etos.media: “The West cannot hide. They cannot claim ignorance. Nobody can say they didn’t know.” The documentary begins with this quote by Palestinian poet Susan Abulhawa, which gives a sense of what the film is about. Why did you choose to start with that quote?
Richard Sanders: Because it seemed to me that was really the essence of what we were trying to say in the film. I think Western coverage, when it’s not straightforwardly pro-Israel, tends to take refuge in the idea that this is a terribly complicated, difficult story. But it’s not. It’s a story of an unusually brutal episode of ethnic cleansing. And there isn’t really an enormous amount of moral complexity to that. It’s also a story in the modern age, and this is the point that Susan makes, of social media, of everyone having a camera on their phone. This is a story that was effectively broadcast live. Nobody can say they didn’t know. Okay, well, the reporting in the Western media is very poor, but that’s the responsibility of the Western media. We have thousands of videos shot by Palestinians themselves, of destruction and of death. But most importantly, and this is the core of the film, we have these thousands of videos shot by Israeli soldiers, where they are revelling in the wanton destruction of Palestinian homes, and occasionally in the murder of unarmed Palestinian civilians.
You have collected a huge amount of evidence. Can you tell us briefly about the process of collecting all that data?
We had a whole team on it, but there was one particular freelancer we worked with who had been doing this work since the beginning of the war. Now we have employed him and he continues doing that. It was an enormous amount of legwork and hours of crawling the internet, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube. But in a sense, it was not a huge amount of detective work. I thought we’d have to do OSINT, facial recognition and geolocation in order to identify these people. But we didn’t. I mean, they were posting this stuff under their names and very often saying where and when it was shot. So, there was so much material, it was a matter of putting a lot of time in. But in a sense, it was there for us to find. It wasn’t difficult to dig out.
Probably not everyone has seen the film yet. Could you please give us a brief overview of its main findings?
The core of the film is these videos by the Israeli soldiers and what they reveal. Some of it is comparatively petty, their obsession with women’s underwear, the humiliation of Palestinian women by parading their underwear and so on, which seems to be an obsession with them. The destruction of Palestinian homes, smashing them up and so on. So, it’s sort of an ascending scale of criminality. You have the wanton destruction of Palestinian homes, the detonation of Palestinian homes, often using far more explosives than is ’needed‘. They’re clearly seeking to make the biggest bang possible. They’re competing for clicks. The posts around these videos make no attempt to claim military justification. The wanton destruction of civilian property and infrastructure is a war crime. It’s as easy as that.
And then there is one particular video that we are focusing on which, incredibly, shows the shooting by snipers of three unarmed men. Now, of course, we can’t know the exact circumstances of these shootings, but the men are clearly unarmed. And what is extraordinary is the sense of impunity with which they felt safe to post this online. These soldiers‘ videos are then intercut with the experiences of Palestinians on the ground. We also explore, in a fair bit of detail, the +972 Magazine’s report of the use of artificial intelligence to accelerate the kill rate, in the early months of the war in Gaza. We also look in great detail at the issue of human shields. Let’s break this into two parts. One is the use of Palestinians as human shields by the Israelis. It’s absolutely shocking. It hasn’t been reported in the past. But it’s clearly been a widespread, systematic practice by the Israeli military for years. And in this conflict, it’s so widespread and systematic that it’s finally starting to break through into the mainstream media. Haaretz, The Guardian, The New York Times and CNN have now all done reporting on the Israeli use of human shields.
In German media, this is not reported. It’s completely unknown to people here.
It’s just starting to make its way into the international media. You could be forgiven if it had passed you by. But perhaps, in one sense, more significance is the reverse of this, the claim that Hamas uses human shields. Now this is terribly important because every time Western politicians and Israeli politicians are challenged on the appalling death toll, they take refuge in this argument that Hamas is using civilians as human shields and therefore Hamas is responsible. There is not a scrap of evidence for that.
And we should really pick apart what people are saying. They’re saying that Hamas and the civilian population occupy the same very small bit of territory. But there’s not a great deal Hamas can do about that. Human shields in the sense of placing people in front of you and launching attacks from behind them, there is not a scrap of evidence to suggest that exists. Human rights groups who have researched this have not found any evidence to support it. It would also involve a complete misunderstanding of the nature of Hamas, because whatever you think of them, they are a democratically elected organisation rooted in the people of Gaza. As a result of this war, the attitude of people in the Gaza Strip to Hamas is now very complicated. On the whole, they’re inclined to support the fighters. That support wouldn’t last 10 seconds if those fighters were using women and children and old people and so on as human shields. And the fighters for Hamas and Islamic Jihad rely on that civilian support. It would make no sense at all. Maha Hussaini of the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor makes another point: there is absolutely nothing in the Israeli behaviour over the past year that suggests that the presence of civilians would cause them to hold their fire or that they would seek to avoid killing civilians. So, there would clearly be no purpose whatsoever in using civilians as human shields because it wouldn’t stop the Israelis from firing.
