John Pilger
first made the film 'Palestine Is Still The Issue' in 1977. It told how almost
a million Palestinians had been forced off their land in 1948, and again in
1967. Twenty five years later, John Pilger returned to the West Bank of Jordan
and Gaza, and to Israel, to ask why the Palestinians, whose right of return was
affirmed by the United Nations more than half a century ago, are still caught
in a terrible limbo - refugees in their own land, controlled by Israel in the
longest military occupation in modern times.
"If we
are to speak of the great injustice here, nothing has changed," says
Pilger at the start of the film, "What has changed is that the
Palestinians have fought back. Stateless and humiliated for so long, they have
risen up against Israel’s huge military regime, although they themselves have
no army, no tanks, no American planes and gunships or missiles. Some have
committed desperate acts of terror, like suicide bombing. But, for Palestinians,
the overriding, routine terror, day after day, has been the ruthless control of
almost every aspect of their lives, as if they live in an open prison. This
film is about the Palestinians and a group of courageous Israelis united in the
oldest human struggle, to be free."
Pilger
distills the history of Palestine during the twentieth century into an easily
comprehensible struggle for land - the loss of seventy-eight per cent of that
belonging to Palestinians when the state of Israel was founded in 1948 and
their claim to only the remaining twenty-two per cent, which had for
thirty-five years been occupied by Israel.
In a series
of extraordinary interviews with both Israelis and Palestinians, he speaks to
the families of suicide bombers and their victims. He witnesses the humiliation
of Palestinians at myriad checkpoints with a permit system not dissimilar to
apartheid South Africa's infamous pass laws. One Palestinian woman tells of how
she was stopped from passing through a checkpoint when she went into labour and
had to return home to give birth with her mother-in-law using a razor to cut
the umbilical cord. The baby later died. He goes into the refugee camps and
meets children who, he says, "no longer dream like other children, or if
they do, it is about death." He is shown round the Palestinian Ministry of
Culture in Ramallah after a recent Israeli attack where he discovers faeces
smeared on walls and floors and a room of children’s paintings vandalised.
Archive
footage shows pledges by successive American presidents in support of Israel.
Pilger describes the Israeli administration as "America’s deputy
sheriff" in the oil-rich Middle East, receiving billions of dollars and
the latest weapons: F16 aircraft, bombs, missiles and Apache helicopters. He reveals
that Britain also fuels the conflict even though it condemns Israel for its
illegal occupation. "During the first fourteen months of the Palestinian
uprising, the Blair government approved 230 export licences for weapons and
military equipment to Israel... Tony Blair has said, and I quote him, "We
are doing everything we can to bring peace and stability to the Middle
East.'" As a result, Israel is now the fourth-largest military power in
the world.
On a hillside
overlooking Jerusalem, Pilger concludes. "The truth is that Israelis will
never have peace until they recognise that Palestinians have the same right to
the same peace and the same independence that they enjoy,’ he said. ‘Recently,
that great voice of freedom, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, asked this: “Have the
Jewish people of Israel forgotten their collective punishment, their home
demolitions, their humiliations so soon?” Israel’s own dissenting voices have
not forgotten and those who speak out in this film honour the best traditions
of Jewish humanity... The occupation of Palestine should end now. Then, the
solution is clear: two countries, Israel and Palestine, neither dominating nor
menacing the other. Is that impossible or is history to witness the
consequences of yet another silence?’"
Palestine Is
Still The Issue was a Carlton Television production for ITV first broadcast on
ITV1, 16 September 2002. Director: Tony Stark. Producer: Chris Martin.
Awards: The
Chris Statuette in the War & Peace division, Chris Awards, Columbus
International Film & Video Festival, Ohio, 2003; Winner, War & Peace
category, Vermont International Film Festival, 2003; Certificate of Merit,
Chicago International Television Awards.
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