1948: Creation & Catastrophe

Has lots of testimonies from jewish ex militias at the time and they were quite frank. It really puts things in perspective of what really happened away from media and propaganda and sensation. I wish it expanded more on what happened the years BEFORE and also I wished there was more testimonies from fighters on the Arab side. Still this documentary is a treasure for the facts it pacts and documents in a conflict where fact and fiction are often exchanged.

While claiming to be a documentary, it becomes clear within minutes that this is a hit piece on Israel, with no intent of presenting a balanced account. The heavily one-sided narrative is so clumsily executed that anyone with a modicum of sophistication will instinctively recognize that there must be another side to these events.

Much like news accounts that report on Israeli military actions while omitting mention of the terrorist acts which prompted them, the film neglects to mention the desperate plight of Holocaust survivors who were turned away from country after country before finally turning to their ancestral Jewish homeland.

Similarly, the film complains of Israel building a wall while omitting to mention the acts of Palestinian terrorists which necessitated the building of the wall as a defensive measure.

In short, this is a dishonest and biased polemic with the clear intent of inciting antipathy to Israel and the Jewish people. It is unworthy of your time unless you're an anti-Semite who hasn't yet got their fill of Israel bashing, to which we are already constantly bombarded.

I'm glad the filmmakers captured the testimony of elders, both Zionists and Arabs, who were alive in 1948. Without their testimony, we'd lose critical first-person accounts of that post-WWII period which set the foundation for Israel's establishment or see the counter-response of locals. Toward the end of the documentary, we meet a Jewish Palestinian whose long, unbroken family line is a counterbalance to the European Jews who fled there prior to or after the Holocaust. This documentary may make some uncomfortable if they harbor a narrative lock stock & barrel of Israel's founding and who prefer to see the country as miraculously springing up from an empty region whose locals voluntarily departed ... History marks the faces of all, on all sides. It's impossible to watch without empathy .. for all. It's us who need to learn.

Very accurate documentary with incredibly moving testimony from those that were actually present during the catastrophe of 1948.