Horror, Heroism, and Hope: A Powerful New Documentary on October 7

My name is Dan Gordon. I’m the screenwriter of such movies as The Hurricane (Denzel Washington), Wyatt Earp (Kevin Costner) and this year’s Irena’s Vow, for which I won the award for Best Screenplay at the Writers Guild of Canada Awards. That movie tells the story of a 20-year-old Polish Catholic girl who, during the Holocaust, hid 12 Jews in the basement of a German major without his knowledge. I never thought when I wrote that screenplay that I would ever live to see a time when Jews would be hiding once again from genocidal mass murderers burning their way through their towns and villages. But that, and much worse, was exactly what happened on October 7th, 2023.

On the night of October 6th in the U.S. (October 7th in Israel) I texted my adopted sister Sarah, who lived in Kibbutz Sa’ad, 3000 thousand meters from Gaza, wishing her a happy holiday. I didn’t expect an answer. The minute I heard the “ding” from my what’s app I knew something was wrong. My sister is observant and would never turn on the phone until after Shabbat. She wrote that rockets were falling everywhere. At first I wasn't worried. I lived in Israel for a long time and served in six wars there. Rocket fire was hardly something new. I knew she and Ephraim, her husband, would be in their safe room.

Reserve duty in Israel 2014

Then Ephraim heard something far more ominous than rockets falling. He heard small arms fire. I told Sarah if she could hear small arms fire there could be an infiltration of terrorists in her kibbutz. I told her to lock her doors and asked if Ephraim had a weapon.

He didn’t and the lock on her door was broken. Then Sarah got a message from the kibbutz security team. Terrorists were attacking the gates of Sa’ad and the Security team was in a desperate battle to repel them.

Then there was another report. Terrorists were all over the South. Gun shots in Mefalsim and Be’eri. Fighting face to face. Across the street from Sa’ad, Kfar Aza became a killing field.

Not far away at Nir Oz, one fourth of the residents were either killed or wounded and at a music festival celebrating peace, some 360 young souls were shot, mutilated, raped and burned alive.

While the slaughter was still going on, students and faculty began demonstrating at some of the most elite universities in the world, not calling for a cease fire, but in solidarity with mass murderers who, in their words “had torn through the wall that had been suffocating them and launched a counter offensive against their settler occupier oppressors.”

I knew that within less than a week the narrative would shift as an insane Orwellian logic began to materialize. Denial of the atrocities turned from “It’s exaggerated” to “it never happened” to “the Jews had it coming.”

I called my manager and said I had to do a documentary that would record what happened, not only in Israel, but on American campuses, and why it happened, what the implications were for the future, what was the history that undercut the misconceptions and outright lies, that let young people who supported gay rights, women’s rights, minority rights and free speech become the witting tools of a terrorist movement that slaughters gays, murders women in so called honor killings, executes any journalist who doesn’t toe the party line and openly advocates the genocide of an ethno-religious minority called the Jews.

The result is an unprecedented, multi-part documentary series called “October 7th, 2023”. It comprises almost seven broadcast hours.

It was a learning journey to say the least.

I learned how Rachel Goldberg’s deep faith armored her against hatred even though her son Hersh had his left arm blown off while tossing Hamas grenades back at them and then was taken hostage where he remains as of this writing.

I learned of the unbelievable morality of a retired Major General and grandfather who received a call from his son which was every parent or grandparent’s worst nightmare. Terrorists were not only in Nachal Oz where his son lived, but literally on his doorstep and the army was nowhere in sight. Armed with only a Smith and Wesson pistol, the retired general set out from Tel Aviv to rescue his son, daughter-in-law and two toddler granddaughters. On the way he engaged in multiple gun battles with terrorists and not once – but twice – stopped to rescue others and get them out of harm’s way, even though he knew it was taking him in the opposite direction from the children and grandchildren he was fighting to save. He did it simply because his values would not permit him to do otherwise.

I learned that for the senior military and intelligence echelons this was their darkest day, but for thousands of ordinary Israelis, police, paramedics, individual soldiers and yes, grandparents, this was their finest hour. They saved themselves, their families, and complete strangers and in so doing bought with their gallantry enough time for the army to regroup and retake the towns and villages from the Hamas terrorists who were plundering them.

With combat engineers in Zeitun taking out rocket launchers

I learned from researching Hamas and its forebears, the Muslim Brotherhood, that the notion that October 7th was a counter offensive against a brutal occupation resulting from the territories gained in the Six Day War was completely bogus. I learned that its origins were not in the so called Nakbah when 700,000 Palestinians fled their homes during the 1948 War of Liberation, when Israel was not only fighting Palestinian irregulars but the combined armies of five invading Arab states. I learned that October 7th was a direct descendant of the massacres in the ancient Jewish communities of Jerusalem, Hebron, Tsfat, Tiberius and others in the 1920’s and ’30’s, before there was a single Palestinian refugee, when there were no occupied territories, long before there was even a state of Israel.

And I learned that it wasn’t confined to the area of the Palestine Mandate. Haj Amin Al Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the “George Washington” of the “Palestinian Resistance” orchestrated not only the massacre of Jews in Mandatory Palestine, but in Baghdad and later in Cairo as well. I learned that he fomented a coup in Iraq, installing a pro-Nazi regime and that while Palestinian Jews spent the war in the Jewish Brigade of the British army, fighting against Germany, Haj Amin Al Husseini spent the war IN Germany advising Hitler on setting up death camps in Palestine once Rommel conquered the Middle East.

Nor did he confine his genocidal intent toward the Jews to the land of Israel. He received a budget and official position from Hitler and set up Moslem death squads operating as part of the SS to kill Serbs, Roma and especially Jews in the former Yugoslavia. I learned that, in the words of the German historian Mathias Kunzel, the war against the Jews and the Jewish state had its birth not in the anti-colonial political movement of the 1960’s, but in German Fascism of the 1930’s and that it was, indeed, not anti-colonial but anti-Jewish.

Finally, I learned that in this story of fanatical hatred and unbelievable courage, despair and determination, there existed – maybe, just maybe – a glimmer of hope.

October 7th, 2023 airs its last four episodes beginning June 14th on TBN (available on most cable and satellite systems) airing at 9:30 Eastern Time and 6:30 Pacific Daylight Time.