Courtesy of Pierre Rehov.

Israeli filmmaker Pierre Rehov spoke about his new documentary, Pogrom(s), and what sets it apart from other October 7 documentaries. Our conversation took place within an hour or so of learning about terror pagers exploding across Lebanon.

Given that the film touches on the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, our conversation touches on the two-state solution and where things are right now. Make no mistake that we are further from a two-state solution than ever better. It doesn’t help when the current PA leadership makes abhorrent antisemitic comments that have no basis in reality. I am publishing this interview while knowing that there will probably be readers who find themselves in disagreement with Pierre Rehov’s comments.

Rehov mentions that his next film will focus on the Qatari money being invested into American universities. A further documentary could certainly help explain why so many people in a position of leadership on college campuses were so lax towards Jewish students being intimidated. This one just barely touches on the matter.

It’s nice to meet you today. How are you doing?
Pierre Rehov: Like somebody living in Israel, what can I say? Kind of good days and bad days. I’m kind of excited because I just heard what happened in Lebanon and what we did over there is kind of spectacular so I’m going to say, yeah, right now I’m good.

Yeah, I just saw that news within the last hour.
Pierre Rehov: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s really amazing. I mean, I just heard that about 400 Motorola pagers blew up and there are hundreds of those guys in the hospitals or dead. All of them Hezbollah so perfect, perfect.

How long after October 7 did you decide to make this film?
Pierre Rehov: Actually, what happened is that I knew everybody was going to make a film about that so I decided not to make one. And one day, around December, I received a donation, quite a big amount. I mean, not millions obviously, but something reasonable. I said, well, that’s weird. Out of the blue, somebody very rich is sending me money like that on my donation account and that must be about something. He said, you have to make a film about October 7th. I said, yeah, but you know, it was not my intention. That’s a sign. Actually, the same person is just now helping me promoting the film. So to answer simply to your question, it all started with a sign and a mission coming on my head in December from a very, very generous and very nice gentleman.

Yeah. One of the things I noticed is that earlier this year is that the three Nova docs that I had seen all ran under an hour and now, we’re getting to a point where films that are about or touch on October 7 are running closer to 90 minutes. I noticed you didn’t interview any of the Nova survivors. What led to this different approach from all these other films that touch on October 7?
Pierre Rehov: That’s a good question and a good point you’re making because it’s precisely what I wanted to do. I knew that, number one, the Nova Festival is a good theme for a film because young people dancing, being attacked—in a certain way, it doesn’t even involve Israel. It’s international. There are Germans and Italians and all kinds of people, young people dancing and being murdered, 240 of them, in the morning, out of the blue, for no reason. It’s a good theme for a film and everybody jumped on it and made it.

I wanted to make something much more complex and I didn’t want it to be from inside, but I want a clear view from the outside. Two things I wanted to do is, number one, make a 90-minute film. It was important to have time to tell the story. And number two, don’t put a voice over. There is no narration. Everything in the film is said by people I interviewed or by material I got. I never intervene myself and that’s the way I wanted it. The very reason is in a situation like that, you just want to be a little bit different everybody has an angle. The same angle has been done again and again and again. I didn’t want something easy because I believe that October 7 deserved something not easy. It was not easy for them—it was horrible. I just didn’t want to take advantage of the situation by going to interview survivors and ask them, so how was it? How did you feel? It was terrible, wasn’t it? That’s American television, international—it’s always the same thing.

I wanted something a little more distance, but this distance allows you to see something more global. It’s not about one individual or 1,200 individuals being slaughtered. It’s about a history of hatred in the Middle East. It’s about a history of hatred within certain cultures. This is what I wanted to make and my film is an answer to Antonio Guterres when he said that it didn’t happen in a vacuum, it happened in a certain context, and the context is they have been trying to exterminate us now for decades. The Palestinians were invented by the Nazis and then put together by the Russian KGB. It has to be said, it has to be shown, it has to be proven, and it has to explain that this very beginning of the creation of the Palestinian people, the invention of the Palestinian people, led one day at a certain point to October 7. It’s no longer a story of the poor little girl and I feel—a billion times that you can imagine—sorry for the poor little girl. But in order to give her a certain homage, in order to try to do something for that poor little girl, I wanted to explain to the rest of the world what really happened.

How did you decide on the interview subjects?
Pierre Rehov: At the beginning, I’m a novelist. My real job in the past has always been to write novels. I wrote a certain number of them as a ghostwriter or under my name. I wrote many, many, many books. When I write a book, I let the story take me by the hand. In a story like this one, I wanted to be taken also by the hand. I knew what had to be said and what had to be proven. I tried to find people in each category being capable of bringing me the answers that I needed. That’s how I ended up with the former Secretary General of Doctors Without Borders, with Sarah, who is amazing, a Ukrainian woman who knows everything about the connection between the Muslims and the KGB and USSR, or other people like that. This is what I wanted. I wanted the story to be told by people who know.

