‘We will dance again’ a harrowing documentary on the hell of 7 October

This BBC documentary on the massacre at the Nova Music Festival in Israel is agonising to watch, reports Michael Coren. But he won’t give up hoping and praying for peace

One of the challenges of showing sympathy towards any group in the Israel/Palestine conflict is that accusations of political bias are immediately thrown around. If I weep for murdered Israelis, I must be a colonial Zionist, a settler, and indifferent to the children of Palestine. If I roar at the injustice of the bombing of civilian targets in Gaza, I’m a supporter of terrorism or even an anti-Semite.

If you doubt me, spend some time on my social media accounts and you’ll realize the hideous authenticity of what I just said. Because I do care for all concerned in this truly terribly dispute. I am not naïve when it comes to the darkly complex realities of it all. I’ve visited the region many times, spent months living there, wrote my university thesis on pre-state Jewish terrorism in the 1940s, and have interviewed leaders on all sides.

Yet the more I learn, the less absolute I can be on the situation. If only I could be as wise as those instant experts and political fanatics who hold forth day after day about experiences and histories of which they have absolutely no knowledge.

Which brings me to the new BBC Storyville documentary Surviving October 7th: We Will Dance Again. It’s a 90-minute account of what happened on that gruesome day, and the sounds of the people crying around me when I attended a preview this week is testimony to the poignancy and power of the film.