FRONTLINE: “A Year of War: Israelis and Palestinians” (Top Hat Productions, WGBH Educational Foundation, PBS, aired October 15, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

The complete Frontline documentary A Year of War: Israelis and Palestinians can be viewed online at https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/a-year-of-war-israelis-and-palestinians/

Last night (Wednesday, October 15) I watched a quite good documentary on PBS’s long-running Frontline series to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the disgusting Hamas attacks on southern Israel on October 7, 2023 and the massive retaliation ordered by the Israeli government and its Trump-like prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The show was called A Year of War: Israelis and Palestinians, though the title was a bit ironic because there have been literally thousands of years of war between the Israelites and whoever else happened to be occupying that narrow strip of land on the Eastern Mediterranean. I was reminded of this when I recently reviewed a new recording of Georg Friedrich Handel’s last oratorio, Jephtha (1751), about an incident in Chapter 11 of the Book of Judges depicting a war between the Israelites and the Ammonites in which Jephtha promises God to sacrifice the first being he sees when he returns victorious – only the first person he sees when he gets back is his own daughter. A Year of War was produced, directed and photographed by Robin Barnwell – whose Web site doesn’t specify their gender, but who has an impressive list of credits including a film about the Russian attack on the Ukrainian city of Mariupol which he happened to be shooting when the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel by Hamas happened. Barnwell gave an interview for the PBS Web site at https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/year-of-war-filmmaker-humanity-israelis-palestinians/ in which he said that as soon as he heard of the attacks, “I wanted to tell the stories of the Oct. 7 victims, to document the savagery of the event and to give a voice to those affected,” Barnwell said. “The last year has been the most violent of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and it felt right to feature victims of the war on both sides and to reflect a range of views. The film took around seven months to make — interviewing people and gathering footage in Israel and Gaza.”

Barnwell made a couple of basic decisions early on that ensured he would end up with a great and genuinely emotionally moving film. First, he decided not to use a narrator – “The people in it are ordinary victims who have been deeply emotionally impacted by events,” he said in the PBS interview – and second, he decided not to shoot in Gaza due to the Israeli governments’ severe restrictions on foreign journalists attempting to cover their genocidal campaign against the Palestinians in Gaza (and elsewhere). “[M]ore than one year into the war, there is still no free and unfettered access inside Gaza for foreign media,” Barnwell explained. “Given the extreme dangers of filming in Gaza and the high number of deaths of local journalists, we decided to look for Gazan contributors who had already been recording their lives during the war instead of commissioning people. The first challenge was to find potential contributors and camera people who had already filmed footage that was mostly unseen. Gaza currently has weak Internet, so we had to conduct searches online from the U.K. to identify potential candidates, so that our local producers could then meet them in person. We, of course, spent a lot of time vetting the footage and making sure the contributors were telling the truth and had no hidden agendas. We selected a group of participants whose wide range of experiences accurately reflect the intensity and horror of the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, the hostage crisis, and the ongoing war in Gaza. These Israeli and Palestinian victims have collectively suffered terror, loss, detention, displacement and mental anguish; some have changed their views about the other side, developing new perspectives on the conflict.”

Barnwell mostly achieved his goal of being even-handed to both sides – an extraordinarily difficult task given the intensity of feeling on both ends of the conflict and the bizarre competing victim narratives of both Israelis and Palestinians (for Israelis it’s the Holocaust and for Palestinians it’s the Nakba, the forced removal from their homes to make room for Jewish settlers after World War II and the formal creation of the state of Israel) – and among other things his film is a testament to the fundamental evil of war itself. Through most of human history war was something that involved only a handful of professional soldiers on both sides, and most people weren’t directly involved until the war ended, one way or the other, and they had to figure out how to live with the outcome. There were exceptions, of course, and many of them involved the ancestors of modern-day Jews; the Old Testament is full of genocidal wars fought by the Israelites against their real or perceived enemies, and God Himself keeps giving the Israelites permission for their genocidal activities. But it was only with the development of modern-day weapons – first the long-range cannons of the 19th century, then machine guns and airplanes capable of dropping bombs on large numbers of people at once in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and guided missiles in the mid-20th century – that war became a total assault on an enemy’s population and the line between “military” and “civilian” first became blurred and then ended completely.

