Television
No news from Israel
Wendy Cope
Last week's Spectator said I was on holiday, which was inaccurate but not very, since the element of work in our writers' trip to Israel (three poetry readings) was both small and congenial. A bolder jour- nalist might have offered to phone in a piece about Israeli television but it's as well I didn't. Our schedule, designed to enable us to see as much as possible in a week, allowed very little time for lounging around in hotel rooms. One night we stayed on a kibbutz and, although we didn't watch any television there either, we heard something about its effect on the life of the community. Now that there is a set in almost every home, said our hosts, people are more reluctant to go out in the evenings and attendances at meetings have declined. Possession of a video is against the rules of the kibbutz but some members have acquired them anyway — presents from friends and relations outside.
Another titbit of information that comes within the remit of this column is that the level of interest in the Eurovision Song Contest appeared to be much higher in Israel than it is here. That, we were told, was the reason our party had a Jerusalem restaurant to itself on the evening of `But we appeal to the press.' Saturday 30 April. On returning to the hotel we found a large group of people glued to the box in the foyer. At that point the UK was in the lead, which seemed a pity, because none of us could have cared less.
Of news and current affairs coverage in Israel I still know only what I have learned from the British media. To be in a place where newsworthy events may well be taking place but not to see or hear the news is a strange experience. Two days before we left England there were riots — or, at least, noisy scenes — in the old city of Jerusalem, when the Muslims gathered for Friday prayers. I know this because I saw it on the BBC Nine O'Clock News. The following Friday I was in the old city, saw black flags flying to mark the death of Abu Jihad, and heard the tape recorder calling to the faithful from a minaret. We didn't see or hear any trouble but remained uncertain for the rest of the day as to whether or not there had been any. We talked to tourists who had been there the previous Friday and who had no idea that anything had happened then.
`Everyday life in Israel is far less violent than some people might assume,' said the narrator of Shattered Dreams, Victor Schonfeld's film about Israel shown on Channel 4 on Sunday. That statement is certainly true, as it is true of life in Belfast or Brixton. There was a great deal of information in Schonfeld's film that was new to me and it was, for a recent visitor to the country, essential viewing. What it had to say about the position of Israeli Arabs and of Oriental Jews was particularly interesting. But I found myself wishing that everyone who saw the film could go and talk to Israelis of various shades of opin- ion. Shattered Dreams would have found favour with the left-wing Israelis we met it argued for withdrawal from the occupied territories and its heroes and heroines were all involved in the peace movement. One character, a Moroccan Jewish musician, popped up so frequently with his bongo drums that you began to wonder if he was Israel's only hope. The Israeli right was represented only by its lunatic fringe, the frightening Kahane and his supporters, seen at a rally shouting 'Death to the Arabs'. This rally took place not long after several Jewish couples were murdered in the Afula area. It would have been helpful, both here and at other points in the film, to have the exact date on the screen.
Shattered Dreams, originally made for the cinema, was filmed over a period of two or three years and divided, by topic, into eight chapters. The chronology was often confusing. And the soundtrack, featuring pop and folk music of a soupiness that would be unusual in a television documentary, cheapened the film. The worst instance of inappropriate music was the sequence about the one minute's si- lence, observed all over Israel once a year, in memory of victims of the Holocaust. A
silence on the soundtrack, punctuated by whatever natural sounds happened to occur, would have been moving. Why the director thought it a good idea to have a soprano singing a folk song at this point, I cannot understand.
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