Poisoned battlegrounds — the war for the narrative of Gaza

The most reasonable director in Hollywood

“They’ve got thousands and thousands of testimonies,” says the actor Liam Neeson, at around 100 minutes into a wide-ranging documentary on the life and work of the highest-grossing director in the history of cinema. “And not just about the Holocaust, about Rwanda, about Bosnia, you know. And it’s amazing, this legacy that Schindler’s List has spawned through Steven [Spielberg].”

I am 12,000m in the air, on a return Emirates flight from São Paolo to Dubai. As I know from the flight out 10 days before, the Airbus A380 offers a richer selection of films than the Boeing 777 that flies between Dubai and Cape Town. And so I am gorging, satiating myself on a feast that will soon disappear.

To watch Spielberg — as the documentary is simply and aptly titled — for the first time in 2025 is to come at it through what feels, to me at least, like an unintended lens. For starters, there is the date of the documentary’s premiere: 7 October 2017.

Would the filmmakers have picked this date if they had known?

Then there are the words of Neeson, who played Oscar Schindler in the director’s masterwork. Beyond his praise of the Shoah Foundation lies the well-publicised fact that he will one day become a Unicef Goodwill Ambassador, appealing in official videos for an end to the killing and maiming of children in Gaza.

Would the actor have been so effusive if he had foreseen?

At this altitude, the questions rise as if untethered to reputations on the ground. Back in 2017, I’m thinking, the progression through the sequence of blockbusters that heralded Spielberg’s arrival on the scene — Jaws (1975), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) — would have brought on an innocent nostalgia. Without doubting the director or his craft, I would have been consumed by the journey through the cinematic markers of my youth: the music of John Williams as the shark approaches the boat; the face of Richard Dreyfuss as the UFO flies over the truck; a seven-year-old Drew Barrymore keeping the secret of what is hiding in the backyard.

But now, 10 days after the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel is declared, it feels as if no big-name Hollywood director — not even the eternally childlike Spielberg — is worthy of the suspension of disbelief.

“The experience of making Schindler’s List made me reconcile with all the reasons, the vainglorious reasons, I hid from my Jewishness,” the great man tells us, around three minutes after we hear from Neeson. “And it made me so proud to be a Jew.”

I am remembering, as the plane tracks northeast across the Atlantic, that Spielberg’s experience as the maker of the film was once mine as one of its (tens of millions of) viewers — I too, on first seeing Schindler’s List in 1993, was proud to be a Jew. Now, more than three decades later, the questions keep asking themselves.

What position does one of the most powerful figures in Hollywood, arguably the most influential visual storyteller of our age, hold on the genocide in Gaza? As the recipient of multiple Academy Awards for Schindler’s List, including Best Picture and Best Director, has he encouraged the addition of Palestinian voices to the testimonies curated by the Shoah Foundation? Does he even believe that what has happened — and continues to happen — in Gaza is a genocide?

The fact that I don’t know means, of course, that I do. A day later, when I am back in Cape Town, I will confirm that Spielberg has made only one direct statement on the “issue”. In March 2024, in a speech marking the 30th anniversary of the Shoah Foundation, he had said: “We can rage against the heinous acts committed by the terrorists of October 7th and also decry the killing of innocent women and children in Gaza.” The rest of the speech, it was reported, had been dedicated to the global upsurge in anti-Semitism.

Over the next four weeks, during periodic visits to the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, the subtext of the speech will become increasingly clear. Of all the various searches I conduct in that time, with the grand total of testimonies approaching 60,000, I will not find one from a Palestinian resident of Gaza.

The full breakdown, by mid-November, will stand as follows: four testimonies from the “Central African Republic Conflict”; five from the “Cambodian Genocide”; five from the “South Sudan Civil War”; 11 from the “Anti-Rohingya Mass Violence”; 22 from the “War and Genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina”; 102 from the “Nanjing Massacre”; 103 from “Contemporary Anti-Semitism”; 164 from the “Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda”; 213 from the “Guatemalan Genocide”; 1,388 from the “Armenian Genocide”; and, lastly, 57,876 from the “Holocaust”.

In truth, I will become slightly obsessed. Although the facts will remain self-evident and unchanging, it will continue to astound me that one of the most comprehensive annals of human barbarism ever compiled will make no mention of Gaza.

