There are armed guards unsmiling at the security entrance on the Finchley Road, NW3.
I show my ID, submit to a body search, and then head down to the event: a screening of a documentary called We Will Dance Again, about the before, during, and after of the Nova psychedelic trance open-air music festival that took place close to Gaza in southern Israel on 7.10.2023, almost exactly a year ago.
It's seen and filmed through the eyes of the young men and women who went to dance there from sunrise, and it also uses Hamas’ bodycam footage of the worst massacre of the Jews since the Holocaust.
This airport-style security is not, however, because it’s a film about Hamas’ mass murder of innocents, a documentary that is moreover being screened by the BBC, which is a turn-up (the state broadcaster has been criticised for deciding not to call Hamas terrorists in case it’s accused of taking sides or be seen to make a moral judgment about anti-Semites/anti-Zionists who want to see Israel wiped from the map).
It’s been the same every time I’ve been to a synagogue, to the Chabad in Belgravia, or anywhere in Israel from a kibbutz to the IDF HQ in Tel Aviv (which I visited in March). A ring of steel has been thrown around a community in fear, sick at the realisation that never again is now and that 7/10 catalysed a global jihad against them, one that is not just being prosecuted by rogue Islamist Iran-backed regimes but also oxygenated by useful idiots on the so called progressive left throughout the west. No wonder there are always men in black with assault weapons present wherever Jews are known to meet.
The woman on my right, who lives in Jerusalem, was weeping. And the man on my left
And there’s also, always, food. Before the film, there are cream cheese and salmon bagels, doughy sweet rugelach, cakes. “Eat,” the novelist Howard Jacobson orders me, as he inserts a bridge roll filled with egg mayonnaise into his mouth. “You won’t want to after.” He tells me that since 7/10, he has not been able to think, talk, or write about anything else.
And then we watch. I’ve decided not to say much about it here as I want you to watch it. If you want to understand why even though it’s been a year since 7/10, this is not the past for Israel; and if you want to understand why there is war raging in the north, and the Middle East is in flames, you must watch it. As the DJ on the decks pulls the plug on his set as rockets from Gaza fill the dawn sky above the undulating crowd of dancers, you can see — you can feel — this is the day the music died for the only Jewish state.
At the end of the film nobody clapped. The woman on my right, who lives in Jerusalem, was weeping. And the man on my left. All you could hear was sobbing. It was only when survivors — whom you had seen in the film — filed on stage to do a panel with the Today programme's Emma Barnett that there was a prolonged standing ovation. During questions, the director was asked why he didn't show sexual violence, the rapes that took place on the day. He revealed the police and the IDF had refused to share their videos, and then he said this, about Shani Louk, who was one of the 364 victims of the terrorists that day, a year ago.
Shani Louk was 22, with long, flying dark dreadlocks. A German-Israeli tattoo artist, and influencer, in baggy trousers and a green scarf tied around her breasts, who’d been filmed by her boyfriend whirling in the desert before dawn, she was taken during the attack. Her broken body, lying face down with her legs at impossible angles, in the back of a pick up truck, paraded as a trophy killing by the adherents of the death cult, became a visual symbol of the terrorists’ treatment of civilians that day.
“As a director, there is one shot in this film that, tells this whole story, and it's Shani Louk on the truck entering Gaza, people celebrating around, spitting on her body, cheering,” Yariv Mozer told the audience. “The terrorists are on her body. The way the body is lying down on the truck… I don't think that there is a single person on earth that would not think about what happened to Shani Louk, before she was murdered. So sometimes in film, an image can say the things that cannot be said otherwise.”
“We Will Dance Again” is a title expressing hope it’s hard to feel. Do watch.
