The Holy Land and Us: Part 2?

Sarah Agla Rob Rinder

If you haven’t yet watched ‘The Holy Land and Us: Our Untold Stories’ fronted and narrated by Rob Rinder and Sarah Agla and available on iPlayer, it is worth watching. Rinder and Agla, along with two more citizen journalists per episode explore their family histories from a Jewish and Palestinian perspective. It is ‘Who do you think you are?’ with a particular focus.

All the participants are moved to tears by hearing about their ancestors’ heroism or trauma or loss. Rinder explores from the point of view of his uncle who went from Nazi concentration camp to Palestine post war and then fought for the formation of the State of Israel. Agla explores the story of her Palestinian grandparents evicted from their village in the Galilee which no longer exists. Jack Seale in his Guardian review of the programme says, ‘A documentary that will make viewers on each side sympathise with the other? Its an ambitious undertaking, but the Holy Land and Us: Our Untold Stories is a fine attempt at hitting an extremely narrow target.’[1]

For Seale, and perhaps for Rinder, the risky part of the exercise is simply giving Palestinians prime time TV time to share their family history as one of the 700,000 displaced by what is called The Nakba. And in the face of some who proclaim ‘There is no such thing as a Palestinian’ and ‘Israel has sole rights to all the land between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan’ it perhaps needs to begin here. What I noticed, however, was how separate the two narratives were. Perhaps the most poignant overlap is the moment where Daniel from London, whose father came to fight for the formation of the State of Israel but never talked about it, realizes the danger he had faced and the costly sacrifices he had made, and wept. The voiceover from Rinder spelled out the cost to Palestinians: ‘More than 50,000 Palestinians lost their homes when Israeli forces captured Lydda and Ramle.’

But at no point did the participants meet to share their stories, and the narrative focused narrowly on the formation of Israel in 1948. 1967 and all that has occurred since did not feature.

It is important that there is a space for both narratives to be heard but I am looking forward to Series 2 where the participants travel together and explore their stories together, mining deep their shared pain and trauma and loss. There has to be opportunity for both sides of the narrative to exist in the same space and be felt together so that out of a common experience of trauma and loss, which underlies both strands of story, an alternative future can be imagined. Painful. Difficult. But in order for it to be possible to share the small land of historic Palestine and present day Israel/occupied Palestinian territories such shared empathic listening will be needed.

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[1] Jack Seale The Guardian Tuesday 14^th March, 2023