We’ve been with my assistant scouting for a lot of people, and I interviewed many more people than those in the film. Actually, I used maybe half of the interviewees I had. Not because I wanted to select or because I had to push an ideology, but when you’re making a film, you want to play with emotions. When it’s a documentary, it’s a little bit more difficult than when it’s fiction. Who is going to say the right thing at the right moment to really prove something that actually exists? That was how I decided to take that interview rather than the other interview. And also, there’s also the artistic decision. That person doesn’t talk too well. This one hesitates too much. The lighting was not good enough in that interview. Blah, blah, blah. In the end, you’re trying to make something as perfect as possible.

There is so much talk about coming to a two-state solution. But after watching the film and then seeing how things have played out over the last year, I think we’re further away from that than maybe ever before.
Pierre Rehov: Oh, absolutely. I mean, you’re a thousand percent right. I’ve been saying that for more than 20 years. It doesn’t work. It works with people who are in good faith or it works with people that you totally defeat. And at the end of the day, you tell them, OK, and now what? This is the case with the Nazis of Germany. This is the case with the Japanese after Nagasaki and Hiroshima. We defeat them and then we make a deal. Once the bad guys are gone, once the Nazis are gone, once the real bad people of Japan don’t want to fight anymore and after that, you end up with the people. What are you going to do with these people? You have to give them something to rebuild their nation. In the case of the Palestinian territories, there’s never been a nation there. It’s an invention and the only reason of this invention is to damage Israel. The only reason for Palestinian to exist is to do bad to the Jews. There is no other reason for them to exist. The reason for UNRWA to exist is because they can keep Palestinian refugees in camps forever and ever and ever to make the situation worse and worse until the day it’s going to blow up. It blew up. It blew up on October 7, and the world will never be the same again.

Now, the two-step solution is, I’m sorry—you’re going to beep—it’s pure bullshit. It’s not possible. It doesn’t exist. It cannot happen. It would happen only if we had a serious partner on the other side. (inaudible) I crippled more than I care for killing Jews. As Golda Meir said in the past, the day Arabs will love their children more than they hate our children, we’ll be able to make peace with them. And yet, not only we are not there, but we are worse than in the days of Golda Meir, because she was fighting Arab countries and there was no such thing as a Palestinian entity or dreaming of having a nation. Judea and Samaria was part of Jordan and Gaza was part of Egypt. I mean, no longer, because I’m talking about the Golda Meir of after 1967, but you know what I’m trying to say. In no cases, I mean, we had all the chances in the world until 1967 to build a country if they wanted one.

We withdrew from the Sinai. We could have also done something with the Sinai. We withdrew, we took away the life of 10,000 Jews in Gaza, living in Gaza. My wife is among them because her family was living in Gush Katif, part of Gaza. She lost her house and her parents lost their house in order to give land to the Palestinians so they could build something. Not Singapore. In order to build Singapore, it’s not enough to have the land and money. You also need people with a brain. If you send the Palestinians to Singapore, it will become a dump hole within 20 years. If you take the people of Singapore and you put them in Gaza, it will become Singapore again in 20 years. It’s not about the money, it’s not about the land, it’s not about anything but the people there.

We are surrounded, sorry to say, by very bad people. Not because it’s in their DNA, it’s a question of culture and brainwashing. If you’ve been raised to hate the Jews since you were born and they tell you that Jews are monsters and they call you a dirty Jew as an insult, if you’re doing something bad and in the mosque they give you a distorted history of the region, proving that the Jews have nothing to do here, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, then you become a Palestinian, meaning you’re never going to accept the very existence of a country named Israel because you honestly believe that it belongs to you. Until the rest of the world decide to do something about it, which is dismantle UNRWA and make sure that the Palestinians are taken care of by the more general organization of all displaced people of the world and not anymore a single organization just for them, until the world decides that Israel has totally the right to defend itself and to kill as many Palestinians as it needs to in doing so, I’m sorry to say, when there is a war, people die. Yeah, in war people dies.