And so, in honour of the characteristics that are supposed to define Spielberg, I will do my best to remain open-minded and reasonable. I will tell myself that the Armenian genocide ended in 1923, that the killing fields of Cambodia were active until the late 1970s, that the atrocities of Rwanda, Bosnia and Guatemala were all over by the close of the millennium. But the time-lag defence will collapse on the basis that, by the time I come along, the Shoah Foundation has already gathered testimonies from 30 witnesses of the 7 October (2023) attack.

Next, I will consider the numbers: six million Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust; as many as two million ordinary citizens eradicated in Cambodia; approximately one million Armenians murdered in the Ottoman Empire; around 800,000 Tutsis butchered in Rwanda; upwards of 150,000 indigenous Mayans “disappeared” in Guatemala. But the body-count hypothesis, against the 67,000 confirmed dead in Gaza (minus the uncounted dead under the rubble), will likewise fall flat. In 2001, although no more than 8,372 Bosnians had been killed, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) deemed the Srebrenica Massacre of 1995 a formal “genocide”.

Still, given that in 2007 the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ratified the assessment of the ICTY, I am compelled to ask one final question: Could it be that Spielberg is waiting for the ICJ to ratify the assessment of a United Nations commission of inquiry, published in September 2025, that “Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip”? Once that happens, will he grant the Palestinians of Gaza a voice in his archives?

If that is the likelihood, it soon occurs to me, it does not explain the inclusion of the non-genocidal atrocities that have taken place in Central African Republic, South Sudan, Myanmar and China. Neither does it explain the top-tier prominence of “Contemporary Anti-Semitism” on the Shoah Foundation’s website.

The girl in the red coat

“Anti-Semitism is a sickness that destroys all who harbour it,” Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi of the British Commonwealth, once said. “Hate harms the hated, but it destroys the hater. There is no exception.”

It is 2 November 2025, and I am reading this quote on my phone, from a bed in a hospital in the southern suburbs of Cape Town. I have been here now for 10 days, hooked up to an IV drip that delivers fluids, painkillers and what is meant to be the final word in antibiotics. My body has already proven resistant to the first antibiotic; if this back-up variant does not do its job, my white blood cell count will return to potentially fatal levels of infection.

I have, in short, been poisoned — but not by anyone, nor by anything. The six-syllable term that defines my condition, I am told, does not have a cause that is known to medicine. Perhaps I triggered it in Brazil, perhaps not. Perhaps it has been lying dormant for years, perhaps not.

The uncertainty leads naturally to metaphysical speculation. Rabbi Sacks, I know, is correct. “Hate harms the hated, but it destroys the hater. There is no exception.”

Today, then, the speculation is as follows: Who do I hate? Whose poison have I swallowed?

Well, I’m thinking, hate may be a strong word, but I severely dislike Arsen Ostrovsky, the pro-Israel influencer who has posted the quote by Sacks. Ostrovsky, as a cursory glance at his X timeline will show, is an Australian-Israeli “human rights lawyer” who, in July, blamed the United Nations for the starvation in Gaza, although, in May, he had “exposed” the starvation in Gaza as a lie. At 365,000 followers, to my mind, his reach and influence are symbolic of the bulldozer logic of his fans.

But I am not supposed to be stressing myself out, apparently. I am supposed to be taking a break. Dutifully, as the days in the hospital have ticked over into the nights, I have become more efficient with my “research time”. Just a few drops of the poison and I am out.

I stop scrolling and open my bookmarks to remind myself of the line. The periodic visits to the website of the Shoah Foundation have inspired a deep dive into what, I have come to believe, is the most significant narrative war of our age — the war for the narrative of Gaza.

On 22 October, two days after my return from Brazil (and one day before my admission to hospital), I had bookmarked the news of the ICJ ruling that Israel had failed to provide evidence of a working relationship between Unrwa (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) and Hamas. Later that same day, in what would no doubt have been another blow to Ostrovsky, I had bookmarked the announcement that slightly fewer than 500 globally prominent Jewish artists, intellectuals and public officials — including Wallace Shawn, Naomi Klein and Avraham Burg — had urged world leaders to impose sanctions on Israel.

