The middle tv#

What The Holy Land and Us serves to do instead - in time-honoured tradition - is prop up a self-serving western myth: of an irreconcilable conflict between two nationalisms, Israeli and Palestinian. There would be no Israel today without such operations, which is why Israel’s founding fathers set out their expulsion principles in a notorious document, Plan Dalet.Īnd yet the term “ethnic cleansing” is notable by its absence from the programme. They had to be ethnically cleansed, and they were, in military campaigns with names such as “ Operation Broom”. Israel’s creation, however, required that the Palestinians no longer stay put.

They had nothing to do with a strictly European Holocaust. The Palestinians, on the other hand, stayed where they were. The BBC’s presentation of the 1948 story as a “Holocaust v Nakba” prize fight creates a false equivalence.Įuropean Jews arrived in the Palestinians’ homeland, under British patronage, to terrorise, displace, and sometimes kill, Palestinians.

The middle tv#

What is the Nakba? Day of catastrophe for Palestinians, explained Read More »Īnd by turning these two historic traumas into a lachrymose competition for the western TV viewer’s sympathy, the Palestinians are set up to fail - just as they did in 1948 against the superior might of the fledgling Israeli army. It is a tale of two peoples’ conflicting claims of suffering: the survivors of the Holocaust, and the victims of the Nakba.

The Holy Land and Us presents the Palestinian and Zionist narratives as two sides of the same story. The programme splits its story into two parallel narratives, separately featuring British Palestinians and British Jews pursuing their families’ connections to the events surrounding Israel’s creation in 1948.Īlthough this satisfies the BBC’s remit for balance, it serves only to continue muddying the waters - and predictably in ways that benefit western establishments, and Israel, rather than truth and reconciliation, the programme’s ostensible aim. It does recall some of the missing historical context for today’s supposedly intractable “conflict”.īut at the same time, even as the BBC breaks its own self-imposed taboo, the programme-makers still manage to obfuscate and mislead. In this regard, The Holy Land and Us is a welcome exception. Palestinian resistance is falsely reduced to “ terrorism”, while continuing Israeli violence becomes simply “retaliation” and “security”, as though the Palestinians started their own dispossession. Simply identifying the Nakba as a historical event is now seen as an act of courage, so completely has it been wiped from western consciousness - just like those hundreds of Palestinian villages.įor 75 years, western politicians and media have barely acknowledged the essential context for understanding the so-called Israel-Palestine “conflict” - a context that, once stripped away, turns the story on its head. This is presumably why the BBC’s The Holy Land and Us seems so “taboo-busting”. These are events Palestinians know as their Nakba, or Catastrophe. The Palestinians in the hope of attracting international attention and intervention Israel’s founders in order to terrorise more Palestinians out of their homeland so that a Jewish state could be established more easily on its ruins.Īnd yet today, paradoxically, hardly anyone knows about Deir Yassin - or the many hundreds of other communities from which Palestinians were driven by Israeli forces during a year-long act of national erasure. In an age of newly available mass communications, both sides were happy for the already dreadful truth to be exaggerated. Simply identifying the Nakba as a historical event is now seen as an act of courage In fact, the numbers of those slaughtered there were inflated, including famously by the New York Times, to more than 200 Palestinians. Unlike dozens of later massacres committed by Zionist forces that were hushed up, some of which were even worse, the atrocity at the village of Deir Yassin, just outside Jerusalem, was widely publicised at the time. In a five-star review, the Guardian newspaper termed the programme “taboo-busting”. And certainly from a Palestinian perspective, it broke new ground on mainstream television.

The first documentary featured testimony of a notorious massacre by a Zionist militia of more than 100 Palestinians, many of them women and children, in early 1948, weeks before Israeli statehood was declared The BBC’s The Holy Land and Us, a two-part exploration of Israel’s founding that concluded this week, has been what pundits like to call “brave television”.