Keys: A Troubled Inheritance

Sami abu Salem is a Gaza journalist who, like most Gazan Palestinians, has been pursued with his extended family up and down the Strip by Israel's war machine since October, 2023. Sami has reported regularly to broadcaster and film-maker Mike Joseph, and so to the Balfour Project. Earlier this week he sent this voice commentary as news of a ceasefire began to circulate. There was no let-up, ho...

Sami abu Salem, fleeing south down Gaza with his family, pursued by the Israeli war machine---bombs, drones, rockets, snipers---finds himself in Rafah. He reports here to Mike Joseph, who is chronicling Sami's plight for the Balfour Project 

Credits Reporter Sami Abu Salem Presenter Mike Joseph Pictures Sami Abu Salem Images Mike Joseph Sami Abu Salem Music Keys Theme & Variations on a Bach Prelude in B minor - Micha Wink PRODUCTION Mike Joseph Producer Zac Ware Sound Editor Pamela Koehne-Drube Audience and Web Advisor

This double episode closes the first season of Keys. With the Hamas invasion and massacre of October 7 2023 leading to the 2023 Israel-Gaza War, this episode brings its historical understanding to the cruel events that are unfolding as we work. We reveal that the horror that fills the news every day has its roots deep in the history of Israel-Palestine. UN Secretary-General António Guterres remind...

How do people become refugees? What’s it like? Mike Joseph’s aunt became a refugee on her 10th birthday. This is the story of comfortable family life transformed in an instant, narrated by the family’s only survivors. Yet even refugees are not the most unfortunate. Some are trapped, unable to escape, awaiting their fate. In this epic journey, Mike sets out to uncover his Holocaust inheritance, but...

In 1938 Britain and the USA call an international conference to rescue Jewish refugees from Hitler. The world refuses to open its doors, a humanitarian disaster that clears the way for Hitler’s Final Solution. But astonishingly, Zionists attending the conference see this as an achievement. How could that be? Episode 8 of KEYS: A Troubled Inheritance released on 25 October 2023, and now available o...

In Episode 7, when Nazi Germany excludes Jews from citizenship, Israel Gold, Mike Joseph’s grandfather, is forced to consider emigrating to Palestine. He learns Hebrew and Arabic, because his kind of Zionism seeks a bi-national state of all its inhabitants. But in 1937, the British Government reveals a different plan: a Jewish state, with its native Palestinian population removed by force. How wil...

Nationalism comes under the spotlight in Episode Six: Israel Gold, Mike Joseph’s grandfather, adds a four-kilo dictionary to his soldier’s kit bag in November 1917. We discover why. Then, without knowing it, Israel Gold becomes Ukrainian, an identity which will through time reveal the strengths of multiculturalism and the perils of ethnic nationalism. In this epic journey, Mike sets out to uncover...

Mike Joseph’s mother petitions the Queen for help to recover her Nazi-plundered house from a resistant Germany. The Queen’s response unlocks a wave of British government action, which escalates towards an international crisis. In this episode, a very personal family story becomes a highly political dispute. In this epic journey, Mike sets out to uncover his Holocaust inheritance, but is led relent...

What do you say to an old Nazi? With this question, Mike Joseph’s daughter Asha opens an episode in which we hear what Mike does say when suddenly, in 1991 he encounters the Nazi who stole his mother’s house fifty years earlier.  The old Nazi shouts him down. Then Mike finds that he is not the only voice in newly-reunited Germany refusing to return property stolen by the Nazis. In this epic journe...

In 1943, while Mike’s mother’s family were being killed, a Nazi journalist obtained Mike’s mother’s home, the Leipzig house from which the SS had expelled them a few years earlier.   In 1951, instead of returning the home to Mike’s mother, East Germany stole it again, and handed it back to the Nazi journalist.   Now it is 40 years later, 1991, and Mike arrives in newly reunited Germany to try fina...

One day in 2006, in a noisy café in Ukraine, Mike thought he had just met a survivor of the Holocaust massacre that destroyed his mother’s family. He turned out also to be a veteran of Israel’s War of Independence, now bitterly rejecting Israel’s occupation of Palestine, telling his family there was no hope and they should leave.   This incident, captured in sound, sums up the contradictions Mike...

In the second episode of Keys, as the Second World War ends, people long for better times, and the United Nations does something about it, declaring genocide a crime against humanity, declaring slavery an abuse of human rights, declaring asylum and freedom of thought to be human rights, as well as the right to own property and not have it stolen. But two states immediately deny that right to refug...

By remembering his family lost in the Holocaust, Mike Joseph encounters the Palestinian Nakba. How do radically different histories connect? Documentary series KEYS: A Troubled Inheritance launches in Wednesday 6th September 2023 An epic journey to uncover a Holocaust inheritance leads relentlessly to discovering a Nakba inheritance: two catastrophes that are very different, but very connected. Ca...

By remembering his family lost in the Holocaust, Mike Joseph encounters the Palestinian Nakba. How do radically different histories connect? Documentary series KEYS: A Troubled Inheritance launches in Wednesday 6th September 2023 An epic journey to uncover a Holocaust inheritance leads relentlessly to discovering a Nakba inheritance: two catastrophes that are very different, but very connected. Ca...