Paramount Pictures
There is a need for a documentary that pulls the curtain back on the rising tide of antisemitism in America and the infiltration of pro-Palestinian propaganda into the minds of the American left. I wish that film was October 8.
Wendy Sach’s documentary (sometimes titled October H8TE) is the work of a respected journalist who has taken a step beyond reporting the news to making a conscientious statement: namely that, in the wake of Hamas’s attacks on October 7, 2023—attacks that killed seven hundred and thirty-six civilians, thirty six of whom were children, attacks that included documented cases of rape, torture, and mutilation—the sympathies of mainstream media and progressives have turned against Israeli Jews and instead embraced the Palestinian cause as promoted by Hamas.
This is a serious charge requiring serious examination, if only because of history’s tendency to disregard Jewish claims of persecution even as the persecution is happening.
It is a charge that also has the virtue of being true.
Here in America and around the world, antisemitic incidents have risen by triple digits.
This includes everything from swastikas on Jewish graves to chants of “Gas the Jews” at public events, tormenting of Jewish children, individual acts of physical violence, and the increased visibility of Holocaust denialism on social media. On college campuses, Jewish professors have been doxxed. Jewish students have been forbidden to attend campus events unless they denounce Zionism. At the Cooper Union library, Jewish students were forced to lock themselves inside as protestors chanted “Free Palestine” and banged on doors and windows.
That antisemitism is on the rise is undeniable.
That the American left is in denial of it is unexpected, though perhaps it shouldn’t be. One of the bedrock principles of liberalism is standing up for the oppressed. When the oppressors are torch-wielding alt-right marchers shouting “Jews will not replace us!” liberals have their eyes wide open. But in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks, even before Israel’s incursion into Gaza, many liberals flipped the script. The victims of the Hamas attacks were seen as the oppressors, while Hamas was legitimized as the defender of the “true” victims, the Palestinian people.
The term “Oppression Olympics” refers to our tendency to believe there can only be one victim whose suffering “wins” our empathy; the suffering of the oppressor is nothing more than chickens coming home to roost. Netanyahu’s brutal conduct of his war in Gaza appears to have sealed the deal, to the point that even well-informed liberals will nod when somebody compares Israel to Nazi Germany.
This is the central thesis of October 8, which Sachs pursues through the testimony of interviewees who argue that Hamas has exploited the suffering of Palestinians to portray itself as a liberator rather than a terrorist organization.
According to them, American liberals—particularly on college campuses—have uncritically embraced the framing of Israeli Jews as white colonizers while Palestinians are the dark-skinned indigenous victims. The Israeli David (Israel against radical Islam) has been recast as Goliath (Israel against helpless Gazans). The result is not only the delegitimization of Israel’s right to exist, but tacit permission to embrace antisemitism.
According to Sachs et al, this is the result of a long-planned radicalization of American liberals that began years before October 7, 2023, which Hamas outlines in writing.
And yet this is where Sachs’s argument goes awry.
In pursuing her target, she indulges in slippery arguments and outright falsehoods that suggest October 8 is less a wake-up call than a work of propaganda. The movie is on track right up to the point it goes completely off the rails.
Let’s start with one of its strongest claims.
After the Al‑Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza was destroyed by a missile strike, The New York Times was quick to blame Israel. And yet even after neutral observers concluded that a misfired rocket from Palestinian Islamic Jihad was, the Times downplayed its retraction. Finally it admitted that it had relied too heavily on Hamas’s version of events.
All of this is correctly reported: but where the facts suggest bad journalism, Sachs sees a conspiracy.
Her insistence on treating every anti-Israeli sentiment as part of a well-coordinated program mars her argument. While it’s true that pro-Palestinian voices are strong on college campuses, there is scant evidence that Hamas or any other terrorist organization is behind it. We have wiretaps from the 1990s showing that Hamas would like to influence American opinion, but none that they actually followed through.
