On Our Land

As a catalogue of the officially sanctioned iniquities and inequities of the Israeli government against the state's one in six citizens who are Palestinian Arabs, Antonia Caccia's documentary is efficient enough. What it achieves by means of its conventional interviews with dispossessed Palestinians (in Arab villages on the West Bank and Gaza Strip) is a persuasive profile of a state pursuing welfare policies which, whether intentionally or by default, amount to racism. Housing, employment, education and medicine are all areas where the Arabs are shown as suffering blatant discrimination. But most telling of all are laws which forbid Arabs to own or build on land they've occupied for generations. What diminishes the film's value to the viewer who is not so much uncommitted to either side as simply uninformed, is a partisanship which doesn't even allow the official Israeli position the opportunity to condemn itself out of its own mouth.