First Person: The Mistakes

Two years after she was shot in Bethlehem, a photojournalist looks back

Last spring, to mark World Press Freedom Day, the Committee to Protect Journalists named the world's ten worst places to be a journalist, places marked by restrictions and outright attacks. At the top of the list was the West Bank, where, among other things, CPJ documented sixteen cases between September 2000 and June 2001 in which journalists were wounded by rubber-coated steel bullets or live rounds. Yola Monakhov was one of them, and this is her cautionary story.

Two years ago I was shot by an Israeli soldier while "on duty," so to speak, as a photographer for The Associated Press. Shot where, people ask. In Bethlehem, I answer brightly. No, where in your body? Ah, yes. Well, to the pelvis, sort of. Let's just say it was lucky that I'm a woman.

My friends were most sympathetic to the new crippled me that would emerge from the wheelchair. "A nice cane will suit you," they said. "Something with a chiseled gargoyle head. Maybe ivory. You'll look cool." Oh, great, thank you. So this was my trip to Israel.

I couldn't help but feel embarrassed. Yes, the pain was unspeakable. But what bothered me most, what anguished me between the shots of delicious morphine, was that I had allowed this to happen to me. In one fell swoop, I had lost my privileged position as spectator and documentarian and become a victim. Whether I was shot as a result of my mistake or one made by the Israeli army, as the subsequent Israel Defence Forces investigation found, the question of mistakes weighed heavily on me. Had I been targeted as a journalist or a deceptively girlish Palestinian boy? What had I been doing in a Holy Land at war, under a dark sky of history and grief I barely understood?

When I'd moved to Israel to free-lance as a photographer — my work there would somehow be more meaningful than the pictures of holiday shoppers and crime scenes I was shooting for the New York Daily News — it wasn't yet a battle zone. But it became one quickly.

On day two of the second Palestinian uprising, whose fires still burn unabated, I was dispatched to Ramallah, a large, lively city in the West Bank. I was stringing indirectly for Reuters through an Israeli photo agency and found myself surrounded by a blizzard of bullets for the first time in my life. What do you do? With a camera, engagement comes naturally: you stay and take pictures. I took the cue on demeanor from my Palestinian photographer counterparts. One stood by bravely, crouched with the shebab — the Palestinian youths — when they crouched, crawled behind them when they crawled. The shebab waved flags, burned tires, hurled stones, prepared Molotov cocktails in discarded Israeli soft-drink bottles, and took cover behind wrecked cars they erected as temporary and unsafe shelters. It didn't occur to me to be afraid.

It was a game, dance-like, awful, cruel. The shebab laughed, giddy and exhilarated. They were lovely in their ersatz Tommy Hilfiger costumes. They were valiant and sad. I doubt they knew exactly what they were doing there either. No one knew, except that this was big. And it wasn't really a game.

The light falls beautifully in the Samarian desert. The images of violence seem real, essential. A voice for those who wage it. A cause. An exhilarating, erroneous truth.

There is a sudden burst of tear gas. A boy takes me by the hand to help me find my way out of the blindness. A buoyant Palestinian girl in a Red Crescent uniform hands out onions to cut the sting from our eyes. She is laughing, on the verge of crying with joy. Later, she takes off her Red Crescent coat and hands it to a co-worker. She runs over to join the shebab in lobbing stones. She screams, allahu akbar and forms a fist in the sky. Then she returns to her job and continues to bandage wounds and help carry bodies into the ever-present ambulances.

This is what happens. People instinctively know what to do. But they suffer, we all suffer from the imperfection of our knowledge.

The conflict marches forward, each mistake validating the next.

Two weeks later, at a bigger Ramallah clash, when a young man is shot in the head and collapses, already a corpse, into the arms of his friend, I am standing just feet away. I do what seems natural. I run toward them and click click click the picture of harrowing sorrow, a Pietà in black godless smoke.

Back at Reuters, grimy and tired, I lay out my film of wide-angle shots on the light table. A sympathetic colleague, a photographer and junior editor, goes over it with a loupe and says, "Yola, you're taking too many chances. Think of what your mother would say if something happened to you." Then she cuts out a couple of pictures to file for the day's take.

Another day I return from a brutal day to the Reuters office and say tentatively to the photo editor, "I have pictures from Ramallah today." He says, "Ramallah? Oh, no thanks. We had a staffer today in Ramallah." "But I have a guy who was shot in the stomach," I say. His eyebrows arch. "Can you see blood?" "Yeah," I say, "there's blood." "Okay, let's see it." There is blood. He files the picture. The next day it was featured on Yahoo!.

But things at Reuters weren't going so well, so later I made some overtures to the AP, the competing wire service. I went through the necessary London channels and an editor in Jerusalem called me in. An AP staff photographer named Eyal was going away to London for two weeks. The AP wanted me to cover for him. I drove to Tel Aviv the next morning to get Eyal's car, which had his AP-issued body armor in the trunk. Eyal was tall, an extra-large in flak jackets.