“We bow our heads in immeasurable sorrow as the evidence accumulates that Israel’s actions will be judged to have met the legal definition of genocide,” their open letter stated.

To reread these words from my hospital bed is to consider the quote of Sacks from multiple angles. Like me, these Jews have all been accused by former friends and family of self-hatred. At the same time, to my reading, their resistance has exemplified one of the most cherished customs of the tradition. And so perhaps, to give Sacks the benefit of the doubt, only gentiles can be real anti-Semites — which means that the next item in my bookmarks is perfectly set up for the test.

“The Nelson Mandela Foundation was once a symbol of unity, integrity, and reconciliation,” a press statement of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) declared on 23 October. “Today, under the chairpersonship of Naledi Pandor and with the platforming of

Francesca Albanese, it has become something else entirely, a stage for anti-Semitism disguised as human rights advocacy. Two women, both repeatedly accused of anti-Semitic bias, now stand together under the banner of the Mandela name, not to bring South Africans together but to unite them in hate.”

Back then, with the infection raging, I had been in no position to fully grasp the import of the statement. A quick scan, as the morphine dulled the pain, was the most I could manage. Today, however, my interpretation is bolstered by a deep appreciation for antidotes. As a legal scholar, human rights expert and UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Albanese’s insights and lucidity had in fact united her South African audience — Jews, Muslims, Christians and atheists alike — in clear-eyed allegiance to the international rule of law.

It was instead the SAJBD, as several observers noted, that had succumbed to the corrosive effects of the poison.

“The SAJBD by its own admission only officially adopted a stance against apartheid in South Africa at the tail end of the liberation struggle,” the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation pointed out in its own press statement on 24 October. “Will it this time be complicit in the face of a live-streamed genocide committed by the fascist state of Israel?”

I put down my phone and stare up at the ceiling. My thoughts drift automatically back to the Shoah Foundation and to Spielberg, to the device in Schindler’s List of “the girl in the red coat”. As Neeson stated in the documentary, and as a clip of the scene makes plain, the girl is a cypher for the innocence of the victims of the Holocaust. As the only splash of colour in a film rendered in black-and-white, Schindler — who is watching from horseback on a hill, as Nazi soldiers round up and execute Jews on the streets below — cannot keep his eyes off her. To him, the girl is a profoundly disturbing wake-up call to the propaganda that his people have bought.

In Gaza, as I have been thinking, the girl in the red coat is, of course, Hind Rajab. But at five years of age at the time of her execution, around the same age as the girl in Schindler’s List, Rajab is no “device”. She is a very real casualty of what a host of experts have deemed an Israeli war crime. Also, despite the fact that The Voice of Hind Rajab won the grand jury prize at the 82nd Venice Film Festival, the story remains anathema to most of the Hollywood elite.

The ideologues, the refugees and the convalescents

Around the start of the second week of November, as I recover my strength at home, I am wondering how best to ease myself back into work. By this point, I have pretty much internalised the explanation that my condition has a partly metaphysical source. I have been too careless with the venom directed my way; too indulgent, therefore, with the venom I have directed back.

On my worst days, I have been no better than the haters I have been writing about. As Sacks promised (albeit in a way he may not have directly meant), I have not been spared the consequences.

But still, I somehow need to get back in the saddle. As a preparatory exercise, while doing my best to separate the principles from the personalities, I continue to take stock of the most toxic battles in the unfolding narrative war. My bookmarks, as ever, have held the thread.

On 28 October, in response to Albanese’s UN report detailing how “the ongoing genocide is a collective crime, sustained by the complicity of influential Third States” — a report she delivered while still in South Africa — Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, called her “a failed witch” from his seat in the General Assembly. The report, according to Danon, was no more than “another page” in Albanese’s “spell book”.

Meanwhile, on 30 October, the satirical TV show Eretz Nehederet — often described as Israel’s Saturday Night Live — ran a sketch of

Zohran Mamdani, in the final days of his mayoral campaign, as a closet Jihadist anti-Semite. Somehow, without a shred of evidence for their implicit claim, the show’s writers had thought it would be wildly amusing to have fake Mamdani wish Jewish New Yorkers an “intifada tova” (good intifada) instead of a “shana tova” (good year), and to confuse hummus for Hamas.

