In 1997, Tom Hayes authored our Nov.-Dec. Link article “People and The Land,” a behind-the-scenes look at his documentary by the same name.  That issue turned out to be one of our most requested; more significantly, his DVD People and the Land has  easily been our best selling video.
 
In 2014, Tom and his film crew returned to Palestine. The documentary that survived his cutting room floor was not the one he expected.  How his latest documentary, Two Blue Lines, came to be is the subject of this issue.

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The author begins with these words: “I was once on track to be a nice Jewish girl, growing up in the small New England town of Sharon, Massachusetts, with liberal minded parents who fled the narrow confines of shetl Brooklyn for the dreams of 1950s exurbia, a sparkling lake, and a moderately out-of-tune though touchingly aspirational civic orchestra.  I played the cymbals, perhaps a warning of crashes to come.

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“Kill Bernadotte” is a story enfolding several stories, beginning during the last years of World War II and continuing through into the 1947-48 war in Palestine. Time and space do not permit a discussion here of the history of Zionism from the late 19th century, the Zionist attempts at collaboration with a variety of colonialist powers from Cecil Rhodes to the Turks, French and Russians—none of which worked until the British Balfour Declaration in 1917—and the next quarter century of Palestine as a British “Mandate” (a post World-War I term for colony).

Our focus will be on one man.

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Morbid thoughts—both predictable and unexpected—fill my mind as I arrive at the Freedom Theater in Jenin’s refugee camp. The large steel gates at the entrance are familiar from the photographs that widely circulated four years ago of the spot where a masked gunman executed the theater’s founder, Juliano Mer Khamis, in broad daylight.

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There is a word in our Link issue that needs explaining.  It’s prosopographic.  Google tells us it comes from prosopography, and it turns out to be a fancy word for investigating the common characteristics of an historical group.  This particular group signed Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence.

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