Israeli TV Series With Arab Views Sparks Debate

JERUSALEM — History is written by the victors, it is often said, but in Israel even the winners do not agree on how to portray their past.

To mark the 50th anniversary of the Jewish state, government-run Israel Television is airing a 22-part documentary series that has enraged many Israelis and apparently enlightened others by telling the story of their country’s founding from the perspective of the vanquished as well as the victors.

Side by side with the country’s heroes, the series gives voice for the first time on national television to marginalized immigrants, Arab citizens who lost their land and identity to the Jews, and Palestinians who engaged in terrorism to fight for the return of their land.

To some viewers, the series is a watershed event that exposes Israelis to a different, more critical view of their history. To others, it is simply blasphemy.

“Does Zionism really have to sit on the defendant’s bench in a series run by public broadcasting in Israel?” Communications Minister Limor Livnat asked. “Do we have to produce films that . . . internalize the views of the Arabs, who for 100 years have been claiming that we are imperialists, colonialists and occupiers?”

Livnat, who has called for the series to be canceled, was so furious about the Sunday night shows that she has stopped allowing her son to watch them.

Infrastructure Minister Ariel Sharon, a key figure for most of Israel’s 50 years, wrote a letter to Education and Culture Minister Yitzhak Levy complaining that the series “distorts the history of our redemption, abandoning every moral basis for the establishment and existence of the state of Israel” and urging that he not use the programs in Israeli schools.

And the host of the series, Yehoram Gaon, quit halfway through production rather than appear on a segment that presents the views of Palestinians who carried out terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians.

“I felt good with the first episodes, which discussed the past and reminded me of my childhood,” Gaon wrote in his resignation letter, “but I find it hard to forget my feelings when presenting the episodes dealing with the present.”

Supporters of the series say its virtue is precisely that: It does not make Israelis feel good with the official line but raises painful questions and provokes debate.

“There is no objective history,” said Yoel Rappel, a historian and radio commentator. “The series is a trigger so that young people will go to the books and movies to learn about Israeli history. Whether or not you agree with the programs, they are raising the right questions. The only way to find a solution between Israelis and Arabs on the land is to raise the right questions. That is the first step on a long journey.”

Controversy Reflects Long-Standing Debate

The public controversy over “Tekuma” (“Rebirth”), as the series is called, mirrors a debate that has been going on in Israeli academic journals for more than a decade. At issue is the story of the revival of the Jewish nation in the Holy Land.

For traditional Israeli historians--and critics of the series--the narrative of Israel’s founding is this: Idealistic Jewish pioneers settled a wide-open land called Palestine that was sparsely populated with Arab natives. The Jews came to live peacefully with the Arabs and to enhance the quality of life for all. They believed in compromise but were confronted with Arab aggression and were forced to fight back.

During Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, local Arabs left their villages in Palestine at the urging of the region’s Arab leaders, who promised the residents would be able to return after Israel was destroyed. But the Jews won the war for their homeland against Arab armies, just as David beat Goliath.

That is the version taught in Israeli schools and the one most Israelis believe.

But a group of “new historians” has taken a skeptical look at that traditional Zionist view and begun shattering what it calls “the myths” of the founding of the Jewish state. The new thinkers say they portray Israeli heroes such as prime ministers David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir with all their warts and wrinkles--as human beings who made mistakes as well as history.

The new historians accuse the founders of having failed to do enough to save European Jews during the Holocaust. They argue that Israel passed up opportunities for negotiations with Arab states and evicted hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their villages during the 1948 war. Israel implemented a tough policy of no return toward Palestinian refugees, they say, and retaliated “in kind” for terrorist attacks in the 1950s.

The controversial segments of the television series, which begins in 1936 with a wave of Jewish settlement in British-ruled Palestine and ends with the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish law student in 1995, adopt many of the views of the new historians that critics have branded “post-Zionism.”

The series accuses Israel’s European, or Ashkenazi, majority of having mistreated Middle Eastern Jewish immigrants, known as Sephardim.

The series accepts matter-of-factly that about 700,000 Palestinians fled Palestine out of fear or under military threat during the 1948 war and became refugees. This goes far beyond other mainstream Israeli accounts of history.

While officials such as Livnat and Sharon see the “Tekuma” account of history as destructive, series producer Gideon Drori defends it as a healthy step forward for a secure and mature society.

“Criticism can be judged by the results it yields. In my opinion, this is constructive criticism,” Drori told the weekly newspaper Kol Hair. “What is destructive about a society which is examining itself and asking questions? That weakens us? In my opinion, it strengthens. . . . We are not less patriotic Israelis than those people who have trouble looking at themselves.”