And then to conclude the cycle, at the beginning of November, the former chief legal officer of the Israeli military, Advocate General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, allegedly attempted suicide. Tomer-Yerushalmi, who had resigned from her position a few days before, had admitted her role in leaking video footage of the abuse of a Palestinian prisoner — specifically, the rape of the prisoner by Israeli prison guards — to Channel 12, the same news channel that broadcasts Eretz Nehederet.

Except, of course, that neither the alleged suicide nor the rape was satire. As Ori Goldberg, one of Israel’s leading dissident voices, noted on 7 November in +972 Magazine, “This saga has dominated Israeli headlines in recent days. Alongside histrionic reports of New York City being taken over by a ‘Jew-hater,’ it has all but erased any remaining discussion of events in Gaza — where, despite their army’s ongoing occupation and periodic bombings, there is little appetite among Israelis for continued coverage now that the ‘war’ is over.”

Goldberg, in the preceding passages, pointed to the underlying detail that Israelis had been scandalised by the leak itself instead of the probable war crime that the footage divulged. As a nation, Israel had turned swiftly and viciously on the “boged” (traitor) Tomer-Yerushalmi. But by my understanding, as I read the paragraph for a second time, it is the two terms in quotes — “Jew-hater” and “war” — that tell the even deeper story.

Again, as far as the old-school practice of journalism is concerned, there is no evidence that Mamdani, who on 5 November won the New York mayoral race in a landslide, had ever hitched his wagon to the losing star of Jihadist anti-Semitism — the hyperlink in Goldberg’s piece is to a Reuters report, published on 4 November, that cites a post by President Donald Trump on Truth Social: “Any Jewish person that votes for Zohran Mamdani, a proven and self-professed JEW HATER, is a stupid person!!!!’ And so why has Goldberg also placed “war” in quotes? Because, as his followers will no doubt be aware, he is one of the few Israelis who consider it a genocide.

For me, then, the deal is sealed. Taken together, these two contested terms, each worthy of an essay on their own, hold the essence of the thread that I have been chasing since the return flight from Brazil — the most entrenched forces in the West, whether expressed by the blunt hammer of Trump or the subtle exclusions of Spielberg, want the events of the last two years erased from the record. And to ensure victory, not only have they weaponised anti-Semitism, they have — as I’ve discovered to my detriment — laced it with a lethal cocktail.

On 13 November, when a planeload of Palestinians from Gaza is left waiting on the tarmac at OR Tambo International in Johannesburg, the cocktail will be released into the system once more.

There will be the bulldozer logic of the pro-Israel shills, who will be exultant at the “irony” that the South African government won’t allow the Palestinians to disembark and yet also, when they do disembark, will be thrilled by the “lie” that the delay had been caused by the absence of exit stamps (Israel, as millions of people will now be informed, doesn’t issue exit stamps). There will be the allegations of Jihadist anti-Semitism, repeated ad nauseam without evidence or scruple, which will now be focused on

Imtiaz Sooliman of Gift of the Givers, who will arrange for the Palestinians the necessities of food and shelter. There will be the hunt by the fearful masses for anything that can serve as a scapegoat, so as to suppress, hopefully forever, the atrocity that has forced the Palestinians to flee.

And yet still, even though it is all so obvious, the toxins are relentless and sly. As much as we can (and must) despise the ideology — or so I am told by those who care about my health — we cannot despise the ideologues. Hatred for anyone, they assure me, will always be registered by the body.

Which leaves … what? Compassion?

Those who care about my health say “yes”. It may be the long and lonely road, they say, but ultimately there is no other way. The perpetrators, they remind me, are enslaved by the same ideology as the victims.

I spend many days alone, go for long walks on the Promenade, consider what the stay in hospital has taught me. I enquire about justice, but am told that it is best left in the hands of time. On 17 November, with my strength returning but not yet where I would like it to be, a headline on my X feed catches my eye: “South Africa to refuse charter flights of Palestinians over fears of ‘cleansing agenda’”. Apparently, after the chaos of the arrivals of 13 November, the government does not intend to be “exploited” again.

The report is from the BBC, which, to me, makes a weird kind of sense. Once upon a time, the Allied powers of World War Two had refused entry to the Jewish refugees of Europe. Now, from the territory that the British had staked out for them, their ghosts are still taking revenge. DM