Pogrom: a violent riot incited with the aim of massacring or expelling an ethnic or religious group, particularly Jews
From the beginning of the film, Pogrom(s)
Pierre Rehov is a French-Israeli filmmaker known for his movies about the Arab–Israeli conflict, Israel in the media, and Palestinian terrorism. I had the opportunity to speak with him about his latest film, Pogrom(s), about the October 7th massacre.
The interview is edited for brevity and clarity.
How is your film different from the videos about October 7 that have already come out?
Most films on October 7th focus on what happened at the Nova party, because it was international. Besides Israelis, there were also Germans, French, and Americans–and it was a party for young people. So it made for a “good” story: young people, dancing, being attacked by terrorists. That is a simple, easy story to tell.
But that is not the whole story.
The terrorist attack on the Nova party was incidental. Hamas had a much bigger plan, one that was much more terrifying. It involved conquering the south of Israel and taking over cities like Ashkelon, to take over Beersheba. That would have been a much bigger tragedy because it would have meant fighting inside Israel for weeks.
Also common among other films is to focus on the survivors. From an artistic and political perspective, I didn’t want to do that because there’s a more important story to tell. I wanted to draw attention first of all to what the first responders saw when they arrived on the scene. I also wanted to include analysts, people who know politics and the International situation, to talk about what happened. That is why the title of my film is in the plural: Pogrom(s). I wanted to show that this pogrom did not come out of the blue. In the context of Palestinian oppression, it is what Muslims do.
It was what Muslims did in Algeria, where I was born decades ago. It is what Muslims did on January 20, 1976, when they attacked Christians in Lebanon in the Damour Massacre during the Lebanese Civil War. They used the same method: raping, burning people alive, separating children from their parents, and killing them in front of the other to make the suffering, humiliation, and torture even bigger. This is the biggest part of it.
We can compare–and it’s in the film–what happened on October 7th with what the Nazis did, with what the Poles did during the pogroms or the Russians. Those people may have been drunk enough to enjoy what they were doing, but even the Nazis were kind of ashamed of killing children and women. And at night, they got drunk and didn’t want to talk about it. They hid it and didn’t want the rest of the world to know about it.
October 7 was different.
Not only did the Gazans enjoy what they did. They wanted the rest of the world to know what they did. They were so proud of themselves, how they opened the belly of the pregnant woman and took the baby out, that they filmed themselves doing it. They filmed themselves doing that and other things. The Israeli government possesses around seven hours of videos of those abominations that those Muslim terrorists happily put on Telegram as it was happening.
But we also have a situation where afterwards, they wanted to hide as much as possible. So, the end result is a situation where people believe that nothing happened to the Jews and the Jews are doing atrocious, terrible things to the other side. This is because people lack imagination. If they don’t actually see it, they don’t understand. They need to actually see it.
So I wanted to tell all of that and I didn’t want to make a film easy to make like: Okay, so your father died and you saw him die. I did not go for the easy stuff and go after the emotions of the people who suffered and make a story out of it. Instead, I gave them the proper honor and respect they deserved, by making this film and explaining to the world the how, when, and why — the real context in which it happened.
Who is the intended audience for your film?
The film is not intended for everybody. Around the world you have, I would say, 15 to 20 percent who are pro-Israel. On the other side, you have another 15 to 20 percent, maybe more, who are pro-Palestinian. They don’t know anything about the situation; they are pro-Palestinian because it’s fashionable, because of all the good marketing made about it. We are not going to convince them. They will always find an answer to everything because it’s an ideology, not a rationality.
My target is not the people who love Israel and it is not the people who hate Israel. My target is the people in-between–the people who heard about it, don’t know so much about it, and if we don’t pay attention, could become the ones who are pro-Palestinian because they don’t have the right information. Those are the ones I want to keep either neutral (it’s okay to be neutral or pro-Israel) but not to let them go to the pro-Palestinian crowd. So that is my audience.
The film came out on October 7 this year. What kind of feedback has the film received so far?
It’s beyond all my expectations. People are crazy about the film, whether the journalists who talked about it or the people who watched it. More than 400 people wrote me on my Twitter account to say “thank you”. Some of them only say thank you. But sometimes they write that they watched it and couldn’t believe something like that could happen or what they learned about the historical context.
At a time when they want to put the Prime Minister of Israel in jail for defending his country, and the United Nations is doing all the terrible things they do to Israel, and French president Macron says he’s going to arrest Bibi Netanyahu if he comes to France–the world is going absolutely crazy. In that context, having so many people appreciate my film and think it will do good, it’s a big honor. I don’t make my films to make money; that is not my goal. Sometimes, I have to finance my films with my own savings or whatever money I can find. But at the end of the day, my films are succeeding. If I convince one person a day, at the end of the year I will have convinced 365 people that Israel is good. This is what I want people to have in mind.
