Gaza: A Story of Love and War

The unfolding genocide in Gaza has been a challenging narrative to unpick since October 7 2023. In the two years since then, the UK government has proscribed Palestine Action, a direct action group with the stated goal of ending Israel's apartheid regime, a terrorist group. Over 1500 people are reported as having been arrested by the Metropolitan Police for peacefully protesting an end to the genocide. For those living in the United Kingdom, the media and government have continued to obscure the true scale of the destruction Israel has levelled against thousands of innocent Palestinians in their campaign of cruelty. Welsh reporter Mike Joseph cuts through the noise in his documentary ‘Gaza: A Story of Love and War’, a deeply empathetic portrayal of human connection in a time of hopelessness, providing some dignity for a people systematically stripped of it.

Mike Joseph opens the film with images of the Gaza–Israel barrier while narrating an adaptation of Niemöller’s poem ‘First They Came’. Immediately, Joseph is linking the Holocaust with the Gaza genocide, a striking and assertive statement to begin with. The documentary serves as an excellent introduction to the history of the region, as Joseph explains how the state of Israel came to be following the Second World War, and how it has expanded outward in the years since. He’s a trustworthy narrator and a confident authority on the subject; the reveal that Joseph’s grandfather was a victim of the Holocaust in 1941 gives the film a personal quality that will carry throughout. The majority of the documentary’s runtime is an online conversation between Joseph and Sami Abu Salem, a Palestinian journalist, via Zoom. The two men share a tender connection, both united in the terrible suffering that their families were historically subjected to. In a poignant segment of the film, Salem speaks of his mother’s village Burayr which her family was driven out of in 1948 when she was only 10 years old, and was subsequently destroyed by Israeli forces. Joseph listens with understanding, the two sharing in the experience of their parents fleeing their respective homelands.

Although the film features the two men connecting with each other, it must be noted that it feels like one arm reaching into the darkness to grasp at fingers. That is to say, there is a sense of distance in Joseph’s reporting of Gaza. Unfortunately for the filmmakers, the footage shot in Salem’s home in Jabaliya has been lost in the conflict, meaning that the camera in the interview segments of the film is purely from Joseph’s point of view. Furthermore, there is a lack of video material from Gaza for most of the film. Over the past year, there have been at least two documentaries lauded for their blistering documentation of the genocide from within Gaza itself: Oscar winner ‘No Other Land’ and Louis Theroux’s ‘The Settlers’. While ‘Gaza: A Story of Love and War’ does succeed in centering Palestinian voices, one wonders if the film could have featured other first hand reports throughout. Significantly, the final minutes of the film are perhaps the most emotionally affecting, as Joseph makes space for Salem’s own video reporting. In his footage, a young Palestinian girl amidst the chaos dreams of a future studying business, a future that has been snatched away from her. It’s a deeply moving section of the film, and it would have been powerful to see more footage of a similar nature integrated into the rest of the documentary.

Joseph lands on a crucial thesis of the film: is coexistence possible? Salem’s response is that yes, it is possible, but only if Palestinians are afforded dignity by fair media representation. This is perhaps the greatest endorsement of ‘Gaza: A Story of Love and War’. The film may lack the punch of some more recent documentaries that turn the camera lens directly towards the brutality of Israel’s imperialist goals, but it succeeds in giving Palestinians a voice in the form of Sami Abu Salem, a dignified and responsible representative of his people.