Land of hope and dreams
IT would be a good question for the pub quiz. What do Madagascar, Uganda, Guyana, Tasmania, the Siberian city of Birobidzhan and a small island in the middle of the Niagara river all have in common? They have all, at some point, but mostly during the 20th century, been proposed as a homeland for the Jewish people.
They already have one, of course, which is one reason why these alternative proposals failed. What about that homeland, then, the State of Israel, established in 1948, and first discussed by politicians in 1917? Journalist Jane Corbin has been reporting from the region for three decades and you might say she has the subject in her blood.
The BALFOUR DECLARATION: BRITAIN’S PROMISE TO THE HOLY LAND (BBC2) saw her piecing together the role of her grandfather, Leo Amery, who’d had a hand in drafting the historic declaration a century ago.
The formation of a Jewish State began less with a declaration, in fact, and more with a letter written by the then-foreign secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, discussing the possibility of a homeland for the Jews in Palestine. As under-secretary, Amery added a crucial phrase to the document, declaring, “nothing should be done to prejudice the rights of the non-Jewish communities”. It expressed a faith that Jews and Arabs could live together in peace (as indeed they had, for centuries, in other parts of the world).
Britain, given control over the region after the First World War, was still hopeful in 1919, as European Jews began settling in the lands they had last called theirs two thousand years before. An official sent a breezy report back to London, claiming all was peaceful and promising a “land of milk and honey” within a decade.
Nobody’s making such rash promises nowadays but it was clear from Corbin’s film that some people have never stopped being hopeful. The Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995, are often not given their due, not least because the two-state solution they promised fell swiftly apart. They still, to some, represent the best possibility of a way forward. Unfortunately, 1995 is a long time ago in Middle Eastern politics, let alone 1917, and it’s along the ancient fault lines where things change the fastest.
BEN FOGLE: NEW LIVES IN THE WILD (Channel 5) was not a million miles away, just a kilometre away from the Sahara desert. The joy of this series is that each week you feel our amiable presenter has encountered his most extraordinary and inspiring wilderness-settler yet.
Mary-Anne Stroud Gabani was a rare treasure, having set up on a smallholding near the Egyptian city of Giza, and devoted herself to curing the sick animals in the neighbourhood. Far from retreating to be alone in some island paradise, she was living surrounded by the rubble of Egypt’s crumbling infra-structure and never entirely sure when her luck might run out.
Originally from California, 67-year-old Mary-Anne had once lived the pampered life of a highsociety corporate wife in Cairo. Now she was doing this, and while doing it, fiercely and doggedly, and equipped with the kind of Arabic vocabulary that would make a Bedouin blush, she provided a fine example of the human spirit.
Her touring vet act also left us those never-forgotten lines no factual telly should be without. “We can’t treat your duck now!” she told a farmer. “This man has twenty chickens and they’re all sneezing!”