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Translating statistics into tragedies

Impact of Terror is an intimate retelling of the horrors of terror bombing in Israel. -Jacobovici

Award-winning filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici’s documentary about terror bombing in Israel is about conflicts everywhere

Jasmine Saroya
Contributor

Impact of Terror is an intimate retelling of the horrors of terror bombing in Israel. -Jacobovici

For many, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is just another conflict of many. The loss of human life, of real people who occupy more than meagre lines on a ledger, is one we don’t often contemplate.

According to Simcha Jacobovici, three-time Emmy award-winning documentary filmmaker and the visionary behind Impact of Terror, our media reduces real human tragedies into numbers. His film about terror bombing screened in the Nat Taylor Cinema on January 17 for three separate film classes.

Jacobovici described his interest in making the documentary as having arisen after viewing much of the coverage of the Second Intifada, the period of Israeli-Palestinian conflict from 2000 to 2005.

“It was all about stats—it wasn’t about people,” Jacobovici said.

It is exactly this trend in journalism which he seeks to correct with his film. Centred on the 2001 Sbarro restaurant bombing in Jerusalem, the documentary explores the lives of the survivors and the relatives of the deceased three years after the attack.

At times, it is grisly, showing footage of the victims with blood streaming down their faces. At others times, it is emotionally draining, telling the story of one victim, a teenage boy, who developed an obsessive-compulsive tendency of constantly cleaning his clothes, believing that he would never truly be clean of the flesh and blood strewn across his body on that day.

The memories of that day still resonate for many of those victims. Interviewee Arnold Roth describes the situation in Israel as being an onslaught of “world-changing events, over and over,” and says that, “as a society [they] are going through earthquakes.”

Addressing the audience after the screening, Jacobovici commented on the lack of media coverage given to conflicts such as the Murle-Luo Nuer conflict in Sudan, or the ongoing conflict in the Congo.

“Do any of you know who the Murle people are?” Jacobovici asked. After no sign of a response, he continued to talk of the disparities in death tolls, and that the death tolls of aforementioned conflicts vastly outnumber that of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“What is the motivation [for this biased coverage]?” he asked.

Such are the kinds of questions raised by Impact of Terror, a film that ultimately exposes the true nature of all ongoing global conflicts, not just the one between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Whether the death toll for one conflict is higher than another is irrelevant. Every one of these conflicts deserves attention, because they concern the lives of real people—not statistics.

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