Clash of the Worlds: Palestine

A BBC documentary looking at the British Mandate over Palestine and the betrayal of the Arab cause.

Robert Fisk – Beirut To Bosnia

Filmed in the 1990s, this series takes journalist Robert Fisk through Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt and Bosnia. He warns that the crimes of the West and Israel are breeding a culture of resistance, resentment and religious radicalism in the Middle East – a warning that the last decade has surely vindicated.

(3 episodes, 52 mins each. h/t Israel’s 60th Birthday)

1. The Martyr’s Smile

2. The Road To Palestine

3. To The Ends Of The Earth

The Iron Wall

We mark Palestine Solidarity Week with this excellent documentary (57 mins), looking at the network of settlements used by Israel to control – and to annex – vast sections of the West Bank, and the apartheid wall that consolidates them.

The maps shown in the video are a few years out of date now; continued settlement has further fragmented the West Bank and the proposed E-1 bloc threatens to definitively annexe East Jerusalem and split the West Bank in two.

For more information, see StopTheWall.org. Also, a small donation could go a long way towards replacing the Palestinian houses (Israeli Commitee Against House Demolitions) and trees (The Olive Cooperative) destroyed by the occupiers’ bulldozers.

Jesus in Islam, Jews in Iran

I don’t intend to promote the Semitic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) or anything, but in these days of Clash of Civilisations rhetoric it’s worth reminding ourselves of their compatibility and their long histories of peaceful coexistence. Here’s two documentaries, both from Reclaiming Space, that do just that.

The Muslim Jesus (45 mins)

For all my suspicion of the Great Alpha Male In The Sky, I have no real problem with Jesus – or Issa – who, with his compassion, humility, and intolerance for money-lenders in the temple, was very much a man after my own heart. A version of him, along with his mother St. Mary, are among the Quran’s central characters.

The Jews of Iran (17 mins)

We’ve had to put up with a relentless propaganda campaign this year, suggesting that the Islamic Republic of Iran is in fact the Fourth Reich, on a mission to kill all the Jews. This is nothing but baseless scaremongering; just ask Tehran’s thriving Jewish community.

In spite of many family ties to Israel and the West, and Israel’s desperate attempts to bribe them into defection, most Iranian Jews identify with their country as proudly as with their faith.

Part Two follows

Survivors of the Summer War

This short (~20mins) documentary looks at Southern Lebanon and Beirut a year after being flattened by Israeli bombs.

Part two follows:

Occupation 101

A superb history of the Israeli conquest and occupation of Palestine.

(click here to watch the whole film)

Israel’s Secret Weapons

At a time when the US and UK prepared to level Iraq based on spurious hints at secret weapons programmes, the BBC aired this documentary (44 mins) showing the absurd double standards that allowed another aggressive Middle Eastern country to secretly develop real weapons of mass destruction (h/t Fanonite).

It was a different corporation, then. After it dared question the intelligence that lead to war, its Director General was hounded out of office by a furious government. Critical journalism like this has become a thing of the past – but, on the bright side, now we have Doctor Who.

Uprooted – Adding Insult to Injury in Occupied Palestine

The slow destruction of Palestine is not just the work of bullets, but of bulldozers and barriers; not just against people, but against communities, homes and centuries-old trees. With a wealth of footage and interviews from within the OPT, this documentary by activist Donia Mili is a long (125 mins) but incredibly important one. (h/t to Khobbeizeh for putting it online).