Conspiracy theories are only one of October 8’s sins. There is also the tendency to homogenize protestors. Sachs makes no distinction between students glorifying Hamas and those calling for a ceasefire on humanitarian grounds, a number that includes many Israeli and American Jews.
There is also a different kind of conflation going on.
Sach’s interview subjects declare as self-evident that to be Jewish is to be pro-Zionist, and that the annual Passover prediction of “next year in Israel” means that the fate of all Jews is bound up in the survival of Israel. Since I am not a Jew, I don’t have a vote on this. I will say that not all Jews appear to agree. Sachs seems to use it as a way of forestalling dissent: if you’re not a Zionist, how can you call yourself a Jew?
October 8’s worst sin is the erasure of Palestinian suffering. Whether or not you believe that Jews have an historical claim to Palestine, whether you think Palestinians gave up their right to protest after rejecting Palestinian statehood in 1947, whether you believe that October 7 was an aggressive attack or a retaliatory act of defiance, the suffering of Palestinian civilians in Netanyahu’s war is undeniable. October 8 does not acknowledge it.
Multivalent interpretations are not popular nowadays, but they are essential.
What Keats called negative capability—the ability to entertain conflicting points of view without forcing a conclusion—is a lost art in this country. We seem incapable of understanding that dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima saved the lives of American soldiers and it was also a war crime. We don’t like to consider that the good guys sometimes do bad things, or that a dead Israeli child is no less of an outrage than a dead Palestinian child. We used to say “Karma’s a bitch” and now we say “Eff around and find out,” but it amounts to the same thing: once you’ve been declared the oppressor, your suffering is immaterial; once you’ve been declared the victim, your crimes are erased. Small wonder that everyone insists on the exclusive right to victimhood. It’s the only way to win the battle of hearts and minds.
Is it the documentarian’s job to tell all sides of a story?
If one talking head says that Hamas is brainwashing us and another one says it’s not, have we arrived at truth? I would say that’s a ridiculous burden to put on any documentary. You should consider all the facts but ultimately you’re entitled to argue for what you believe. Still, there is a line that matters. This is the point at which you stop accounting for conflicting points of view and simply pretend they don’t exist. The radical anti-Israel view is that Netanyahu = Israel = Zionism = Judaism. Strangely enough, that also appears to be Sach’s belief. It’s one thing to argues that Jews were viciously attacked on October 7 and quite another to behave as if Israel has done nothing wrong since then. An argument for does not require a denial of.
October 8 is one of those movies that demands a serious fact check, and most of the time it checks out.
The American press wrongly blamed Israel for the Al‑Ahli Hospital attack and was slow to correct itself. Cases of rape and sexual assault on Jewish victims of October 7 are underreported—“#MeToo except for Jews,” as the memes describe it. Tessa Veksler, student body president at UC Santa Cruz, was recalled for her pro-Israel stance and only kept her post by a single vote (why that deserves the attention it gets is another matter).
On a scale of Pennebaker’s Crisis to Oliver Stone’s JFK, October 8 ranks somewhere in the middle: it’s not fly-on-the-wall reportage, but it’s not lying either. Its flaws lie in how it frames arguments, assumes intent, and filters out contradicting facts to lead viewers to a single, uncomplicated conclusion. I wish that there was a different film on this subject: one that could separate legitimate criticism of Israel from outright antisemitism, or shine a light on Hamas propaganda while still acknowledging the atrocities that the IDF has committed on Netanyahu’s orders. A documentary may be too small a canvas for such an exploration. Then again, Anna Deveare Smith managed to tell a multifaceted story of the Crown Heights Riots in less than two hours with her one-woman show Fires in the Mirror. Her objective was not to convince but to humanize. That may not be the story that Wendy Sachs wanted October 8 to tell, but it’s the one we need.
Extras are plentiful with a commentary track, deleted scenes, extended interviews, behind-the-scenes material, and more.
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