Israel and the Palestinians: The Road to 7th October
Israel and the Palestinians: The Road to 7th October
7.29.0
World leaders and their top advisers tell the inside story of two decades of conflict that saw diplomacy fail and Hamas's power grow, leading up to the attacks of 7th October 2023.
Patrick Willis reviewed
October 9, 2025•
Israel and the Palestinians: The Road to 7th October is a masterclass in intellectual fraud, pretending to be a historical analysis while doing everything possible to avoid its stated subject. The title promises a road, but the filmmakers provide a carefully curated cul-de-sac that leads directly to their own pre-fabricated moral high ground.
The film's central, cynical conceit is its "both-sides" framework—a tired, diplomatic trope used not to illuminate, but to inoculate itself from criticism. It presents a dutiful, bullet-pointed list of historical grievances: 1948, 1967, settlements, checkpoints, intifadas. It's all there, laid out with the soul of a PowerPoint presentation. But this is not rigor; it's set-dressing. The "road" is just a series of signposts pointing to an inevitable, simplistic conclusion: that endless occupation and oppression naturally culminate in horrific violence.
The film uses the Palestinians' suffering as a clinical, academic preamble to the events of October 7th, implicitly framing the massacre as a historical outcome rather than a specific, monstrous action. It engages in the most insidious form of moral accounting, where decades of brutal political reality are placed on one side of a scale, and the shattered bodies of Israeli civilians are placed on the other, as if a verdict could possibly be rendered.
It dares to use the word "Understand," and in doing so, reveals its true, cynical purpose. It does not seek to understand the specific ideologies that drove the perpetrators on October 7th, nor the specific terror of the victims. It seeks only to provide a historical alibi. It is an exercise in creating moral equivalence where none can exist, offering a pseudo-intellectual pardon for the unforgivable. The film isn't a road to understanding; it's a well-manicured path to exculpation, and it's paved with the corpses it so pretentiously claims to contextualize.