A colossal intelligence failure, an arrogance of power, followed by a surprise attack, on a major religious holiday, and of a scope and lethality adding up to the most serious national trauma inflicted on the Jews since the Holocaust.
Those descriptors — used to describe the brutal Hamas attack launched from Gaza on Oct. 7 — apply equally to the Yom Kippur War of 1973 when Egyptian and Syrian armies nearly overran the Jewish state.
On Wednesday night a cinematic prism to compare and contrast the past and current crises drew approximately 125 people to Yale University’s Humanities Quadrangle on York Street.
There the Yale Film Archive screened Golda, a new biopic by Israeli director Guy Nattiv, with Helen Mirren as Golda Meir and Liv Schreiber as Henry Kissinger, among other actors.
It’s a heart-stopping military procedural softened by Meir’s stoically grim humor, lasering in on Israel’s national existential ordeal of the three-week-long Yom Kippur War. The drums are beating, the tanks are grinding, the cries of the young soldiers in battle are heard day by day and hour by hour, as experienced through the by turns steely and guilt-ridden perspective of the prime minister.
Doron Ben-Atar.
The event was co-sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Greater New Haven and the Hebrew Program of the university’s Near Eastern Languages and Civilization Department.
The screening took place several weeks after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas terrorists that left 1,400 Israelies dead and hundreds more kidnapped or missing. It also came as Israel has stepped up its blockade and airstrikes on Gaza, leaving two million people in a dire humanitarian crisis and killing thousands.
The film — framed by the painful national post-war inquiry in 1974 and heavy on psychological close-ups of Helen Mirren’s face masked and/or made up into a remarkable likeness of Meir — takes a deep dive into the past with a disturbing and haunting contemporary resonance.
When the screening ended (over the haunting closing music of the Leonard Cohen dirge “Who By Fire,” inspired by the war, in 1974), a deep silence filled the room.
Although the screening was planned months before Oct. 7, “the timing is eerie,” said Doron Ben-Atar, an Israeli-born history professor at Fordham University. Ben-Atar was one of the presenters and moderators of a brief post-film discussion, along with Prof. Shiri Goren of the Near Eastern Languages Department.
Eerie and relevant, Ben-Atar added, including “echoes of 1973, of the failure of the state, the not paying attention to the signals, trusting physical barriers [fences in the case of Gaza and the Suez Canal in 1973], trusting in technology, and a western arrogance of putting faith in the wrong things.”
The differences, of course, are also dramatic, added Goren.
For instance: that Meir took personal responsibility for failures associated with the war, although the commission found her innocent of official wrongdoing. Whereas current Prime Minister Benjamin “Netanyahu is doing everything he can to shirk it,” added Ben-Atar. “He has no legitimacy. She did.”
Ben-Atar was viewing the film also through a highly personal lens. His nephew hid with his wife and three children on Oct. 7 in a double-locked safe room in their home in kibbutz Nir Oz, a short distance from the Gaza border. Hamas terrorists, he reported, ransacked their home but didn’t burn it.
“We were lucky,” said Ben-Atar. “A quarter to a third of the residents of kibbutz Nir Oz were either murdered or kidnapped. They lost many friends. Some of the worst atrocities were committed there.”
That’s why to him Golda evoked echoes not just of 1973 in the specific, but also of 1948, when it wasn’t borders that were being contested but the very existence of the newly created state of Israel.
The movie also rang true for another Israeli-born longtime New Havener who was in the audience. We’ll call him Sam; for reasons of personal security he preferred his name not be used.
Sam has been in regular touch with relatives in his home town of Rehovot, south of Tel Aviv. When they conveyed to him that they are thus far OK, he was relieved. But he also continues to feel guilty. “I should have been there,” he said.
His take on the present crisis was “to finish it off, once and for all.”
“It’s horrible that so many more will die,” added Ben-Atar, who described himself as far left in the peace camp, but for him the only conceivable next step is the complete defeat of Hamas. “It is a war for the survival of Israel. If Israel accepts Hamas’s presence, Israel will collapse irrevocably,” he said, as no one will feel safe continuing to live there, and certainly no one near the borders. “It will be brutal and horrible, but it is life and death for Israel.”
Goren’s take was a little different, more optimistic: “The film tells me we will get through this. Israelis are resilient. They are more resilient than they know. Israel’s army failed on Oct. 7, yes, but today there is no existential threat.”
Supporting students was a goal of the cinematic gathering, according to Rabbi Josh Pernick, the Jewish Federation’s rabbi-in-residence and its director of community engagement.
“For Jewish students at Yale, they feel supported by Jewish groups, but feel generally abandoned and excluded on campus. They often feel loneliness, either not seen or actively attacked,” Pernick said.
“The emotion” of viewing the film, said one young member of the audience, “was like leaving Yad Vashem — sorrow and also pride.” He said a game-changing moment has occurred among younger people of his acquaintance who may not have thought much about their Judaism or identified very visibly as Jews: “They are now saying, I’m so proud to be Jewish.”
The purpose of the screening, added Rabbi Pernick, was “to watch it and unpack it together and hope it makes them feel less alone.”
“We’re not alone,” added Goren as she drew the gathering to a close. “And you’re not alone, that’s important.”
Click here to read an article about another recent local film screening, hosted by the Palestine Museum, that offered a Palestinian perspective on past and present violence in Israel and Gaza.
The historical hatred toward the Jewish people and the most recent barbaric attacks on Israel on October 7 must not be allowed to fester and will not overwhelm the spirit of hope or whittle away at their resilience. Never again.
כוח וחוסן
"For as long as we live, they too will live, for they are now a part of us as, We remember them."
From the poem "We Remember Them" by Sylvan Kamens & Rabbi Jack Riemer