San Diego Audience Reacts To '1913: Seeds Of Conflict'

PBS will air Tuesday night the documentary "1913: Seeds of Conflict." It explores the little-known history of Palestine during the latter part of the Ottoman Empire, a time of relative harmony between Arabs and Jews. The film screened earlier this month in San Diego at a Jewish temple.

The documentary "1913: Seeds of Conflict" uses archive footage, interviews, and re-enactments to educate viewers about Palestine before 1948. Director Ben Loeterman said he would not call his film "fair or balanced" because it’s not a survey over time but rather a glimpse of one small moment in history.

"The other thing I try to do is not tell an objective, omniscient kind of history. I want you to hear a cacophony and complexity of points of view, to have a little trouble following it maybe, which is OK with me because that’s how life is and that’s how history is," Loeterman added.

There was a cacophony and complexity of voices following a screening of the film at Temple Solel earlier this month. It was hosted by J Street, the self described political home for pro-Israeli, pro-peace Americans. The director and San Diego State University film scholar Lawrence Baron hosted a panel and fielded questions from the audience. The post film discussion was lively and divided, but civil.

Max Ashkenashi describes himself as an Italian-Israeli-American Jew. He felt the film offered a fresh perspective by focusing on 1913.

"It brought a part of history that we don’t get to see very often. So the fact that there is a movie and people get the opportunity to actually ponder and think about the origins, and ask questions and get opinions in a civil way here is good," Ashkenashi said.

Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, a history professor at California State University San Marcos, was more critical of the film. (Read her article.)

"As a historian, I would have liked to see a film that showed what the film did show, that there was harmony, but didn’t over-glorify it, and didn’t suggest that there was this perfect harmony until these insular Jews with their guards and their unwillingness to mix messed this harmony up," she said.

Sandra Silverstein is a member of The J Street organization.

"People in the general community seeing this who don’t have the deep knowledge of what happened are going to see this, and I don’t feel they are going to get as complete a picture as I would like them to get," Silverstein said.

But for Shamrit Braun Kamin, an Israeli visiting San Diego, she felt the film encouraged people to look beyond history.

"What I think as an Israeli that lived in Israel... is that this film should encourage us not to look at just history but look at what we are now, and how we act from... now on and for the future," Braun Kamin said. "I think that today we have the ability — there is a two-state solution and there is actually an agreement that has already been done between Israelis and Palestinians — and this conflict is possible to resolve and I really hope that for people who watch this film [they] will be encouraged to sit and talk, and be able to promote a solution, and to act toward this solution, and not suffer from another hundred years of conflict."

Rivka Milana grew up in San Diego and just graduated from George Washington University.

"I think we should really be trying to understand how to really fix this problem and conflict, and to end perpetuated violence. It is to really necessary to understand that both narratives have some truth," she said.

But that’s hard to maintain in a community that Professor Baron said is growing more polarized: "If anything it has gotten worse in the last four or five years. The sort of wooing of Jewish voters on the basis of Israel for the Republican party, which has become very obvious, and the sort of feeling of being under siege by those who were defending Israel, I think comes out in these kinds of discussion."

Goldstein Sepinwall acknowledged that for many in the audience the movie did open their eyes to a chapter in history with which they were unfamiliar.

"There were people who thought the movie as wonderful and I suspect that some of the people who saw it weren’t aware of the history at all," she said. "So it was new to them to find out that there was harmony, and I think when you don’t realize that, it must be wonderfully liberating to realize that peace is possible. I think ultimately that is the message of the film as it is of these French Jewish films that I have been working on... even if the current situation seems intractable... there’s the hope that one day there will be peace."

Eugenia Kuttler belongs to the group Jewish Voice for Peace and said she was struck by Professor Baron’s closing words.

"I think it is so important especially the last words said here about opening ourselves to seeing the reality of walking in the other person’s shoes and what I noticed is many people were not capable of doing it," Kuttler said.

Those closing words resonated for Ashkenasi as well but with more hope: "The problem like the professor said is most of the time we come with an opinion and we leave with the same opinion but I think in a way, in my case, I saw a side I hadn’t thought about and I’ll think about it some more."

And that is inspiring to Silverstein.

"I thought there was a pretty wide spectrum of people here, it was wonderful. Look there’s still people here talking about the movie so that’s wonderful," Silverstein said.

Film is a wonderful way to start a dialogue and Tuesday night "1913: Seeds of Conflict" will reach a much wider audience on PBS. And perhaps by highlighting how history can be altered by presenting it from different points of view, it will broaden the discussion about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"1913: Seeds of Conflict" screens Tuesday night on KPBS at 9 p.m.