The Long Way Home (1997)

I don’t think I’ve seen a documentary that has attempted to follow the period immediately after the liberation of the death camps at the end of WWII through to the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948, and this makes good use of a wide array of archive material to illustrate just how torturous this process was for many. With most of Europe in ruins and even the victors on their economic knees, the problem of what to do with tens of thousands of displaced persons was one that nobody had a straightforward solution for. Tired of being shunted from pillar to post, the Jewish people increasingly focus on returning to their ancient homeland of Palestine, but with the Arab population united in opposition and the British struggling to operate their UN mandate effectively, this was going to have to be yet another fight for these exhausted and determined people - many of whom had little more than the clothes they stood up in and the numbers tattooed onto their flesh. What this does not is offer us any semblance of balance as it tells it’s story. There are contributions from survivors and from some American journalists and politicians to impress upon us the difficulties these people faced, but it doesn’t really address the chronic issues of supply faced by the allies as they faced massive problems of their own in the aftermath of the war. Much is made of the British refusal to allow unfettered migration into Palestine, but not to explain why this view was taken by Attlee’s resource-stretched government in London, nor does it really present anything by away of a credible plan from the Jewish leadership to establish their new country in the face of hostility from their would-be new neighbours upon whom most of the West was still heavily dependent upon for oil. Indeed, the overly simplistic narrative risks using their homelessness as a shield to justify a period of indiscriminate assassinations and bombings of the British establishment along the lines of them being freedom fighters against an enemy who are not given any opportunity in this film to explain their rationale for their position. It also raises quite a few issues around the concept of modern-day “nationhood” as a territorial entity in a part of the world where that might have been more suitably attributed to a much less specifically geographically defined location? It has been bought and paid for by Americans so of course Truman gets some decent press as the United Nations narrowly votes to create two nations in Palestine, and the film ends with a rather naive sense of optimism that further shows the editorial limitations of it’s scripting. Still, it presents an impressively assembled selection of clips from an astonishing, troubling and frequently harrowing collection of newsreels and military films that indicates that the end of the conflict with the Nazis was, in many ways, just the beginning.