‘October 8’ is a danger to both student protesters and Jewish Americans

It's also not very good or convincing as a piece of cinema, though its straightforward, flimsy form likely won’t matter when it’s preaching to the choir. Its rote construction—robotic oscillations between talking heads, slyly presented news graphs, and social media videos meant to scaremonger—are repetitive and predictable, but they ironically feed into existing fears and prejudices. For instance, in its many vertically oriented phone clips, the very presence of students donning headscarves and Palestinian keffiyehs are the beginning and the end of its imagery at times, and are accompanied by a rising, chilling score.

There are, of course, more detailed segments, beginning with an opening prologue of a survivor of the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 being interviewed in front of the burnt remains of her home at the Nir Oz kibbutz. Like with the dueling Israeli hostage documentaries presented at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, A Letter to David and Holding Liat, the images of charred debris at Nir Oz become a stirring symbol of suffering. However, only the latter movie wrestled with the weight and irony of history. Namely: the fact that Nir Oz was, until 1948, the Palestinian village Ma’in Abu Sitta, which was subsequently destroyed. If October 8 is propagandistic in its presentation, it’s equally so because of its omissions, which circumvent any history of Israeli-Palestinian conflict both before and after Oct. 7, 2023 and which frame the protests as fueling violent, at-all-cost measures for Palestinian freedom, without examining how its subjects’ applause for Zionist ideology fails to recognize this very same aspect of its praxis.

No documentary is beholden to presenting every perspective at once, but Sachs’ film reveals a number of jaw-dropping ironies amidst its attempts to mirror campus protests with images of Nazi book burnings. The movie is often speculative in nature. On one hand, it makes bizarre claims using logos laid out side by side (but with no real investigative evidence) tying youth organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine to Hamas—not only in terms of funding, but direct marching orders. On the other hand, its central arguments about antisemitism also dangerously stretch credulity. Various interviewees, like Messing, columnist Bari Weiss, and Columbia professor Shai Davidai (notably barred from campus for harassing student protesters), all frame their concerns as preemptive. These protests, they claim—based on nothing but vibes—will potentially lead to a backslide into Holocaust-era fascism. October 8 also uses footage of various suicide bombings from around the world  to imply that this too will definitively occur in the United States if these campus protests, and if anti-Zionism, go unchecked. “Violence will follow,” one subject warns confidently down the lens.

But there’s a problem with making these claims in this specific context, given how many instances of protesters decrying active genocide appear in the film itself. In October 8, the imagined specter of violence is of far greater concern than actual, ongoing violence. This disconnect is made all the more disquieting by one specific statement, wherein a subject claims that if the United States and other powerful nations had been quicker to condemn antisemitism in the wake of Oct. 7, then “Hamas would have no ammunition.” The callous irony of using “ammunition” in this metaphorical way ought not to be lost on anyone even vaguely aware that countries like the United States continue to supply literal ammunition to the Israeli state, which—despite the January ceasefire—recently carried out what Israeli newspaper Haaretz describes as “the largest child massacre in its history.”

But even if one accepts that ignoring these heinous acts is inevitable for October 8, the movie films appalling proclamations even on its own terms. Antisemitism is undoubtedly a problem in real and online spaces, but the movie’s subjects repeatedly dismiss the growing Neo Nazi movement in the United States as a far lesser concern than campus protests. Between this, and the insistence that Zionism as a belief ought to be inseparable from Judaism, the film is likely more harmful to Jewish Americans than any of the protest slogans it features (to say nothing of the numerous Jewish students and organizations who are part of the protests). One can expect an opposing side of any documentary to be given lesser weight or importance, but here, the interviewees are often deciding—independently of any Palestinian voices—what the real motives and subtext of the pro-Palestine movement really are. It’s all too easy to claim you’re in danger while projecting fears of persecution onto an Arab-shaped boogeyman, while simultaneously claiming that dangerous factions on the far right—whose “Jews will not replace us!” sloganeering even appears in the movie—are actually of little concern.

This is, in large part, because October 8 is a deeply right-wing documentary. One needn’t look further than its own text to support this. Between its numerous instances of cleverly edited protest footage—at one point, to tie slogans about “disruption” to violently antisemitic intent—the film goes on wild tangents about conspiratorial subjects like Chinese influence on American youth and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), the American right’s new favorite buzzword to demonize non-white people and racial equity. It attempts to lay the blame for creeping antisemitism at the feet of progressivism, framing any and all equality movements, from queer liberation to Indigenous rights, as so naïve as to be easily manipulated into becoming Trojan horses for antisemitic intent.

At no point does the movie, or anyone in it, actually try to counter the campus protesters’ claims (of apartheid and genocide). However, framing their intent and motives as terroristic allows for a wholesale dismissal, and an easier demonization. It’s the very same rhetoric that has recently led to Columbia overhauling its protest policies (among other demands from the Trump administration) and has allowed for so much support of ICE detaining green card-holder Mahmoud Khalil for possible deportation, on no discernible grounds beyond the vague specter of terrorism. The arguments in October 8 are indecipherable from those used to kidnap Khalil from his home: that pro-Palestinian protesters have ties to terror groups, and that their sentiments are inherently pro-terrorism.

“I wasn’t seeing an ideological disagreement,” says Davidai at one point. “I was seeing hatred.” It’s a particularly revelatory claim—also clipped in the movie’s trailer—because it goes to show how much easier it is to throw out an argument when you frame it as an inherent threat to your life. This is the larger point and purpose of October 8. It’s a documentary filled with the kind of intellectually dishonest fear mongering that has already led to numerous fascist crackdowns on free speech and ideological criticism, all while its subjects claim they’re being silenced, while also boasting their New York Times op-eds and speeches before Congress. The movie may not convince anyone who’s already opposed to its messaging, but for those on the fence, it’s likely to grant them permission to cheerlead the ongoing stripping of protesters’ civil rights—and, ironically, the growing antisemitic threat of white nationalism too.