Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 1998, Page 106

Video Review

People and the Land

Produced by Tom Hayes, Diverse Media Zone, Inc., 1997. 57 minutes, List: $25, AET Book Club : $20.

Reviewed by Jane Adas

The point of Tom Hayes' 1997 documentary, "People and the Land," is clear: what Israelis are doing to Palestinians is an American issue. It should be of concern not only to Muslim Americans, or Arab Americans, or Jewish Americans, but to all tax-paying Americans.

The film begins with a shot panning across the legend written in stone on the Internal Revenue Service building: "Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society." Then it explains that $77,726,000,000,000 of those tax dollars (the total figure at the moment Hayes edited the film and a sum that increases by $15 million per day) have been granted to a country that is carrying out a most uncivilized occupation.

Hayes juxtaposes two facts. Since 1967 Israel has been the largest single recipient of U.S. foreign aid. Sections 502(B) and 116(a) of the Foreign Assistance Act prohibit military and economic aid to any country that engages in "a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights." He then demonstrates the human cost of this contradiction, both in Israel and in the United States.

We see the economic havoc that results when the occupation authorities close off a street in East Jerusalem to Palestinian traffic. We hear from Palestinian Christians who cannot worship in Jerusalem, which for the first time in history is closed to Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank. We see Israeli settlers breezing past a checkpoint at which a Palestinian ambulance is held up while a child dies. We see a wall built for security purposes around a refugee camp on which Hebrew graffiti is written: "It's cheaper to kill them." Jews-only settlements, built in violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, are contrasted with one of the more than 2,000 Palestinian homes that have been demolished in violation of Article 53 of the same Convention to which Israel is a signatory.

We are told that Palestinian schools were shut down for three years during the intifada, creating "more targets on the streets" for Israeli soldiers. An Israeli human rights worker says that more children under the age of 16 were killed by Israeli forces in the sixth year of the intifada than in the first, in spite of an Israeli military spokesman's claim that "Israel worked hard to develop non-lethal means of control," such as plastic and rubber bullets, as part of its policy of "purity of arms." A Palestinian doctor then provides evidence that, when fired at close range, these rubber bullets have in fact produced fatalities as well as 46,000 handicapped children. We hear Israeli soldiers shooting into a crowd of mourners at a funeral for a Palestinian youth they had killed earlier. Eerily echoing Shakespeare's Shylock, a Palestinian father says, "Am I less than you? I have ears; you have ears. I have hands; you have hands. As God created you, He created me. Why should I be oppressed?"

"People and the Land" convincingly demonstrates Israel's "consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights." So it seemed like a good choice to show at an event sponsored by the Columbia University chapter of Amnesty International, the human rights organization.

The first problem was that some groups objected to the phrase "ethnic cleansing" as a description of Israeli policy on the flyer announcing the event. The film does show Palestinians talking about "a policy of slow transfer," of the planning of occupation authorities to rid the area of Palestinians as a demographic problem by making life so miserable for them that they will be pushed out in order "to build a pure state for a certain kind of people." Nevertheless, Columbia student officers of the Amnesty chapter replaced every single flyer with new ones omitting the offensive words.

After the film was shown, it was the audience's turn. Most of them were astonished by seeing what Palestinians are forced to endure. However, one woman said the film was unfair because it didn't show how Palestinians oppress Israelis. Another threw her hair barrette at the writer saying, "If this were a rock, you'd be dead." Leaving aside the fact that rocks are hardly as lethal as the M-16s Israeli soldiers wield, her mini-drama was intended to invert everything we had just seen by portraying Palestinians as the aggressors in the conflict.

Actually, the Columbia University reaction demonstrated that in the United States, particularly in New York, it is unusual and even risky to present the Palestinian side of the conflict. A Swiss lawyer told me afterward that what he found most remarkable was that people were surprised by what they had seen. What he did not realize is that this is information that is not readily available in American media, despite the fact that we pride ourselves on being the most open society in the world.

THE INFORMATION BLOCKADE

As Tom Hayes explains in the film, all reporting that comes out of Israel has to pass through two levels of military censorship. He describes it as "a prism between reality and your brain." Then, in the United States, information about the Israeli-Palestinian situation comes up against equally formidable methods of thought control—what Hayes calls the Information Blockade. In the most recent issue of the Link (Volume 30, Issue 5), he describes the methods used to prevent "People and the Land" from being seen or, failing that, to delegitimize him as a filmmaker.

And then there are tactics of harassment. In response to showing the film at Columbia, the Zionist media-watch organization CAMERA has been hounding Amnesty International. To avoid further unpleasantness, Amnesty may discourage other chapters from doing the same.

Nobody in the audience challenged Hayes' figures regarding the human cost in this country of the billions of dollars we export free of charge to Israel. That this is one of the main targets of the Information Blockade is suggested by the fact that the number of copies of Richard Curtiss' "U.S. Aid to Israel: The Subject No One Mentions" (Link, Volume 30, Issue 4) reported missing from libraries is unprecedented.

Some of Hayes' comparisons: all the funding for the National Endowment for the Arts since its creation in 1966 amounts to less than eight months of aid to Israel; the $10 million cut in funding for PBS equals 16 hours of aid to Israel; in 1996 cuts in programs for America's poor totaled $5.7 billion, cuts in aid to Israel were zero, aid to Israel was $5.5 billion. "From the mouths of the poor onto the necks of the Palestinians."

No wonder organizations like CAMERA are agitated. If Americans knew, they might want to do something about it.

Both Link articles mentioned are available from Americans for Middle East Understanding. Room 245, 475 Riverside Drive, New York, NY 10115-0241; telephone (212) 870-2053; e-mail AMEU@aol.com

The video "People and the Land" is available from the AET Book Club Catalog .