Frustrating effort to put conflict in focus

TV review

My Israel, BBC4

The Battle for Jerusalem, BBC4

BBC FOUR'S season marking the 60th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel began with two Storyville films attempting to address the interminable war between the sides.

Shot over eight turbulent years, Yulie Cohen's My Israel was a sincere yet disappointingly unfocused essay that struggled to say something profound about the situation. While working as an El-Al stewardess in 1978, Cohen was injured in a terrorist attack by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. One of her colleagues was killed. Some 22 years later she began a controversial campaign to release her attacker from prison. Cohen believed that the only way towards peace was forgiveness and reconciliation, and began writing to the prisoner. He responded with the claim that he no longer believed in violence as solution.

Frustratingly, this potentially interesting strand got lost as Cohen tried to juggle too many other stories. While visibly moved by her encounter with a woman who had lost her child in a terrorist attack, I never got the sense that Cohen had altered her views about forgiveness. Stunned by the events of 9/11 she briefly considered writing to her attacker and telling him to "go f*** yourself," but that appeared to be a minor blip.

We were also told – but never saw – that her perspective on the conflict had been altered by a friendship with a Palestinian man, yet she failed to expand much upon this revelation. She questioned her father, a former soldier, about his role in the Six-Day War, and was disconcerted to discover that he was involved in eradicating entire villages. Her way of coping with this and other traumas was to meditate in the desert.

Aside from attempting to chronicle the wider political situation in Israel over the last eight years, Cohen also examined her relationship with her teenage daughters, both of whom she kept as virtual prisoners at home, so afraid was she of losing them to terrorist bombers. On top of all of this, she also documented the family's 25-year estrangement from her ultra-orthodox Jewish brother. Although she tried in vain to bring him back into the fold, he only renewed contact briefly when their parents became ill.

While I appreciate that all of these strands were connected by themes of hope, fear, and reconciliation, Cohen failed to weave them into a satisfying whole. It's a shame, because there was a thought-provoking film in here fighting for breath under too many layers of good intention.

More effective was The Battle For Jerusalem, which told the story of the 1948 conflict from three perspectives. For years, the photographs taken by pro-Israeli Life correspondent John Phillips were thought to be the only pictorial evidence of this historic event. It was later discovered that a Palestinian photographer called Ali Zaarour also owned a collection of evocative snaps, many of which were stolen by the Israeli army in 1967. Thanks to the efforts of one of the programme consultants, Zaarour's ageing son was granted access to the military archives, and the missing photographs were eventually returned to his care.

Also interviewed was 92-year-old Jack Padwa, who produced Israel's first feature-length film in 1955, the now forgotten Hill 24 Doesn't Answer. This romantically pro-Israeli movie was basically a live-action evocation of Phillips's photographs.

The importance of pictorial histories, and the ambiguities and complexities they bring up, was argued well in this restrained and thoughtful programme.