LETTER FROM JERUSALEM
Caught in the Middle
My wife and I moved to Jerusalem
from Moscow with our two kids in September 1997. About the time
we were packing our bags, three Palestinian suicide bombers blew
themselves to bits on Jerusalem's main pedestrian shopping street.
Four Israeli bystanders were killed.
We decided on a security strategy that went something like this: no hanging around crowded places or going to the shopping malls; no public transit. I can't remember now what else we decided because the fact is we didn't really implement "the plan" at that time. Four years into peace talks there was a still a sense that the conflict was heading toward resolution. Relatively speaking, acts of violence were isolated. So we weren't on our guard for long.
My wife's a journalist, too, and, like the flock of other reporters who arrived here around that time, we thought covering Israel and the Palestinians was a pretty good gig. There was always something happening, and if things ever did slow down, a lot of Jerusalem-based reporters just hit the road for Syria, Lebanon, Iran, or any of the neighboring countries that get only a fraction of the attention lavished on Israel.
A bonus in this posting is that you get two countries for the price of one. Israel has the Biblical sites and the Middle Eastern climate, but it's a high-tech, Western oasis in the desert. After Moscow we felt like we'd landed in Florida. Yet, only minutes away by car lies the West Bank: women in veils, kids on donkeys, the sound of the mosque's call to prayer, the slower pace of a desert people. Each "country" provided a welcome break from the other. As outsiders we moved between these mutually antagonistic worlds with complete ease, welcomed warmly in each as visitors from afar.
As they say, that was then, this is now.
These days the phone rings at midnight, as it did December 1, alerting us to the fact that ten young people had been killed by suicide bombers at Jerusalem's open-air mall. Some were just teens, ripped apart by nails packed around the dynamite. And these days, friends near Ramallah call in a state of panic, describing how Israeli helicopters are hovering overhead firing missiles into the city center. Their terrified kids are sick with worry.
Even more than before, this beat commands world attention, and
it offers reporters unparalleled exposure. But it's a job rife
with tension, made worse by the fact that your every effort to
deal with this complex and seemingly irresolvable conflict brings
close scrutiny from interest groups. And by the fact that it has
become a lot more dangerous.
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The Nine-to-Five War
When the second intifada erupted in September 2000, we developed
a real security plan and this one we implemented rigidly. No malls,
no McDonald's, no lingering downtown, no movies, and this time,
absolutely no buses. In July I told my kids, ages nine and six,
a white lie. I said I'd drive them half an hour each way to day
camp because the mini-bus the camp provided didn't have seatbelts.
The fact is, I was worried that a bus full of kids might make
a tempting target for some extremist.
We started hiding the newspapers and never watched the news in their presence. It worked for a while but they heard stories at school and, as the months passed, that bubble became harder and harder to maintain. The day camp director didn't help much. In his welcoming speech he told the kids that in case of "terrorist activities" they should run to the arts and crafts teacher, pointing out a grandfatherly-looking man holding paintbrushes. He had a 9 mm pistol bulging from his belt.
Of course, we don't go on family outings to Palestinian towns like Jericho and Ramallah anymore. The one time we made a partial exception to our travel rule, going just beyond the northernmost Jerusalem checkpoint, turned out to be a disaster. While we visited with our Palestinian friends, there was a terror attack back in Jerusalem and the checkpoints were locked down. We pulled up to one just as Palestinian teens began throwing rocks at the Israeli soldiers. In moments there was the bang of tear gas canisters being fired and clouds of smoke were rising a few cars ahead. I could barely choke out my meager words of comfort as I executed a hasty U-turn. The kids were not comforted.
In September we moved out of the center of Jerusalem to an outlying suburb to get away from the increasing number of bombings in the city and to escape the din of the Israeli helicopters and tanks, which were regularly operating just south of us, near Bethlehem. Like most people here, we stay home a lot to keep the war at bay. I use the word "war," carefully, because, while the fighting is localized and happens in relatively short bursts of activity, with more than 700 Palestinians and over 200 Israelis dead in fourteen months, the word fits.
