Transcript of More 4 News broadcast
Kylie Morris: Burma to the Middle East, from a natural disaster to a political tragedy. For Israelis it’s a moment that marks the birth of a brave and defiant nation. Palestinians see it very differently: they call it the “Nakba”, or the catastrophe. This week and next sees the anniversary of, the 60th anniversary of the events of 1948. Here, we’ve just heard sirens going off across the city and people stopping their cars, getting out, standing by them, quietly remembering those events. We’ve seen some terribly, kind of, moving scenes by the western wall in the Old City, which we’ll be able to show you a little later on. But there’s really one burning question here, one question that has to be answered. As these, as these people, kind of remember these two very different versions of history, can they contemplate a shared future? Girish Juneja looks back at the human legacy of 1948.
Abdullah Salhani: When I left it was raining. They told us that you will come back in one week, maximum a month – that was sixty years ago. But I have kept my documents. They confirm it is my house. I have my papers so I still own my land.
Girish Juneja: It’s in camps like Shatila in Lebanon that the Palestinian refugees of 1948 and hundreds of thousands of their descendents still live. Abdallah Salhani was from a village called Bassa. Now, in northern Israel, it’s a place his own children have never seen. After meeting him I’ll embark on a journey to Israel to see what, if anything, remains of his village. But first, Mr Sulhani wants to show me his documents – many are in the name of his grandfather. There’s a birth certificate, building permits, inland revenue receipts. There’s a real sense here of history, an album full of documents detailing what he hopes one day will… [Abbdullah Salhani points at document] He pointed out the, his prescription from the opticians. To him, all the links with a vanished past, even the most mundane, are significant.
Abdullah Salhani: My village was so close to the sea the waves would hit some houses. We were farmers, we grew crops between the banana trees but we could not grow between the lemon tree[sic]. They grew so large, they blocked the sun and our house – we had just built a third set of rooms for my brother so we had three keys. I have kept them since I left, sixty years ago.
Girish Juneja: He remembers the chain of events that he says forced his family to escape to Lebanon. Hundreds of thousands of Jews, many fleeing the Nazi Holocaust and other persecution had been coming in to Palestine in search of a homeland.
Abdullah Salhani: I learned of the conspiracy in 1947. I was working on the railway track just outside my village. Jewish people had been coming for many years. They had built three towns in the hills. They only left the northern side to Lebanon open. Then in May 1948 they started shelling us.
Girish Juneja: He says the shelling and artillery barrage lasted for four nights. Trapped, the villagers fled north, over the hills to Lebanon. Bassa was in what is now northern Israel. Like everywhere else in the country this week, flags and bunting express the fierce pride Israelis have in the Zionists of 1948 and in the personal loss and sacrifice of subsequent generations.
Girish Juneja: We’re on the coastal road two hours north of Tel Aviv, and heading towards the Lebanese border, but more importantly, towards Bassa, which is Mr Salahani’s old village. This is a road that he used often, when selling produce from his farm to the nearby cities of Akka and Nahariya. And after we passed Nahariya, not a place he’d recognise anymore, we stumble upon our first clue – the railway he helped to build in 1947. It’s been abandoned now, bits are strewn everywhere and it’s worn through. Quite quickly I found where Bassa is or was. There is now a boutique shop and a cappuccino bar, both nestling right in the shadow of the remains of Mr Salhani’s village. Beyond the new road, an old dirt path and the last remaining houses of Bassa. Like many other Palestinian villages, the majority of houses in this one were destroyed to make way for a new Israeli town. The old village, surrounded, as Mr Salhani described, by hills, has given way to warehouse and office complexes, including one of Israel’s biggest meat producers. It’s expanded hugely and is no longer called Bassa – welcome to Shlomi. Like so many Israeli towns it’s bristling with an entrepreneurial energy and Shlomi’s mayor is planning further expansion – within 20 years, he says, this town will be a city. In his shirt sleeves, mayor Gabi Na’aman takes us on a journey to the future. One of many in Shlomi, this building site will be a school and technology centre. The plan is to build on the past – literally.
Gabi Na’aman: You can see where the old houses were destroyed. I have asked the architect if we can use the stones - I want to build a wall around the school, they are very beautiful.
Girish Juneja: But there was very nearly a snag.
