Norma Percy has produced documentaries on some the world’s most volatile regions, with The Death of Yugoslavia (1995), Iran and the West (2009), The Iraq War (2013) and most recently, Putin Vs the West (2023), which was reviewed by me earlier here.
But in 1998 she made a six part series on what is surely the most contested corner of the entire globe; The 50 Years War: Israel and the Arabs.
What Percy manages to do, somehow, is to persuade practically every single one of the principle players to sit down and talk to her, on the record. The reason they agree to do so is that she allows them to articulate their views, whatever they are, which she presents in a transparent and entirely neutral manner.
Here, we hear from a host of Israeli defence, foreign and prime ministers, including Benjamin Netanyahu, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir, a wide range of combatants, negotiators and minsters from both the PLO and a number of its splinter groups, from former U.S. presidents Jimmy Carter, George Bush and Bill Clinton, from former KGB operatives, Jordan’s King Hussein and from an array of senior diplomatic and military figures from every corner of the region.
It’s both comprehensive and consistently illuminating, with probably the most surprising revelation being the fact that it was in fact the Russians who’d quietly triggered the Six-Day War in June of 1967.
They’d looked at how stretched the Americans were over in Vietnam, and had concluded that opening up a second war front in the Middle East could be the final nail in their coffin. So they put a great deal of effort into convincing everyone in the region that the Israelis were amassing troops on their border with Syria. Which, plainly, they were not.
They even went so far as to try and convince the Israelis that that was what they were doing, even though they knew perfectly well that they were making the whole thing up!
Then, in the aftermath of that war, after Yasser Arafat and the PLO had planted themselves in Jordan, a faction within the PLO took it upon themselves to go to war with their hosts, on the grounds that they clearly weren’t being sufficiently supportive of them.
And before he knew it, King Hussein found himself under attack from Russian-provided Syrian tanks that were on their way to Jordan, funded and supported by Egypt, to help their Palestinian brothers with their fight against the Jordanians. Arab against Arab.
So the King turned to the only military force capable of coming to his aid. But the Americans insisted that they could have nothing to do with what was going on. It would have to be the Israelis. So the King of Jordan was finally rescued by the arrival of Israeli jets, that sent the Syrian tanks scurrying back to whence they’d set off from.
King Hussein of Jordan, by the way, exudes effortless grace and charm, and is the most marvellous advertisement for breeding and the kind of education that only obscene wealth can provide you with. And the contrast he provides to the sight of those similarly schooled clowns who’ve been knocking the furniture over in Westminster for the past decade or so is, to put it mildly, stark.
There are, inevitably, one or two gaps. I was surprised that there was no reference to the way in which the price of oil was used by the Arab countries in the wake of the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Notwithstanding which, this is a landmark television series.
But it’s impossible not to note that, for all the violence, bloodshed and hatred that was then in the air, when the series ended in 1998, that was, we now know, a high point in Israeli-Arab relations.
Whatever about the first 50 years, the next 25 would, unimaginably, see a significant deterioration.
Very unusually, you can see all 6 episodes on YouTube:
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