I'll only recommend one, because frankly, documentaries aren't my shtick. The one I'd recommend is The Fifty Years War. It's originally a PBS documentary, and in total I think it runs something like 5 hours, maybe even more, but it's a really great look into the history of it. It holds up despite being fairly old (to me that's a fun nostalgia factor, the 90s-style TV transitions and music), but most importantly, it has a ton of fascinating interviews. They have interviews with Israeli leaders, with Arab leaders, with ordinary folks who lived through the 1948 war, and all the rest. It has so much ground to cover, and does it relatively well and admirably.

That's not to say it's perfect (for example, it does not reference Jewish refugees resulting from the 1948 war, only Palestinian ones), but it's one of the few documentaries I've watched where I didn't feel, as I was sitting through it, that they were trying to spoonfeed me a message or present a "point". They were just trying to adequately work through massive historical events and materials with the perspectives of people who were involved in them, with video, with historical perspectives, and it was very good.

Unfortunately, given it is relatively dated, it won't go into the past 20 years of course. However, I still think it's a very, very good watch for someone looking to get a basic overview, and get started somewhere. And the interviews alone get you a real feel for the major people involved in a way you'll rarely get. Most of the time, documentaries will focus in on snippets of speeches, or lower-ranking officials who they interview. It's rare you see a documentary like that.

And most importantly perhaps, it's easily accessible because it's all on YouTube for free, which to me is one of the bigger selling points.

Hi there anyone interested in recommending things to OP! While you might have a title to share, this is still a thread on /r/AskHistorians, and we still want the replies here to be to an /r/AskHistorians standard - presumably OP would have asked at /r/history or /r/askreddit if they wanted non-specialist opinion. So give us some indication why the thing you're recommending is valuable, trustworthy, or applicable! Posts that provide no context for why you're recommending a particular podcast/book/novel/documentary/etc, and which aren't backed up by a historian-level knowledge on the accuracy and stance of the piece, will be removed.