Earlier this month, Google banned three violent anti-Hamas games from its Play Store. The games—which could be played on any Android smartphone—were uploaded in the last week of July, when Israel’s Operation Protective Edge was at its peak.

Though the games weren’t quite as successful as Flappy Bird, they took off like wildfire. One was a spoof of Whac-A-Mole called ‘Whack the Hamas.’ A description of the game ‘Gaza Assault: Code Red’ challenged potential users: “Terrorist cells are launching rockets into your country, do you have what it takes to protect your citizens?” The rules of the app were simple: the player would take control of an IDF drone equipped with powerful weapons, and aim to hit targets in Gaza. It was loosely based on real IDF tactics. ‘Bomb Gaza,’ which was posted on July 29, simply required the player to “drop bombs and avoid killing civilians.” Before Google removed the app on August 4 it was downloaded over 1,000 times.

Many Google users expressed outrage in the feedback section of the ‘Bomb Gaza’ page, reports The Telegraph. “To think that you can turn genocide, murder and ethnic cleansing into a game is absolutely disgusting,” said one. “My beloved brothers and sisters are dying in Gaza and some stupid ignoramus decides to make a game like this,” said another.

Speaking to The Telegraph, Chris Doyle, the director of The Council for Arab-British Understanding, said these games normalize violence. “We’ve seen huge amounts of hate language and bigotry over the past few weeks. It’s the last sort of things that’s needed… These games glorify the horror and violence of the bombing of Gaza.”

“You can have video games that deal with war, but when you base it in a reality of a conflict that’s going on right now it’s extremely problematic,” he said.

Google removed the games from the Play store in the first week of August. A company spokesperson said “we remove apps from Google Play that violate our policies,” but would not comment on the Gaza games.

The Israeli developers of these apps have a different perspective altogether. One of the developers of ‘Bomb Gaza,’ Roman Shapiro, told The Daily Beast that “the game was a joke made in 2 hours.”

“It is based on avoiding killing civilians,” he said. “As usual, Jews are demonized by everyone. Not surprised. Fuck them all.”

The developer of ‘Whack the Hamas,’ Avishay Segal, told The Times of Israel that he saw the removal of his game as “unfair.”

“Our app doesn’t advocate for any type of violence against groups of people based on anything, be it on their race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, or sexual orientation/gender identity,” he explained. “We developed the app only for fun and relaxation, for the people who are being killed every day by a terrorist group.”

(Image: Screenshot by author)

Related: An Open Letter to Selena Gomez, From Two 12-Year-Old Fans in Southern Israel

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• Daniel Craig: the latest in a long line of catalysts for Jewish male complexes. [Tablet]

• The latest perfume in Gaza is called M-75. You know, life the missile Hamas fired at Israel a few weeks ago. [Times of Israel]

• Scooter Braun, Justin Bieber’s momager, was not happy about the young phenom’s lack of Grammy nominations. [EW]

• Judd Apatow gets the Terry Gross “Fresh Air” treatment for his new movie, This is 40—sure to see a big ticket sales spike on Christmas Day. [NPR]

• Meanwhile, Sir Apatow orchestrated a Freaks and Geeks reunion, 20 years later. [Vanity Fair]

• Albert Brooks is a big liar:

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Tears of Gaza is a strange bird, a documentary that has a total grasp of its subject—the suffering of Gazans, particularly children, during Operation Cast Lead—but is almost defiant in its lack of context. Focusing on the 22 days when the IDF launched a devastating military campaign in Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009, Tears of Gaza presents some of the most extraordinary footage of urban combat that I’ve ever seen. Its scenes of people scouring the rubble of apartment buildings and languishing in bloody hospital emergency rooms are difficult to watch. The smoke from bomb detonations, mixing with the dust of collapsed buildings, fills the screen like an apocalyptic weather event.

But Tears of Gaza, which is screening this week in New York, offers no background material about the nature of the conflict, such as that Israel launched an air and ground campaign against Hamas in response to repeated rocket fire against towns near the Gaza strip. Some characters in the film make mention of the economic blockade, but it’s otherwise unexamined. Nor is there discussion about the Goldstone inquiry and the controversy it engendered. We also don’t learn that Operation Cast Lead, while a particularly destructive and deadly campaign, can be seen as part of a cycle of tit-for-tat violence between the IDF and militant groups in Gaza. The word “Hamas” goes similarly unspoken.

