Itai Anghel, one of Israel’s most recognizable documentary reporters, was with his wife and toddler son in New York City, celebrating his Emmy nomination for Last Stop Before Kyiv, in which Anghel and cameraman Eddie Gerald reported from Ukraine during the early months of Russia’s invasion.
As the glitter of the celebratory excursion dissipated, Anghel began receiving news from home. Thousands of terrorists from Gaza had flooded into Israel, in a cataclysm that was only beginning to be understood.
Israeli airspace shut down on Oct. 7, 2023, but, leaving his family in the safety of the United States, Anghel managed to return, and focus his camera on the catastrophe.
Anghel shared his story here in a lunchtime event for business community members May 29 and that evening at Shabbat services at Congregation Schara Tzedeck.
Anghel is the recipient of the Sokolov Award, Israel’s highest award for journalism, and is a university lecturer in history and international relations. He is a correspondent for the television news program Uvda, sometimes referred to as Israel’s 60 Minutes.
On arriving back in Israel, Anghel received a call from a stranger at Kibbutz Nir Oz, in the Gaza Envelope, urging him to get to their village immediately and record the atrocities committed there.
Anghel told the caller that, as far as he understood, Israeli military officials were preventing outsiders from entering the region. The stranger insisted Anghel come, telling him that, if the military tried to prevent his visit, they would shoot the soldiers. The government, the stranger told the reporter, would seek to cover up the reality of what happened and the failure of the Israel Defence Forces to intervene, and getting the reality on video was of utmost importance.
The suspicion of a government coverup may not have been based in reality, but what Anghel saw at Nir Oz was like nothing he had witnessed in war zones in Bosnia or the killing fields of Rwanda.
The Nir Oz survivors took Anghel from home to home, where he filmed the aftermath of some of Oct. 7’s most grisly atrocities. More than 10% of the community’s residents were murdered and 76 residents, almost 20% of the population, were taken as hostages to Gaza.
“They set on fire whole families, whole communities, the terrorists were in Nir Oz for seven hours and not one Israeli soldier confronted them,” Anghel said.
At a home where a mother and child were shot point blank, Anghel reflected on their final seconds.
“The last thing that this boy saw before he was shot to death was someone shooting his mother to death,” he recalled. And, if that didn’t happen, the mother saw her son murdered before she was killed.
Anghel asked for a break, maybe to have a bottle of water, but the people of Nir Oz wouldn’t let him stop witnessing and recording, insisting that he continue his documentation.
As he moved through the kibbutz, he did not process what he was seeing. He admits that his camera is a shield between him and the world. Often, he said, it is later that he begins to process what he sees.
“It was only when I got back to Tel Aviv that I understood what I saw and began reflecting,” he said. “For the first time, I was crying.… The reflecting would come later, when I’m in the editing room.”
He has harsh words for people sitting in comfortable TV studios opining on places they have never visited or who practise, as he acidly calls it, “hotel journalism,” rather than “field journalism.”
The latter, in which Anghel embeds himself among ordinary people and even terrorist fighters, is how journalism used to be done, he said, before the 24-hour news cycle created demand for semi-qualified talking heads to discuss things of which they have only surface knowledge.
Anghel has an American passport – his parents were students in the States when he was born – so he can go places his Israeli passport would not permit.
“People are so focused on ‘everyone’s an enemy,’” he said, but when he interviewed people in Damascus, Syria, Israelis couldn’t believe their openness to good relations with Israel.
Being relatively fluent in Arabic opens doors for Anghel.
“I tell them I’m from the US, but I’m not a soldier, I’m not from the army,” he said. “They are in a state of shock because they have never heard an American speak Arabic.”
He tells them he studied the language so he could communicate with people like them and, from there, he almost always finds a willingness to open up.
Anghel took special aim at the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who last month published an at least partially fictionalized account of IDF atrocities, including attack dogs allegedly trained to rape Palestinians.
“It is so radical and parts so far-fetched,” said Anghel, noting that the organization Kristof cited as the source for some of his most incendiary allegations is Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, which Anghel and Israel’s diaspora affairs ministry characterize as a Hamas front organization in Europe.
“Anyone with very basic knowledge knows that Euro-Med is an affiliation of Hamas,” he said. “If you get information from there, at least be honest and say so.”
That the Kristof piece could pass the standards of the New York Times is, Anghel said, symptomatic of a decline in basic journalistic rigour, in which terms like “apartheid” and “genocide” are applied without qualification.
“They know already, they’ve decided already and there is no openness to hear anything else,” he said.
On the other hand, Anghel admits to getting criticism from all sides. Some Israeli viewers condemn him for platforming anti-Israel terrorists. Israel’s government is no fan of Anghel or Uvda, either.
Anghel is blunt in his assessment of Israeli cabinet minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
“He’s a fanatic, a criminal, in charge of law enforcement in Israel,” Anghel said.
Anghel and his TV program have also been condemnatory toward what he calls Israel’s abandonment of the Kurdish people.
“We knew that jihadists in Syria would like to crush them and we did nothing,” he said.
The relations are complicated, he admitted, but Israel prevailed upon the new Syrian regime to protect the Druze people in the south of Syria, because Israel has a special relationship with the community because of the Druze population in Israel. The Kurds, in northern Syria, who Israel has allied with at times, were left to their own devices, Anghel said.
Of all the threats to Israel’s future, Anghel said, his greatest fear is internal strife.
“Israel is divided like it has never been,” he said. “The situation is awful. You cannot make it look nicer. It is awful.”
While some Canadian Jews are thinking about leaving, he noted, in the past two or three years, 10,000 Israelis came to live in Canada.
The schism between ultra-Orthodox, who generally do not serve in the military, and the majority of Israelis, who have been carrying the burden of service, is a particular point of division. At the same time, the birth rate among ultra-Orthodox portends a country that is demographically shifting toward that group.
Many Israelis are concluding that the current government does not care about people like them.
“You make the calculation and you realize maybe it is not the place for you to live,” said Anghel.
“I’m not afraid of Hezbollah, I’m not afraid of Syria, I’m not afraid of Iraq, I’m not afraid of Yemen’s Houthis, I’m not afraid of nuclear weapons from Iran,” Anghel said. “I’m afraid of ourselves.”
Schara Tzedeck’s Rabbi Andrew Rosenblatt thanked the Diamond family for sponsoring the event in memory of the late Charles Diamond. Josh Pekarsky interviewed Anghel.