Dueling documentaries chart the chaotic aftermath of October 7 at U.S. universities. They couldn’t be more relevant now amid Trump’s campus crackdown
The arrival of two recent documentaries about how the Gaza crisis unfolded on U.S. college campuses, October 8 and The Encampments, could not be more timely. The war in Gaza rages on, and so too does the campus crisis it inspired.
Trump has begun following through on a vow to deport all non-citizen university activists with ties to the pro-Palestine faction. This week, masked ICE agents apprehended a Tufts student, for the apparent offense of writing a pro-Palestine op-ed.
The history of how we got here, at least according to these documentaries, remains highly contested.
As October 8, which is in theatres now and executive produced by Debra Messing, tells it, the explosion of pro-Palestine protest that immediately followed the Hamas attack came from a combination of latent antisemitism and mass misunderstanding of the Israel-Palestine situation. The former undoubtedly exists — the stratospheric over-representation of Jews in FBI hate crime data, for example, cannot be ignored — while the latter is more debatable.
Director Wendy Sachs assembles professors, extremism researchers, Israeli officials, and right-leaning commentators who blame the leftward tilt of the protests on a fog of social media algorithms, Hamas propaganda, what they see as an anti-Israel press and a compromised human rights community, and, perhaps most strikingly, the social justice and diversity movement itself.
Viewers are told that within these left-learning spaces, the “snake started eating its own tail” and developed an “orthodoxy that’s unhealthy” singling out Israel and Jews, according to interviewee New York University professor Scott Galloway.
“There’s not a lot of nuance,” he adds, though this statement comes in a documentary where the only Palestinian who speaks is a former Mossad asset.
The Encampments, which debuted in New York this week and has rapper Mackelmore as a producer, features more contemporaneous interviews during the protests as well as more historical analysis. The film suggests that students were motivated by their own experiences, beliefs and education. It notes, for example, that Palestinian refugees and Palestinian-Americans with direct ties to those being annihilated by U.S.-made armaments were among those leading the protests.
Both documentaries also omit seemingly relevant parts of the record, too.
October 8 doesn’t bother trying to reckon with (or even interview) any of the hundreds and likely thousands of Jewish students who helped carry out the encampment protests, many of whom cited the Jewish tradition of social justice activism as their inspiration.
Their absence is all the more glaring given the very real violence the protesters, including the Jewish ones, faced because of their activism. At UCLA, for example, police largely stood by as a gang of masked vigilantes, some draped in Israeli flags, attacked students with fireworks and blunt objects, then fled before officers regained control or made arrests.
If all the encampment protesters were Jew-haters, what does that make the Jews inside the barricades, who ended up in handcuffs or at the hospital for their beliefs? What does that make the people who attacked them?
People like Trump have one response. On the campaign trail, he wondered aloud how anti-Israel Jews “even exist” in America and suggested they needed to get their “head examined.” October 8, understandably, doesn’t quote that, but it does not address the question any other way.
And speaking of Trump, the president and his political influence apparently didn’t warrant a mention either, despite the Republican standard-bearer dining with neo-Nazis, allying closely with the GOP’s pro-Israel megadonors, and using rhetoric on the 2024 campaign trail that non-Americans were “poisoning the blood” of the nation, comments that wouldn’t have been out of place at a Nazi rally.