“Gaza” is more than a documentary. It’s also a great collection of evidence. Are you working in any way with human rights lawyers? And what will you do with all the information you have gathered?
We’re going to put more stuff on our website, filling in the evidence we’ve provided. We’re still in that process because there’s such a massive amount of evidence we gathered. We’d certainly hope that the ICC and the ICJ will take a look at the evidence that we and other people have collected and do their own research and use it. It’s all out there in the public domain. It’s not difficult to record this. You just have to collect it. You just have to put the time in.
The footage shown and all the assessments of the human rights experts in the film provide sufficient arguments to recognise that Israel is violating international humanitarian law and committing war crimes. So how is it possible that there’s still a delay in the arrest warrants for Israeli Defence Minister Gallant and Prime Minister Netanyahu?
Certainly, it’s very odd. The issuing of the final arrest warrants ought to have been a formality once the request had been put in. Surely, it’s a process that normally doesn’t take more than a month. So, there’s been this long delay and that’s clearly worrying and clearly suggestive of the political forces and how they work.
But do you think it’s likely that they will eventually issue the warrants?
I just don’t know. Clearly, colossal pressure is being brought to bear.
In the documentary, Germany’s role in all this is mentioned a couple of times, but not as much as Britain’s, although Germany is arguably the bigger supporter of Israel, especially in terms of arms supplies. Could you expand on Germany’s role in this?
The reason we focused on Britain was because there was fresh, original reporting on British involvement that had not been reported in the mainstream media. We quote these statistics in the film that 69% of the weapons come from the US and 30% from Germany. So, yes, I was struck by how much of it came from Germany. My understanding is that the German government, like the British government, is a bit nervous about international law here. And there has been a reining in of these arms exports in recent months. Although some ministers in the German government are seeking to play this down and say that they’re still supporting Israel in the same way.
We felt that the British thing was significant because the British, on the whole, don’t supply a significant amount of arms to Israel. But there is this entirely hidden thing of the role of the RAF Akrotiri (British Royal Air Force, editor’s note), the British air base on Cyprus, which is clearly playing a very important role in the war. And that is going entirely unreported and we felt it was important to correct that.
That was indeed a very important part of the documentary. Could you elaborate on that part?
Yes, so we’re always quite happy to take the reporting of other independent media and acknowledge their role. This all comes from Matt Kennard at Declassified UK, who’s done excellent work on this. One of these peculiar quirks of history, colonial, imperial hangovers, is that we own a little chunk of Cyprus, just as we own a little chunk of Spain. And on that little chunk of Cyprus, guess what? We built an enormous air force base. There it is in the eastern Mediterranean. There’s a lot more to Declassified’s work than we have in the film, it shows that in the early months of the war there were huge numbers of enormous military transport planes flying from Akrotiri to Israel. Then there were huge numbers of surveillance flights over Israel. In fact, more recent work from another department in Al Jazeera has shown that there’s re-fuelling being done from Akrotiri as well. So, as with all these things, you don’t get a lot of sense out of the British government. I think they said that the cargo planes were carrying medicine and diplomats, and they claim that the surveillance flights were purely to do with hostage rescue. People can draw their own conclusions. It seems to me these explanations are entirely unsatisfactory. And the obvious conclusion is that RAF Akrotiri is effectively the hub in the eastern Mediterranean for Western assistance to the Israelis.
We can imagine that, outside of the interested parties who are already aware of the ongoing genocide, there was some resistance to this film. What do your critics usually bring up?
They don’t. (laughing) They ignore us. This is what they do. It’s quite interesting. In a way, you know, I’ve made three films for Al Jazeera now. One gives an alternative perspective on the Labour Party’s anti-Semitism scandal. The second one on October 7, and this is the third one. The world is full of people who, if they could, would love to discredit these films. But people haven’t even tried because, you know, the journalism is absolutely solid. In the absence of being able to discredit it, what they do is ignore it. And it’s almost like some sort of memo goes out. I mean, it’s absolutely extraordinary, the Omertà in mainstream media towards our films. They can entirely ignore it. But of course, in this day and age, you can’t just crush things because it all comes out on social media. You know, millions of people watch these films on social media. Interestingly, there’s more response in the Israeli press. Haaretz actually did some quite interesting stuff. There were a couple of interesting opinion pieces in Haaretz saying ‘we don’t like Al Jazeera and we don’t really like this film, but, you know, the evidence here is pretty compelling. And we’ve got to confront the fact this is how the world now sees us.’ That was quite interesting.
