FILMS AND POLITICS-Happened to catch a preview showing the other night at the Levantine Cultural Center of director Ben Loeterman's well researched and insightful documentary film Seeds of Conflict. It carefully examines the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict circa 1913 by reenacting the actual statements made by members of the various factions at the time, while showing rare footage recently discovered from the period.
At the end of the film, I don't think I was alone in the ethnically diverse audience in thinking things in the Middle East might have been resolved in a much more positive and equitable manner for all sides in Israeli-Palestine and the rest of the Levant.
Looking at what was to become the end of the 400 year Ottoman Turkish empire in Palestine and elsewhere at a time when initial ethnic harmony was the rule, one cannot help but wonder if the present conflict might have been avoided, if a less exclusive and excluding form of Zionism had prevailed. It's one thing to have a homeland. It's something else to have it at someone else's expense.
While one clearly has empathy and understanding for Jews who had suffered 2000 years of Diaspora and the incessant discrimination ending in pogroms and the Nazi final solution that cost 6 million human beings their lives, I have always had trouble with a brand of Zionism that seems to view Palestinians as unter menschen and rationalizes depriving Palestinians of their own Zionist dream of a homeland by referring to Palestine as "a country without a people for a people [the Jews] without a country."
There is a certain irony to a Jewish Zionist dream that unnecessarily becomes the cause of a Palestinian Diaspora. One would think that a people who had suffered so much for 2000 years might have come up with a more amiable solution.
Seeds of Conflict premieres on June 30th at 9 pm on your local PBS station.
(Leonard Isenberg is a Los Angeles observer and a contributor to CityWatch. He’s a second generation teacher at LAUSD and blogs at perdaily.com. Leonard can be reached at [email protected] )
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 13 Issue 51
Pub: Jun 23, 2015
