Muzzlewatch, the antipropaganda site of Jewish Voice for Peace, reported this story from a Canadian based journalist about a documentary seen on PBS on the 40 year anniversary of Israel’s Six Day War in 1967. It supplies further evidence of the news censorship and bias prevalent in the US media in the reporting of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in this case, on PBS, a government sponsored medium. If America Knew, FAIR, Jews sans frontiers, Muzzlewatch, and documentaries such as Peace, Propaganda, & The Promised Land and Off The Charts have already alerted Americans about the depths to which the Middle East reality is being manipulated to Israel’s advantage.
The documentary was called Six Days In June. Two versions were cut: a French version seen in Europe, and an American version, which was only seen in North America including Canada. The French edition is what Montreal-based producer Ina Fichman called the “international version,” which was sold to Italy’s RAI, Australia’s SBS and elsewhere.
Fichman said that,
PBS demanded entire scenes and sequences come out, and others be softened.
The Muzzlewatch article which was entitled, PBS protects American viewers from international version of 1967 documentary, gives some idea about the censorship that marked the American version.
Antonia Zerbisias wrote about the duplicate (duplicitous) version in the Toronto Star:
…a stunning $1.2 million Canada-Israel-France co-production, Six Days in June. Fast-paced and rich with archival footage, its stories are told not by “experts,” nor pundits, nor academics. The people who we see are witnesses – as fighters, journalists, politicians, diplomats, refugees or survivors.
Two not-so-subtly different versions have already aired this week. Both about two hours in length, one ran in French, on CBC’s sister networks Radio-Canada and the all-news RDI, the other in English on PBS. (A three-hour edition also aired to rave reviews in Israel.)
It depicts, among other historical facts, the expulsion of thousands of Palestinians by the Israeli army, a move the narrator delicately describes as “the first change to the demographics of the West Bank.” It shows, through the eyes of a former Arab resident and an Israeli who photographed the event, that, where large villages stood, now are forests (many planted with Canadian charitable donations).
There is also a sequence, as related by the American-born Abdullah Schleifer, editor of Palestine News, as well as an Arab whose home was destroyed, about the overnight razing of a 700-year-old Palestinian neighbourhood in Jerusalem by the triumphant Israeli defence minister, General Moshe Dayan.
“When I saw this destruction, there was a part of me that felt tremendous dread, that a whole new problem was going to be created,” says Schleifer. He says this in the PBS version as well, but the horrifying context is stripped away for American sensibilities.
“PBS is really not a liberal left-wing broadcaster,” says Fichman. “It’s subscription and sponsor-based, with members of the Jewish community among its supporters.”
The sad part is that, unless the feature-length “director’s cut” by Israeli-born filmmaker Ilan Ziv gets distribution, Canadians will not get to view what the rest of the world, including Israel, has.
CBC-TV, for example, did not buy it because PBS already had North American rights. The film also did not fit with its focus on “contemporary political and social issues.”
And so, we get the whitewashed version of history. Not surprising.
As the narrator says, “The Six-Day War will prove to be an unfinished war, just one battle in a conflict that has never ended.”
As indicated, hidden from American audiences was the ethnic cleansing of another hundred thousand Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, many from refugee camps that were created after the ethnic cleansing of 1948 that ejected two thirds of the Palestinian population, an estimated 750,000 people, from their homes and villages in what is today Israel.
Whereas Israel reveled in a military victory, for the Palestinians the 1967 war marked the beginnings of a new era in the colonization of their lands.