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Restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive with funding provided by Barbara Roisman Cooper and Martin M. Cooper, National Endowment for the Humanities and The Packard Humanities Institute

The Arab-Israeli Conflict as Seen Through the Hearst Newsreels

March 9, 2015 - 7:30 pm
In-person: 
Jeffrey Bickel, newsreel preservationist, UCLA Film & Television Archive.

Beginning with the nationalist uprising of Palestinian Arabs against British colonial rule in the late 1930s and continuing through the Six-Day War in early June of 1967, the Hearst newsreels covered the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East for over three decades.

Tonight’s program will include a selection of 15 newsreels from Hearst’s News of the Day series.  Starting with two newsreels featuring stories on the Arab revolt in British Palestine in 1938, the presentation will continue with an issue from May 20, 1948, covering the First Arab-Israeli War, which began almost immediately after the announcement of the establishment of the State of Israel.  This will be followed by a group of newsreels released in the months prior to the Second Arab-Israeli War, better known as the Suez Crisis of 1956.  There will also be two newsreels, one from 1958 and another from 1962, on the continuing border clashes between Israel and its Arab neighbors.  The evening will conclude with four newsreels covering the Six-Day War.

The Six-Day War took place June 5-10, 1967.  It was the third of the Arab-Israeli wars and was fought between Israel and all of its neighboring countries—Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon—which were aided by other Arab nations.  The war concluded with a decisive victory for Israel in which it expanded its territory significantly—the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan and the Golan Heights from Syria.  The warfare created hundreds of thousands of refugees and brought under Israeli rule more than one million Palestinians in the occupied territories.  Of course, the status of these captured territories became a major point of contention in the continuing Arab-Israeli conflict.  —Jeffrey Bickel

35mm, b/w, total program runtime: approx. 100 min.

Restored from 35mm nitrate original negative, 35mm nitrate composite print, 35mm triacetate original printing negatives and 35mm triacetate composite dupe negatives.   Laboratory services by YCM, The Stanford Theatre Film Laboratory, Simon Daniel Sound, Audio Mechanics, DJ Audio, Film Technology Company, Inc.  Special thanks to: King Features.