The Holy Land and Us: Our Untold Stories
BBC 2 ★★★★☆

Well, that was a stressful watch. As a Zionist, the words ‘Israel’ and ‘BBC’ may hardly inspire faith, but this BBC Two documentary has mostly managed to achieve something of a minor miracle; taking a perennially contentious subject, the creation of Israel and the displacement of the Arab population, and fulfil all obligations of impartiality. Football personalities take note.

The Holy Land and Us: Our Untold Stories may well upset some people on both sides of the historical divide -  usually a sign of doing something right -  with its cleverness rooted in its simultaneous exploration of the two dominant narratives that expound Israel’s creation myth, one of exaltation and one of tragedy.

The stories told here are not really untold to anyone who’s read a few books on this matter, but they are definitively personal to the ‘Us’ of the title though, us being various British people with family history in the region, who in ‘Who do you think you are?’ mode take us with them on their travels exploring the details of half-remembered lore. 

Most recognisable of the bunch and providing half of voiceover duties is Robert Rinder, whose Jewish mother’s concern for the entire enterprise somewhat encapsulates the post-war British Jewish attitude of ‘Don’t make a fuss!’  -  a fear ever more born out these last years with antisemites more and more resorting to Israel as their cudgel of choice. Rinder weathers the risk though as he follows his grandfather’s cousin of the same name, whose path after Auschwitz took him east to an embryonic country. Then British-Palestinian actor and writer Sarah Agha retraces her father’s journey to the village he and his family fled in 1948, a village which no longer exists.

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Palestinian actor Sarah Agha (BBC)

As we go back and forth, along with Daniel who discovers his dad helped secure Israel’s survival in the War of Independence, and Shereen whose grandmother survived a stain of the same time, the massacre by Irgun militia at Deir Yassin, perhaps the only connection we can find between all these individuals and the peoples they represent, is the strength of emotion elicited.

In that way I’m not certain what the documentary can practically achieve, for while technically there may be balance, with the narratives so far apart on the scales is it ever possible to get anywhere close to the middle? This is only the first of two episodes, and a glimpse into next week offsets one of my primary criticisms, the lack of a Mizrahi voice to represent the 850,000 Jews exiled from Arab countries, usually the largest gap in most people’s knowledge of the time.

Perhaps they’ll also bring all of our tour guides together at the end. It would certainly make for good TV, but with wounds reopened rather than healed, positions seem more intractable than ever. What’s successful though, and achieved with aplomb, is illustrating how passionate people are about their ‘side’, and exploring and examining the precise reasons why. In that sense, whilst fundamental disagreements may remain, peace can never be achieved without understanding, making this an excellent starting point.