Palestine: Story of a land
Three-part documentary series
Part 1, SBS, Monday, May 18, 8pm (7.30pm in SA)
Preview by Jennifer Thompson
In a sea of versions of the Arab-Israeli conflict, timed for Israel's 50th year, this collection of rare pictures and archival footage, accompanied by an astonishingly sincere account of the history, stands out in sharp relief.
After the rampant glorification of Israel's political and military history, or those written to spare the complicity of imperialist powers in the Palestinian tragedy, watching the first in this documentary series is also a great relief.
The program traverses the great number of events, groups, individuals and policies which transformed the land promised by the British to the Arabs who lived on it after the defeat of the Ottoman empire, into one divided by borders and occupied by European colonists, Theodore Herzl's Zionist forces and finally hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing genocide in Europe.
One of the delights of the program is its inclusion of the few remaining pictorial records of historical Palestine, as seen by orientalists and Arab photographers. As well, there is footage of historic events, Zionist propaganda films and British newsreels.
Indeed, one of the threads through the narrative is the inferior recording of events and politics from an Arab point of view — part of the attempt to convince the world that Palestine was "a land without people for a people without a land".
The self-serving role of the various imperial powers — Britain, France and the US — is also dealt with. The French and British betrayal of their Arab allies through the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot plan to divide the Arab world between themselves, ratified by the League of Nations in 1922; the Balfour Declaration of Britain's commitment to make a national home for the Jewish people of Europe in Palestine; the British repression of the 1938-39 Palestinian uprising against British control; and mass Jewish immigration are covered dispassionately.
The British refusal to protect the Arab population against increasing incidences of terrorism by the Zionist Haganah, Irgun and Stern militias, and the massacre of the entire village of Deir Yassin by an Irgun gang in the dying days of the British Mandate, is also described. That massacre was to become an important lesson in the litany of fearsome lessons which led most Palestinians to flee in the Israeli "war of independence".
The inability and unwillingness of the League of Nations and United Nations countries to prevent the unfolding disaster is also chronicled — the 17 international commissions of inquiry into Palestine in 25 years, culminating in the majority recommendation to partition the country, and the 1948 assassination of the Swedish mediator Count Folke-Bernadotte, ordered by Stern gang leader (and later Israeli prime minister) Yitzhak Shamir.
Israel gained an extra 4000 square kilometres, Jerusalem was divided, and Egypt and Jordan took control of the remaining Palestinian territories. Instead of a Palestinian state, says the documentary, the UN created the UN Works and Relief Agency which set up tent cities and handed out rations cards to the refugees: 200,000 in the West Bank, 180,000 in Gaza, 100,000 in Lebanon, 60,000 in Jordan, 70,000 in Syria. There were an additional 200,000 refugees who did not need the cards.
Overall, this documentary is a remarkably truthful coverage of the events between 1880 and the 1950s. Hopefully, the other two parts of the series, which cover the period until the 1991 Madrid peace conference, will meet the high standards set by the first.