Election Section

The conflict in Palestine and Israel is surely one of the best documented in human history. Every twist and turn in the struggle has been recorded and analyzed in scores of books, articles, websites, and films.  

The problem is that hardly any of this information, except what the corporate media choose to present, gets to the average American. 

In Berkeley, however, that’s no longer completely true. Since late last month Berkeley Community Media has been running a series of top-notch documentary films that offer a critical perspective on Israeli policy, and a sympathetic look at the travails of the Palestinians, on B-TV Channel 28, one of the two local public-access television channels the non-profit group operates. For those who have Internet access but no cable subscription, the shows are also streamed from the Berkeley Community Media website, www.betv.org.  

Among the movies in the series scheduled to run this weekend are: 

• Palestine Is Still the Issue, an overview of the conflict by the award-winning Australian-British journalist John Pilger. (Next showing: Saturday, Nov. 19, at 7 a.m.) 

• Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land, an analysis of the way the mainstream media typically distort the issues, by the Media Education Foundation. (Saturday, Nov. 19, at 5:40 a.m.) 

• Wall of Shame, a 2003 look at the wall Israel is building through the West Bank (Friday, Nov. 18, at 7:30 p.m.) 

Other titles shown previously include the acclaimed Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear and the Selling of American Empire; The Loss of Liberty, a recent look back at the 1967 attack by Israeli forces on the U.S. Navy ship Liberty; and interviews with Israeli nuclear whistle-blower Mordechai Vanunu, historian Ilan Pappe, and UCSF Professor Jess Ghannam, a leader of the Bay Area’s Palestinian-American community.  

In addition, Ch. 28 is currently showing extras from the DVD versions of Hijacking Catastrophe and Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land, including extended interviews with Noam Chomsky, Palestinian leader Hanan Ashrawi, Village Voice journalist Alisa Solomon, Rabbi Michael Lerner, and British author and Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk. 

For complete scheduling information, go to www.betv.org, click on the “B-TV 28” link, then on “Schedule.” Unfortunately, there’s no weekly programming grid; click on the calendar to get the schedules for upcoming days.  

The showing of these films on public-access TV is an outgrowth of a grass-roots movement that began in 2003 to get KQED-TV to air Palestine Is Still The Issue. Despite a sustained pressure campaign that included such innovative tactics as projecting the film on the outside wall of the station’s San Francisco headquarters, KQED executives have steadfastly refused to show the Pilger film, but as a sort of consolation prize they did run Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land in 2004. (For more on the campaign, see www.palkqed.com.) 

In the wake of that semi-success, one of the campaign’s leaders, Fred Shepherd of Global Information Services in San Anselmo, came up with the idea of assembling a series of films on Palestine and related issues that could be shown on public-access TV channels. He has so far collected 11 films that can be broadcast without paying fees (thanks in some cases to special permissions Shepherd secured from the producers).  

I submitted the full set on DVD to Berkeley Community Media, which has done a great job getting them on the air. Meanwhile, Shepherd and other activists have arranged to get them shown on public-access channels in other communities, including San Francisco, South Marin County, Novato, and Oahu. 

Getting movies like these shown occasionally on public-access TV is no substitute for what we really need: media that would routinely tell the truth about what’s going on in Palestine, Iraq, Haiti, and other world trouble spots. But given the increasing corporate control of the mainstream media, it’s remarkable that it’s at all possible for ordinary citizens to get critical perspectives on the air at all. In that sense, my hat is off to Berkeley Community Media, and I hope many Daily Planet readers will take advantage of the rare opportunity the group is currently offering to learn more about the Middle East. 

(If you’d prefer to obtain the films on DVD, for your own use or to send to a friend who will submit them to a public-access station in another community, contact Shepherd at altencon@aol.com or 415 459-8738. Individual titles cost $15 to $25, and the full set is available for $159.) 

Former San Francisco Chronicle reporter Henry Norr has spent three and a half months in Palestine over the last three years..