Viewing the intifada stitch by stitch - broadcast of 'Days of Rage' on PBS - column

National Review, Oct 13, 1989 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

Viewing the Intifada Stitch by Stitch It required more stamina than my own to sit through the whole one and one-half hours of "Days of Rage," the controversial documentary shown by PBS giving the Palestinian side of the intifada. Israeli loyalists did what they could to prevent its showing, insisting that funds had traveled their labyrinthine way from Kuwait on over to the producers of the documentary, which representation was indignantly denied by said producers. The PBS compromise was to sandwich in "Days of Rage" between ten minutes given over to the Israeli position at the outset of the entire two-and-one-half-hour program, and an hour's discussion of the documentary's failing after it was over.

I gave the documentary fifty minutes and went on to other pursuits, and the reason for this is relevant to the great argument between the Palestinians and the Israelis.

First there was the theatrical problem. It simply consumes too much time to have a question put forward in English, translated into Arabic, replied to in Arabic, and translated back into English. So that you get such sequence as:

"Do you mean that the Israelis will not permit you to rebuild the house that they destroyed six months ago?"

"Bushiwi sanguine serdatipo lassilo eddali simiisi hala bushi?"

"Bushi nilli construqui halla setti alli bonni haska tutilili hjalla messi juju hoo hoo."

"The Israeli authorities will not permit reconstruction for one year since the incident they falsely accused us of initiating."

That was hard enough on the nerves, but then there was the scene-after-scene problem of what one might call the endless black eye (fractured leg, broken arm, beaten back, mutilated finger). The awful physical grossness of the intifada is best presented vividly and briefly. To travel to one house with four rooms and 24 inhabitants, to explain twice that there are 650,000 Palestinians crowded into the tiny Gaza Strip, to show signs of physical mauling in protracted footage pays little heed to the sensibility of the viewer. To feel indignation over Israeli brutality does not require that one visit every black eye in a Palestinian hospital. How many corpses does one need to view to understand the horrors of Auschwitz?

The Israeli position is that the only way to deal with Palestinian terrorism is by counterterrorism, however modified. For all we know, the 16-year-old with the first black eye had aimed a stone at an Israeli guard and clobbered him. The issue between the Israelis and the Palestinians isn't really the point of the documentary, which can't hope to dispose authoritatively of the question of whether the Israelis have any business taking over the West Bank 22 years after occupying it in a defensive war. The real question has to do with the nature of Israeli defense methods.

A bright young shcolar put it this way the following day. "If the physical mutilation we saw had been done by Syrians, nobody would be surprised. That is the way those people treat each other, let alone their enemies. But if the physical mutilation we saw had been done by Spaniards, the world would deeply resent it. The question then is legitimately asked, Do the Israelis, in the conduct of their defense against the intifada, think of themselves as Mideasterners in their practices, or do they think of themselves as Westerners? Becuase if the latter, they cannot excuse their behavior."

I think that fair enough, and of course the criticism is relentlessly made by a large number of Israelis who deplore the behavior of Mr. Yitzhak Rabin's military even if they do not deplore the colonization of the West Bank. Collective punishment isn't civilized practice, and the Israelis correctly pride themselves on exhibiting the fruit of Western civilization in the Mideast. The larger question--Who owns the West Bank?--will probably be settled not by reason, but by force majeure: Who can, over the long run, establish their de facto control of it? If the Israelis prevail, they will need to rewrite their commitment to political democracy, given that a minority of 5 per cent cannot reasonably assert control fovever of a land 95 per cent alien without coming up with a South African formula to defend their practices.

The Israelis' insistence that their motivation is purely defensive withers on the vine of Biblical irredentism. Scant time was given, during the one hour viewed, either to the disposition of the Palestinians to submit to carefully monitored disarmament, or to the disposition of the Israelis to settle for carefully monitored disarmament. Meanwhile, outrages continue on both sides, and though we need to know about them, we do not need to view the wounds stitch by stitch.