love and friendship

There were numerous acts of heroism and sacrifice that are recounted, but this is honest and real, and as such there are also admissions of terrible fear. Unarmed, some of them drunk or high from the party a few hours earlier, and none of them expecting an attack, what amazed me about these people in their late teens or early 20s was their sheer courage. When terrorists threw grenades inside a shelter in an effort to kill everyone, these young people tossed them back out again. Incredible and inspiring. All the more so as these stories are told by people who were there, watching and waiting and wondering.

Then there were the hostages taken, some of them older people or even babies, from local kibbutzim. We see film of a lovely young woman, dancing in joy and liberation at the festival, and later watch her smashed body on the back of a truck, with Hamas men putting their feet on her as if she were an object, or nothing at all. Her body was later found by the Israelis and returned home for burial.

I didn’t hear a word of hatred or even anger from the interviewees, nor any calls for revenge or retaliation. There was nothing contrived about all that, merely a natural response of good people who endured hours of terror, saw friends killed, and lived through a day of what one of them compared to hell. For once, this surely wasn’t hyperbole.

So, back to my starting point. How will people respond to We Will Dance Again? Frankly, I suspect that after Israel’s campaign in Gaza, a lot of people will be sorry, but will also feel a form of compassion fatigue. I’ve heard this for some time now. “They’re all as bad as each other, it’ll never end…” The truth is, if you really knew the people involved, the real people, the normal people, you’d say that they were all as good as each other. Because I’ve constantly been inspired by the grace, sense of forgiveness, and sheer humanity of Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Israel and Palestine.

It’s that humanity that we have to grasp if anything bright or light – or at least not vile and venomous – is to develop from all this. I’ve no idea if there will ever be a lasting peace but I refuse to abandon the idea, the ideal, the Gospel-soaked conviction, that something can come from a God-driven transformation. I used to work in Northern Ireland, covering in particular the loyalist paramilitaries. I saw violence that shocked me then, and still shocks me now. I never thought that peace would come, but it has. Not a perfect peace, but a world away from the murder and hatred I saw close-up for so long.

I’d urge you to watch this documentary. You may cry, you may turn away, you may wonder at people in Britain who ripped down posters calling for Israeli hostages, some of them children, to be returned home. But you will also learn about the human spirit, and the bonds of love and friendship. When I first visited Israel in 1979, I was told, “This is the place where miracles happen.” I still believe that to be true, and I pray for it every single day.

The BBC Storyville documentary, Surviving October 7th: We Will Dance Again, will be broadcast on BBC Two at 9pm on Thursday 26 September