Israel’s 1973 Yom Kippur War is brought to life in VALLEY OF TEARS. Courtesy of HBO Max.Valley of Tears, Israel’s most expensive TV series to date, was filmed in 2019 and premiered on HBO Max in November 2020. Nearly two years later and I just watched it. I know, I’m very late! Usually, I don’t get behind on new shows, especially Jewish ones. It may just be me, but I barely remember reading news about this show when it came out. Perhaps the release date of the series wasn’t the best. Fall 2020 into 2021 was…yeah. Pretty bad. I don’t know about you, but I certainly had my “I’m sick of COVID!” emotional meltdown during that time. Attempting to binge another new series was the last thing on my list.
Also, HBO Max typically isn’t popular for streaming Israeli shows. In 2019, they distributed Our Boys, a powerful, emotionally gutting true story about the murder of a 16-year-old Palestinian teenager in July 2014, which was instigated by the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers just one month prior. Besides that, the network doesn’t really show a ton of publicized, international shows, at least to my knowledge. Valley of Tears seems to have come and gone. It’s an underrated show from a time when we were still terrified to step outside and interact with the world. The series, a blockbuster about the Yom Kippur War, is action-packed and brutal, but it works in its avoidance of glorifying war, a commonality seen not too often in action films nowadays. War movies and shows may have a lot of cool special effects and explosions, but the reality is that war sucks. Period. It’s not like a video game. People die. There’s nothing to “cheer” about in any war.
Yaron Zilberman, director of films like Incitement (2019) and a fantastic American indie called A Late Quartet (2012), helms the 10-episode series with vigor and energy. His show – and this is his first one – feels like less of a TV series and more of a feature film. If you have the time to spend 10 hours watching this, please do, but you may need to take some breaks and watch a happy movie in between. The series is grim and occasionally very gruesome. If you love Israeli history, blockbusters, and Fauda, I guarantee you will enjoy Valley of Tears. It does its job in that as soon as an episode finishes, you want to turn on the next one.
Although the series may be binge-worthy, it does require a bit of Israeli history knowledge. In the opening of the first episode, there is a fast narration recounting the state of Israel in 1973. The Cliffs Notes is that it has been six years since Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War between them and a coalition of Arab states. Israelis, as the narrator states, feel invincible. There is peace. There is joy. People tan on the beach and party at night. Israeli Jews feel accepted and content in the Holy Land. Zilberman opens and closes every episode with actual archival footage from Israel, both before and during the Yom Kippur War. The war shots are eerily similar to those reenacted on the show.
Long story short, Israelis feel at peace, and the thought of another war is outrageous. The show opens in an outpost, located on the sunny, ostensibly hot Hermon Mountain, on October 5, 1973. The outpost, reminiscent of Winston Churchill’s war rooms, is claustrophobic and features the usual dozens of wiretappers, sitting row by row, intensely listening in on potentially dangerous calls. One of those wiretappers, Corporal Avinoam (Shahar Tavoch), a gawky-eyed, very peculiar fella with a pet hedgehog, becomes distraught after hearing that Russians are evacuating to the airport and Syrians have told farmers to keep away from the border. He warns his lieutenant, Yoav (Avraham Aviv Alush), as well as the other soldiers, that an attack is imminent, but his pleas are completely ignored. Unfortunately, just one day later, the Syrian army invades the Golan Heights and attacks the outpost. And we’re not talking about just one Syrian tank coming to Israel. We’re talking 1,600…against the IDF’s 177.
Valley of Tears essentially gets moving as soon as the invasion happens, and the show primarily takes place in three settings. In the first, we follow Avinoam and Yoav, both of whom end up escaping the outpost and striding in the desert with just one gun. They form a tight, beautiful friendship, and in episode five, we see a real humanity evolve in both of them. Avinoam is over-the-top and admittedly annoying, but he’s a hero. Without his incessant warnings of imminent war, Yoav could be dead. The lieutenant, while tough and mighty on the outside, has a softer side and understands Avinoam’s apprehension.
