"Voices from Gaza": Barred From American Television?

By Pat McDonnell Twair

"Voices From Gaza," a polished, low key documentary featuring the testimonies of 15 Palestinians from Israeli-occupied Gaza, made its US debut to live audiences under private sponsorship at universities and other institutions March 17-27 in Washington, DC, Houston, Austin, Berkeley and Los Angeles. To date, however, not a single television station has dared to show it.

By contrast, the 51-minute documentary has been shown on television in England, Canada, New Zealand, Japan and throughout the Middle East, and earned excellent reviews everywhere it was shown.

Filmmakers Antonia Caccia, a British Jew, and Maysoon Pachachi, an Iraqi, accompanied their production on its US tour. When asked why Americans are not able to view the documentary on television, both cautiously replied that executives of various PBS stations have told them "the time is not right" to air 'Voices.'

When this explanation was offered during a March 26 interview on KGIL radio in Los Angeles, a caller pointedly asked Pachachi if responsibility lay with the pro-Israel movement that for one year tried to prevent American producer Jo Franklin-Trout's documentary, "Days of Rage: the Young Palestinians," from being aired by PBS.

Private Approval, Public Caution

It is apparent from the favorable private and cautious public reaction it has attracted that self-appointed pro-Israeli thought-police are working within the media establishment to bar "Voices" from US television.

"Voices" differs from "Days of Rage," which encountered the same initial resistance, in that the former does not show scenes of confrontation. Instead it focuses on the grinding daily misery of occupation, from the open sewers and lack of space and freedom in the refugee camps, to the ubiquitous Israeli soldiers armed with machine guns in their patrolling military jeeps.

Geared to an audience unfamiliar with the displacement of the Arab population from 1947 to 1949, the film reviews the situation since 1946 and interviews Palestinians ranging from a woman who lost all her young children in the 1947 fighting to a mother whose elbow was shattered by an Israeli bullet as she tried to protect her children in 1988.

English subtitles translating the statements of the Palestinians interviewed are works of poetry. But then, most Arabs speak in poetry. Startling are the remarks of a Gazan farmer whose land has just been grabbed for an Israeli settlement. "Thanking" his Israeli overlords for their beneficence, the farmer notes that before they took his land the Israeli occupiers always taxed him for services he never received. "If these wonderful Israelis could do it," he states, "now they would put a meter on my nose and tax me for the air I breathe."

Both Caccia and Pachachi were born in 1947. The former was graduated from the National Film School in 1975. US-born Pachachi was graduated from the London Film School in 1974. Caccia's first film, "End of Dialogue," was one of the first documentaries to portray life inside the black townships of South Africa. It was shown by the BBC in Britain and by CBS-TV in the US, where it won an Emmy. Her other credits include" The War in Zimbabwe;" "The Big K," about a coal miners' strike in Yorkshire; and "On Our Land," a documentary about a Palestinian village in Israel. Pachachi's British film credits include editing the films "Mindor" and "Widowo" for Thames TV, before she formed August Films in London in August 1987.

"At the onset of the intifada," Pachachi said, "people in London asked why the Palestinians were throwing rocks. We decided to go there and let them know why on film."

Reminders of South Africa

It wasn't an easy task. Caccia's camera and soundmen, who had been with her on location in South Africa, expressed their astonishment at the similarities between the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and the treatment of Blacks in South Africa.

"At one point, we were in a Palestinian home when we heard a commotion," stated Caccia. "We stepped outside to see seven Palestinian men standing against a wall and being beaten by Israeli soldiers. When our cameraman started filming, the Israeli troops spotted us and one soldier grabbed the camera, trashed the film, and started beating our cameraman."

Caccia would have been next, except that, according to her account, a Palestinian passerby rounded the corner and happened upon the scene. When the Israeli soldiers began hitting him, she seized the opportunity to slip away.

"The complete disregard of human rights is a fact of life in Gaza," Caccia said. "Every moment is lived in tremendous fear because each Gazan, whether 4 years old or 90, knows violent death could occur at any time, and there is no authority to protest to. This is a state of war." Added Pachachi: "I can't describe the state of exaltation with which our crew returned. They had witnessed the indescribable sacrifices of having family members maimed, jailed and murdered. Yet the spirit and willingness to sacrifice for freedom inspired these Palestinians to say they were ready for martyrdom for independence."

Informing the Uninformed

At the March 25 screening in Los Angeles, a teenage Gazan who had been shot by Israeli troops at his home in Beach Camp before he came to the US to study, asked the filmmakers why they hadn't shown more examples of the horrors Israelis have wreaked on Gaza's civilians.

Pachachi explained the film aims to inform the uninformed with understated interviews. The actual recording of commonplace Israeli atrocities would only earn disbelief from Western viewers misinformed for more than 40 years about "Zionist Israeli benevolence" toward Palestinians.

"The situation is far worse in Gaza today," she added in a radio interview. "I doubt that we would be allowed to film there now. Many camps are deprived of water, electricity and phones for up to three days, while, in the meantime, no one knows what the Israeli military is up to inside the camps."

Readers and educators can purchase or rent this excellent documentary from Icarus Films, 153 Waverly Place, 8th Floor. New York, NY 10014.

Pat McDonnell Twair is a free-lance writer based in California.