Hanoch Daum speaks out about hilltop youth

You know a situation has gotten serious when a comedian addresses it in his sitcom, and that was the case when Hanoch Daum’s Keshet series, "Life Is a Difficult Age," devoted its Tuesday night episode to the issue of terrorists who have been brutalizing and killing Palestinians in the West Bank.

The show is generally about how Daum’s life in the West Bank is really quite ordinary, and focuses on his regular-guy shtick as he navigates problems with his family, neighbors, etc.

But this week was very different. The setup for this episode on hilltop youth and their crimes is that his buddy, Rafi (Omer Etzion, who does the world’s greatest US President Donald Trump imitation on "Eretz Nehederet"), learns that his son plans to spend the night on his friend’s West Bank farm, where there are no adults around.

This worries Rafi’s wife, who sends him to bring their son home, and Daum tags along.

At first, they are charmed by the hilltop youth they find there, with Rafi praising them for staying true to Jewish values by farming and building instead of playing video games all day. But when they talk to the group leader, who looks to be in his late teens, he says a few things that trouble them both.

First, when Rafi and Daum disagree with him, he calls them Nazis. Then he and his friends laugh about the assassination of former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, call far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir a leftist, and disparage the army. Rafi and Daum are stunned and don’t react strongly.

Daum’s rabbi (Shai Avivi) arrives and shows tolerance for their rhetoric, praising their choices, and showing how some of the settlement movement has tolerated and even nurtured these extremists in their midst.

Daum recognizes donkey as stolen from Palestinians

When one of the young men comes in with a donkey, Daum realizes they have stolen it from local Palestinians and that they have carried out a pogrom on an Arab village, where Ali (Nahd Basheir of Nutuk), the contractor who built Daum’s house, lives.

Before long, these hilltop youths have covered their faces and are hurling stones and then Molotov cocktails at an IDF patrol. Ali reports that they have attacked Palestinian villagers, including an elderly man. Daum appeals to the rabbi to calm them down, but the hilltop youth turn on him.

At this point, Daum turns to the camera and makes an uncharacteristically earnest speech about how these masked terrorists are evil and do not represent what the settlement movement is about.

“This is what happens when you ride the tiger – in the end, it devours you. The thing is, I am a settler, so are my family, my neighbors, and my friends. These are good people, really good people, law-abiding and tax-paying; they do military reserve duty,” he says.

“This tiny, anarchistic, extremist minority is not who we are. They do not represent us. Despite this, perhaps precisely because of this, we must shun them. ‘And you shall cast out the evil from among you.’ We must shun them mainly because they simply do terrible and horrible things.”

It was further than I expected him to go, but I wished he had gone even further – not in his remarks but in his portrayal of the hilltop youth. I wish they hadn’t been shown in such a cutesy light in the early parts of the episode.

Most of all, I wish he had shown them in action, physically attacking Palestinians and Jews who help them, as they did a couple of weeks ago when a friend of mine, fed up with their brutality, went to help renovate a house they had destroyed.

He and those with him were attacked by masked terrorists, one of whom threw a rock into the face of my unarmed friend, who is in his 60s, from a few feet away. He hit the ground and needed a head CT; his nose was broken, and his face was bruised, but he was lucky because he could have been killed.

As is so often the case, no one was arrested, and that is the part I wish Daum had emphasized more clearly: the authorities must know, as Daum and Rafi do, exactly who is behind these crimes, but arrests are rare. I hope Daum doesn’t drop this issue here, but returns to it more strongly in future episodes, and I hope that people listen to him.

UK's 'Slow Horses' back on Apple TV+ for sixth season

"Slow Horses," the often-comic British spy series about a unit of MI5 screw-ups, is back for its sixth season on Apple TV+, and it hooked me from the first few minutes, as it always manages to.

I watch each season as quickly as possible, completely gripped. When they end and a little time passes, I come up with a few criticisms about implausible plotting, but while I am watching, all I want is to see what happens next.

Season five ended with us learning an important truth about Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman), the cynical, disgusting, and brilliant head of the Slough House group, nicknamed “Slow Horses”: that decades ago, he once cared deeply about a woman, another agent, and was tortured to protect her.

It added another level of complexity to the character, but he is back to his old profane tricks in the new season, which opens with the murder of a former Slow Horses agent. It turns out someone is assassinating Lamb’s former “joes” one by one, at the same time that Diana Taverner (Kristen Scott Thomas), now the head of MI5, has had all traces of the Slow Horses scrubbed from the agency’s database.

As Lamb mulls these developments, a funeral takes place for his old nemesis, David Cartwright (Jonathan Pryce), the grandfather of one of Lamb’s current agents, River (Jack Lowden), who has finally died after suffering from dementia for years.

The funeral turns into a twisted family reunion for River when his father, Frank (Hugo Weaving), a rogue mercenary who has done dirty work for MI5, turns up, and Lamb is convinced he is the one offing the ex-agents. A lot is going on, and it brings out the best and worst in all the characters, including some familiar faces we thought were gone for good.

There is a great deal to enjoy, including chases through bowling alleys, arcades, and bleak city streets, and the eternal nonchalance of Coe (Tom Brooke), the most eccentric of all the Slow Horses.

If you miss the original French series "Call My Agent!" about a high-level Parisian talent agency, remade in several languages, now you can watch the Call My Agent! movie on Netflix.

It’s much sillier and doesn’t have the wit of the series, which was willing to show ambitious people being cunning and devious to get what they and their clients want. Some of the cast only make cameos, and the movie focuses on everyone’s favorite egomaniac, Andrea (Camille Cottin, who is currently starring in the movie Just An Illusion).

No longer an agent after the breakup of the ASK agency, she is now directing an earnest love story about a female criminal (Laetitia Casta) on the run and the police detective who tracks her down (played by different actors – the casting is part of the story).

After some setbacks, she teams up with flaky Noemie (Laure Calamy) to produce the movie. Cameos include George Clooney, and the film throws in a few nods to Francois Truffaut’s classic film about movie-making, Day for Night, for cinephiles.

Now that Andrea is a mother and a director, though, she’s lost some of her edge, and none of it is as much fun as the series, which unfortunately is no longer available to stream in Israel, although you can watch Call My Agent Berlin on Disney+.