Watching Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989 (Icarus Films, $29.98 DVD), a hulking film composed entirely of archival footage and spanning nearly three and a half hours, a paraphrased lyric from Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” surfaced often in my mind: “How did we get here?” Ultimately, after absorbing this exhausting and multifaceted account of the world’s most eternally opposed region, with its four documented wars across 30 years, a different line from the same song seemed to echo across the deserts and cities, refugee camps and settlements: “same as it ever was.”
From tensions to terrorist attacks, terrorist attacks to uprisings, uprisings to wars, wars to arguable genocides, the Israel-Palestine conflict presents, in director Göran Hugo Olsson’s vital work of curation, as an endless volley of responses to responses to responses whose origins date back well prior to the 1948 establishment of Israel. It is Newton’s Third Law — action and reaction — manifest in blood, ad nauseam, with no end in sight.
Experts sager on this subject than a humble Florida film critic have bemoaned these seemingly irreparable schisms in books and articles and white papers. But it’s something else entirely to see an accounting of the region not through the pages of magazines and academe but through the lens of objective, in-the-moment televised media. As its matter-of-fact title explains, Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989 is composed entirely of 16mm film and video specials aired on Swedish public-service television across this pivotal 30-year period.
The reporters and producers, driven by a “mission to be impartial,” come across as the most valiant force in Olsson’s epic, planting themselves in all the right places and asking all the right questions to just about anyone who will talk to them — the heads of state and guerilla movements but also rank-and-file members of the PLO and IDF, intellectuals, fellow journalists, refugees and members of the Jewish diaspora living in Sweden and beyond. Voices from the fringe and the mainstream, warmongers and peaceniks, are platformed. Cameras take viewers into a Palestinian emergency room, where a bloody-gloved surgeon shares information on the wounded civilian in front of him, and the office of an Amnesty International official, who breaks down in tears after describing the destructive impact of rubber bullets on a recent victim.
Effectively untangling the muddled factions and motivations of their sprawling cast of characters, the intrepid journalists appear on the front lines of every flare-up, explaining the intricacies and ramifications of the Six-Day War, the rise of the Palestinian Fedayeen, the Munich Massacre, the Yom Kippur War, the Lebanese Civil War, the Camp David Accords, the First Intifada and many other conflagrations.
This is a heavy, sobering watch, whose footage, presented mostly in chronological order, year by year, functions as an indispensable history lesson. But don’t let that deter you. As with 2024’s exceptional Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat, a methodical and immersive account of the events before, during and after the murder of Congolese opposition leader Patrice Lumumba, Israel Palestine is a historical crash course stripped of the dryness and distance that often define such a work.
The result captures the conflict as an ever-shifting prism, catching myriad points of light in vivid detail. By engaging with everyone without fear or favor, Israel Palestine is foremost an argument for both neutrality and directness in media coverage, a combination that is in scant supply in the balkanized American press.
This tendency toward unblinking transparency, likewise jettisoned in the U.S. media, is most evident in its news gatherers’ shocking footage of civilian casualties, particularly children, in ghastly medium shots and close-ups that one cannot un-see. Paired with footage of children trained in the ways of jihad — “I will fight to the last drop of my blood,” attests one young person — a heartbreaking cycle perpetuates. How can any peace deal, whether brokered at Camp David in 1978, or Washington, D.C. in 1993 or 2025, account for this sort of primal hatred, indoctrinated by extremists on both sides and “justified” by recent actions?
Except that now, the halcyon days of open journalism in this particular theater of war are evidently over. Unlike the Swedes in Olsson’s film, independent reporters continue to be banned from covering the current devastation of Gaza outside of sanitized press tours led by the Israeli military. Same as it ever was? Perhaps, but in some ways it’s worse.