 |  |
Click for Contents
Rebirth of a Nation
David B. Green
Israel TV's series on the state's history has put a mirror up to society.Not everyone has liked what they've seen.
On of the most chilling pieces of testimony in "Tekumah," Israel Television's documentary series about the history of the state, comes from the former paratroop officer Ya'akov Hisdai, in the segment about the Yom Kippur War. Hisdai describes leading a group of soldiers into Suez City, on the western side of the canal. There they came under attack by forces from the Egyptian Third Army. Hisdai radioed for reinforcements.
"Then I got the word," Hisdai recalls today, "that completed my picture of the war, from the division's command: 'Sorry. We can't help you anymore. Make do on your own.'"
What makes that radio exchange particularly disturbing is that it took place not in the confused and desperate early days of battle, but on the last day of the war, after Israel had retaken the territory initially overrun by Egypt. As Hisdai recounts, more in irony than anger: "The whole IDF is surrounding Suez City, and I have to make do alone." Eighty of his soldiers were killed in the battle. They were among the 2,565 Israelis to fall in a war that is sometimes remembered as simply another of Israel's heroic victories, but that, as "Tekumah" insists on driving home, was also a case of near-criminal negligence by the country's leadership.
Intended by ITV as a continuation of its landmark 1981 series "Pillar of Fire," which documented the pre-State annals of the Zionist movement, "Tekumah" ("Rebirth") doesn't reveal anything that anyone reading history or even intelligent journalism of the last decade wouldn't already know about Israel - including about the Yom Kippur War.
What it does do is present some of the most dramatic footage of 10,000 photographic documents from film archives around the world, interspersed with interviews with witnesses representing both the great and the small, and a running commentary that overarches it all. And it's been the most talked-about event of the 50th-anniversary year.
Though 19 different directors assembled "Tekumah's" 22 one-hour segments, at a cost of $4 million, the series has a strong sense of continuity to it. Some top documentary filmmakers participated, but their individual styles are never allowed to protrude, due to the strong hand of chief editor Gideon Drori, who created it together with Esther Dar.
"Tekumah" examines many of the more disturbing chapters in the country's history: the cool reception given various waves of new immigrants, the status of Israeli Arabs, and the conflict with the Palestinians; the Ashkenazi-Sephardi gap, and secular-religious tensions; the shocks that accompanied the Lebanon War. None of this is exactly breaking news. But by trying to look at Israel as it is, rather than as it has tried so hard to present itself to the world and itself, "Tekumah" has raised many hackles.
Calling for the show's cancelation, Communications Minister Limor Livnat complained that no one had the right to deprive a country of its founding myths, and that a "normal people" wouldn't mark its jubilee year this way. Haifa University historian Yoav Gelber, who served as one of the series' four academic consultants, sharply criticized, in an internal memorandum, the segment on the Palestinian movement as fitting perhaps for a show marking 50 years of Palestinian autonomy, but not for Israel Television. The popular entertainer Yehoram Gaon, who had been serving as host of the show, resigned, also before the broadcast of the Palestinian episode - by his account in protest, according to ITV just before it fired him, after his treacly presentation had made him a liability.
Tel Aviv University historian Anita Shapira, considered mainstream in her views, told a TV panel that the willingness of the state-sponsored station to make a show that looked at the country critically, and of Israelis to watch it, was a sign that Israel was "growing up." Psychoanalyst Itamar Levy notes that every Western country has dark subjects that have taken decades to confront, if at all, "be it the Vichy years in France, the Nazi period in Germany, or even the U.S.'s treatment of native Americans." Israel's willingness to spend its anniversary year looking in the mirror was a healthy sign, he says.
Mordechai Kirschenbaum, recently retired director general of the IBA, who presided over "Tekumah's" production, told The Report with regard to the comments by Livnat and others: "These people don't understand that there's a limit to how far you can fool all the people all the time. They say: If the lie you tell is good for Zionism, then it's a moral lie. I agree that every society needs its myths, but you can't be hostage to them; you need to know where the myths end and the truth begins." Livnat, Kirschenbaum added for good measure, was a "fascist."
