Atlanta, GA
April 29, 2025
In December I was interviewed for a potential documentary about my late aunt (prompted by a lengthy Wall Street Journal profile, linked here).
The discussion was about my relationship with her, her career as first producer of the MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour, her accomplishments creating acclaimed documentaries…and how she ended up homeless in Palm Beach Gardens.
Jo Franklin produced several notable films, mostly about the Middle East. During my conversation about her life, those accomplishments obviously came up.
One of them was top of mind a couple nights ago, when the BBC aired The Settlers, Louis Theroux’s follow-up to his 2011 documentary, The Ultra Zionists. Each covered terrain my Aunt Jo Anne once trod.
Days of Rage
In 1989, she released a film that drew one of the largest audiences ever to watch a PBS program. It also attracted the greatest controversy that network ever garnered.
Televised on approximately 300 stations across the US, Days of Rage: The Young Palestinians provoked protests, accusations of funding irregularities, and criticisms of PBS for presenting unapproved perspectives.
The documentary almost wasn’t shown. Its initial broadcast was cancelled, because it offended people who shared sentiments expressed by a couple interviewees during the opening sequence:
“I appreciate that [the Palestinians] would like their own state,” said one of them. “But I’m not sure the world needs another…a 24th Arab Muslim, possibly radical…state in an area so sensitive as this.”
A few seconds later, Daniella Weiss (the “godmother of settlers”) chimed in with this gem:
“The solution is finding a national expression for Palestinians somewhere in the Arab world. In Saudi Arabia, in the Sahara, in north Syria. Not where it touches or endangers the future of the state of Israel.”
How kind of this woman (who last month was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for her ongoing advocacy of ethnic cleansing) to offer desolate wastelands to people whose parents were forcibly evicted from their property to accommodate a century of settlers from eastern Europe.
Contrary to our contemporary assumptions, antipathy between Jew and Arab isn’t an ancient hatred. For a millennium till the late 19th century, Levantine Jews and Muslims lived in relative harmony. During that period, relations were much more amicable than what Jews endured in most of Europe.
So what caused this contested region to become “so sensitive?”
From the Temple to the Intifada
Modern Israel isn’t the Old Testament land of the Jews. That was shattered two millennia ago by people other than those the Israeli government keeps displacing.
About four decades after the crucifixion of Christ, the Romans destroyed the Temple and dispersed the Jews. By the time Mohammad was born, most Hebrews had long since left the region. But for more than a thousand years, those who remained were treated relatively well.
Private property is paramount. Its violation is what causes conflict; its restoration usually resolves it.
Despite rotating rulers, private property was respected for centuries among Arabs and Jews. It was generally honored in law and peaceably transferred thru voluntary exchange.
There was implicit recognition that these rights are individual, not collective. Ownership in Palestine was determined by agreement between buyers and sellers, not ethnic allocation based on sweeping assertions in holy books.
Acrimony arose when East European Zionists encroached on private property of native Palestinians. Their understandable migration was prompted by European pogroms in the nineteenth century. But it accelerated after the Balfour Declaration issued in exchange for Rothschild funds that helped Britain finance the First World War.
In the wake of that calamity, pogroms continued… killing 100,000 Jews in the Ukraine alone. The next three decades, for such sympathetic reasons, Jews continued fleeing to Palestine.
That they’d seek distant refuge certainly made sense. But horrors in one place don’t excuse injustice in another. Confiscation of Palestinian property didn’t begin in 1967, or even 1948.
At the turn of the twentieth century, most of Palestine was Muslim. About ten percent was Jewish, with a comparable Christian cohort. The incoming (mostly secular) Zionists, like any new arrivals, were more than welcome to purchase Palestinian land from any inhabitants. Some did.
But many didn’t.
Between the wars, Arab tenant farmers were dispossessed by this rising tide of European migrants. Predictably, riots and uprisings proliferated in Mandatory Palestine. Palestinian revolts and Zionist terrorism, punctuated by the Irgun bombing of the King David Hotel, amplified tensions.
The Holocaust provided an irresistible impetus for a Jewish exodus to a new “homeland”. In 1947, they essentially got it.