One curious aspect of this war is that it happens so close to home, reporters don't need to travel far to cover it. For example, Bethlehem is only a ten-minute drive from Jerusalem. My friend from Fox News, reporter Jennifer Griffin, has managed a feat that would be impossible almost anywhere else: to be a war correspondent and a new mother. "It's a nine-to-five war you can cover and still be home for dinner at night," she says. "I've gone out the door with a flak jacket and a breast pump!"
But being able to commute to the "front" hasn't made it any easier for reporters to report on it. Israeli soldiers regularly refuse access to the media when tanks move into Palestinian towns. In October 2000, Israel banned its citizens from going into the Palestinian Territories, which prevented the Israeli cameramen and producers who work for foreign media from doing their jobs. Bureaus were forced to scramble and find Palestinians to fill the gap, and to use their Israeli staffers only inside Israel.
But that expensive arrangement could be doomed, too. The Israeli
government press office announced last summer that it would revise
its criteria for issuing press cards to Palestinian cameramen,
fixers, and interpreters at the beginning of this year. The fear
is that Israel will refuse to accredit them, which would, for
example, make it impossible for a translator or cameraman to travel
from Ramallah to nearby Jenin or Nablus, because the Israeli army
controls the roads between Palestinian cities. The press office
says it's looking at the security risk posed by these people,
but more than one reporter has told me they have no doubt that
the purpose is to reduce firsthand coverage.
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The Weight of Words
I've always been struck by the tone and the volume of propaganda
generated by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But fourteen months
of fighting has turned the flow of press releases, updates, briefings,
and availability sessions into a tidal wave. The amount of spin
out there is enough to make anyone dizzy.
Israel would like the press to reflect its view that it's acting in self-defense. It's the Israelis, they argue, who are under siege and are straining to convince the world that they, just like the U.S., are fighting terrorism. In the spin wars, the Israelis' big gun is Ráanan Gissin, media adviser to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. "We're in the building!" announces Gissin's handler as they make the rounds of Jerusalem Capital Studios, where just about every foreign media outlet has offices. Gissin is shopped around from CNN, to BBC, to Reuters and AP, then Fox, and on and on, offering the Israeli take of the day.
I last saw Gissin in the hallway outside APTN, the TV arm of The Associated Press, in November, when he was asked about Israel's most recent killings of Hamas militants. Israel had stepped up the practice of tracking down and killing "wanted" Palestinians in the last year, sometimes blowing them up with helicopter-launched missiles. The Palestinians say more than sixty men have been killed in this way. Amnesty International condemns these as "extrajudicial executions" that undermine the rule of law, and the U.S. State Department has called them "highly provocative." What journalists call them is a sensitive point for Israel. The government rejects the word "assassination." At various times, it has referred to "initiated actions" or "pre-emptive self-defense strikes." The most common term these days is "targeted killings."
On this day, Gissin said that the army had "intercepted" the militants as they prepared to commit an act of terror in Israel. The journalists weren't buying. One reporter even laughed at the term and said, "'Interception' — is that what you're calling it now?" "Intercepted," said another, "is that what happens before they die?"
Gissin is just the most visible face in a vast Israeli spin machine. "They're very pro-active and professional," says Lee Hockstader The Washington Post, "as good any anyone in the U.S." The machine offers up access to high-ranking politicians, military men, and officials. But Hockstader says they rarely tell him anything he doesn't already know. Tracy Wilkinson, of the Los Angeles Times, says it's hard to get beyond the spin line of the day. "They bombard you with faxes and people to further the same line," she says.
Hockstader knew he'd entered the highest strata of spin in mid-October when Prime Minister Sharon called him on a Saturday evening to explain what he had really meant in that speech on October 4 in which he compared President Bush's "appeasement" of the Arab world to the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's agreements on Czechoslovakia in 1938.
