reviews the recent BBC series, The Fifty Years War THIS WAS MORE than a missed opportunity to examine the causes and reality of the Middle East conflict. There is a good series to be made about the hundred years of conflict between Zionism and the Arab national movement; but this is not it. Instead by reapeating, in a modern and slightly revisionist guise, all of the Israeli propaganda myths, this series actually sets back the search for such an understanding.
Even the title, implying that the conflict began with the creation of Israel in 1948, is misleading. Nor are the programmes helped by appallingly inaccurate translations, which frequently omit key sentences or grossly mistranslate them.
One of the most effective early. pieces of pro-Israel propaganda was the film Exodus. It presented a kitsch, over-sentimentalised view of the birth of the Jewish state, while leaving the Palestinians almost totally out of the picture.
By casting Paul Newman in the The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is seen as simply a series of Israel-Arab wars lead part, Otto Preminger did more than anyone to establish the image of the Israeli as tall (Newman wore platform heels), blue-eyed, blond and handsome - in effect, as an Aryan.
The Arabs were presented as shifty, dirty, bloodthirsty and thoroughly unwestern - as Semites.
The Israeli as superhero, the Arab as coward - this image has been repeated ad nauseam over the past fifty years, and even accepted by many Arabs.
In one of the useful extracts of archive film in the BBC series, a 0y.2 young Yassir Arafat is seen explaining after the 1968 Battle of Karameh, in a striking echo of earlier Zionist language, how he is struggling to create a 'new Palestinian'. But overall, the series reinforces the stereotype of the Palestinian as miserable refugee or vicious terrorist. The emphasis is on archive film and interviews with military and political leaders. In the same team's earlier series, on Yugoslavia, this proved an effective formula.
But this time, lacking any adequate historical or political framework, they reduce the conflict to a succession of wars between states. Nothing is said about economic or social developments, or even about internal political situations.
Anyone who relied on this series to educate them would learn that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict (or, as the series sees it, the Israel-Arab wars) began when Arabs refused to recognise the right of Jewish survivors of the Nazi holocaust to establish a state in Palestine.
The previous half-century of conflict between Zionist colonialism and the Palestinian national movement is totally ignored: The expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948 is presented as purely an unplanned result of the war.
This view is no longer seriously expressed even by Israel, where a new wave of young historians has convincingly established the position long argued by the left -that the Zionist movement implemented a conscious plan of 'ethnic cleansing'.
The notorious Deir Yassin massacre is presented out of context, as a one-off crime committed by marginal right-wing militias. There is no acknowledgement that this was just one - and not even the worst - of scores of notion of revolution beloved of generations of stalinists - is what has led to the impasse of today's South Africa. These were the sort of events that led Leon Trotsky to write his classic book, Permanent Revolution, which explained that in the epoch of imperialism the only way to win any real gains, even things that might seem very small, was through socialist revolution.
Despite this political weakness, Pilger's work stands head and shoulders above virtually everyone else in the mainstream press.
His importance is precisely that this gives him an audience which is way beyond what this or other socialist papers can reach. Hidden Agendas, published last month follows in the fine tradition of his previous books. massacres, most of them committed by the mainstream army linked to the then-ruling Labour Party. In a similar vein, the first programme spoke of the Arab invasion' in 1948. In fact, Arab armies did not invade the area allocated as a Jewish state by the UN partition plan; they sent forces into the areas allocated as a Palestinian state, from much of which they were driven out by an Israeli invasion.
Through their ignorance of the Middle East, the producers do not recognise a real scoop when they stumble across one.
Thus, they repeat the accepted wisdom that the goal of the Israeli sabotage ring in Egypt in 1954 was to destabilise Egypt and prevent British withdrawal from the Suez Canal - even though, as the interview with an Egyptian diplomat makes clear, the Israeli army's real purpose was to undermine the govern-. ment's attempt at rapprochement with Egypt and prepare for the 1956 invasion of Sinai.
Overall, the series suggests that the prime conflict is between Israeli moderates and reactionaries, with the Palestinians as mere unfortunate bystanders - a classically Eurocentric, Orientalist view.
This collection of essays cover many aspects of world politics in which the expositions of today's battles are strengthened by telling the tales of what came before.
Whether in East Timor, Vietnam or the Liverpool docks he weaves a graphic picture of the land, of ordinary people's lives and convictions. The craft of his writing and the ideas of those he lets speak on these pages has power to win new friends to these struggles and to further inspire the already involved.
'On the Famine Road', an essay about the Irish Famine, is probably my favourite, though it is difficult to choose in this book of gems. Read it - and borrow a video of the film if you missed it on TV.