One to watch out for on BBC Two

This coming Tuesday (March 14th) the first episode of a series titled “The Holy Land and Us – Our Untold Stories” will be aired on the BBC Two television channel.

The BBC’s press release about the series informs us that:

“Due to air on BBC Two and iPlayer this spring, The Holy Land And Us: Our Untold Stories follows actor and writer Sarah Agha and barrister, author and broadcaster Rob Rinder, MBE, along with four families of Jewish and Palestinian heritage, as they explore their personal family stories, and the ways in which they have been defined by events in Palestine and Israel.

Sarah will learn about the circumstances under which her family fled their village in Galilee in 1948, and Rob will follow his relative’s journey to escape the horrors of the Holocaust and start a new life in the recently established state of Israel.

2023 marks 75 years since the State of Israel was founded. For Jews across the world, this represented a longed-for opportunity to find a place of safety. For Palestinians the events of this period, which created over 700,000 refugees and resulted in hundreds of towns and villages being destroyed, are known as the Nakba, Arabic for the Catastrophe.

Through powerful and profoundly moving family stories, this series gets to the heart of what happened to people on both sides of the conflict as the Middle East was reshaped.

Rather than presenting a comprehensive history, the series lets the human stories of the time speak for themselves, enabling viewers to reach a richer understanding of the divisions that have lasted to this day. […]

Sarah Agha, Actor and co-Presenter, says: “My Palestinian father was just two years old when his family was displaced from their village near Tiberias in Galilee in 1948. I was always told they were forced to leave, but I know little about the exact circumstances in which they left, so I want to follow in their footsteps and uncover what happened. My father also told me that our Palestinian ancestors used to have a lot of land and influence in the nineteenth century. I want to find out how in less than a century they went from power-brokers to refugees.””

The synopsis to the first episode states:

“In this first episode, Rob and Sarah are joined by a father and son who follow in their father’s and grandfather’s footsteps from Hackney to becoming caught up in Israel’s War of Independence, and meet a woman whose grandmother survived one of the most notorious episodes of the Nakba.”

More from Hadar Sela
Revisiting the BBC’s 2013 PA funding audit story
Over three years ago BBC audiences learned of an EU audit of...
Read More
Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *