During the month of Ramadan, official Palestinian Authority TV is broadcasting a series called “Children of the Village Chief. The series portrays Arab life around the time of the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and afterwards in a village in what was until the 1967 Six-Day War the “West Bank” of the Kingdom of Jordan.
The first episode starts with the so-called Palestinian nakba—the “catastrophe” of the establishment of modern-day Israel—and the series takes the audience up to the 1980s.
In one episode, a boy around the age of 10 asks his uncle to teach him how to use a rifle because he wants to shoot at “the Jews.” The uncle obligingly explains to his young nephew that he must only aim at “the enemy,” who the boy then again identifies as “the Jews.”
In another episode, a woman wonders how the Arab forces were defeated by the Jews since “the Jews are cowards.” The man replies that “the British are a snake in the grass ... they gave [the Jews] everything.” (Britain did not arm Jewish forces during Israel’s War of Independence.)
In a later episode, Jews are portrayed as potential rapists and “impure schemers.” Set during the Six-Day War, the villagers discuss running away before “the Jews” arrive because the villagers “have wives and honor is precious,” and they fear the Jewish soldiers will rape the village women.
