BBC's Antisemitic Documentary Of Israel's Origins

Trigger

Just (6/15/2014) saw this video on YouTube “Israel : The Real History of Israel's Origins (Full Documentary)”. It appears same video is posted multiple times on YouTube by different users.

The exact provenance of this video or authorship is not clear from these YouTube postings, but it appears to be a BBC documentary. I was unable to google this video as coming from BBC.

The BBC pretended this documentary to be balanced and to present both sides of the story, but I am afraid it is not.

Several Eye Popping Claims

That Israeli forces committed several massacres of innocent Arab civilians (women, children, elder) during the 1948 war. I am personally not aware of a number of such massacres. Unfortunately, I do not have the time to investigate the authenticity of such claims or the circumstances and details thereof.

That the Israeli forces systematically displaced large numbers of Arab families from their properties and forced them to flee. This claim contrasts with the widely known story that it was Arab leaders who asked the Arabs to leave Israel.

I believe, there were a few other claims that I cannot remember at the moment without watching the documentary again.

Deir Yassin Massacre

There is a lengthy article in Wikipedia on this subject here. This one serves only as an example. I am not sure whether the above documentary reported on this one.

Anyway, the Wikipedia article is long and here is what I took away from it:

1. Whether this war incident qualifies as a massacre is quite debatable
2. It appears that some of the brutal acts (e.g. throwing hand grenades into family homes) were due to house to house combat in a village
3. It appears that both warring parties, i.e. the Jews and the Arabs, may have spread rumors about atrocities committed at this event for propaganda or rivalry purposes
4. The article mentions that Jewish villagers from a neighboring village came and they tried to prevent atrocities

A Few Observations

BBC had basically only one and the same Arab man present their side of the story. There were in total only a very few Arab men interviewed over a significant time period for this documentary.

The documentary omitted quite a few things:

1. Hundred thousands of jews were brutally expelled from their ancestral homelands in Arab countries
2. The close relationship between leading Arabs and Hitler (the documentary only slightly hinted at this subject)
3. The documentary did not really show that there were a number of Arab pogroms against jews before the 1948 war.
4. The documentary fails to shed more light on how much land the jews actually bought from Arabs and what they paid for it