Palestine was partitioned into an Arab state, a Jewish one, and the city of Jerusalem which (with Bethlehem) would be under the provision of the nascent United Nations.
The U.N. was founded just a few years earlier, and had no authority to carve countries into existence (tho’ there’s ample evidence it never did).
In May of the following year, David Ben-Gurion unilaterally proclaimed the new state for his transplanted people. Native Arabs naturally resisted, and war erupted. Three quarters of a million Palestinian refugees were pushed from their property in the land now known as Israel.
Most moved (or, rather, were removed) to squalid camps in the Gaza Strip and along the West Bank of the Jordan River. In 1967, after two decades of riots and uprisings, Israel launched a “preemptive” strike against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Within Six Days, it captured the Sinai Peninsula, Golan Heights, West Bank, and Gaza Strip.
Israel returned Sinai during the Camp David Accords, since which the U.S. has bribed Egypt to leave Israel alone. Israel has kept (and expanded) it’s other holdings ever since, including the simmering resentment of an occupied people.
Which brings us back to my aunt’s film.
The Balance
Her documentary depicted the First Intifada from the Palestinian perspective. In Gaza and the West Bank, Jo Anne interviewed young resisters, letting them describe their experiences, frustrations, aspirations, and treatment. She offered minimal narration, allowing the Palestinians to paint a picture of their ongoing uprising.
Three months after its initial cancellation, Days of Rage was given clearance to take the air. But it included “wrap-around” panel discussions before and after that cloaked the message of the movie in perspectives of those who wanted it smothered.
Would a pro-Israeli film have required similar mitigation? The question answers itself. The story (and irony) of Israelis displacing “undesirables” and putting them in camps was supposed to go unremarked.
It’s not that Days of Rage wasn’t “unbalanced”. Of course it was. That was the point!
It was the balance. Then as now, the Israeli perspective permeated the press… and was veritably compulsory on almost every American politician. Even the slightest push-back isn’t permitted… as my aunt discovered.
Not that she didn’t know what she was getting into. And if she didn’t, she should have. She’d been in the business twenty years. She knew the Israeli lobby wielded enormous power. But she may have underestimated it.
Grabbing Oars
In the 1970s and 80s, Jo Anne was a pioneer. Particularly in the Middle East. It took guts for a pretty blue-eyed blonde to poke around the Muslim world.
But even more to infuriate Israeli interests in Washington and on Wall Street. Bankers, munitions makers, and the power elite steering the ship of state don’t appreciate uppity filmmakers grabbing oars that rock their boat.
This documentary was essentially the culmination of Jo Anne’s career. She was never the same after it aired. Her descent into self-destruction and delusion accelerated, along a trail of fraud and debt that led inexorably to life as a bag lady in a hotel garage.
My aunt made a film that dared provide an opposing perspective. Doing so likely cost her career. It almost certainly precipitated its decline.
Like the rest of her family, I was estranged from Jo Anne the last years of her life. Sadly, thru her own actions, she allowed what mattered most to slip away.
But despite efforts of its detractors to kill it in the crib, Days of Rage survived suppression, and stuck around.
Unfortunately, it looks like they will for a while.
JD
Interesting story.
One comment. You wrote: "About four decades after the crucifixion of Christ, the Romans destroyed the Temple and dispersed the Jews. By the time Mohammad was born, most Hebrews had long since left the region."
Actually - we don't know that. The Israeli historian Shlomo Sand, in his book "The Invention of the Jewish People" argues that there is no evidence that there was a forced Jewish exile in the first century at the hands of the Romans, and that it is basically a myth (i.e. - Jews had to leave Jerusalem itself, but were free to remain in the rest of the area). Sands reckons that most of the Jews in Palestine became Muslims over the centuries, and that most modern Jews are descended from converts (largely from Eastern Europe).
I have not read Sands' book, but Sheldon Richmond has, and he finds Sands' arguments convincing.
Bless your Aunt, JD. She tried without thinking of herself. She was and still is a heroine. And, you have resurrected her by sharing. Thank you.