c. 1999 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ The Public Broadcasting System’s new documentary,”The 50 Years War: Israel and the Arabs,”opens and closes with a camera shot of the same tree _ the tree framing five decades of history compacted into five hours of television.

As the tree sways at the show’s debut, the narrator invokes,”Palestine, a land divided.”At the end of the five hours, the same tree sways and the same narrator concludes,”After 50 years of war and suffering, a halting, tentative partition of Palestine was underway.” While the first reference to division refers to the establishment of the state of Israel, the second, that”halting, tentative partition”is a reference to last fall’s Wye River agreement in which Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed on terms of granting additional Palestinians authority in the West Bank.

In between, the documentary shows, are five decades of blood shed on, and by, both sides.”The 50 Years War: Israel and The Arabs”was a co-production of the BBC and Boston public TV station WGBH. It has already been shown in the United Kingdom, where it was well received.

It apparently did not fare as well in the Middle East. London’s Middle East Broadcasting satellite distributed the program throughout the Arab world, however it is uncertain how many nations actually broadcast the program.

In Israel, the program was relegated to a difficult time slot _ Saturday afternoon, the middle of the Jewish Sabbath when religious Jews do not watch television and secular Jews are caught up in soccer games and shopping.

The five hours include 96 interviews, including an impressive number of senior Arab military and intelligence officers, many largely unknown to American viewers. There are Egyptian, Lebanese, Jordanian and Syrian spies, soldiers and diplomats. And, of course, their Israeli counterparts.

Jimmy Carter, George Bush, Netanyahu, Yitzhak Shamir, Ezer Weizman, Shimon Peres and former U.S. Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, George Shultz, James Baker and Warren Christopher round out the cast.

Worth noting are the extensive comments by King Hussein of Jordan and Israel’s most controversial and successful general, Ariel Sharon.”We did not clear anything with political entities,”said Zvi Dor-Ner, the series’ executive producer at WGBH.

Dor-Ner is a former Israeli television producer who has produced U.S. public TV documentaries for two decades. In the early 1960s, he spent more than two years in Israeli Army intelligence.

While the five hours focus on the region’s intertwining military, diplomatic and political histories, the documentary does not consider the question of religion _ despite the problems that growing Jewish and Muslim religious extremism have presented to the peace process.”We have not dealt with it,”Dor-Ner said.”We could have, but we didn’t.” Dor-Ner did say 1967’s Six-Day War had strong resonance with Israel’s religious political parties.”It was the religious parties’ ministers who were the most wary about the Six-Day War,”he said.”At the time they did not feel that the land of Israel was a religious ideal. But today, the religious parties’ leadership are very much on that part of the continuum that greater Israel has to be part of Israel.”What I find interesting is that for many years, religious people in Israel did not consider that issue central to their religion,”he said.

The program also shows the change in the Palestine Liberation Organization from a military, terrorist-based movement set on destroying Israel to one seemingly willing to compromise to obtain a Palestinian state.”The Palestinians did realize the errors of their ways,”Dor-Ner said.”They realized that for themselves much earlier than they realized it to the rest of us. They realized that Israel was not a colonial entity _ as if you beat the French out of Algeria and they go back to France.”The truth of the situation is that if you want to adapt any one single dogma, you trip,”he said.”If you want to adopt some kind of ideological posture, it collapses on you.” (OPTIONAL TRIM _ STORY MAY END HERE)

Aside from chronicling the region’s well-known wars, the documentary also explores the often shifting relations Israel has had with it Arab neighbors.

In one scene from September 1970, for example, Palestinian guerrillas attempted to take over Jordan with Syrian tank support. Caught in the bind was King Hussein. Through American intermediaries, the king received Israeli support through a show of force to turn back the Syrian tanks and cripple the Palestinian effort.

On camera, Israeli Air Force commander Mordechai Hod recalled:”I got the authorization to send Phantoms to fly over these tanks. I briefed the leader of the formation myself. I told him, `Fly over them. Leave no doubt that they see and hear you. Make mock attacks so that they understand what we want them to do, which is turn around and go back’ … The tanks turned around and went back.” Added Dor-Ner:”It is exactly this kind of situation that makes you realize you cannot ignore each other. Everybody, whether they want it or not, is living with everybody else. And in that interaction, there is a more powerful motivator to make it work out; the notion of the necessity for compromise, not necessarily because we love each other, just because nobody is going elsewhere.” Dor-Ner said he heard one of the best observations about the conflict from,”a totally uneducated and extremely wise Yemenite Jew.”The man told him that one tragedy of the past half-century has been”`that our conflict is with the Palestinians, and that they are such nice people.’ In the noise of the conflict, this kind of realization is not always made.” Eds: Check local listings or local PBS outlets for airing time in your area.)

DEA END FINNIGAN