There is a fight between Good and Evil. Evil has a way of making you believe they are the good people and that the ones fighting for freedom, liberty, and justice are the bad ones. It is amazing how they make Israel responsible for everything in this war, including the hostages. They have even convinced people within Israel that Netanyahu and his government are responsible for the hostages, that you just have to put the weapons down and accept all the conditions and by magic, the hostages would be free to come back home. This is crazy.
After Israel suffered the biggest tragedy of its entire existence, with 1,200 people killed in the most atrocious ways, you would expect people in the streets of New York, Los Angeles, Paris, and Berlin to shout and come out with Israeli flags and say: “We are with you. What happened is terrible!” No, they were already prepared to go with Palestinian flags everywhere in all the capitals of the Western world as part of the plan. The next step is a major terror attack. So on the one hand, they do their pro-Palestinian propaganda, and on the other are the attacks to inspire fear. And in the meantime, there’s all this money coming from oil that they are using to corrupt everybody. That’s the strategy I’m trying to expose because I don’t see any other solution at a certain point, but to go after them and defeat them in the same way Nazism and Communism have been defeated until now.
But you mentioned in a tweet that the film has been restricted on some sources like YouTube.
YouTube has many ways of banning a film. One of the ways is to make it forbidden to people under 18 years of age. Your film is still on YouTube, but you cannot embed it on any other platform and people must have a YouTube account to be able to watch it; you cannot just click and watch it. Then, once you arrive on your YouTube account, you must claim that you are 18 or older. It’s a way not to censor it, but to reduce the possibility for people to have access to it.
I received an email from Amazon, saying that the film doesn’t fit with their rules. Their rules say no violence, but there is violence in films all the time. Okay, it’s fiction. So maybe they don’t want violence in documentaries. So they just rejected the film because it didn’t fit their agenda.
The film is on Apple TV, where the film is available for most countries. Except for Great Britain. They refused the film. That’s it. We don’t have any say.
In the film, there is no voiceover. I don’t speak in the film even once, There’s no voiceover and no narration. You just see the things that happened and people explain what happened: what they think and what they did. It is like dominos; one thing leads to another. And at the end, you get the whole picture. It was a very difficult exercise and I wanted to do it this way. You cannot make a film about October 7 and make it easy for yourself. You owe to those people, but because it is a tragedy you cannot take advantage of that tragedy. You have to be very, very honest with yourself, and with the situation in order, to make it the proper way. I had to give homage to the people who served there as well.
The film debunks the anti-Israel narrative. Qatar says it was all because of the Palestinians. But this film shows that they have always been doing this kind of thing. It’s proven, it’s not like I say so–it is. You have the images, you have the people, you have the Arabs talking, and you have the guys who have been arrested. And you have the images from the past.
Do you see what happened in Amsterdam as a pogrom?
Those predators who are after us are always getting more excited when they smell blood. On October 7th, Hamas made the entire world smell the blood of the Jews, to show that they could rape women and could kill babies. And they celebrated in the streets of Gaza.
What is happening around the world is not spontaneous. It is prepared and organized. When I saw what happened on October 7 in the afternoon, and the following days in the capitals of the world, I knew there were sleeping cells. They know how to shake the population around them so it behaves the way they wish.
So I will not call Amsterdam a program per se. Thank Gd, nobody was too badly hurt. They had the means to hurt them if they had really wanted to. I will not use the word pogrom because it would diminish the abomination of a real pogrom, but the intention was the intention of a pogrom. They had people coming from France and North African Muslims and they all came to Amsterdam to create this situation because one of the things they want, is to make the Jews afraid everywhere we go. They want the Jews not to have a normal life anywhere, anymore. They want the Jews to feel like they did back in the 1930s. All of this is a part of a two-level plan. One plan is for Islam to conquer the world, but there is also the hatred of the Jews that dates back to the times of Muhammad.
What do you think of what is going on in the West Bank, where people are accusing Israelis of pogroms?
It is a situation that is concerning. I have been to the Palestinian territories many times over the past 21 years. I have been almost everywhere from Jenin down to Hebron and Gaza. I went almost everywhere. I remember a time when even though there were terrorists within the Palestinian territories, a lot of people were just happy to have a job working in the kibbutz, working in the Moshavim. And the situation was not as tense as it is today. You have a situation now where the people who live in the territories are in a very difficult situation because at any moment we can take a car and go out and Palestinian kids are going to throw stones or we are going to be machine-gunned.
I don’t support violence coming from the Israelis living over there. But at the same time, I understand because It’s been too much for too long. Today, after October 7, with all the violence, and the attempt to kill Jews. I don’t think that today myself. I would go back to the Palestinian territories, to do my job. I wouldn’t dare. I know that I would be risking kidnapping, even murder. It’s a very, very dangerous place to go.
So, I disapprove of what the settlers are doing, but I understand.
The same situation is happening in France and Great Britain. You can go out if you are Muslim and beat up anybody you want. You will be judged, but after that, they will give you a few hours of community service and told not to do it again. Now, if you are a white-collar, or a businessman who is tired of it and is going to write one day on the Internet that you are tired of all those Muslims–you can end up in jail because they have succeeded in invading, scaring, and corrupting. And we have to stop it.
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