The second setting of the show involves a slew of other IDF soldiers, Alush (Imri Biton), Marco (Ofer Hayoun), and Malachi (Maoir Schwitzer). These are very interesting characters because they are neither happy with their country nor Prime Minister Golda Meir. Instead, all three are members of the Black Panthers, a group of demonstrators protesting for the rights of Mizrahi Jews in Israel. (This group was real and took its name from the American protestors of the same name.) In fact, when we first meet Malachi, he’s in jail for a protest he took part in the night before, while Marco doesn’t even want to return to the army. I say these are “interesting” characters because for a show about a victorious war, I expected the lead soldiers to be your usual, patriotic, “I-love-my-country-to-death” ones like we see in so many war movies. In Valley of Tears, however, Zilberman taps a little bit into the modern-day zeitgeist of the growing number of people who battle their country’s policies. This isn’t a propagandistic work of television with a big, biased statement. The Yom Kippur War actually happened, and there were many people – Israelis and Arabs – who neither supported the war nor their own country.
Eventually, Alush and Marco make it back to their unit, headed by their second-in-command, Caspi (Omer Perelman Striks), a man who immediately loses his mind the second that missiles hit the ground. Malachi, the comic relief of the show, manages to break out of prison and hitch a ride to his unit with a reporter named Meni (played by…that’s right, Lior Ashkenazi!). Meni writes for Maariv, and similar to Alush and his friends, he is pretty indifferent about Israeli patriotism. The reason he wants to get into the battleground is to find his estranged, paratrooper son, Yoni (Lee Biran), whose French mother insists he get out of the country. Along the way, the two also pick up Lieutenant Dafna (Joy Rieger), a feisty young woman who will stop at nothing to bring her boyfriend back to the Command Center. And her boyfriend…is Yoav!
Alright. That’s all I’ll say about the plot! I think (and hope) I have you invested already, and I hope I didn’t confuse you with all these characters, all of whom become more interconnected as the series moves along. All in all, Zilberman has crafted a rousing action-epic with the right portion of emotional depth. What he does so brilliantly is capture the fear, confusion, and chaos of the moments. Everyone is unprepared. When the IDF first hears of a Syrian attack during Yom Kippur morning, they roll their eyes, thinking it’s just a minor incident. They are unaware of the toll this war will take on them.
The special effects in the action scenes aren’t too CGI or “fake-looking” in colloquial terms. The scenes are incredibly frightening and unnerving; the gunfire, the smoke, the cacophony of it all. Watching these scenes, I was reminded of the opening sequence in Saving Private Ryan (1998), a war film so good because it does not try to glorify or “entertain” you. Valley of Tears is similar in its suitable depiction of war. Soldiers aren’t superhuman people incapable of feeling sadness or pain. If you kill someone, your “enemy”, that is, that memory doesn’t just go away. It haunts you. It takes a lot to be forced to join an army and murder people. To think that’s a “simple” task is preposterous.
Although this is an Israeli show, Zilberman equally shows the humanity on both sides of the war. There is a particularly heartbreaking scene in Valley of Tears when Avinoam, unarmed, comes across a Syrian soldier from Damascus, scared out of his wits. The soldier explains to him how he doesn’t want to fight anymore. He just wants to go home. Both of them are sick of this war, tired of the civil unrest. However, like in any war, because he is the “enemy”, he must be terminated.
Even if you already know the outcome of the Yom Kippur War, this is a show worth seeing, not just for its grand scope and big action scenes but its authentic exploration of the chaos and pointlessness of war. War is not entertainment. It is the biggest tragedy of human nature. Can’t we ALL just get along?
(SIDE NOTE: For some reason, HBO Max dubbed Valley of Tears in English, but not to worry! If you hate dubbing as much as I do, you can watch the show in its original Hebrew with English subtitles.)
Valley of Tears is now streaming on HBO Max.