“Terror in the Promised Land” was one of the first mainstream portrayals of Palestinians on American television, on the broadcast network ABC, in October 1978.
The title is, of course, offensive, but the content was humanizing. The film focused on Palestinian resistance, particularly on the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and George Habash, co-founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Palestinians’ resistance against armed Israeli soldiers is terrorism, since armed resistance to occupation is permitted under international law.
The film’s announced broadcast was met with enormous pushback from Zionists, including threats from the Jewish Defense League, an actual terrorist group. ABC even had to store the copy before airing it in a fireproof safety cabinet. The producer, Malcolm Clarke, has said that ABC had to hire a bodyguard for him after he faced threats on his life. Clarke was inspired to produce the documentary after watching Gillo Pontecorvo’s classic 1966 film, “The Battle of Algiers.”
(It is worth noting that FLN members were able to travel freely in the US during the Algerian War of Independence, even though the organization engaged in some acts of terrorism: the targeting of civilians for political purposes. At the time, terrorism was seen as a tactic that did not mark one’s cause as more or less justified. Israeli propaganda has played a key role in redefining terrorism as an essence, and one that is fundamentally different from other forms of violence, such as state violence, which automatically confers illegitimacy on a cause.)
Despite Zionist calls to cancel the broadcast, ABC aired it — but only after adding a last-minute anchor introduction that went out of its way to condemn the footage the audience was about to see.
Nevertheless, Americans watched a primetime documentary, as the late ADC member Jack Shaheen, a doyen of Arab representation in the US, related, which was among the first to show Palestinian human faces to the mainstream public.
Shaheen recorded the broadcast on his VCR for his archive, which is now hosted at New York University. This was an incredible save since, as Shaheen has reported, ABC destroyed every copy of the documentary after the airing. In fact, it basically erased any history of it. ABC News’s website lists no record of the documentary.
(The writer went to NYU with the son of Malcolm Clarke, and eventually found the tape in the Shaheen archive, which led to its first private re-airing in 2013 at the MESA conference.)
The backlash to the documentary will ring familiar to anyone attuned to Zionists’ attempts to silence any Palestinian voice. Obviously, the practice dates back decades, and was significantly more successful back then.
The Jewish Telegraph Agency reported in Nov. 1978,
Protest continued to pour in from Jewish leaders today, denouncing the ABC-TV presentation of the film “Terror in the Promised Land” as a one-sided glorification of Palestinian terrorist outrages.
The JTA’s framing that the documentary was “glorification” is, of course, deeply tendentious editorializing. “Terror in the Promised Land” did not do such a thing. It merely conveyed the Palestinian perspective, their animating spirit, including the fact that Israel has stolen their land. The report continued,
Charlotte Jacobson, chairman of the World Zionist Organization-American Section, stated in a letter to ABC-TV president Frederick S. Pierce that she took strong exception “to comparison of the Palestinian refugees’ situation with the Holocaust of the Jews in Europe. The comparison is dishonest and contributes nothing to an understanding of either tragedy.”
She observed that “one of the insidious notes introduced was the contrast between the living conditions in one of the worst of the refugee camps with the neatness and order of an Israeli kibbutz. The legitimate contrast [Editor’s note: notice the arrogant insistence of dictating how the Palestinian experience should be related] would be between the way Arab refugees are forced to live by their Arab brothers and the way those same Arab brothers themselves live, in the oil-built palaces of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, etc.”
Of course, it should come as no surprise that “The most extensive attack on the program was released by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith in a statement by its general counsel, Arnold Forster, a day before the film was shown. […] Forster said ‘The evil of the ABC film is its acceptance of the PLO rationale of its murder program, almost giving the impression that the producers understand and accept that rationale.'”
Protest also poured in from ABC’s rival CBS, which was notorious in those days (and now again under Bari Weiss) for parrotting the Zionist line. As much so, that AIDS activists once protested CBS, chanting “Fight AIDS, not Arabs!”
As the New York Times reported at the time,
Attacking the documentary was Perry Wolff, veteran producer of CBS documentaries. […] Far more puzzling was Mr. Wolff’s vehemence in denouncing the documentary: “Not journalism at all . . . . I think you were taken in . . . . An unbalanced picture . . . a mark of the deterioration of standards [at ABC News in general].”
The Times reporter pushed back against Wolff’s attacks:
In fact, “Teiror in the Promised Land” was a powerful exploration of what had been carefully introduced as an essay not about right and wrong, but about the Palestinian perception of right and wrong.” Suicide squads for the Palestinian Liberation Organization were seen in training. The phenomenon of the “cult of the martyr” was examined in close‐up. While terroristic activities were never even remotely condoned, the fanatical dedication of a terrorist was presented with rare clarity. Mr. Wolff chose to see the result as a propaganda coup, “bestowing legitimacy on the P.L.O. cause.” He objected that the film did not deal with the harassment of the Palestinians by other Arab states. Yet, shown on the WNYC program was a brief clip from the documentary specifically noting that Palestinian unity “has always been a source of fear and suspicion to other Arabs.”
Mr. Wolff seemed especially upset because so much emphasis was put on Israel as the “sole enemy” of the Palestinians. But can anyone deny that Israel has a severe “Palestinian problem”?
The documentary also won a rave review in the New Yorker:
TELEVISION has been mainly horrible this fall, when not either silly or boring (or all three of the above), and, among the several purveyors of media junk food,” the ABC network has certainly purveyed its share: space trash, the ever-speaking unspeakable Cosell, cutesyporn, and so forth. But last Monday night ABC News presented a documentary on the Palestinians and the P.L.O, “Terror in the Promised Land,” which seemed altogether first-rate—an all too rare example of broadcast journalism employing its considerable strengths […]
I thought the ABC documentary showed us more about the Palestinians in fifty-seven minutes than most American, news organizations, large or small, have printed or televised in the past dozen years—and showed it with an uncommon mixture of judgment and perspective. [Emphasis mine]
A Jan. 1979 New York Times report, by the same journalist referenced above, roughly a couple of months after the broadcast, also defended the documentary for shining a rare light on Palestinians and noted that Zionists often seek to censor such portrayals:
… needless to say, many Israelis and their supporters, Jewish or non Jewish, are disturbed by any attention given to the Palestinians, particularly when that attention appears to be noncritical.
The ABC News documentary “Terror in the Promised Land,” broadcast in October, was widely attacked for affording Palestinian terrorists a forum for their anti‐Israel “propoganda.” Yet, the program was painstakingly introduced as a study not of right and wrong but of Palestinian perceptions of right and wrong.
The fact that the documentary was praised by such prominent establishment sources and, yet still, faced erasure from ABC News speaks to the enormously successful pressure campaigns Zionists have wielded to suppress any Palestinian point-of-view.
A novel incident related to “Terror in the Promised Land” is that the CIA took note, too:
