Many people have written to us expressing their concerns over two documentaries broadcast on Channel 4 under the theme of “Battle for the Holy Land” – “Jerusalem”, aired on 19 May, and “Love Thy Neighbour” on 21 May. We do not wish to comment directly on material that is currently unavailable online for those subscribers who were unable to view these progammes for themselves. However, for those of you who wish to write to Channel 4, we are able to share the thoughts of other commentators who have already expressed an opinion.
Carol Gould comments on “Battle for the Holy Land: Jerusalem”:
Had I known nothing or even very little about Jewish, Zionist and Israeli history I would have come away from former MP Paddy Ashdown’s two-hour documentary on British Channel Four’s primetime Saturday slot thinking the Jews are just about the most disagreeable race on this planet. Were I an Arab or Muslim I would believe the Jews of the Holy City are the scum of the earth.
In this film he managed to label the Jewish authorities of Jerusalem ‘racism masquerading as bureaucracy,’ ‘discriminatory and inhumane’ and ‘waging a forty-year war over the Haram al Sharif.’
Once again a British television programme has taken the complex and tragic story of Israel and turned it into a polemic about the endlessly victimised Palestinians and those brutal, hate-filled, despicable Jews….
In the documentary he asserted that after 1967 and the rise of Zionism things went from bad to worse for the Arabs of Jerusalem. Mr Ashdown needs reminding that the birth of the Zionist movement took place in the 1890s after centuries of brutal and relentless European and British anti-Semitism, culminating in the trial of Alfred Dreyfus and the publication of ‘J’Accuse’ by Emile Zola. Why are these facts never offered in British programming or articles? The original Zionist movement was a noble enterprise led by Jewish Socialists hoping to establish co-operative farms alongside their Arab neighbours. Furthermore Jews have lived in the Holy Land for thousands of years and are not new, irritating arrivals, as is so widely promulgated by the mass media and the anti-Zionist New Left.
Read the full review here as well as BICOM’s response to the programme.
LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR
Melanie Phillips comments on a Sunday Times preview piece by Rod Liddle based on the “Battle for the Holy Land: Love Thy Neighbour” programme:
Now I put Liddle, who describes himself as a supporter of Israel, in a different camp from Ashdown. His piece nevertheless gave a venomously false and unfair impression. I myself have little time for the attitudes of many American-born settlers, some of whom are a disgrace to the Jewish people. It is however tiresome when people focus on the settlers as a paradigm of the Israel/Palestinian impasse. They are not. Their attitudes are vastly different from the overwhelming majority of Israelis; and the impasse, which was not created by the settlements but by a century of Arab resistance to the Jews’ return to their ancient homeland, will not be solved by their removal. Focusing on the settlers deepens the gross failure of the west to understand that the Middle East tragedy is not a dispute over the division of a piece of land, but over the enduring aim of the usurper Arabs who violently colonised that land to obliterate from it, for the second time in history, the Jews for whom it was originally their own nation state.
And this gets to the real problem with Liddle’s piece, and it is surely at the very the heart of the problem of western hostility to Israel. For Liddle’s piece rested on a particular false assumption which I put down to an ignorance which is widespread. It is an ignorance about the history of Israel, and in particular the land known as the West Bank. People assume Israel itself was an artificial creation resulting from Holocaust guilt, when a load of European Jews were transplanted into a land owned for millennia by Palestinian Arabs. That itself is false. Israel was the nation state of the Jews centuries before the Arabs took it by force, and an unbroken Jewish presence remained in Jerusalem and other cities, some of which, indeed, had a Jewish majority.
And even if people don’t make this false assumption about Israel itself, they certainly believe – and Liddle’s article rested on this premise – that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is illegal and illegitimate because Israel has no claim to that land which it has, in Liddle’s own incendiary word, ‘stolen’ from the Palestinians whose land it rightfully was. The animus against Israel’s occupation of this territory after the 1967 war is therefore not really about the behaviour or attitudes of the settlers or the Israeli military. It is based on the perception of gross injustice – of a land that has been stolen from its rightful owners. It is not surprising therefore that people with perfectly decent instincts are enraged by the continued ‘occupation’ of the West Bank. But they have been led to believe something that is not true.
Read the full article here as well as BICOM’s response to the programme.
If you saw either of these two documentaries and wish to comment, write to Channel 4 through its website or contribute to the debate on Channel 4’s Culture Forum.
to media bias.
