The timing of the release of Our Boys couldn’t be more tragically relevant. The ten-part miniseries, which debuts on HBO Monday night, may be a docudrama set thousands of miles away from the United States, but it centers around something that’s all too familiar to Americans in the wake of the recent mass shooting in El Paso, Texas: racist, right-wing, politically motivated murder. Although the show’s Israeli and Palestinian creators couldn’t have anticipated that specific juxtaposition, they were long aware of the fact that they were telling a story not just about three Jewish extremists’ real-life murder of an Arab teenager in Jerusalem in 2014, but also about the ways in which nationalist violence rots away the soul of both the Jewish state and the Land of the Free.
“The election of Trump was a crucial point in the development of the series,” says Hagai Levi, speaking via Skype from Israel alongside the show’s two other co-creators, Tawfik Abu-Wael and Joseph Cedar. “Until that moment, we kind of talked about religious people who are extremists or ideological, but when Trump was elected, it was clear to us that we were going to make a show about hate crime.” In other words, they wanted to tell a story that transcended the specific ethno-religious clash between Jews and Palestinians and rose to the level of universality for any place wracked by reactionary prejudice and violence. “There are so many layers underneath what you call a hate crime,” Levi continues. “And what happens when those layers meet incitement and create a perfect storm to create murder?”