The controversy over "Tekumah" is yet another reminder that Israel is as much a concept as a place, and that there is not today, nor has there ever been, consensus as to the meaning of that concept. Those who believe Israel still faces an existential threat are inevitably going to find it very hard to listen to the Palestinian narrative. But for the show's creators, that narrative is the essential flip side of the Israeli one.
"Tekumah," which was to finish its initial run in mid-May, ends with the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Editor Drori, a 27-year veteran at ITV, acknowledges that when planning on the series began in mid-1994, "we thought we'd end with Oslo, at the same time, of course, asking questions about ourselves and our society, such as: Once the external threat is removed, will we be unified enough to deal with our internal problems?"
With Rabin's murder and the shift in the government, it became unclear just where Israel was headed, and, says Drori, "we were uncomfortable bringing the series up to the present. We thought we'd be finishing with a happy end, but we don't."
In the sense that underlying "Tekumah" is the assumption that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a zero-sum game, then the series does have a politi-cal bias that is untenable to part of the Israeli public. But generally the series tries as hard as possible to be pluralistic in its voices.
Its great strength is its "casting" of those voices: former cabinet minister Victor Shem-Tov, describing the stunned silence around the cabinet table on Yom Kippur day 1973 as Golda Meir announced that war was about to break out; Sarah Nahshon, one of the original settlers who came to the Park Hotel in Hebron in 1968 and never left, describing the death of her newborn son, Avraham, shortly after her arrival there, and her decision to defy the defense minister and bury him in Hebron's old Jewish cemetery (just as another Abraham and Sarah, she points out, had bought a plot of land in Hebron for burial four millennia ago); former PLO terrorist Faudi Nimr, who participated in a number of attacks on people and property in the North, but who's startling today in his mildness ("My conscience is not at ease that I killed Jews. When I was young, I thought otherwise; today, it's not comfortable for me").
There is a former Jewish Agency official, Yigal Ilan, who recounts taking a busload of new North African immigrants to the remote Negev sands that were to become Dimonah, and having them refuse to disembark ("You told us it would be 20 kms from Tel Aviv!"). Finally, one of their number, named Moshe Dayan, stepped off the bus and kissed the ground, and the rest followed. Ilan, voice cracking, calls him his "messiah."
Israeli TV audiences have responded to the show with unexpected enthusiasm.
Each weekly segment, which opens with a romantic montage of phrases from the state's Declaration of Independence faded in and out over dreamy Israeli landscapes, accompanied by an evocative theme song by Shlomo Gronich, has been broadcast twice, with combined ratings exceeding 30 percent of the viewing audience, remarkable for any show, unbelievable for a documentary.
ITV has also created two foreign-language versions, one a two-hour film, the other a six-part series that covers Israel's history thematically (and which is scheduled to air in the U.S. on PBS in June). Though all three versions rely on the same archival material, the interviews in the export version concentrate on well-known figures, and are in English.
Trying to explain the controversy stirred up by the show, Gideon Drori paraphrases historian Michael Harsegor, who has said that the only thing that keeps changing is the past. But writing in Ha'aretz, iconoclastic columnist Doron Rosenblum noted: "The argument is only apparently about the past. For in our existential status quo, where nothing is ever resolved, and no conflict ever put to rest - the series places a mirror before us: Each episode from the past appears to be a fable about the present or prophecy of the future."
Speaking to The Report, Rosenblum, who is generally complimentary about the show, adds that what most upset him in some of the later, more controversial segments were the panel discussions ITV tacked on at the end, presumably for purposes of balance. "The discussions show no willingness to draw conclusions. It's obvious that Lebanon was a crazy mistake. But they argue over the facts. Not only do we repeat our mistakes, we insist on doing so. It's like people in England arguing today that Chamberlain was right."
1998
 |
|
 |
|
© The Jerusalem Report 1999-2000 |  |