Palestine is Still the Issue
Documentary by John Pilger
Thursday, October 8, 8.30pm
SBS
REVIEW BY ROHAN PEARCE
John Pilger's documentary, Palestine is Still the Issue, is a moving and powerful indictment of Israel's illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The sheer violence of the occupation and its everyday impact on Palestinians is brought home from the very first scenes.
Footage shot at the Palestinian Ministry of Culture proves that the Israeli government's justification of "self defence" for its multiple invasions of the West Bank and Gaza earlier this year was a lie. The ministry was occupied by the Israel Defense Forces during its "Operation Defensive Shield" in April.
Scenes which were absent from the Western corporate media's coverage reveal the pointless destruction of an institution dedicated to the promotion of Palestinian culture. The sickening vandalism by Israeli soldiers included rubbish being strewn throughout the building, shit smeared on a photocopier and a room of children's paintings and drawings destroyed.
Scenes shot during the first intifada, which began in 1987, show Israeli soldiers breaking the bones of Palestinian prisoners. Nothing has changed. Footage taken this year shows whole neighbourhoods reduced to rubble by Israel's military.
Palestine is Still the Issue
Pilger talks to the brother of Wafa Idris, the first woman Palestinian to become a suicide bomber, who blew herself up on January 27, killing one Israeli and injuring 100. Idris was a volunteer paramedic. Her brother says none of her family expected it, but that she was most likely driven to it by the scenes she witnessed during her work: people's brains blown out by Israeli soldiers; people dying of gun wounds to the stomach; women whose babies died after they were forced to give birth to them at Israeli military checkpoints.
A visit to a Zionist settlement in Gaza provides a shocking contrast to the scenes of destruction in the Occupied Territories: a middle-class area that could have been transplanted from US suburbia and dumped in the middle of poverty-stricken and desperate Palestine. It is separated from the Palestinians by barbed wire, fortress-like walls and automatic weapons.
These settlements are armed Israeli colonies within the West Bank and Gaza, illegal under international law. Strings of them carve up the territories, linked by roads that only Israeli's can use. They are the front line of Israel's occupation. According to some estimates, these colonies control 42% of land in the West Bank.
Pilger talks to a number of courageous anti-occupation Israelis. Rami Elhanan's 14-year-old daughter, Smadar, was killed by a suicide bomber in 1997. Elhanan is a former soldier whose father survived the Nazi's Auschwitz concentration camp; many of his relatives died in the Holocaust. He says that while he won't "forgive or forget" the actions of the bomber, people need to understand the cause of the violence. It didn't just come "out of the blue". An entire people have been brutalised and denied their rights.
"The suicide bomber was a victim the same way as my girl was, of that I'm sure", Elhanan said. He describes the idea, used by many Zionists to justify their war, that Palestinians would "drive the Jews into the sea" as "a laugh".
Ishay Rosen-Zvi is one of the Israeli soldiers who refuse to serve in the Occupied Territories. Rosen-Zvi describes what it's like to be part of the occupation and the power that Israel's soldiers have over the lives of ordinary Palestinians. More than 480 "refuseniks" have signed the "Courage to Refuse" letter (visit <http://www.seruv.org.il>), stating that they "shall not continue to fight beyond the 1967 borders in order to dominate, expel, starve and humiliate an entire people".
The complicity of imperialist governments in Israel's war is also tackled. This year alone, Israel will receive more than US$2 billion in military aid from the US. In the first 14 months of the current Palestinian uprising, which began in September 2000, the British government approved 230 licenses for the export of military equipment to Israel.
Palestine is Still the Issue does more than just counter the myth that "Arab terrorists" are attempting to bring down "Israeli democracy", it offers an insight into Palestinians' fear and anger, but also of their will to resist Israel's apartheid.
It is also a call for solidarity with the struggle of a people who, as Pilger says, "have been abandoned by the world". From the scenes of Palestinians stranded at military checkpoints, to the rubble-filled streets of Bethlehem, to the apologetics of Dori Gold, senior adviser to Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Palestine is Still the Issue exposes the sanitised, distorted view of the conflict propagated by the corporate media.
From Green Left Weekly, September 25, 2002.
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