>>> From "PBS Purges Web Content on Israeli Disapproval" by Thomas C. Greene, The Register (UK), 5 Sept 2002:

"The US Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is airing a documentary film this week by affiliate WNET in New York, called "Caught in the Crossfire: Arab-Americans in Wartime," which considers the predicament of Arab-Americans since the 9/11 atrocity. In addition to the film is a companion Web site offering background material for curious viewers.

Unfortunately, a few people disapproved of some of that material, and PBS did exactly what any spineless pandering coward would do; they buckled to pressure (or the fear of pressure) from New York's Jewish and Israeli lobbying groups, and removed content from the companion site which dares to tell the Palestinian story without the mandatory pro-Israel bias."

Others, however, feel the page was pulled because it was supposedly slanted and inaccurate. From "PBS Draws Ire Over 9/11 Show" by Ira Stoll, New York Sun, 3 Sept 2002:

"A few of the many aspects of the Web site criticized by the Israelis and American Jewish groups:

• Israeli premiers Barak, Netanyahu and Sharon are described, respectively, as a “former military leader,” “hawkish” and a “right-wing politician.” But Yasser Arafat is described as “leader of the movement for a Palestinian state” with no mention of his connections to terrorism.

• The site makes it sound like Jordan did not participate in the 1948 Arab attack on Israel. As Mr. Safian of CAMERA put it: “That would be news to the defenders of the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, and those of the Etzion Block — especially the ones executed after they surrendered to the Jordanian Legion. How exactly do the producers think Jordan came to occupy the so-called West Bank?”

• The Web site lists the election of Mr. Netanyahu and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin as setbacks to peace negotiations in the 1990s, but makes no mention of terrorist bombings by Hamas against Israeli civilians."

Regardless of which reason is correct (or whether both are), the page has been erased by PBS, so we're preserving it below.

The area referred to as Palestine is an historic region, the extent of which has varied greatly since ancient times, situated on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, in southwestern Asia. This area is now largely divided between Israel and the Israeli-occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza, parts of which are self-administered by Palestinian Arabs.

Around 63 B.C., the Roman Empire took the Jewish kingdom of Judah and placed it under a series of consuls, including Herod the Great and Pontius Pilate at the time Jesus was believed to have lived and preached. The Empire under Caligula prompted a Jewish uprising, which lasted four years but was crushed when the Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed. After a second revolt, Jerusalem was razed and the province of Palestine decreed. The defeat marked the end of the Jewish state and the beginning of the second Diaspora, or scattering of the Jewish people (the first Jewish Diaspora came when the first Temple was destroyed about 586 BC).

In 331 A.D. Emperor Constantine became a Christian, giving approval to a previously illegal religion. Churches of the Holy Sepulchre and the Nativity sprang up all over the region to mark sites of religious importance. But in 638 A.D. Jerusalem fell to Caliph Omar and was declared a holy city of Islam. In 1099 the Christians occupied Jerusalem, murdering Muslims and beginning nearly 100 years of Christian rule. But by the mid-1200s the Islamic Mamluks reclaimed Jerusalem.

The Ottomans took over in the beginning of the 16th century, but by the 1800s began to lose control of the region. Britain opened a consulate in Jerusalem, and in 1878 the first Jewish colony was founded.

At the end of World War I, Britain promised both the Arabs an Arab state and the Jews a homeland in Palestine. When the war ended, Britain was given a mandate by the League of Nations to rule the country, and stopped all immigration to Palestine. Despite this law, large-scale Jewish immigration from abroad (mainly from Eastern Europe) took place, with numbers swelling in the 1930s as Jews fled Nazi persecution and genocide. Palestinian Arab demands for independence and resistance to Jewish immigration led to a rebellion in 1937, followed by continuing violence from both sides during and after World War II. In 1947, Great Britain turned the problem of bringing independence to a land ravaged by violence over to the United Nations.

