Capturing the Scope of ‘Israel and the Arabs’

The images from one of history’s most intractable conflicts are searingly familiar.

Joyous Israelis stream into Jerusalem’s Old City after its capture from Jordan in 1967. A Lebanese man weeps at the destruction of his home by Israeli jets in 1982. Defiant young Palestinians battle Israeli troops on the occupied West Bank in 1988. President Clinton gently draws Yitzhak Rabin into a historic handshake with a beaming Yasser Arafat on a sun-swept White House lawn.

Exhilarating, horrifying and heart-wrenching, the footage contained in the PBS documentary “The 50 Years War: Israel and the Arabs,” airing Sunday and Monday on KCET, is always dramatic, illustrating the modern Middle East’s tortured saga of war, intrigue and peace.

But it is the interviews with key players on all sides and from every juncture during half a century of bitter conflict that are gripping and make this five-hour series important watching for anyone with an interest in the region.

Two Years in the Making

Told mainly in the words of the participants, “The 50 Years War” traces the region’s story of struggle, of mediation and assassination, of missed opportunities and rare, electrifying breakthroughs. Two years in the making, the documentary begins with the 1947 United Nations vote to partition Palestine, the Israeli declaration of independence and the war that followed. Remarkably up-to-date, it ends with last October’s Wye Plantation agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.

King Hussein of Jordan, Palestinian Authority President Arafat, current and former Israeli prime ministers Benjamin Netanyahu, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir, and former U.S. Presidents George Bush and Jimmy Carter are but a few of those who tell the story, often in surprisingly candid terms.

But there are many others, equally insightful--ranging from Israeli and Arab foreign ministers to onetime guerrilla leaders. Voices from the U.S. are matched by those from the former Soviet Union, the superpowers that alternately calmed and fueled the conflict.

Co-produced by WGBH Boston and BBC London, the tale is largely one of military strategy and international diplomacy. Regrettably, the story of everyday people affected by the conflict--Israelis, Palestinians and others--is often neglected in favor of the talks or battles that shaped their fate.

There are also abrupt transitions. The series jumps too rapidly, for example, from the 1993 Oslo agreement to Arafat’s historic arrival in Jericho and the 1994 peace treaty between Israel and Jordan.

But there are fascinating moments as well.

Hussein’s Painful Decision

In one, King Hussein speaks painfully of his decision to declare war on Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization in the bloody 1970 civil war that pushed the Palestinian leadership out of Jordan. A quadruple airplane hijacking by a radical PLO faction, in which three jetliners were forced down near Amman, forced Hussein to confront the PLO’s threat to his rule. The Palestinian actions “questioned whether Jordan really existed,” he says.

In another, an exhausted Moshe Dayan, then Israel’s defense minister, tries to rally his shattered nation during the first days of the 1973 war, launched by Egypt and Syria on the Jewish fast day of Yom Kippur. “We must fight as if we are fighting for our lives--and we are fighting for our lives,” he says.

Key participants give a ringside view of the Camp David negotiations between Israel and Egypt, and the secret talks in Norway that led to interim accords between Israel and the Palestinians. And they tell of Israel’s once-promising, now-stalled negotiations with Syria.

Spanning half a century and crossing the spectrum of emotions, “The 50 Years War” is a powerful, complex story--well worth the investment of time.

Trounson is based in The Times’ Jerusalem bureau.

* Part one of “The 50 Years War: Israel and the Arabs” airs on PBS Sunday at 9 p.m. and concludes Monday at 9 p.m. The network has rated it TV-PG.