Violence is never far away in the historic region of Palestine, in life or in Winterbottom’s film, which pulls no punches in displaying the horrors of terrorism, with bomb blasts, indiscriminate shootings and cold-blooded murder. The audience is quickly brought up to speed with archive newsreel footage and a voiceover; our narrator is Shoshana, played by Irina Starshenbaum. The daughter of Russian Marxist Zionist Ber Borochov, she is a member of the barely-legal Haganah territorial army, an organisation founded to defend the Yishuv, the group of Jewish residents in the region living there before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
