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‘Bearing Witness’ Is a Film the World Needs to See — Whether We Want To or Not'

David Alpern along with Mihran Kalaydjian of DFI-LA were invited to a preview of OCTOBER 7: BEARING WITNESS TO THE MASSACRE (october7film.com), which is being released to the public this fall (October 3, 2025) on Amazon Prime Video and other VOD platforms. The film is a documentary and serves an important role in that it focuses on the history of the conflict to better understand what motivates the parties to the conflict, specifically focusing on the Muslim mindset, and why their culture has such a radical proclamation toward violence, and are willing to sacrifice their own life toward the goal of capturing the entirety of the land that is known today as the State of Israel. This is a concept foreign to most Western thinking. The film references for example, how this mindset allowed ISIS to recruit 40,000 fighters nearly overnight.

One of the strengths of the movie is the frequent return to having the wonderful Einat Wilf provide perspective. Ms. Wilf is a former member of Knesset and has a tremendous grasp of the history of the Arab world. The movie is further supported by having Daniel Gordis, the famed American Israeli author, provide frequent commentary over much of the film.

The documentary does such an effective job of combining historical perspective, with news reporting all comingled with interviews and visuals filmed as Todd Morehead explores what happened on location. Much footage is spliced in so to help understand the actions, the motives, and the reactions. In essence, this isn’t a movie; this is evidence.

This is not a film about war. There are no soldiers shown in combat. There is no analysis of military operations or political policies. The focus is singular and chilling: the deliberate killing of unarmed civilians. Whether or not you support Israel’s government is irrelevant in context of this film. The footage doesn’t ask you to take sides. It asks you to recognize shared humanity. The suffering on screen is not abstract — it’s deeply personal. And that’s what makes it so urgent.

364 were killed at the Nova festival and 44 were taken hostage into the dungeon tunnels of Gaza. European style pogroms came to Israel on October 7, 2023. Exactly what Israel promised its people would never again ever happen to them… sadly did happen to them.

For those of us in Los Angeles—a city with one of the largest Jewish populations outside Israel, and a growing and passionate Palestinian community—this film poses a deeply uncomfortable civic question: Can we recognize suffering, even when it challenges our politics? Can we make space for grief without immediately converting it into accusation?

Yes, the film is traumatic. People have left screenings in silence. Some wept. Others could not speak. That reaction is normal. It’s human. But if the footage is real—and it is—then the pain is not staged. It’s the documented aftermath of a real human catastrophe.

Some argue this is not the right time to show such imagery. But if not now, when? How long do we wait before we allow ourselves to confront the truth? And if we turn away from this, what else are we willing to ignore?

In a time of deepfakes, disinformation, and willful denial, Bearing Witness is a stark reminder that some truths are not up for debate. The film does not exist to comfort. It’s not trying to persuade. It exists to document — to ensure that what happened is neither forgotten nor denied.

To bear witness is painful. But it is necessary. Because once we have seen this footage, we can no longer say, “We didn’t know.”

Watch the trailer: https://www.october7film.com/gallery?pgid=mcccsxdx-d851953a-532c-40c0-bfb8-0d64cbc12fb7

Pictured are DFI-LA's President Gregg Sokovits and Executive Board Member Mihran Kalaydjian at the March 2025 Democratic Party of the San Fernando Valley General Assembly with Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and newly elected Assemblymember Nick Schultz. Also, a group shot of all the attendees.

Colleen Henry Schwab honored as outstanding volunteer of the year by DPSFV on January 25, 2025.

On his passing (12/29/2024) at the age of 100, DFI-LA remembers President Jimmy Carter as a principled leader who loved America and celebrates his monumental achievement of the first ever peace agreement between Israel and one of its neighboring Arab states. President Carter dedicated an enormous amount of focused time to this one issue during the 13 days of the Camp David Summit (September 5–17, 1978). Rarely had an American President devoted as much sustained attention to a single foreign policy issue as Carter did over the summit's nearly two-week duration. That peace treaty remains in place to this very day, and for that DFI-LA thanks him immensely.

An interesting post this week by Rabbi Benjamin Kelsen (@bgkelsen) who stated how this pretty much makes it clear that a Trump/Vance Administration is not one Israel could rely on, despite Bibi’s love for Trump:

To those members of the Jewish community still supporting the Trump-Vance ticket, please see this most recent interview which was given by Senator Vance earlier this week.

He openly states that he doesn’t believe that the United States should support Israel if its interests do not overlap with those of the US. He also stated that he does not believe that the US should support Israel in military action against Iran.

He states that his belief as to what would make it “worthwhile” for the US to be involved in military action against Iran is how much money it would cost the US to be involved and how much money would be saved by staying out of the conflict.

Given his statement a moment or two before regarding Vladimir Putin, one must seriously question the wisdom of relying on a Trump-Vance administration to have Israel’s back.

Don’t rely on my assessment. Watch the video for yourself: Sen. JD Vance on the Tim Dillon Show #414: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPlqID3zv4k

• “Obviously, Israel has the right to defend itself, but America’s interest is sometimes going to be distinct, like sometimes we’re going to have overlapping interests, and sometimes we’re going to have distinct interests,”
  
  
• “Our interest, I think very much, is in not going to war with Iran, right? It would be a huge distraction of resources. It would be massively expensive to our country.”
  
  
• “In the reaction to it, what I noticed is that American pro-Israel people, or people who fashioned themselves as pro-Israel, were actually much more militaristic than the Israelis who were living in Israel,”
  
  
• “The Israelis were like, OK, Hamas just attacked us. We’re gonna go really screw Hamas up. But of course, yeah, there’s a humanitarian side of that, and we want to try to minimize civilian casualties. But you had Americans saying, ‘Oh … This attack happened on Putin’s birthday, right? So we need to go to war against Russia, and obviously the Iranians funded part of this. We need to go to war with Iran.’”
  
  
• “Now, I don’t want Iran to get a nuclear weapon and I think we should be very strongly encouraging the Iranians and using all the influence that we have to encourage them to not have a nuclear weapon. I think nuclear proliferation is just a bad idea. Enough people have nukes, and the more people that have nukes, I think the greater the risk of nuclear war. But we just have to be smart about it,”
  
  
• ”Again, I’m not saying we stick ourselves into the Middle East and start a war here, but look, we recognize [that the] Israelis, Gulf Arab states don’t like Iran, so let the Israelis and the Gulf Arab states provide the counterbalance to Iran,”
  
  
• “America doesn’t have to constantly police every region of the world. We should empower people to police their own regions of the world. One, we would save a lot of money. Two, we’d save a lot of focus,”