The movies have always had a parasitic relationship with times that produce them. With cable news networks constantly reoutlining the general topics and specific atrocities of the religion-based conflicts flaring up all over the globe, it only makes sense that contemporary motion pictures would use similar subjects as dramatic grist. So far this year, a 19th-century Mormon massacre (“September Dawn”) and the Holocaust (“Miriam”) have been brought to the screen with a shallow, hand-wringing sanctimony that makes the CNN headline treatment seem like James Joyce.

“O Jerusalem,” a new film about the formation of the state of Israel, was directed and co-written by Elie Chouraqui, the man who made the luridly poetic 1987 kidnapping drama “Man on Fire” (which was remade a few years ago by Tony Scott). Like “September Dawn” and “Miriam,” Mr. Chouraqui’s film is almost completely lacking in the kind of verve and filmmaking smarts that its maker’s less high-minded earlier film had in spades. And like those two other films, it begs the question: If the threshold moments in man’s history of religiously motivated inhumanity are to be the foundation for a new kind of exploitation filmmaking, why do the films themselves have to be so hard to sit through?

The squirming starts quickly in “O Jerusalem.” In post-World War II New York, Bobby Goldman (J.J. Feild), a young Jewish army veteran meets and befriends Said (Saïd Taghmaoui), an Arab with deep ties in Jerusalem. Every radio in every vintage car in New York seems abuzz with the news of terrorist attacks and skirmishes in the three-way British, Jewish, and Arab standoff in Palestine. Mr. Chouraqui is eager to sell what must have seemed like a dry historical bill of goods via the fictional friendship between two young men representing the two most contentious sides of the conflict.

But Bobby and Said haven’t the chemistry to be more than mouthpieces for opposing political viewpoints. Worse is Bobby’s hotheaded childhood chum Jacob (Mel Raido), a character so unrepentantly prone to anachronistic retorts about being “straight up” and having to give out “bitch-slaps” that I initially thought he might have been a time traveler from the present day.

No such luck. Instead of returning to the future, where his slang and haircut belong, Jacob emigrates to Palestine to help Jerusalem’s Jews defend themselves. Bobby and Said’s consciences see to it that they are not far behind. Aided by brutally on-the-nose explanations from Jacob, (“It’s the Haganah — our secret army,” he helpfully points out to defuse one potentially tension-inducing moment before actual drama breaks out), Bobby swiftly climbs through the ranks of the Jewish freedom fighters, who fear the Arabs will make good on their threats to drive the Jews into the sea when the English leave.

Sabers rattle, the Brits move on, and civil war ensues when David Ben-Gurion (played by Ian Holm in a mad-scientist wig that makes him look like he’s impersonating classical conductor Leopold Stokowski) announces that Palestine will be the site of the new Jewish nation, Israel.

History in “O Jerusalem” is gracelessly rushed via every conceivable form of movie shorthand, including color tints, newsreel excerpts, poorly written “period” news broadcasts, and three-tiered titles that not only needlessly pinpoint every occasion and location, but do so in Hebrew, Arabic, and English simultaneously. Melodrama ensues when Bobby alienates Said’s affection by killing his uncle, and an awkward romance flowers between the young Brooklynite and a midriff-baring hottie named Hadassah. As “O Jerusalem” clunkily goes through the narrative motions, predicated on the kind of sudden changes of heart and forsworn oaths that have hamstrung period dramas since the silent era, I grew nostalgic for Amos Gitai’s “Kedma” and Otto Preminger’s “Exodus,” two films that cover the same ground in very different and considerably more satisfying ways.

The film does bear a timely message about tolerance and the worthy idea that no conflict is irresolvable, no matter how long it’s been fomenting. But that message is delivered so frequently and with such preachy bluntness that one leaves the film checking for visible marks. Mr. Chouraqui can be commeded for taking inspiration from Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre’s 600-plus page accounting of the formation of the Jewish state upon which his film is based. But in bringing “O Jerusalem” to the screen with the book’s heart intact, Mr. Chouraqui apparently had to abandon its brain.