The Palestinian side, meanwhile, wants to be portrayed in the media as the real victim, whose actions stem from being an oppressed and occupied people. The media standard bearers are spokespeople such as Saeb Erekat, chief negotiator, and former legislator Hanan Ashrawi. But they are sometimes undermined by the rest of the Palestinian spin machine, which has fewer resources and less experience than the Israelis. It also tends to exaggerate the circumstances or the numbers of people killed or hurt in clashes with Israelis.
The classic example was the case of Issam Judeh. He was found dead near his car by the side of the road not far from his village of Uhm Safa, on the West Bank. The Israelis said he'd died in a car accident; the Palestinians said he'd been tortured and killed by Israeli soldiers. Other versions of the story claimed that his eyes had been put out and that he'd been skinned, probably by Jewish settlers. The case gained such a high profile that a team of forensic investigators was sent by Physicians for Human Rights, based in Boston. Their examination of Judeh's injuries led them to conclude that he died when he was thrown from his crashing car.
Some reporters have had experiences that go beyond exaggeration.
When Jennifer Griffin of Fox News did a story on Palestinians
who collaborate with Israel, Palestinian officials offered her
an interview with a convicted collaborator in Gaza's maximum-security
prison. After talking to the man for a few minutes, Griffin says,
it became clear to her that he had been coached to say he'd helped
Israel find some Palestinian activists, who it then assassinated.
She doubted he had the wits to carry out such a deception. Afterwards,
Griffin was told that the man had been shot dead trying to break
out of jail. She wrestles with the fear that he was killed once
he'd served his purpose. "I feel I'm being used, I feel dirty,"
she says. "There's no real truth here."
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Under the Microscope
Another kind of pressure on journalists comes from advocacy groups
for both sides based in the U.S. and elsewhere. They dissect reports,
do "studies" in search of bias, organize letter-writing
campaigns, and take out ads to put pressure on reporters here
and on their editors in the U.S. Leading the charge for Israel
is Boston-based CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East
Reporting in America), which has 40,000 members. It publishes
a magazine and maintains a Web site where print and broadcast
reports are analyzed and where individual reporters are chastised.
One of CAMERA's favorite targets is National Public Radio (NPR), whose coverage it once analyzed by counting the number of "pro-Arab" vs. "pro-Israeli" words. The results, published in a large ad in The New York Times in August, accused NPR editors and Jennifer Ludden, the network's Middle East correspondent, of "skewed" and "false" coverage. The ads urged CAMERA members and the public to write to their congressmen, and to complain to local NPR affiliates. In Boston, two donor companies headed by CAMERA members pulled their funding of affiliate WBUR last summer, and urged other corporate donors to do the same.
Reporters tend to bristle when you mention such pressure groups. The mail they get has convinced them that the groups on both sides exist to weigh every word and complain about those that don't support the group's position. If the point was accuracy, Tracy Wilkinson from the Los Angeles Times says, she'd welcome the criticism. But it's not, she says; "it's 'we don't like what your wrote because it doesn't further what we believe.'"
Do such tactics have an effect? As you sit down to write a piece they can loom large. For example, Gilo. Do you call it a "settlement"? If so, it is Israeli housing built, in violation of international convention, on West Bank land captured in 1967. Or should it be called, as pro-Israel groups prefer, "the Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo"? That would be saying that it sits on land that's part of the State of Israel. Do you go with "targeted killing" or do you call it an "assassination"? How do you refer to Jerusalem? Israel's supporters insist it's the capital of Israel. Palestinian advocates complain if we don't refer to the Arab side as "occupied territory." "Script writing is torture," Griffin of Fox News says. "Words are part of the battle here, and that does affect the coverage." The choice of words, of course, is often dictated by senior editors or by policy.
"It's just my personal opinion," says Jennifer Ludden of NPR, "but I think the pressure groups are making reporting not as sharp as it should be. Euphemisms and 'he said/she said' reporting dulls the analysis and sharpness of the context, which does a disservice to the audience."
One of the leading media monitors on the Palestinian side is a man named Ali Abunimah. He monitors the media for anti-Arab bias from his base at the University of Chicago. Though his is a comparatively modest enterprise, he's a prolific letter writer. I got letters complaining about emphasis and vocabulary which reminded me of those voiced by the Pro-Israeli side.
