Göran Olsson’s Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989 is a remarkable documentary, if not purely for its access to decades worth of newsreels, interviews, and documentaries concerning Palestine. The three-and-a-half-hour film is composed entirely of archival film from SVT — Sveriges Television — which was the country’s primary public broadcasting service for much of the time period indicated in the film’s title. But Olsson never presupposes that this footage is capable of telling the entire story, opening the work by observing: “Archive material doesn’t necessarily tell us what really happened. But it says a lot about how it was told.”
The film opens with excerpts from the film Ghetto in Gaza (1984), before jumping back to 1858 and proceeding chronologically from there. The early shorts are, to put it bluntly, Israeli propaganda. The narrator from Israel – Land of Wonders (1961) speaks in unwaveringly glowing tones about how the Zionist project has turned an empty land into a modern state: “Before the Jews cultivated this land, it was a land of bare mountains and hills. Scorched earth, hopelessness, misery and begging.” The 1967 short Young in Israel recreates (intentionally or not) the dissonance upon which Israel was built: a narrator explains that Israel must spend 40% of their national budget on their military while an IOF tank rears its gun to point at the audience. Suddenly, the film cuts to a disco where young Israelis are “dancing on a powder keg.” In 1964’s The Duel, ambassador Gunnar Hägglöf debates professor Herbert Tingsten on the conditions which Arab refugees face (still no mention of the word “Palestinian”), and here Hägglöf appears to be the first prominent Swede to speak on television about the Nakba: “What above all frightened these Arabs, most of whom were farmers and gardeners, was the atrocious terror. The massacre organized by the Jewish terrorist organization when they practically annihilated the Arab population of a village named Dair Yassin on 9 April, 1948.”
The first major change in perspective occurs after the six-day war in 1967. Documentary footage captures Israeli planes bombing the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian militaries in a surprise attack that killed more than 15,000 on the Arab side. Israeli soldiers sing, dance, and pray in their conquered territory, and the camera does not shy away from their blood of the conquest — “enemy” soldiers lie dead in the streets, and for the first time the word Palestinian is used: “For the Palestinian people, it was a disaster like no other.” This section then ends by describing the plight of the Palestinian cause — a return to a lost homeland occupied by Israel’s military. More impactfully, the final shot shows a young Palestinian boy carrying his little sister on his shoulders as they flee. A news program called Aktuellt from the same year veers into even steeper criticisms of Israel’s six-day war: dead bodies are strewn across shelled ruins of what used to be Egyptian territory; tattered white flags blow in the wind. The Israelis have left about 20,000 dead bodies to rot in the sun — the Swedish reporter explains a “foul, sweetly smell.”
From this point, though it would be hard to describe any of the coverage as “anti-Zionist,” Olsson’s documentary takes on a new tone. Instead of the dissonance felt by the audience in the Palestinians’ absence, there is now a sense of revolutionary hope underlying these programs. Interviews with fighters from the PFLP, leaders of the PLO, and everyday citizens of Gaza and the West Bank underscore just how dedicated the Palestinians are to their cause, and the citizens of Sweden respond to this. In 1972, a young Swedish man talks to a reporter about the Olympic attack where Palestinian freedom fighters took several Israeli athletes hostage in exchange for release of Palestinian hostages in Israel. “As you can see, there are guys who dare to act, to give their lives… If you see it from the Palestinian point of view, it’s good.” Another older man follows that up: “It’s good that they’re putting an end to their misery.” The short Where are Israel’s Children Heading contains interviews with Israeli professor Israel Shahak, who compares Golda Meir to the Nazis, and declares that “Our society… is undergoing a process of Nazification.” The film then builds to the first Intifada in 1987, which is shown by the Swedes to be an act of revolution which is violently stamped out. As tens of thousands of Palestinians are jailed in Israel over the course of this occupation, a single thrown stone can cost someone 10 to 15 years in prison. As the young men of Gaza rebel, the first victim is an 11-year-old boy.
Olsson rarely interjects commentary, except to provide contextual details. His real skill as a director lies in how he has presented the chosen material to the audience. In 2011’s The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, Olsson took a similar approach, but supplemented archival footage with celebrity and activist interviews, but the addition of these narrators undercut the films more often than not. Olsson’s relatively hands-off approach in Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989 works leagues better, as the archival footage is powerful enough to speak for itself ten times over. Some positioning lends itself to open-ended interpretations of Olsson’s intentions with the film — he began creating this over four years ago, and he claims current events (Israel’s genocide in Gaza) have only motivated him to finish it sooner. In the film’s final montage, Israeli soldiers have presumably injured a young Palestinian girl, and her relatives attempt to rush her to the hospital, but soldiers stand in their way. They detain the entire group (including the young girl who needs medical attention) for questioning. The last image is of an Israeli soldier shutting down the production, with threat of force.
Olsson’s epilogue muddles this ending, fast-forwarding to the Oslo peace accords and the shaking hands of Arafat and Rabin — Rabin getting the final word, saying “Enough of the blood and tears. Enough!” To take the documentary out of the context established (STV 1958-1989) suggests that Olsson saw something so meaningful in these words that he couldn’t bear to leave them out. To pose Rabin as a peace-maker is laughable, as his Prime Ministership played the introduction of the break-their-legs directive toward “stone-throwing” Palestinians in the Intifada. Rabin said just one year before the accords, “I wish I could wake up one day and find that Gaza has sunk into the sea.” It’s a strangely dissonant note to leave things on, and not reflective in tone or attitude of the majority of the project — to such an extent that perhaps another explanation is needed for its inclusion. In truth, it would not be surprising if this ending was an addition so that the might play better Venice audiences, to appeal to the liberalism of the festival circuit. But if we are to look beyond its unfortunate post-ending, Olsson’s film is an otherwise crucial record of the barbarity of the Zionist project, and the role of the media in shaping the narratives that protect it. More importantly, it’s an essential documentation of the Palestinian struggle — as filmmakers export globally these necessary images that act to clarify the fight for a free Palestine.
