TELEVISION
Murray, Michael
TUBE AS MEDIATOR TV The potential of television to do more than spread entertainment over a wide area has been much talked about but seldom explored. An interesting experiment is underway on the...
...The alien atmosphere of politics, propaganda, and the nastiness of real problems began to drift over a program which had been until then completely personal...
...That too affected the individual Syrian's willingness to 'sound moderate.' " Nevertheless, Peter McGhee now says, "Our Arab and Israeli producers believe that the people we spoke to represent a substantial number of their fellow countrymen...
...The Arab doctor, in a sort of deadpan bewilderment, said, "We all hate this violence...
...The men were thoughtful, but above all wary...
...And the more graves we have, the more here we are...
...Perhaps it is not our fault...
...Yet both were still caught in their circumstances...
...The Arabs talked at length about their heritage, their roots in Sinai going back to the Pharaohs...
...was to reduce the scope of moderate statement available...
...On the assumption that there was more moderate opinion on both sides than was being reported, he proposed to station WGBH in Boston that a series of programs be made which would show moderates on one side to moderates on the other, and show both of these to viewers in the United States who, he felt, were exposed to only extreme points of view on this subject...
...The tapes were made and viewed in non-threatening situations, and as the groups sat back and looked at each other on television they came to regard each other as at least human...
...It was a step...
...In Syria, a week later, our film visit coincided with the rumored Israeli mobilization...
...The fourth segment, for example, presents the extremely verbalized sorrow of the Egyptian Ali Darwish (Continued on page 427...
...Emotion overwhelms everything...
...A TV film demonstrating the common humanity of Egypt and Israel may make a contribution to understanding among men, but sooner or later the nations must also come to grips with the specificsâfor example, what to do about Sinai...
...It is a problem with this series, however, that if most of the plain people interviewed in the segments which I have seen were acquainted with the issues in any detail, their views were not drawn out...
...The WGBH press release concedes a few problems in this area: "The filming of the Palestinians in Beirut coincided with Arafat's speech at the U.N...
...Each son, said each father, died for others, for the future...
...An uncle of the Israeli boy said about his homeland: "We were born here...
...Patriotism staggered under his emotion...
...With "Arabs and Israelis," Roger Fisher, Professor of Law at Harvard and the originator of "The Advocates" on PBS, apparently sought to extend this idea considerably: according to a press release, he believed that television might be an instrument for solving conflict between nations in the Middle East...
...Suffering unites these people...
...For a group of interviews expressing hope and moderation, the primary emotion that comes through is, perhaps not so strangely, grief...
...Zvi Dor-Ner, an Israeli television producer, and Mohammed Salmawy, an Egyptian newspaperman, became co-producers of the project and, with Peter McGhee as Executive Producer for WGBH, they went out seeking moderate opinions on location in the Middle East...
...A shift in emphasis in the middle of the second segment points up a curious ambiguity in the series...
...The program ended with alternating candid stills of the dead Israeli boy, Dwor, and the dead Egyptian boy, Hassan, receding back into historyâthe boys as soldiers, as students, as teen-agers, as toddlers, and finally as infants in their happy fathers' arms...
...But beyond patriotism, each family seemed sick of the struggle, demanding a solution to the problem...
...Perhaps it is the fault of those who are leading us...
...They were trying to express their own feelings, but they also had official obligations to their governments' positions in regard to Sinai...
...Entitled "Sinai," the program moved from interviews with two young widows to conversations with two military men âan Egyptian Rear Admiral and an Israeli Generalâ and the viewer suddenly had the feeling that he was watching a different sort of program altogether...
...Of course, distrust among nations always comes to a head over specific issues...
...and increased Israeli bombing of refugee camps in South Lebanon...
...The first episode, broadcast two weeks ago, focused on two families whose sons died on opposite sides during the Yom Kippur war...
...We don't have another place...
...His son's death, said the Israeli, "was not only a loss of lifeâit was a loss of hopes, a loss of plans, a loss of a world...
...A violent argument about the uses of Washington Square Park in New York some years ago, for example, was eased when an underground video organization taped the opinions of one group, showed them to another group, taped the response of that group and carried it back to show to the first, and so on...
...A similar technique has been used occasionally before, but on a very small scale, often with inexpensive, portable videotape equipment...
...Here we are...
...The net effect...
...An interesting experiment is underway on the Public Broadcasting Service in a series entitled "Arabs and Israelis," which began as an effort to use TV as a mediation deviceâa means to bring together antagonists who would have difficulty with face-to-face, in-the-flesh confrontations...
...The fathers, an Israeli engineer and an Egyptian surgeon, came across as articulate and intelligent, but they were clearly devastated, worn out by war...
Vol. 101 • February 1975 • No. 15