You showed the film in different countries, there were screenings in many countries. How was it received in those countries?
Sorry, remind me, I’m very old and senile. Did we meet at the one in Berlin? (laughing)
We saw briefly, we chatted for a minute or two.
Amongst people who see it, the film makes a huge impact. People seem to find it quite powerful. It’s a frustration, we’re trapped in a bubble. Now, it’s a very big bubble. The film has 1.7 million views on YouTube at the moment. It was watched a lot on X as well. But even so, the frustration is that it’s simply being ordinary members of the public, they are not simply having it on their sort of terrestrial evening television. And that’s frustrating. But of those who do see it, it has a huge impact. One concern I have about this film is that it’s too harsh.
As a general rule, when you’re reporting appalling things from around the world, you rein it in a bit because you have this problem that people just switch off, they can’t cope. I think there’s an element of that with this film, that people, A, just don’t watch it because they can’t cope with any more horror. Or B, they do watch it and they get 15, 20 minutes in and they just can’t cope anymore. And I think that does happen. On the other hand, I’m not quite sure what other kind of film I could have made about Gaza. I mean, you can’t. It is what it is.
Yes, it was really hard to watch. I have been following this issue for the last year, 24-7, but to see it all in such a condensed way, it was really hard to watch at some points. But of course, what kind of film are you supposed to make?
Exactly.
Could you tell us a little bit about the rhetoric of the big supporters of Israel, especially Germany, the US and the UK, on Israel-Gaza compared to the Russia-Ukraine war?
I think one thing that’s very difficult for, certainly Palestinians, but I think more broadly for Muslims and people of colour generally, is the crudeness of the double standards, of the totally different way that one is reported compared to the other. Our reporting of Ukraine is immediately … Don’t get me wrong, I’m no supporter of Putin or of Putin’s operations in Ukraine, not for a moment, but our reporting of Ukraine is immediately emotive and takes it as given that we are on one side and not on the other. Whereas our reporting of Israel and Gaza, where the human rights crimes, by any metric, absolutely dwarf those that have been committed in Ukraine, there it’s continually reported as complicated, as nuanced, as difficult and so on. And I think the crudeness with which Western media and Western politicians make it clear that one type of life, specifically that of white people, is worth more than another type of life, specifically that of people who aren’t white or who aren’t part of the West, that one is worth more than the other; I think the crudeness with which that has been articulated in the last year, it’s very, very difficult for a lot of people.
But what do you think? Why can these countries continue to get away with these narratives? The double standards are so obvious, but they just don’t care. How can they maintain these double standards?
The simple answer is racism. But the thing is, it’s a racism that infects the political media establishment more than the general public. Now, I’m not saying there isn’t a lot of Islamophobia and so on, and there aren’t a lot of people buying into these narratives in the general public, but the peculiarity of this conflict in every single country, particularly in Europe, is that all the polls suggest that where people have a clear opinion and view, they are more sympathetic to the Palestinians than to the Israelis. And those figures are shifting quite fast as well. The negative attitude towards Israel is becoming more negative quite quickly. And you simply wouldn’t have that impression from listening to politicians in the West and watching Western media. It’s dreadful here in Britain. I know, you poor sods, it’s even worse in Germany. Germany sounds absolutely horrific.
Yes, I agree. Could you talk a bit about Western mainstream media and their reporting on Gaza?
