When the British punk-rap duo Bob Vylan and their fans were chanting “Death, death, to the IDF” at the Glastonbury Music Festival in June, they were engaging in a dangerous act of incitement for sure.
But, they were also expressing – in a uniquely explicit manner – a variation of the same moral inversion promoted by much of the British media since the Oct. 7th war: casting Israel’s military, and not the perpetrators of the worst antisemitic massacre since the Holocaust, as the uniquely evil party.
So, prominent documentaries aired by British broadcasters to date, such as Channel 4’s ‘Doctors Under Attack“, and the BBC’s universally condemned “Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone“, have not only been based on the pre-determined conclusion of IDF guilt and misconduct, but have ignored Hamas’s role in the war they started when their pogromists engaged in mass murder, rape, torture and mutilation in southern Israel.
ITV’s documentary “Breaking Ranks: Inside Israel’s War“, by documentary producer Zandland, follows this pattern of myopic focus on Israeli soldiers – as is evident in the title, which omits Hamas from “Israel’s war”- while failing to critically scrutinise the accusations leveled by a few soldiers.
Those familiar with the NGO called Breaking the Silence would be familiar with this style of exposé: involving usually anonymous, low-ranking soldiers giving anecdotal testimony about alleged misconduct by the army, while lacking specific dates, locations and other vital details. Such omissions, as well as the fact that most of these military eyewitnesses never filed complaints within the army’s chain of command, mean that the IDF was unable to properly investigate the complaints.
Breaking Ranks follows in this style of ‘investigation’.
The moral myopia of the ITV documentary is evidenced by the fact that, in one hour and ten minutes of film, viewers see only about one minute of footage of the Hamas atrocities on Oct. 7th, while almost completely disappearing the terror group for the duration of the film.
Though the Israeli death toll on Oct. 7th is briefly shown on screen, viewers aren’t informed that the overwhelming majority of those murdered were civilians. Nor are they told of Hamas’s rapes and other examples of their truly barbaric treatment of men, women and children.
The implicit message throughout the film is that the IDF brutality and attack on civilians alleged by the soldiers are not just true, but that this likely amounts to genocide.
This is partly supported by footage of a deceptively edited press conference by the country’s president, Isaac Herzog, in which he’s seen arguing that “[Gazans are] an entire nation out there that is responsible…This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved [in the October 7 onslaught] — it’s absolutely not true.”
Omitted from the ITV documentary was the rest of Herzog’s speech, in which he stressed that “Israel abides by international law, operates by international law. Every operation is secured and covered and reviewed legally.” He also said: “There is no excuse [for] murdering innocent civilians in any way in any context. And believe me, Israel will operate and always operate according to the international rules. And we do the same in this battle, too.”
The documentary’s gross distortion of Herzog’s words is but one example of how the media and arts community have falsely characterised the words of Israeli leaders early in the war to promote the genocide libel, thus shifting the focus away from Hamas’s actual genocidal designs.
In fact, the dishonest editing of Herzog’s full quote appeared right after a short clip of one of the former Israeli soldiers, Major Neta Caspin, complaining of an IDF rabbi (named Avraham Zarbiv) who told her, while she was on duty in the territory, that “there are no civilians in Gaza”. So, the clip of Herzog was designed to dishonestly suggest that such immoral advice from one military rabbi was the accepted view within Israel’s political echelon.
Another extremely deceptive feature seen throughout the film includes gratuitous footage of explosions and destruction in Gaza which almost never includes even the briefest explanation of what target was hit. The desired take-way is that Gaza was “pulverized”, which, again, erases Hamas, and vital context that such attacks took place during a war in which terror groups routinely embedded themselves and their military assets in civilian areas and structures.
Later in the film, viewers hear from soldier, “Lt. Col. F”, whose face is hidden, opining that “I think the use of force in Gaza is probably unprecedented in combat…in terms of the number of explosives dropped per square mile. I don’t think even in the bombing of Dresden there was a higher density of explosives used”.
The soldier’s musings aren’t supported by data or a source. Nor is his ahistorical comparison of IDF attacks on targets in Gaza to the firebombing of Dresden, an attack by British and US bombers in 1945 specifically targeting civilians, in which an estimated 25,000-35,000 people were killed, challenged.
Further into the film, Amjad al-Shaw, from the Palestinian NGO Network,(PNGO) is interviewed, talking about the destruction in Gaza, claiming, without evidence, that the IDF’s bombing was “designed merely to maximise the death and destruction”. Later, al-Shaw talks about allegations of innocent Palestinians getting shot, and then commenting that “innocent civilians would ‘innocently’ go into forbidden military zones in Gaza, because of overcrowding, and then be shot.” Again, the broad and source-less allegation is just left there for viewers, with the clear intent of promoting his claim as factual.
Tellingly, viewers aren’t told of his NGO’s support for terror, their leadership’s alleged ties to PFLP terror group, or that the group issued a statement on Oct. 8, 2023, praising the Hamas massacre.
Further, to promote the film’s pre-determined conclusion, the film cites a report by +972 and the Guardian claiming that the IDF authorized the death of a higher number of civilians in attacks on high level terror targets than in previous wars. Yet, viewers aren’t provided with information that would challenge the premise, or the vital context of Hamas’s documented human shield policy.
Nor is anyone interviewed to share with viewers what’s been described by some military experts as the unprecedented lengths the IDF has gone to protect the civilian population in Gaza: the military continually warned civilian population about impending attacks and directed them to evacuate to safe zones by distributing millions of flyers, text messages, voice mails and QR codes with military maps—thereby suffering a clear military disadvantage.