Also, one of the regrettable results of both the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas on southern Israel and the resulting Israeli overreaction has been it’s hardened attitudes on both sides and made people who previously supported peaceful solutions to the Israel/Palestine crisis much more bitter. Barnwell’s rather anodyne statement that “some have changed their views about the other side, developing new perspectives on the conflict” is rather at odds with the actual content of the film. People, both Israelis and Palestinians, who once supported a two-state solution have backed away from that, and in particular Palestinians who once prided themselves on being able to distinguish between “good” and “bad” Israelis now proudly proclaim themselves not only anti-Israeli but anti-Jewish. At the same time the film also underlines the absurdity of Zionism, and particularly their belief that by plunking themselves into the middle of an already occupied country and displacing its inhabitants by force, they could create a “safe space” for the world’s Jews to come together and avoid being the victims of another Holocaust. A heavy-set woman named Gali told Barnwell’s interviewers that both her father and grandmother were Holocaust survivors, and she had settled in Israel precisely because she and her family saw it as a “safe space” – only her husband Tsachi was captured by Hamas terrorists on October 7 and their teenage daughter Ma’ayan was killed. Not surprisingly, Gali said the experience of her family’s victimization has turned her against the two-state solution and hardened her heart against all Palestinians – just as the Palestinians whom Barnwell included in his film, including a quite compelling young man named Ibrahim and Dr. Mohammed El-Ran, who worked at the Indonesian Hospital and then at another medical facility until both were destroyed by Israeli bombing raids, are far more bitter against Israelis and Jews in general than they used to be.

It’s the sort of thing that leads to decades – or even centuries – of war, especially when the atrocities committed against both sides lead to eons of bitterness between them. One recalls grimly how long (30 years) the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland continued – and that was between two groups who shared a similar ethnic and cultural background and were of different sects within the same religion. Some of the Palestinian interviewees recall joining in the cheers in the streets of Gaza’s cities after the Hamas attacks, often before the true horror of what Hamas’s fighters had done reached them, and one young Palestinian noted that since Hamas took control of Gaza following Israel’s withdrawal of military occupation in 2005 (in a free and fair election, by the way, though in the nearly two decades since they haven’t allowed another one that might vote them out of power), they’ve set up a dictatorship of their own in which no public criticism of Hamas, its leaders or its policies, has been allowed. It also remains maddeningly unclear just why Hamas ordered the attacks on Israel when they did and what they hoped to achieve by them (just as the world, or at least this individual in it, remains stumped by what Osama bin Laden and his minions at al-Qaeda hoped to accomplish with the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon).

I suspect that part of the motivation was the leaders of Hamas were worried that as more and more Arab countries normalized relations with Israel and signed the so-called “Abraham Accords,” the Palestinian cause would lose support from moderate Arab governments and the Palestinians themselves would be left without any allies in the region (aside from Iran, which sponsors both Hamas and the Hezbollah militia in northern Palestine and southern Lebanon which the Israelis are also now targeting). So they staged the attacks on the 50th anniversary of the start of the 1973 Yom Kippur War (Muslim terrorists in particular are big on anniversaries; the September 11, 2001 attacks took place on the anniversary of an earlier 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center which failed dismally) to get the world to take notice and say, “We are still here.” Along with Barnwell’s interview, another article on the PBS Web site by Patrice Taddonio (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/gaza-israel-october-7-israeli-palestinian-hamas-war-documentary-excerpt/) uses material from the film to profile two young women caught up in the conflict on each side. “I’ve forgotten who Ghada was and how I used to live,” says a 23-year-old Palestinian woman named Ghada. “If I want to remind myself, I go back to my phone and look at photos. My dream was to start a solar energy company. To be honest, my dream now is for my family and I to make it out alive.” Another woman, a 17-year-old Israeli hostage named Agam, said, “I can only remember a sort of sigh of relief as I was about to die. After five hours of being scared to death, it’s finally happening. I certainly didn’t think they would kidnap us. It didn’t cross my mind. … I was trying to come to terms with the fact that my life is now in the hands of a terrorist organization: From now on, I have to rely on Hamas. Of course, I didn’t trust them. I was dying from fear. Their control over me was total.” Agam told Taddonio, “I thought, in another universe, we might live together,” but now she believes “the gap is so deep” and “the opportunity is gone.” Likewise Ghada said, “My family, or I, could die at any moment. There’s no future at all.”