It’s quite clear. There is enormous intimidation going on. When I try to persuade people to see our film or to cover our film, you can smell the fear. Now, you have to be careful about the language you use, the Israel lobby is very powerful. It just is. And it also has all sorts of outriders who have their own particular reasons for attacking different groups. And all sorts of brazenly Islamophobic groups that obviously jump onto this platform. So, you have a fair bit of reporting, which is just straightforwardly parroting Israeli propaganda. More common, as I say, is this business of presenting it as complicated and nuanced. If you’re a smart Zionist, you know that it’s actually pretty difficult to get people to side with Israel, given what it’s doing. But the main goal is to stir up dust and make it as complicated as possible. What they want, above all, is for people not to regard this in the same way as in the 1980s when it was taken as given in a sort of polite liberal society whose side you were on and whose side you weren’t on. What they want to avoid above all is a situation where Israel is a pariah nation and Zionism, for what it is, is an apartheid system, in the same way that the apartheid system was seen in South Africa. In doing this, of course, you have this enormously important weapon of defining anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism. It gives them this hugely potent weapon to wield in their own defence. It’s such a powerful weapon precisely because the resonances of anti-Semitism in European history, and of course, above all, in German history, are just so appalling that it tends to be, the minute you invoke anti-Semitism, a lot of liberal people immediately switch their brains off. Who wants to be on the wrong side of this debate?
Maybe you’ve heard the recent news about Germany, that the Bundestag, our parliament, has passed a resolution “zum Schutz des jüdischen Lebens”, so “to protect Jewish life” in Germany. It’s non-binding, but it’s an expression of the parliament. It says it wants to protect Jewish life, but basically, it’s just a very repressive set of rules. They can now deport people more easily if they don’t commit to the state of Israel in a way that is sufficient to them. They can withdraw funding for cultural institutions or for scientific projects if they say what they define as anti-Semitic things, which is basically the IHRA definition that the resolution endorses. This is a very dangerous resolution in our view. Could you comment on the specific German context of all this?
Germany suffers from all the things we’ve talked about, and worse, obviously because of the particularities of German history. It was a thing I hadn’t appreciated until I was in Berlin. I hadn’t realised until recently how large the Palestinian population is in Germany. It must be appalling for them. They’re effectively clubbed into silence. They have to witness the wholesale slaughter of their cousins, relatives and what have you, and the minute they protest about it, they are portrayed as the racists. I mean, you also have this extraordinary thing in Germany, where precisely because Jewish people are so active in the anti-Zionist movement, in the pro-Palestinian movement, so many, especially young Jewish people, are so horrified that this is being done in their name. Jews are massively disproportionately represented in those groups that support the Palestinians in the West.
This means that, perversely, you end up with a situation where these laws target Jews in particular. You’ve seen this very dramatically here in the British Labour Party, where Jewish people are massively disproportionately more likely to find themselves disciplined for anti-Semitism in the Labour Party than non-Jewish people, which really ought to be setting off a few alarm bells for journalists, but apparently it doesn’t.
If you list all the events, lectures and speeches in Germany that have been cancelled because of accusations of anti-Semitism or people’s opinions on Israel and Gaza, a large number of them are Jewish. And they say that’s fighting anti-Semitism. But back to Gaza. For more than a month there has been a massive campaign in the north of the Strip, and on top of that the Knesset has just effectively banned UNRWA. Can you please link these two things?
The fact that UNRWA is responsible for the Palestinians is problematic for the Israelis if you want to starve and intimidate the population into leaving. But there’s also something more fundamental to that. The fact that a great share of the Palestinian people are under the protection of UNRWA is an acknowledgement that Palestinians are refugees, and therefore their original home is Palestine, which is now Israel. This, of course, is a theoretical underpinning of the Palestinian struggle that the Israelis would dearly love to kick away. Now, as for northern Gaza, it’s astonishing that this isn’t the headline on the news every night. It has been blindingly obvious for months really, but especially in the last month, that the end game for the Israelis is to entirely empty the area north of the Wadi Gaza, the Gaza River. And the media, in as much as they report about it at all, continue to report it as ‚Oh, this is what Palestinians say, but this is what Israelis say, hey, who knows?‘ It is blindingly obvious that a brutal process of ethnic cleansing is underway in the north. To continue to obfuscate that, to pretend that it’s not clear, is to be complicit, frankly.
I would like to end on a more personal note. How has working on this documentary affected you as a professional, as a filmmaker, as a human being?
It’s difficult. I’m not going to pretend it’s not. It was also difficult to watch all the footage from 7 October (for Sanders‘ previous film, editor’s note). There was a lot of horrific stuff. And then last year, no … it’s very difficult. There’s only so many dead children you can look at. Equally, I think it’s psychologically helpful to have an outlet for your anger and outrage and to feel you can channel it in some constructive way. I think simply sitting here slamming my head against the wall, which would be the alternative, would be even worse.
Richard Sanders is an award winning TV producer specialising in history and news and current affairs. He has made more than 50 films, mostly for Channel 4. He has written for a number of publications including The Daily Telegraph and the Boston Globe and is also the author of two history books.
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