Gabi Na’aman: We had to check to see how old the ruins are. If they were older than 250 years we could not build but if they are only the Arab ruins of Bassa, it’s fine. Luckily, the remains are only of Bassa so we will build.
Girish Juneja: And what of the four-night siege of Bassa? Mr Sulhani said the firing came from the Jewish towns in the hills – I paid one of them a visit but sixty years on would anyone want to talk about it? Shlomo didn’t. He’s ninety years old and prefers gentler memories.
Shlomo Pumerante: When we came there was only one building – now it’s a museum. Us youngsters decided to settle. It was so hard but it was the best period. It was exciting. With no one here, we didn’t have to evacuate anyone.
Girish Juneja: The [unclear] man, Micha Navon, allowed me to join him on his round.
Girish Juneja: I understand that they bombed, that they bombed the village of Bassa.
Micha Navon: It is right. It is right. Not, but not from here, not from here. It is right, not from this point. It was the army somewhere, and not from here. Not from Hanita to Bassa.
Girish Juneja: As we look over the valley toward Bassa, Navon recounts the sight his father remembered.
Micha Navon: One morning, after four days, something like that, suddenly people from here, used to watch them here, climbing on the mountain, this [unclear] mountain that you can see from here. Most of them families, not just the men, families, just left.
Girish Juneja: Palestinians and Israelis love this land in equal measure but as both remember the past, they know it cannot provide a modal for the future. Girish Juneja, More 4 News, the Upper Galilee.
Kylie Morris: So that was the situation on the local scale but let’s remind ourselves of the lines on the map, which have given rise to the tumult of the last sixty years.
The human legacy of Israel’s 60 year war can be traced back through the changing map of the region. This is what it looked like at the start of 1948 – there’s Bassa, which you saw in that report, in the north of what was British-controlled Palestine and this was the Partition Plan, with a Jewish area in blue and an Arab area here in gold but this is what really happened: (refers to map). After eight months of fighting, Israel emerged a larger state than originally planned. It was a devastating setback for the Palestinians on the wrong side of the line – they call what happened, “Nakba” – the catastrophe.
LACK OF CONTEXT BY EXCLUSION OF RELEVANT INFORMATION AND FACTS:
The journalist excludes crucial facts about how Israel’s early borders were determined. She leaves out the fact that the Palestinian leadership turned down the Partition Plan of 1947 and that it was the Arab states which declared war on, and invaded, Israel, causing the fighting that led to the Palestinian loss of most of their assigned share of the land. The journalist also excludes that fact that during the course of the 1948 war, Jordan annexed the West Bank and Egypt took control of Gaza. The absence of these pieces of information creates a skewed picture of events.
(Refers to map) For each dot an Arab village depopulated in the conflict. Not everyone left though – today nearly twenty per cent of the population within Israel remains Arab. In 1967 more conflict and trauma and the large Palestinian areas, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, the remnants of British Palestine, were occupied by Israel.
More wars followed in the seventies and eighties against Egypt and against Palestinians in Lebanon but then, in the early nineties: what appeared to be a breakthrough: the Oslo Accords - the first face-to-face agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.
MISREPRESENTATION OF FACTS:
The journalist implies that Israel launched aggressive warfare in the 1973 war by describing the conflict as “against Egypt”. This is a misrepresentation of the event as this war was started when Egypt and Syria launched a co-ordinated surprise attack on Israel.
The Palestinians acknowledged Israel’s right to exist and Yasser Afarat’s Palestinian Authority took responsibility for the twin territories of the West Bank and Gaza. The accords called for Israel’s withdrawal from both.
But what does the West Bank look like now? (Refers to map) Only the gold parts are actually Palestinian. The rest are controlled by Israeli settlements that have sprung up since 1967 and they are, officially, illegal. The Gaza settlements no longer exist but these ones do, as does the distrust and bitterness between Palestinians here and their occupying power, matters not helped by Israel’s recent erection of a separation wall. Right now though, we’re here, in the most historic and the most contested city on earth, Jerusalem.
LACK OF CONTEXT BY EXCLUSION OF RELEVANT INFORMATION AND FACTS:
The journalist states that the Gaza settlements “no longer exist”, without providing the context for this, namely that Israel withdrew settlements and troops in August 2005.