What’s wrong with ‘demonising’ Hamas?

A new Channel 4 documentary about the events of 7 October lays bare the brutality that was meted out on Kibbutz Be’eri – one of the communities savaged by Hamas a year ago. Unsettling but important viewing, you might think. And yet the documentary has been criticised by the Guardian for ‘demonising Gazans’ – seemingly because it dared to depict Hamas’s horrors. (The article has now been removed ‘pending review’.)

According to Guardian film critic Stuart Jeffries, ‘If you want to understand why Hamas murdered civilians… One Day in October won’t help’. Even worse, in his eyes, the documentary ‘does a good job of demonising Gazans, first as testosterone-crazed Hamas killers, later as shameless civilian looters’.

Of course, the documentary makes no such generalisations. It seems that daring to present the unvarnished truth of 7 October is the same as presenting all Palestinians as racists, murderers and looters, according to this midwit reviewer, at least.

To the normal viewer, however, this is a grotesque objection. The film does its job, which is to convey the unimaginable horror of 7 October, the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. It does not set out to ‘understand’ the motives of an anti-Semitic terror group.

One Day in October uses footage captured on the day, mostly recorded by the Hamas terrorists themselves. In one scene, GoPro footage shows a Hamas fighter panting with excitement, as he says: ‘I swear to God, we’ll slaughter them. I want to livestream this. We’ve got to show the folks back home.’ Other CCTV footage depicts armed Hamas terrorists swarming Kibbutz Be’eri.

We all know what happened next. But according to the Guardian, such footage – real footage of the atrocity, let’s not forget – makes the documentary little more than an ‘othering machine’. Heaven forbid that viewers might not see eye to eye with those who murdered, raped and kidnapped their way through southern Israel that day.

The review also complains that ‘all of our sympathies’ in the documentary are guided towards ‘relatable Israelis’, as if ‘sympathy’ were an unusual reaction to footage of a 15-year-old boy asking his father to bury him with his surfboard – or to an interview with Emily Hand, who was abducted by Hamas when she was just eight years old.

Time and again over the past year, we have seen supposedly progressive media struggling to grasp the horrors of 7 October and deflecting attention away from Hamas. But this review is something else. Apparently, even depicting Hamas’s barbaric crimes can be ‘othering’. The Western intelligentsia really has lost the moral plot.

Hugo Timms is an intern at spiked.