Drori said the series went into production at the beginning of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, when it appeared that the country was moving toward a resolution of the decades-old conflict.

“When peace is on the agenda, it becomes necessary to understand reality from the other side’s point of view,” Drori said. “It was clear to us that we would make a pluralistic series of many voices that would include, as much as possible, [all] perspectives.”

Ensuring that a variety of voices would be heard, each segment was crafted by a different director. But many Israelis still have objected to what they feel is a leftist critique of history.

‘People Don’t Want to Open Their Eyes’

Director Mouki Hadar said that after his segment on Arab citizens of Israel aired earlier this month, Israel Television received hundreds of calls from people who complained not about the accuracy of what was said in the piece but about the fact that an Arab viewpoint was included in a series about Jewish history.

“I knew the series was sad because it shows the mistreatment of Arab Israelis, but I didn’t expect that Israelis were not ready to watch this,” Hadar said. “I am insulted that people don’t want to open their eyes. Imagine doing a story about America at 200 years without a piece about the blacks.”

Many Israelis feel that a series commemorating the modern Israeli state’s 50 years should be a festive event celebrating the country’s accomplishments and not a critical one. Hadar’s segment, however, shows the physical and spiritual conquest of the Arabs. It includes footage never before aired on Israeli television of Palestinians who remained in Israel after the war surrendering their weapons to Jewish soldiers, and of Arab schoolchildren dancing in the formation of a Star of David, waving Israeli flags on Independence Day.

It talks about the fact that Arab citizens of Israel lived under military rule for 19 years, unable to leave their villages without permits. The program points out that about 60,000 Arabs signed up for army service after an Arab draft was announced in 1954 but were rejected when the government feared they would not fight against their Arab brothers.

The Arabs’ lack of army service has often been used as a justification for denying them equal rights.

Deputy Education Minister Moshe Peled said he regretted that many schools had bought the series.

“I am afraid that in a year or two or 10, the students won’t even understand what happened here,” Peled said. “This is not a program about the resurrection and foundation of the state of Israel. Everything we have been through in the 50 years of the state is presented as though we are the murderers and the Palestinians are the victims.”

Many of the segments still to be broadcast are likely to prove at least as controversial as the Arab-Israeli segment. On Sunday, a show on the construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank aired, and soon to follow are segments on Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the Palestinian uprising, or intifada, that ended earlier this decade.

Title Change Made to Calm the Anger

The segment on Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) attacks, scheduled to run next Sunday, is called “Biladi, Biladi” (“My Country, My Country”), the name of the Palestinian anthem that was banned in Israel until Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo peace accords in 1993.

The title raised such a red flag for Israelis that many officials urged that the piece be eliminated. In response, the Israel Broadcasting Authority altered the name to “In the Road of Terror: Biladi, Biladi” and decided that the broadcast would be followed by a televised debate.

Host Gaon, who resigned over the segment, asserted that it gives “the heroic story of the terror organizations.” But the director, Ronit Weiss-Berkowitz, said she believes the piece is balanced.

Her segment begins with footage of Palestinian refugees walking barefoot through the mud and standing in line for United Nations food and water rations, and it also shows the development of the PLO.

It gives a history of attacks carried out by the PLO against civilian targets in the years between Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1982 fighting in Lebanon. It alternates in perspective between Palestinian perpetrators and supporters of such actions and Israelis who lost children or were hurt themselves. It shows bloody footage of some ofthe worst Palestinian attacks and Israeli retaliation.

“What I am saying here is that there are two sides for the same story. What is a terrorist for one side is a brave fighter for freedom for the other side,” Weiss-Berkowitz said.

“I was looking for human beings on both sides. I wanted to understand what brings a young man from a refugee camp to come and kill me. I wanted to understand his motivations, his pain. And this is why [the critics] are so angry, because to try to understand them makes you a traitor, an enemy of the people,” she said.

“But to understand terrorism doesn’t mean I agree with it. I don’t agree. I am crying with our people, our wounded, our dead,” she said. “I didn’t come to prosecute Zionism. I believe we are strong enough after 50 years to look in the mirror. Nothing will happen. . . . The state is a fact. We are here and we are strong.”

Palestinians who have seen the series so far say that while it raises questions new to Israelis, it does not go far enough in accepting guilt. They see the Jews who settled in Palestine and created the state of Israel as colonialists who committed a grave injustice that undermines the legitimacy of Zionism.

“To some extent, I think the series is successful in providing various perspectives, but all of this is superimposed on the Jewish, Zionist perspective, “ said Sammy Smooha, an Arab sociology professor at Haifa University who was a consultant to the program. “If an Arab had produced this, it would be something else entirely. There would be no legitimacy for the whole Zionist project. Here, there is the counter-assumption.”