Coming to PBS today, Tuesday, June 30: 1913: SEEDS OF CONFLICT
Ben Loeterman’s look back at the origins of Middle Eastern strife made its festival debut at the Middle East Scholars Association fest in DC last November. In addition to an extensive series of educational and community screenings, the film has also been featured at the Global Peace, Atlanta Jewish, and Houston Palestine film fests.
As noted by his film’s title, Loeterman focuses his attention on a discrete period of time in Palestine’s history which is posited here as integral to the seemingly intractable quagmire of Israeli/Palestinian relations that has developed over the past century. Notably, this pre-World War I period is concerned with the Ottoman Empire, not the later British rule which began in 1917 which has often been the subject of more scrutiny in its role in later historical developments. The world of Palestine as detailed in Loeterman’s docudrama is a land where a majority population of Muslims coexisted generally peacefully with both Christian and Sephardic Jewish minorities, with all groups adopting an overarching sense of Ottoman identity. This begins to change in response to other global forces, chiefly the mass influx of Ashkenazi Jews to Palestine, seeking to escape persecution. As argued here by scholars, in contrast to the generally assimilated Sephardic Jews, this wave of new Jewish immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe steadfastly held to their own identities, language, and culture, espousing Zionism to lay the groundwork for the establishment of a Jewish homeland, and in so doing, alienated Arab neighbors, who responded in kind. While the film’s subjects speculate that a peaceful solution may have been possible, the outbreak of World War I extinguished this hope. Loeterman attempts to liven up what is at heart a talking heads heavy historical doc with dramatized re-enactments featuring monologues from contemporary figures. While the authenticity of their writings is appreciated, the use of actors in period garb are ultimately just additional talking heads in period costume, and an awkward distraction from the more compelling history lesson offered here, including not quite enough on Noah Sokolovsky’s recently rediscovered 1913 documentary, THE LIFE OF THE JEWS OF PALESTINE.
what (not) to doc 