Battle for the Holy Land
Conflicting experiences
Channel 4’s Battle for the Holy Land programmes explore what has happened to people on both sides of the divide since Israel’s conquest of the West Bank and other territories in 1967.
In Love Thy Neighbour, Rod Liddle meets with Palestinians in Bethlehem and the villages nearby to see the effect on their lives of the checkpoints, the Wall and the machinery of military occupation. The official justification for the Wall is to close off the West Bank and stop suicide bombers coming into Israel, ‘but,’ says Liddle, ‘it does not follow the line of the 1967 border. Instead, it twists and turns deep within Palestinian territory. Its tortuous, circuitous route has left Bethlehem virtually enclosed.’ He describes the wall seen from above: ‘In the distance one of the Jewish settlements of the West Bank, with acres of land to expand into. And right there, Palestinian Bethlehem, hemmed in on all sides.’
There are now close to half a million settlers in the West Bank, living in apparent prosperity, while few Palestinians are granted permits to build homes on their own land. Over 5,000 Palestinian homes have been destroyed in the occupied territories in the last six years and, as Paddy Ashdown discovers in Jerusalem, not only are the houses knocked down but the Israeli government requires their owners to pay the cost of the demolition – at as much as £20,000 a time.
Rod Liddle talks to Jewish settlers in Tekoah, part of a block of settlements to the south of Jerusalem. Unlike their Palestinian neighbours, they do not suffer from water shortages in the blazing hot summers; they are generally waved through the ubiquitous checkpoints and do not need permits to visit their holy places – indeed, in many areas there are even separate roads for Jews and Arabs.
Nevertheless, they express a deep sense of insecurity, in which their fear of the Palestinians is intertwined with recent Jewish history. Mayor of Tekoah, Shaul Goldstein, says: ‘We are not going to the Holocaust again. … I lost all my family in the Holocaust. I don’t have grandmothers, grandfathers, uncles. I have nothing. The world can say whatever they want. This is our land and we are going to stay here.’
The pain of recent history perpetuates the conflict in Israel and Palestine, whether deliberately or unconsciously. Actions taken today hark back not only to the Holocaust but also to the conflict in 1947-49, which the Israelis call the War of Independence, and the Palestinians call the Naqba – disaster.
In Jerusalem, Paddy Ashdown hears an Israeli describe the massacre of Jews by Arabs at Gush Etzion in 1948. Then he hears a Palestinian describe the massacre of Arabs by Jews at Deir Yassin, a village near Jerusalem which no longer appears on the map.
A Palestinian resident of Jerusalem describes how she lost her home when the Israeli army destroyed the Moroccan Quarter of the Old City in one of its first acts of conquest in 1967. An Israeli resident of Jerusalem describes how, when the Arab Legion captured the Jewish Quarter in 1948, its 1,500 surviving Jewish residents were forced to leave before the Jordanians systematically destroyed the quarter.
Is there any common ground to be found between these peoples?