In Gaza, very few collateral damages have been recognized. We know by even the numbers of Hamas, compared to the numbers of the IDF, the IDF killed roughly 15,000 to 18,000 terrorists over there. They announced that maybe 40,000, we are not sure of that, Palestinians have been killed. It means that the ratio of one to one, roughly. It never happened ever. Never happened in the world before. When the French army attacked Mosul, the ratio was one fighter for maybe 20 civilians, terrible ratio. Americans, when they bombed Baghdad and other places, also, the ratio was terrible. This is what is important, the ratio. Of course, civilians die. But also, another point, which is important to say, is that in philosophy, intention is paramount. Intention is very important. It’s not the same when a guy by accident kills somebody driving his car and when a guy takes his car to kill somebody. Intention, okay?

It’s not the same when Palestinians come into a kibbutz, rape women, behead babies, burn alive entire families for pleasure and fun and take selfies of themselves doing so and are proud of doing it. When we retaliate and by accident—we have to do it, unfortunately—we kill children over there because Hamas is hiding behind women and children. Intention again. That’s a point I’ve been trying to make also in the film, not talking too much about what Israel is doing, but putting 100% of the blame, where it has to be put, which is on the Palestinians.

I felt that there were a number of parts in the film that could easily be a documentary in and of itself, like the ISGAP findings and the college campuses or the lack of a response, really, to all the sexual violence from people we thought would have been vocal.
Pierre Rehov: I know, I know. It’s difficult to talk about everything extensively in 90 minutes or in two hours or 10 hours. People are going to write books that thick about what happened and even then, won’t be able to go to the bottom of it. My intention was to make another film after this one, but I got very busy, but I will certainly make it next year, about the way Qatar has been financing all the American universities in a way to make sure that, at a certain point, the professors will change completely the curriculum and therefore the students will just have this kind of left-wing, anti-Israel, antisemitic mind that has developed until recently, thanks to the Qatari money. Not only the Qatari money, but there’s also Iran. Iran is also financing the crisis of fentanyl in America and very few people know that. They are paying China, Chinese laboratories to create fentanyl, and then they are using their own network of illegal immigration to America to bring the fentanyl over to America. So all those things—it’s not only about Israel, it’s about the free world.

Some people have decided to destroy and replace by a total dictatorship, whether it will become a communist dictatorship or Muslim dictatorship, and they dream of both, because those people are crazy and they think that the Muslims of today are the proletarians of yesterday. The extreme left wing and the Marxists and all that realize that the people they used to defend 50 years ago are now bourgeois. They are middle class. The workers in factories, they got their five weeks vacation, and they got their healthcare. I mean, I’m talking just about Europe. Also in America, they got a lot of advantages that they didn’t have in the past. They are no longer their constituents. They are no longer their target for their ideology so they had to find a new target. The Muslims are perfect. They have been dominated by Islam and by dictatorship for so long that they don’t even have a way of thinking about themselves anymore and they arrive in droves. Iif you look at the news, only males are getting into America. This is the way, in which I’m going to become a little bit more political, I believe the way Democrats hope they will be able to win elections again and again and again until the end of the world. I’m talking about the Democrats of today. I was a big fan of Bill Clinton, but I have to say I’m not a big fan of Biden and Kamala Harris. Sorry.

When it comes to showing audiences how we reached this point, what do you hope they take away from the film?
Pierre Rehov: Again, as I said, my film was an answer to Antonio Guterres saying that it didn’t happen in a vacuum, and I hope they will understand what the real context is. I hope that they will understand that they are being lied to by other media, because the film is very factual, and everything said in the film can be double- and triple-checked. There is no propaganda in it. I hope they will not become anti-Palestinians or want more war or want to kill anybody, but that they understand that things would get better if, at a certain point, media and the politically involved leaders, leaders of the world would be a little more balanced and would think a little less about Arab money and Arab oil and a little more about humanity on both sides. This is what I wanted to show. Stop putting the blame all the time on Israel, because the Israelis are Jews, and look at the big figure because until you actually let Israel do its job to protect its population, there’s not going to be a two-state solution, a three-state solution, a whatever solution, because the enemy, after every defeat, believes that he won. That’s the key to the problem.

Hamas, after having half of Gaza destroyed, they come out of the tunnels and they declare victory. Why? Because they had a ceasefire. Why did they have a ceasefire? Because there were pressures on Israel from the United Nations, from the United States, from European Union. They think that this is their victory. Until the moment the Western world realizes that Israel is on the front line to defend democracy, to defend humanity, to defend the free world, and has to be helped in that task, and it’s not like bad, strong Israeli soldiers against a poor, weak, and gentle Palestinian population. The reality is completely different. I want to reestablish that specific balance in the mind of people.

Thank you so much.
Pierre Rehov: My pleasure. I hope I answered all your questions.

Middle East Studio releases Pogrom(s) on digital platforms on October 7, 2024. For more information about the film and how to watch it, click here.

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