70 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019
The show lets contradictory impulses smack against one another without resolution.
ON TELEVISION
BLAME THEORY
A hate crime in Israel, on “Our Boys.”BY EMILYNUSSBAUM
ILLUSTRATION BY YONATAN POPPER
A
few episodes into “Our Boys,”
Simon, an agent for the Shabak,
Israel’s internal security service, talks
with two policemen about a case that
they are struggling to solve: the death by
burning of a sixteen-year-old Palestin-
ian boy. He was abducted in the after-
math of another horrific crime, Hamas’s
kidnapping and murder of three Jew-
ish teen-agers—students whose dis-
appearance united Israelis, first in the
hope that they would be rescued, and
then, once their bodies were discovered,
in grief and rage.
Revenge seems to be the likely and
logical motive, but the cops reject it.
“Jews would never do this,” one of
them says, making a dismissive gesture.
“You sure?” Simon asks.
“Yes,” the cop says.
“So is my mother,” Simon says,
showing him a text message: “Thank
God Jews didn’t do this, take care.”
“Just like my mother,” the second
cop replies—and holds up a similar text.
“Let’s recruit them,” Simon says.
It’s the world’s bleakest Jewish-mother
joke, a rare moment of humor in “Our
Boys,” a galvanic new series on HBO,
co-produced with the Israeli network
Keshet. Ten episodes long, the show is
a partly fictional deconstruction of a
hate crime that took place in 2014 and
led directly to war in Gaza. It’s a storyof family grief and family dysfunction,
and also a beautifully paced thriller about
a police investigation. But it’s something
more ambitious, too: a challenging work
of art about the intractable problem of
identity—the struggle of any individ-
ual to maintain core values, when the
world demands nothing but solidarity
based on shared victimhood. The show
is unusually fearless about letting moral
discomfort linger, and manages to be
stirring without ever offering false hope,
a rarity for even the best-made dramas.
“Our Boys” (which was created by
three Israelis, two Jewish and one Arab:
Hagai Levi, who made “In Treatment”;
Joseph Cedar, of “Footnote”; and the di-
rector Tawfik Abu Wael) was bound to
attract controversy. During the run-up
to this month’s elections in Israel, Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attacked
it as anti-Semitic propaganda and urged
Israelis to boycott it. He also, in his Trump-
ian style, took aim at Keshet—which
has, not coincidentally, helped publicize
corruption allegations against him.
Netanyahu’s description is nonsense.
“Our Boys” is thoughtful and layered in
its portrayal of both Jews and Palestin-
ians. Like many diaspora Jews, I know
only a little about Israeli culture, but
even I recognize that the show has a
deep sense of specificity, from the
cramped Jerusalem kitchens to the gated
back yards in the settlements and the
streets lit by Ramadan lights as Muslim
families walk beneath. The series ex-
plores tensions between big-city secular
Ashkenazi Jews and ultra-Orthodox
Sephardic settlers, laying out divisions
within the families of the victims and
the perpetrators. It also dramatizes both
the broken and the functional aspects
of the Israeli justice system—which,
through skilled police work, nailed the
killers of the Palestinian boy, Moham-
med Abu Khdeir, in only a few days.
What the show doesn’t do is focus
on the first crime, the murders of Naf-
tali Frenkel, Gilad Shaer, and Eyal
Yifrah. Instead, it views that crisis from
a mediated distance, often showing pro-
tests and rallies through screens—on
phones and on TV—scanning crowds
gathered at the Western Wall, praying
for the boys’ return, as their mothers
plead for their sons’ lives. This narra-
tive choice has divided viewers, but it
feels purposeful: despite the title, this