The Voice of Hind Rajab is an emotionally devastating, 89-minute docudrama about the January 2024 slaughter of a family of Palestinian innocents (and the five-year-old Hind Rajab in particular) in northern Gaza, from impassioned director-writer Kaouther Ben Hania.
It screened this morning at 8:30 am, and was met with sustained applause during the closing credits.
I found the film deeply upsetting, but it has to be stated that the focus is solely on the anguish and terror of this poor little girl, and is therefore manipulative by creating a narrative that says “bloodthirsty Israel troops were the bad guys who brought pure evil into this girl’s life”.
But at the same time the film ignores the indisputable fact that Hind Rajab would probably be living today if Hamas had not viciously attacked and murdered 1195 Israelis on 10.7.23, and if Israel hadn’t decided to turn the Gaza Strip into a lifeless moonscape in response.
Rajab was killed by IDF forces during the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip, roughly 20 months ago. They also killed six of her family members, plus two paramedics who had attempted her rescue.
Wiki excerpt: “Rajab and her family were fleeing Gaza City when their vehicle was shelled, killing her uncle, aunt and three cousins, with Rajab and another cousin surviving and contacting the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) to ask for help while noting that they were being attacked by an Israeli tank. The cousin was eventually killed.
“Rajab was left stranded in the vehicle for hours on the phone, as paramedics from PRCS attempted to rescue her. Both Rajab and the paramedics were later also found killed.
“Israel claimed it had no troops present and denied carrying out the attack.
“This was refuted, however, by Washington Post and Sky News investigations, which relied on satellite imagery and visual evidence, concluding that a number of Israeli tanks were indeed present and one had likely fired 335 rounds on the car that Rajab and her family had been in, with tank operators being able to see that the car had civilians including children in it.
“The Forensic Architecture investigation also concluded that an Israeli tank had also likely attacked the ambulance that came for Rajab.”
HE reaction, tapped out a half-hour after the screening ended: “This is an emotionally manipulative drillbit film about the awful ravages of war.
“No God’s-eye view, no bitter irony, no Paths of Glory-like compassion for combatants on either side, and certainly no conveying the basic reasons for the slaughter.
“It’s mainly about the constant milking of our emotions by focusing on a terrified five-year-old girl struggling to survive inside a car with her dead (i.e., ‘sleeping’) family as she speaks to a small group of Palestinian crisis workers trying to arrange for Red Cross workers to rescue her.
“Hind Rajab’s life is at extreme risk, of course, because of (a) Hamas’s suicidal fanaticism and (b) Benjamin Netanyahu’s determination to wipe them all out, down to the last combatant.
“The film is extremely sad and affecting (the audience applauded passionately), but be honest — it shamelessly milks, milks and milks until the cows come home.
“Innocent civilians, after all, have been in the collateral line of fire and savagely murdered throughout history. When has this never not been tragic or horrifying?
“How many terrified little girls died because of the aggressive battle strategies of Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Napoleon Bonaparte, George Washington, William Tecumseh Sherman, Adolf Hitler, George S. Patton, Omar Bradley and William Westmoreland?
“And how many little German girls died, by the way, from bombs dropped by Lieutenant Colonel James Stewart, who was the flight leader for a massive thousand-plane attack upon Berlin, and who also helped bomb the shit out of Frankfurt, Brunswick, Bremen and Nuremberg?”
News bulletin: War is cruel, merciless and morally repugnant.