The Price For a Nation

 

 

Harry’s Place records that

Anti-semitic incidents reach record level in July 2014

 

One anti-Semitic incident was missing from those statistics.

At a time in history when the Middle East is in flames and running with blood and the Israel/Palestine conflict is oft cited as the catalyst for all other conflicts you might think it was an incendiary move by the BBC when it decided this was the perfect time to add fuel to the flames by broadcasting a series that sides with Islamic terrorists and promotes the destruction of Israel.

 

The BBC thought otherwise.

 

‘You know what “clue” is in Ancient Greek? It’s “thread”.

One thread to pull it all together.

And all I have to do is find it.’

So said MI5’s Hugh Hayden-Hoyle in the BBC’s ‘The Honourable Woman’.

Many, if not all, reviews of the series have declared that it is an immensely complex and deeply plotted piece but in reality it is quite simple…once you find the thread, the message it wishes to impart.

That thread that pulls everything together for the BBC’s ‘The Honourable Woman’ is  the terrible things Palestinians are prepared to do, forced to do by Israeli tyranny and oppression in the writer’s eyes, in order to establish a Palestinian state….the thread throughout the series is that ‘price for a nation ‘.

The politics of the programme were pretty much ignored by the reviewers, not bothering to ask if there was a message in the tale, possibly as any genuine assessment would not paint the BBC in a good light,  though one reviewer declared that Palestinians would be upset as ‘once again they find themselves cast as the villains’.

The series did indeed revolve around a Palestinian group kidnapping and murdering its way to its intended goal, a Palestinian state, with the connivance of the USA and a rogue UK MI5 officer.

However….such unpleasant actions, we were repeatedly told, were the inescapable and tragic result of decades of Israeli terrorism, murder and lies against the defenceless Palestinians who had no other weapons but terrorism…a narrative echoed by sympathetic BBC reporters in the recent Gaza conflict…though that is somewhat turning the truth upon its head….the Israelis being the ones who have suffered 70 years of terrorism, attempted invasions and ethnic cleansing.

 

Here you can see that narrative in black and white as a Palestinian excuses her duplicity and the murder of the Jewish Stein family…..

Atika:

I lost all my family.
All my family.

Have you seen the hills? What they’re building? Every day and every day? What you try don’t change anything for my people.  We need so much more.

Nessa:

What else can I do? Do you need me to die? Me?

Atika:

Oh, no. No….But if it’s the price for a nation I’m sorry to tell you, yes.

 

 

Here is the BBC laying out the Palestinian’s case for mitigation and absolvement for their use of terrorism……an analogy where the writer uses the Palestinian’s murder and rape of Nessa Stein’s family as a metaphor for what the Jews have supposedly done to Palestine…and in turn turning the Palestinians into ‘animals’, uncultured and violent…just one more reason to hate the Jews…..and in the end Nessa, being told these ‘truths’, agrees and accepts ‘her’ guilt saying ‘I deserve it‘….Nessa is ‘Israel’ here….the writer making her the guilty symbol of the Israeli state, and making her agree that Israel is to blame…..

 

Zahid Al-Zahid (Fatah commander):

Do you know who I am? I am Kasim’s grandfather.
My son raped you.
On my orders.
Mine.
One of my soldiers, also, he killed your father.
On my orders.
What I have ordered goes beyond all imagining.
So I must ask you if there was a knife on the table between us here what would you do? Your brother is dead.
My orders.
The hatred you feel for me right now only matches what I have felt for your people all my life.

I know you won’t take it because you think you are better than me….More cultured, more sophisticated, more human.
And I hate you all the more because you have never stopped to think why that is.

 

Nessa Stein:

No, I have.
I have.
And I know the answer.
And I’ve known it since I first asked and after every dreadful thing that’s happened since and the answer’s always the same.
I deserve it.
All of it.

 

 

So that’s the message from the BBC…the Jews deserve everything they get from the Palestinians…all of it.

A message reinforced when Atika, as she lay dying, spat out the demand to ‘Get off my land!’

 

This long drawn out BBC series set in Israel/Palestine, ‘The Honourable Woman’, has been a blatantly pro-Palestinian State tract all along….with the message that Israel is an illegitimate state that should be erased from the map….a message silently bolstered by the camera lingering on a map in a Palestinian official’s office showing ‘Palestine’ as including the whole of Israel….

One of the few comments that touches slightly on the politics of the programme is this as the Guardian applauds Blick’s apparent  skill in negotiating the political minefield:

Does anyone perceive Blick taking sides? I thought he walked a difficult tightrope with real skill. Calling for equality of opportunity with the statement: “Terror thrives in poverty. It dies in wealth,” felt powerful without being contentious.

The Guardian tells us that the writer, Hugo Blick, also the producer and director,

Chose no sides and offered no political resolution.

That’s clearly not true…he sided with the Palestinians and his political resolution was a one state solution…in other words the end of Israel and the erasure of a Jewish homeland and safe haven.