But there was one letter that gave me pause. I can't remember
the specific point, but it got me asking myself whether I actually
had an unconscious bias that I wasn't aware of: I live on the
Israeli side of Jerusalem. I have the Israeli English dailies
delivered to my door, the translations of Hebrew newspapers delivered
by e-mail, and I listen to the English news in the morning on
Kol Israel. We live in fear of Palestinian suicide bombers or
gunmen, not in fear of Israeli tank and aerial assaults. I'm conscious
of their particular bent, but a lot of the Jewish reality has
become my reality. And frankly, when I do live Q&As on radio,
I see that this is true of a lot of American journalists too.
Their questions to me reflect the fact that they relate more to
Israelis, who, like them, are modern middle-class members of a
Western consumer society. I try to compensate by mentally changing
one hat for the other, but it's only a partial solution.
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Caught in the Middle
Both sides, of course, do battle for the sympathies of the outside
world, especially in the United States. The journalists are in
the middle, where it can be dangerous.
On September 11, Palestinian security officers threatened the life of an Associated Press television cameraman in Nablus after he shot video of Palestinians celebrating the attack on New York, and AP chose not to run the footage. When the Foreign Press Association complained, the Palestinian Authority promised it wouldn't happen again. But days later the Palestinian police detained several journalists, including some working for foreign news agencies, who were covering a pro-bin Laden demonstration in Gaza. The police confiscated videotape, film, and some camera equipment.
So it's safe to assume that the Palestinian Authority, well used to abusing its own media, will continue to come down on the foreign press on those occasions when it thinks the story is particularly bad for the Palestinian cause.
Perhaps because Israel has a regular army, civilian masters, and a free press, reporters tend to expect higher standards from the Israeli side. But tell that to the French television reporter Bertrand Aguirre of TF-1. Last May Aguirre was covering a clash between Palestinian rock-throwers and Israeli soldiers near Ramallah. He was folding up a tripod once the action died down when an Israeli soldier drove up and jumped out of his jeep, cigarette dangling from his mouth. The soldier aimed his M-16 in Aguirre's direction and fired a live round from 100 meters away. Aguirre fell to the ground writhing. Several cameramen caught the shooting on video.
He was lucky. The heavy chest plate in his flak jacket stopped
the bullet. The force of the impact made a dent that was so hot
it burned deeply into his skin. "Nobody was shooting on any
side, the demo was all over," Aguirre says. "He had
no excuse to open fire." Aguirre accepted assurances from
the Israeli Justice Ministry that it was launching a serious investigation.
He provided the tapes and the testimony of eyewitnesses. More
than four months later Aguirre got a form letter saying the case
had been dropped for "lack of evidence." The Committee
to Protect Journalists, based in New York City, has documented
more than two dozen cases in which journalists, most of them Palestinians,
have been either shot or beaten by Israeli security forces while
covering the conflict. Reporters without Borders, based in Paris,
has placed both Israel and the Palestinian security forces on
its list of "Predators of Press Freedom."
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Hanging In
We know only one journalist who evacuated his family from Israel,
and he brought them back three weeks later. The vast majority
have simply adjusted to the new reality of life here. Several
times a week on our way to school, my kids and I stop on the very
spot where, in September, our car was rocked by the blast of a
Palestinian suicide bomber blowing himself up less than 100 yards
away. He was apparently en route to a crowded vegetable market,
but he was just steps away from the entrance to our school when
soldiers stopped him and he detonated his bomb. Had the traffic
light been green instead of red, we could have been right in front
of him.
I think reporters learn to cope with the fears, frustrations, and uncertainties for some pretty obvious reasons. It's a big story that gets more airtime and column-inches than almost any other overseas posting. Landing the job was a good career move; I think that most of us would view asking to get out early as a bad one.
On a good day, you're glad you're here, on top of a dynamic, heart-rending, and uniquely interesting story. On a bad one, you realize you have been lucky not to pay too high a price, and you count the days until your time here ends.
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