Israelis mobilize against denial of October 7 atrocities
TEL AVIV – Former IDF spokesman Alon Penzel is embarking on a Canada-wide speaking tour in coming weeks. He exhales deeply when asked why: he felt he had to, given the level of Oct. 7 denialism, minimalization and ignorance two years into the Gaza war.
“To speak up for those whose voice was taken,” he says; those who were murdered “but also to those tortured, raped, wounded, held hostage, abused; to the victims’ families and the massacre’s survivors, who want their story and the truth out, but some of them are still too traumatized, mentally unprepared, to share these stories themselves.”
When Penzel spoke June 2 last year at Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands, protesters broke windows, threatened him with bodily harm, and denied Hamas’s atrocities, screaming “lies,” and insisting there were no women raped. Harry Pettit, assistant professor of geography at Radboud, posted on social media that Penzel was a “terrorist,” said Israel was committing a “holocaust,” and that the school “should refuse to normalize platforming Zionists.”
Penzel authored “Testimonies Without Boundaries, Israel: October 7th 2023,” released just five months after the Hamas-led massacre, containing 50 first-hand accounts of the horrors.
The effort to record the brutality was a fight against
a tide of revision and propaganda that continues to muddy the historical record, and erode global understanding, he explained over coffee in Tel Aviv.
“I documented the atrocities and wrote the book because already on October 7, I immediately foresaw the worldwide denial that we would face. I realized the urgency for documentation. I knew something must be created so that what happened would be commemorated for generations to come — and so I did,” he told the Post.
StandWithUs will be organizing the speaking tour, according to Penzel, that will combine campuses and community events.
The world seems oddly inclined to accept the Hamas narrative, which delegitimizes the Gaza war and has successfully delegitimized Israel as a result, according to interviews with several writers, filmmakers, politicians and activists.
Penzel’s was the first compilation of its kind after the attacks, has since been translated into nine languages, and was used as research material for the Dinah Project – the U.K.-backed comprehensive study on October 7 sex crimes.
In the past 18 months, Penzel has spoken to tens of thousands of people in 16 countries, addressing the U.K. House of Lords and university campuses as well as journalists, diplomats and others.
“The reason I decided to write the book in the most unfiltered, graphic and unapologetic way possible, without censoring any of the atrocities’ details, as challenging as it is for the reader, was to shock the international community. To wake them up. To make them comprehend the extent of the cruelty, the evil, the inhumanity,” said Penzel, who worked for the IDF’s Unit for Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), which coordinates civilian and humanitarian affairs in the Palestinian territories.
His pain is compounded by the shock of watching much of the world taking at face value what comes from Hamas-supportive information sources, leaving Jews and Israelis outraged and heartbroken.
“A lot of what Hamas was doing was recorded. So it’s not like you can deny it, even though a lot of people around the world are trying to deny that this even happened,” said member of Knesset Shelly Tal Meron, of the centrist Yesh Atid party, reflecting the collective disbelief that, despite a flood of evidence, denialism and disinformation has gained traction.
“What we’re seeing around the world, all the demonstrations, all this chanting of ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,’ I think that people basically don’t understand that means no state of Israel,” she said. “They have no idea which river and which sea. They don’t even know where we are on the globe. So a lot of people are watching TikToks of 30 seconds, and they’re sure that they’re experts on Israeli history.”
Minimization, willful ignorance and apathy on organizational levels have only emboldened the denialism, she said. As acting chair of the Knesset Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality, she wrote more than 100 letters to human rights organizations and women’s organizations in the weeks following Oct. 7, asking them to condemn sexual assault as a weapon of war.
“It’s not the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It’s not right or left. It’s simply the moral thing to do, to say that this is wrong. Nobody responded. Not one,” she told the Post, in a meeting facilitated by the Jerusalem Press Club, in Tel Aviv.
Yet on a political level, she’s found some success. Alongside France’s minister for gender equality, they’ve built a coalition of other leaders around the world, to acknowledge sexual assault as a weapon of war — “not only Israel, Yazidi women, Ukrainian women, Druze women that just suffered this in Syria and many other conflict areas.”
Certain countries that ordinarily would not have normalization with Israel agreed to join the committee (she would not specify which).
Documentary filmmaker Igal Hecht.© Igal Hecht.
Igal Hecht, who released his Oct. 7 documentary film The Killing Roads online for free in hopes of cutting through misinformation, said “the further we get from the 7th, the easier it is for people to change the narrative. If you can deny what happened on the 7th, then it’s much easier to demonize and blood libel Israel.”
In Canada, many try to “blur the lines,” the Toronto filmmaker said, with “our state-funded broadcaster and mainstream media disregarding the 7th, glossing over it, to look at it like a footnote.”
That helps remove any context to Israel’s response, said Hecht, an Israeli-Canadian documentary filmmaker.
Hecht also said that colleagues in his industry “outright minimized the rape of Israeli women” and some even denied the rapes occurred at all. Other colleagues told him that there’s no proof Hamas was responsible for Oct. 7, he said.
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Filmmaker Chris Atkins’ plane had lifted off from Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport on Oct. 7, 2023, moments after Hamas attacked Israel, and he recalls being “horrified” as the news beamed into his phone.
He felt the urge to act. Simultaneously his friend, Egyptian-born human rights advocate Majed el-Shafie, had the same urge, hiring a cameraman in Israel to begin documenting the atrocities.
El-Shafie reached Atkins – both are Christian – to help sew together the footage, when the two agreed they had to continue the work together. It was the beginning of the documentary Dying To Live, screened for the first time in Toronto, in November 2024.
The film, which incorporates October 7 archival footage, takes viewers through areas devastated by violence, including kibbutzim and the site of the Nova music festival, as El Shafie conducts interviews with survivors, victims’ families and those affected by the attacks.
In one segment, El-Shafie had a frank discussion with a Palestinian man, who “justified the attacks, diminished the attacks,” he told the Post.
For Atkins, the denialism hit home.
“I actually have family members who either don’t believe October 7 happened, or that it was an inside job planned by Netanyahu,” he told the Post. “I’ve met others with similar and worse beliefs. It’s put a strain on my family, and I’ve lost friends over this. It’s also interesting that these people refuse to watch our film.”
Adam Hummel, meanwhile, published “Essays from Afar: 700 Days of the Diaspora Experience Since October 7,” a book of collected writings from his “Catch” Substack, putting together two years of weekly commentary.
Much like Penzel, Hecht, Tal Meron and Atkins, he’s concerned that few sources get the war story straight, and as such, the untruths contribute to denialism.
The report from the UN Commission of Inquiry in September alleging there was “genocide” perpetrated by Israel, for example, “is an unfortunately misguided piece of fiction,” said the Toronto lawyer.
“I often say that if Israel wanted to kill all the Palestinians, this war would have been over on Oct. 8, 2023. They do not, however; which is why 900-plus Israeli soldiers have been killed over the last two years, because Israel has gone above and beyond to protect the lives of innocent Palestinians in Gaza, who have been put in the line of fire because of their own leaders.”
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