The U.N. proposed partitioning Palestine into two independent states, one Arab and the other Jewish, with Jerusalem internationalized. Zig-zagged borders that cut off portions of Arab and Jewish populations from each other proved impractical. Antagonism between Arabs and Jews quickly escalated into a cycle of violence characterized by gunfights, bombings, riots and sabotage.

When the British withdrew their forces in May of 1948 Jews in Palestine declared Israel a Jewish State defined by the UN resolution borders. The next day neighboring Arab nations, with the exception of Jordan, declared war on Israel and attacked. By the end of the war in 1949 Israel had expanded to occupy 77 percent of the total territory defined in the UN's resolution. Over half the Palestinian Arab population fled or were expelled. Jordan and Egypt occupied the other parts of the territory assigned by the partition resolution to the Palestinian Arab state that never came into being.

In 1967, after a period of increasing hostilities between Israel and its Arab neighbors, Israel launched a strike against Egypt, sparking a full-scale war with Egypt, Jordan and Syria. After six days Israel occupied the remaining territory of Palestine - the West Bank and the Gaza Strip-which had been under Jordanian and Egyptian control, respectively. This included East Jerusalem and the Old City, which Israel annexed. Five hundred thousand Palestinians left.

In this period, Yasir Arafat of the Fatah Party became chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and leader of the movement for a Palestinian state. Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and Gaza began soon after the war, and by 1977 were official Israeli policy. Today some 200,000 Jews live in settlements scattered throughout the West Bank and Gaza.

In 1987 a popular uprising, the intifada, brought international attention to the Palestinian cause, but resulted in a heavy loss of life among the civilian Palestinian population. In 1991 Israeli officials met with a Palestinian delegation in Madrid, and eventually PLO leader Yasir Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Itzak Rabin agreed to work for peace. After months of negotiations, the Oslo Accords were drawn up, detailing a phased exchange of land for peace between Israel and the PLO. In 1993, Israel and the PLO signed an accord providing for joint recognition and for limited Palestinian self-rule in the Gaza Strip and Jericho. In 1995, Israel and the PLO agreed on a transition to Palestinian self-rule in most of the West Bank. Despite the major setback of Rabin's assassination by a radical right-wing Jewish Israeli, and the election of the prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu of the right-wing Likud party, negotiations for peace continued after a brief stall.

The Labor party came into power in 1999 headed by former military leader Ehud Barak. His withdrawal from the Security Zone in southern Lebanon, where Israeli troops and Hezbollah guerillas had been fighting, raised hopes for a final peace settlement that would establish a Palestinian state alongside Israel. An agreement was nearly reached at Camp David, but broke down over two issues: the status of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, and a proposed Palestinian right-of-return. In February 2001, Israelis elected as prime minister right-wing politician Ariel Sharon, who had inflamed Palestinians eight months earlier by visiting the temple mount in Jerusalem, which is also the site of the Al-Aqsa mosque holy to Muslims. This marked the beginning of the second intifada.

Since then, the area has suffered the worst violence in decades. Palestinian suicide bombers have killed and wounded many Israeli civilians. Many Palestinian civilians have also been killed by Israeli troops, who have intermittently occupied most of the West Bank in military attacks they claim are meant to hunt down militants and damage terrorist infrastructures.

With political opinion on both sides increasingly polarized, there is no end in sight to the historic and ongoing struggle over this land.

See the "Homelands" Webpage as it exists now, with the following ludicrous excuse for removing the text:

"The purpose of this Web site is to be a companion piece to CAUGHT IN THE CROSSFIRE: Arab Americans in Wartime, a documentary which looks at the lives of three Arab Americans living in New York City following the events of September 11.

The "Homelands" section of the site drew attention away from the message of the film. Our goal was to provide background information that contextualized the cultural histories of the people whose lives are chronicled in the film. In an effort to keep the focus on the current experience of Arab Americans, we have removed that section of the site."

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