As the conflict in Gaza commenced the BBC no doubt thought that The Honourable Woman could have its place in the BBC battle order as it agitated against the Israeli state…..it is a ‘weapon’ of war as much as any gun or bomb…it is a ‘smart bomb’ delivered into thousands, if not millions, of homes around the world bearing not high explosives but a poisonous message….a message delivered by the BBC on behalf of Hamas, Fatah and all those who wish to ‘wipe Israel off the map’.

That explosive message is that Israel, the ‘Jewish state’, should be dismantled and the Palestinians allowed to take the land of Israel….needless to say the BBC glosses over what would happen to the Jews, merely implying that all would be peace and harmony as the love and understanding flowed between the two peoples.

The smart bomb that is intended to target the secure walls of the Israeli ‘house’ whilst not killing the occupants, merely forcing them to flee into exile, once again.

Hugo Blick declares he has no axe to grind, the series is apolitical….

The Honourable Woman is a work of fiction and yes, it does look at real and current politics in the Middle East but, I am certainly not offering any actual, specific answers to such a complex and emotionally provocative issue except to explore what happens to fictional characters who do.

My political sympathies and/or ideologies are not relevant to the story which stands on its own particular platform.

However he admits that he has a strong interest in those politics…..

Here this fascination comes from a lifelong interest and careful consideration of the real world conflict that serves as a back drop to this story – but necessarily it only goes so far as to relate to the motivations of my fictional characters.

It is important that viewers and critics watch the entire series – as intended – before making judgements on the characters or story arc because great care has been taken to explore this complexity.

 

 

The series though had threaded through it continuous slurs against Israel and apologia for Palestinian atrocities.

As Nessa Stein was being raped by her Palestinian captor we saw that he needed to take drugs to enable him to carry out the crime.  Essentially we were being told he is a decent man driven by circumstances and unable to do it unless off his head on drugs.  As he went to rape Nessa he waved photographs of his wife and child, killed by the Israelis, in Nessa’s face as yet more proof that it is the anguish and mental pain caused by those evil Israelis that excuses his actions.

 

Blick’s tale is a shallow, naive allegory of the Middle East…Nessa Stein’s zionist, arms dealing father is the old Israel, or rather the Israel that it still is, ‘armed and dangerous’, whilst the daughter, Nessa Stein, that ‘Honourable Woman’, is the new Israel, or rather the ‘one state’ solution where the walls are taken down and there are no barriers any more between the Jews and the Palestinians and everyone lives happily everafter.

The father is killed off, Blick signalling his belief that Israel should be destroyed as a state….Blick admits that the conflict is embodied within the characters…what happens to the characters a metaphor for what happens in the conflict…. ‘In The Honourable Woman the conflict is used as a creative device – a reflection of the internal conflict of the central character.’

Nessa tells us that strong walls were needed for Israel to thrive at its birth, and that’s what her father offered, strong walls for a fledgling nation….but those walls aren’t needed now.
She goes on, telling us that Israel’s GDP in the previous year exceeded $220bn…a fledgling nation no more….the Palestinians on the other hand had a GDP of only $4bn.
She tells us ‘What a difference a wall makes.’

Which wall would that be Mr Blick?  Could he possibly be making a not so subtle allusion to the Israeli security barrier?  It must come down!

Nessa goes on to reveal that ‘I believe in Israel’  but there needs to be ‘fundamental change….the greatest threat to Israel is Palestinian poverty, terror thrives in poverty, it dies in wealth…..The strongest wall we can help Israel to maintain is one through which equality of opportunity can pass.’

Blick is saying that that wall must come down, it must be breached, he is saying Israel must be destroyed as a Jewish nation.

And Blick is not above using Jewish stereotypes…the moaning wife of Nessa’s brother being an archetypal ‘Jewess’ whilst the Jewish businessman, Shlomo, wanting the contract for laying communications cables, is the Pub ‘humorists’ idea of a Jewish businessman…brash, rude, loud and obnoxious….add onto that a racist talking of that ‘Palestinian bastard’ and subliminally suggesting that Arabs are ‘fucking camel jockeys’….oye vay!

It should also be noted that the BBC was happy to screen this programme despite it involving the kidnapping of a Palestinian child.  No cultural sensitivities, no postponing of the broadcast, at a time when a Palestinian teenager has indeed been kidnapped and killed.

The Guardian certainly liked what it saw and applauded its ‘relevance’…check the link they provide:
‘This new eight-parter is among the most exciting TV events of the year (pace the World Cup). The opener didn’t disappoint, weaving not one but two whodunnits – the suicide/murder of Samir Meshal and kidnap of Kasim – around the most intractable political issue of the day (it could hardly feel more timely) and the life of the woman in the middle.’

There were some nice anti-Semitic touches in this episodes that must have played well with some.

