This is an extraordinary film, documenting the carefully crafted, decades-long propaganda effort that prepared the West for acceptance of a Zionist, post-WW II, takeover of Palestine.
I lived in the Bronx, New York City, through the world war, the 1948 war on the Palestinians, and for almost a decade after the Korean war.
At the time there were a million Jews living in the Bronx, more than there were in the British Mandate of Palestine. The neighborhood I lived in was predominantly Christian and overwhelmingly white.
Television was in its infancy, so the only news of Palestine we got was through a press that was sympathetic to the immigration that took their land from the Palestinians.
I had no idea of the extent of the propaganda that has rationalized the oppression of Palestinians, went back that far. Through my childhood and adolescence, I saw no balance to reporting about that forced colonization. We in the U.S. were collectively ignorant as to the nature of the land seizures, that brutal exodus, the forced diaspora of the indigenous inhabitants. Golda Meir who had immigrated from Russia to Milwaukee as an eight-year-old, then immigrated to Eretz Israel in 1921, eventually becoming prominent in the Zionist government, was a folk hero to us.
The mechanism of telling this story is a brilliant instrument. It focuses simply on the produce that was the primary export commodity of an invaded land, using of contemporary film footage and photographs, including interviews with elderly Jews who lived in Palestine before the forced expulsion of a huge part of the Arab population. This film documents the true nature of what has been presented to us in the U.S. for over six decades as a legitimate response to Arab attacks.
That meme was clearly as fraudulent as Hitler's putative causus belli for the invasion of Poland; his Nazi soldiers dressed as Polish cavalry faking an invasion of Germany.
This puts the current cruelty to the Palestinians in the West Bank into a sharp historical relief. It is shameful that our government is so wedded to the myth, the one it subsidizes and allows to be further illegally financed, the one protected by our sole opposition to any restraint on Israel's expansionism in the Security Council, that this genocidal campaign can continue its expansionism, its subjugation and destruction of the native peoples of that land.
The Holocaust was the most horrific event in the past century, but it does not begin to justify in any remote sense such a eradication being launched by its victims against a people who had no part in its execution.
This documentary gives us a sorely needed alternative perspective in this age of public relations saturation that has successfully promoted a bogus historical story line that has been used to justify such draconian oppression.
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