Last week he screened Hostages of Hatred at the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue on the Upper West Side. The film looks at how Arab states, the Palestinian elites and the United Nations have all been instrumental in keeping Palestinians festering in refugee camps since 1948.
It has been a mainstay of Arab propaganda since 1948 that the Jews kicked the Arabs out of Palestine. But Rehov presents Arab newspaper and magazine accounts from both before and after the war of 1948 documenting Arab leadership's many calls to Arab citizens of Palestine to get out before the impending war started.
Those citizens were assured that they would be able to return to their homes within two or three weeks, after the Jews had been defeated. It didn't play that way, of course, and unlike all the other refugees from wars of the 1940s, those who had fled have been kept in squalid, hatred–breeding refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Gaza for more than a half-century.
The UN oil-for-food scandal pales in comparison to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency which was set up ostensibly to serve the Palestinian people but which has more than anything else become a work program for 22,000 permanent UN workers who live well off of the misery
Every other refugee situation that needed UN attention has been handled through the United Nations High Commission on Refugees with reasonable degrees of success. Only the Palestinians had their own refugee organization set up for them, and the fact is that it has virtually condemned them to be refugees in perpetuity.
As Rehov has documented, Israel has attempted to alleviate their conditions, but they were turned down, for example, when they tried to build better housing for them in Gaza.
Some of the refugees Rehov interviews still dream about returning to Palestine, even those who have spent their whole lives in the camps. Rehov infuses this documentary with sadness and feeling for people who have been trapped by a prison of Arab rhetoric.
Rehov is currently editing Suicide Killers, a study in the cult of death. His other films include Silent Exodus, about the million Jews expelled from Arab lands; The Road To Jenin, which refutes the Palestinian propagandist Mohammed Bakri's film about a "slaughter" that never took place, and Christians in Peril, about Christian Arabs' flight from the Middle East. The plan is to bring them all back to New York late in the year for a tour of college campuses. This is the only way to see them, since despite much interest and press, there's little chance of such charged content finding its way to HBO, PBS or any other media outlet.