We had one character called ‘Yaniv Levi’ described as that ‘horrible, horrible Israeli terrorist’ (there are of course so many of those)….whilst the Palestinian ones were all conflicted and anguished, driven to do ‘horrible things’ by dire circumstances forced upon them by the cruel world.  The Israeli ‘terrorist’  seemed to be just a gratuitous creation designed purely to suggest it is not only Palestinians who are capable of such things.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Levi was made to look as unattractive as possible with copious amounts of body hair, slumping fatly in a track suit with a Star of David made up of rifles that the camera lingered over for some reason whenever he came into shot……some sort of message there?  He was later described as ‘an Israeli attack dog….he always has a price….what Jew doesn’t.’

Good old BBC, feeding the stereotype and making up a few new ones.

And what to make of the Stein group’s logo?  Looks remarkably like a rocket launch from Gaza with someone cheering it on.  Just a coincidence I’m sure…..it must mean something else entirely……

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Palestinian commander ordering the rape and killing is from Fatah not Hamas…why Fatah and not Hamas in Gaza?  Fatah being the BBC’s least favourite Palestinian terrorist group….the BBC once dismissing Hamas’s murderous rampage in 2006 when it threw Fatah members off roof tops and dragged them from hospital beds to shoot them in front of their families as merely ‘clearing out a corrupt and violent Fatah’.  That’s OK then.
The Fatah commander gloried in the ‘poisoning’ of the Stein bloodline with Palestinian blood….

‘The grandson of Eli Stein with my blood in its veins…first I ordered his death and now I take his heritage….how great is his defeat!’

A clear message…the Palestinian militants have fought the Israelis and killed many but the real battle will only be won by destroying the ‘heritage’, the bloodline, the purity of the Jewish state by flooding Israel with Palestinian people…the ‘right of return‘…in other words destroying the Jewish nature of the Israeli state…the whole reason for its existence….that second phase can only begin when Israel drops its guard, its military defence (represented by the death of the arms dealing father) and more importantly the will to defend itself….this loss of will is represented by Nessa taking over the company with a completely different mindset and attitude and who believes that if only the Jews and the Palestinians could work and live together all would be well…there would be no ‘Israel’ but a one state solution…..a Palestine from the river to the sea…in other words Israel is wiped out.

A nice bit of pro-Palestinian propaganda from the BBC.

The Palestinian nanny, Atika, tells us that she is ‘A stranger in her own land….but we learn how to wait’….clearly the thought is that  the tyrannical Israel cannot last forever.

Nessa proclaims that Atika is ‘The Wandering Arab’…not once but twice to reinforce the message…this is an allusion to the ’Wandering Jew’, Blick trying desperately to make clever associations and to turn the Palestinians into victims of Israeli oppression and tyranny….The Wandering Jew was forced to roam the world homeless and scavenging for a living…..Atika dramatically states ‘It is what the world has made me.’  Not really though…it is what the Palestinian leaders have made her.

When Nessa and her brother Ephra are at a family party the camera lingers on a group of Jewish men who cheer the news on the TV that ‘Israel will not negotiate with terrorists’…..Nessa says to Ephra, who initiated the change from arms dealing to ‘promoting peace and reconciliation’ for his father’s company, that ‘Pappa would be proud of you.’….Ephra looks disdainfully at the cheering Jews and says ‘Yes I think he would have been.’   Quite clear what message the writer intended to impart to us.

The Israeli Ambassador is played as if he were a Gestapo officer from the war….very reminiscent of so many WWII films….Just another coincidence I’m sure….good to have a Jew acting like a Nazi!

Blick also introduces a device into the programme seemingly just so that he can accuse Israel of being a racist state running an apartheid system.  He creates an unnecessary storyline where Israeli ex-military are given preferential treatment when applying for university courses…to the detriment of Israeli Arabs.

‘What I discovered, it seems that the, erKidma Academy, ‘funded by the Stein Foundation, ‘is running a discriminatory selection process ‘against Israeli Arabs and in favour of Israeli military veterans.   Education is a meritocracy by function.   As soon as you use it as a tool ‘for social engineering on race grounds you’re simply creating an apartheid system.’

This was, as said, just an excuse to malign Israel by proclaiming it an apartheid state (repeated for reinforcement of effect as with the ‘Wandering Arab’ line) despite being in reality one of the most democratic and open states in the Middle East…and one where Christians can consider themselves safe…not something they could do anywhere else in the Middle East.

The character played by Igal Naor, Shlomo Zahary, was a pantomime Jew, a stereotype set up to be portrayed as shifty, money grabbing and untrustworthy….Blick summarises him as someone ‘who could always smell a deal.’…what does he mean about our stereotypical Jewish pantomime villain?

Blick has a clear message to impart…Israel is a racist, apartheid state that oppresses the Palestinians who are forced to react in the only way possible for them with terrorism,  but Israel will eventually be overwhelmed by a flood of returning Palestinians to ‘their own land’ when Israel’s will to defend itself militarily is broken and the ‘purity’ of the Jewish state is leavened by the demographic reality of that mass of Palestinians making a Jewish state meaningless and impossible.

‘How great would be their defeat?’  

Some at the BBC are already planning the obituary.