Later, a male soldier named ‘Itai’, whose face is hidden, is interviewed, and claims that anyone in Gaza walking who’s between 20-40 years old can be targeted if there’s suspicion he’s walking where he’s not allowed. Again, this is an extraordinary allegation, one which isn’t countered by a response by anyone within the military. In fact, most of the Israeli responses to the charges in the film are merely copied and pasted from past statements – from news reports at the time – in response to allegations during the war.
There are somewhat counter-narrative views expressed by some of the anonymous soldiers during the film, such as when a soldier whose face is hidden admits that warning shots are typically fired on suspicious people who wander into military zones. Another soldier whose face is also hidden explains that “every man of fighting age is considered a terrorist”, which, at least implicitly, shows that women, children and elderly are not targeted.
But, such rare comments are never explored, and aren’t contextualised by the filmmakers in a way that viewers could process the information as running counter to the desired narrative.
In fact, the film then pivots to another soldier whose face is hidden claiming that a commander ordered a building in a civilian zone to be destroyed. But, he doesn’t explain why: were there terrorists, weapons or other military assets inside? Such possibilities aren’t explored – nor is precise information given on the building’s location and the date of the attack, which would allow these questions to be fact-checked.
Another soldier claims that though a commander reported that his unit killed 112 terrorists one day, only one of those killed was suspected of being armed. But, it’s unclear how he knows this, as he doesn’t provide any details on the day’s operations that the IDF could investigate. Further, the fact that a Hamas commander giving orders to fighters to carry out strikes isn’t personally armed doesn’t render him an illegitimate target.
This kind of serious, nuanced conversation is absent from the ITV documentary.
Tendentious and misleading language is also used throughout the film, such as when viewers are told that the IDF “displaced thousands of residents”, instead of saying that they were evacuated so no harm would be done to them – again, unintentionally admitting that the IDF continued to protect Gaza civilians.
You continually see destroyed buildings throughout the film, but never terrorists or their weaponry. Hamas all but ceased to exist in Gaza after Oct. 7th, according to the film.
A soldier named Yuval Ben-Ari says – as if it’s incriminating – that he took photos of Gaza where all you could see was devastation. Throughout the film, the vital context of the countless battles between the IDF and terrorists in Gaza is erased.
While, as we noted, there was nothing in the documentary about the context of Hamas’s strategic use of human shields throughout the territory, one of the anonymous Israeli soldiers alleges during the film that the IDF used “Palestinian human shields” to map and search Hamas’s tunnels. This allegation, denied by the IDF, has naturally been highlighted by anti-Zionist outlets like the Guardian, who reviewed the ITV documentary and, of course, accepted every allegation in the documentary as true.
Tellingly, the charge that Palestinians are used as human shields by the IDF, in order to search Gaza’s tunnels, was the first reference, as oblique as it was, of Hamas’s 350 miles of terror tunnels, much of which, crucially, was intentionally built below civilian infrastructure: another example of Hamas’s human shield policy.
The only other mention of the terror group’s vast underground terror network, which was built by siphoning off millions of dollars in humanitarian aid, was in plain text that appeared on the screen for 10 seconds.
Another interviewee is Haaretz journalist Amira Haas, an Israeli anti-Zionist used to legitimise the pre-determined conclusion of the film of IDF villainy, who alleges that Israelis don’t know about “the hell that we turned Gaza into”. This is a common refrain by journalists and commentators in the British media, suggesting that the Israeli Hebrew media is biased, and doesn’t report on the suffering of civilians in the Palestinian territory.
However, in addition to the fact that Israel is a free country with a free media, in the modern world of cable news, internet and social media, it strains credulity to suggest, as Haas does, that only a select few in the Jewish state are able to understand what’s ‘really happening’.
Note also that similar accusations are never made of Palestinians, either in Gaza or the West Bank, who don’t live in free societies and who disproportionately get their news from propaganda sites like Al Jazeera.
Later, viewers hear the anonymous testimony of a GHF truck driver who claims he saw the IDF killed ‘what appeared to be two innocent teenagers’ near an aid site – an unevidenced and unchallenged claim that is illustrated with a video simulation of the putative ‘incident’
Viewers are then told, as if it’s a fact, that 944 aid-seekers have been killed while seeking aid “according to the UN”, while failing to note that the UN doesn’t have any independent casualty data-gathering capacity, and that all such figures come from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry.
Later, footage is again shown of destroyed civilian buildings – including mosques, hospitals and schools – without so much as the suggestion that they could have been destroyed because Hamas launched attacks from those facilities, or used it for other military purposes.
Towards the end of the film, viewers see the following farcical, completely discredited Guardian claim regarding Gaza civilian casualty statistics to back up his libel:
For ‘balance’, the following screen shot tells viewers that the IDF denies these statistics. So, they checked the ‘fairness’ box, as it were, but viewers aren’t told that, other than the Guardian, no other mainstream outlet we’re aware of cites those numbers, or that informed researchers have disproven the alleged civilian death ratio.
Though the film’s producer, Zandland, claims to be a “documentary studio dedicated to telling incredible true stories with empathy, [and] objectivity...”, ‘Breaking Ranks’ represents yet another example of the cultural groupthink that denies agency to revanchist, illiberal and antisemitic Palestinians while fanning the flames of hatred towards the Middle East’s lone Western-style democracy.
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