Rather, the film opens simply, with some title cards explaining that Israel embarked on a bombing campaign in late 2008 and statistics about the number of Palestinian casualties. Following that, we are introduced to some main characters, including Yahiya, a green-eyed young boy who wants to become a doctor in order, he says, to treat people who have been hurt by the Israelis. With no narration—subjects frequently speak directly to the camera, and notes on-screen reminds us of the date and location—we then follow Yahiya and his family, along with several others, as they dodge Israeli bombs. There are also frequent scenes of bodies (and the occasional survivor) being pulled from the rubble, as well as desperate flights down murky streets in search of some kind of shelter.

Despite its deliberate myopia, I found myself deeply moved and impressed at Tears of Gaza. Crucially, the film makes no claims to comprehensiveness. Although it leaves much out, including all that I mentioned earlier, it also does not claim to present one true, all-encompassing narrative about life in Gaza or the conflict between Israel and Hamas. Its “bias” is simply that of the camera and what it sees. There is no further editorializing attempting to make a rhetorical point, though the sympathies of Norwegian director Vibeke Løkkeberg clearly lie with the Palestinians, particularly the children, to whom the film is devoted.

There are, however, some attempts by the people within the film to offer commentary. Whether prompted by the cameraman or their own experience, they know that they are offering a kind of testimony and that a film can be a place from which to launch appeals to the outside world. In one scene, three dead children are shown on a table at a hospital. Two have bullet holes in their chests, one in his head. They appear to have been shot at close range. A voice off-camera says, imploringly, “There is no editing here.”

Tears of Gaza, then, is best interpreted as a heartrending glimpse of people living and dying amidst horrific conditions. Those holding the cameras—they are Palestinian—do so at mortal risk to themselves. But save for experiencing the real thing, their footage represents the closest one can get to understanding what it is like to experience a fusillade of bombing and artillery; to live in an overcrowded conurbation that may be blown apart at any moment. In this atmosphere, safety is entirely contingent—the film takes us, for example, to a UN-run school, an ostensibly neutral place that later comes under artillery fire; news reports at the time counted 40 killed in the attack, while Israel claimed that militants fired at them from within the school.

During the extended scenes in Gaza hospitals, when children are rushed in with gaping wounds, their faces shrouded in grey dust so that they look like some abandoned rag doll, the parade of gruesome injury can be overwhelming. The viewer is forced to perform a kind of emotional triage, acknowledging, for example, that the children who still cry and scream are likely in better shape than those who stare dazedly into space while being worked upon by doctors and nurses.

This is the “point,” if one can be so glib, of Tears of Gaza: that this breed of suffering is senseless and heinously creative in the variety of destruction it wreaks. That there is far more to this story—decades of painful history, competing political and national narratives, far too much death, mistrust, corruption, and wasted opportunity—makes this film no less powerful or urgent.

(still image from Tears in Gaza)

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• Bar Refaeli’s new Mossad thriller, currently filming, is being called a “Zionist conspiracy” by relatives of the Hamas chief whose assassination inspired the film’s plot.

• The New York Jewish Week’s ‘36 Under 36’ list is out, and Mark Zuckerberg is not on it.

• John Cleese will be in a new film from Israeli director Reshef Levi.

• Howard Stern made a seven-year-old cry on America’s Got Talent:

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Haaretz reports:

Gideon Raff, the writer-director of the Israel show invited Shalit to join the Homeland set Monday, and sat with him as he watched Danes do her takes, sitting in a tall director’s chair behind the Homeland writer-producer Howard Gordon and director Michael Cuesta. Raff was unable to invite Shalit to visit his set of Hatufiim, it turns out, because the last day of their filming took place on the very day Shalit was released.

(Photo credit: Jack Guez-Pool/Getty Images)

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Refaeli, best known for gracing the cover of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit edition and being the former longtime girlfriend of Leonardo DiCaprio, has made the crossover from modeling to acting before. She starred in the 2011 thriller “Session” and appeared in the Israeli TV series “Pick Up.”

But she said “Kidon” is giving her a taste of a job she really wants: working as an agent for Israel’s notorious spy agency.

“I would love to be in the Mossad and maybe I am. Who knows? I think that being a famous model is the best cover,” Refaeli told reporters.

(Photo credit: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images)

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