Pierre Rehov

Who is Pierre Rehov?

Pierre Rehov is the pseudonym of a French-Israeli film maker and novelist, most known for his movies which are almost exclusively based on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Rehov was born to a Jewish family from Algiers, then a French department. According to his website, there he experienced terrorism at a young age. In the sixties, Rehov with his mother and younger brother left Algeria to join his father, already in France. So his family became a part of as many as 250,000 other Jews and about one pied-noirs fleeing Algeria, which was to become independent the next year. He made later a film on the Jewish refugees describing the fate of the million Jews who fled Arab countries after 1948. He chose not to describe his own community from Algeria, since the Algerian war was a colonial problem involving France more than the Jewish community. Although he recalls that Jews in Algeria, had been suffering of Muslim antisemitism for decades, even when Algeria was part of France.

Rehov says he was not a pro-Israeli activist until 2000, when he saw the death of Muhammad al-Durrah on television, and doubted its authenticity. He, among others, requested an investigation into the murder of al-Durrah, in which he claimed that it was Palestinian gunfire that killed the child. This investigation was also featured in the film Decryptage. Since then, he has been working mostly in the Palestinian territories, and other Arab countries, including in Iraq, where he was embedded in the US army as a free lance reporter.