After I finished shooting an economics story about a Palestinian bakery — its business had been hurt by the constant clashes — I called the AP editor in Jerusalem to let him know I was done. I told him that two youths had dragged out a tire, an early sign of some sort of clash to come. It looked like nothing, I told him, but he asked me to stay there and cover it.

It was eerily quiet that day in Bethlehem. I called in several times, bored, hoping to be dispatched somewhere else, but the editor was content to just keep me there in case something happened. So I kept trying to make pictures. It was hot, clear, and brilliant, and Eyal's enormous bulletproof vest didn't allow me to move. I walked back to the car to put it in the trunk and saw a small group of Israeli soldiers. We exchanged wary shaloms.

About two hours later, I was standing in the street with a group of Palestinian boys. They had abandoned their stone-throwing and given up on a homemade Molotov cocktail — it had been quiet and uneventful, the sort of day on which I could suggest to them that instead of breaking up a perfectly good sidewalk, they should really be at home doing their homework. We were bantering. I think I was answering a question about whether or not I was married, always tricky in a place where women my age are mothers of four. Suddenly, a cry went up. An Israeli soldier had appeared at the end of the street and was aiming his M-16 at us.

Assuming that I was clearly visible as a photographer — I had two cameras, a ponytail, camera pouches, a hiking daypack — I got out of the way to the lee of a doorway with another Palestinian youth, as the rest of the kids ran away. I was looking at them, watching them run, when I felt it. It was deeply, awfully shocking. I'd been shot in my very center. It was like the needle of a compass piercing through a sheet of paper. I was nothing. Everything revolved around the wound. I crumbled in pain and surrender but retained the presence of mind to release a loud, shrill, feminine wail. I wanted the soldier to know: What have you done? You have shot a civilian, a woman, a photographer.

After a couple of minutes, the shebab came back and carried me to a Red Crescent ambulance that had suddenly appeared. Luckily, word about what happened got back quickly from the Palestinian hospital in Beit Jala, where I had been taken, to the AP in Jerusalem. The AP arranged — after intense negotiation — to get me transported to Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem. A Palestinian ambulance ferried me to the Bethlehem checkpoint. I was moved over to an Israeli stretcher. Then the Israeli ambulance delivered me, spent and resigned, to Hadassah.

No aspect of Israeli life is free from politics, and my injury was no different. Right away, an X-ray revealed that the live bullet had shattered inside me, leaving what my surgeon described as "a big mess." A pelvis turned to powder, multiple punctured organs. A zigzag of destruction and pain. But my journalist friends told me that the IDF proclaimed that no one had been shot. And that if someone had been shot, it was "only" a Palestinian. And that if the person shot was not a Palestinian, then only a rubber bullet was used.

In the emergency room, a very nice Russian-Israeli man in a medical scrubs took it upon himself to translate for me from Hebrew to Russian what people were saying. He came several times to my bedside, held my hand and smiled kindly. The day after the surgery he appeared again and asked me who I thought had shot me. "An Israeli soldier," I told him. "That's impossible," he spat out. "You have no idea what goes on, what those Palestinians do to our boys. How horrible it is for us." I never saw him again after that. "When you play with fire, you get burned," another Israeli told me, while checking my incoming and outgoing fluids.

I was very, very lucky. I received the best medical treatment. And Jocelyn Noveck, then Jerusalem bureau chief of the AP, pressed the army for an investigation. I won the distinct privilege of being the only foreign journalist, among many shot in Israel, whose incident merited a full IDF investigation, at least at the time. The army sentenced the shooter and his commanding officer to twenty-eight days in jail, and the officer was demoted. The army also took full financial responsibility for my treatment. I was to receive the same sort of care given to wounded Israeli soldiers, and my hospital bills were paid.

The IDF investigation, meanwhile, yielded a new fact: on the day before my injury, a twenty-year-old Israeli soldier named Shahar Vekret had been shot in the neck by a Palestinian sniper, on the other side of the same building where the seemingly meaningless Bethlehem clash would take place. It was a soldier from Shahar's unit who shot me. Like me, Shahar had been rushed to Hadassah hospital where Dr. Avi Rivkind, the same superstar surgeon who treated me the next day, tried to revive him, unsuccessfully.

When I was brought to Hadassah, Dr. Rivkind had instinctively connected the two incidents. He told a small group of journalists assembled outside the operating room that "I couldn't save the soldier, but I will try to save her."

The question that lingers with me is why the soldier who emerged from behind the street corner to shoot, in the words of his officer, "that Palestinian in the gray T-shirt and jeans," didn't see that I wore a sky-blue T-shirt and dark slacks, was a woman, and held two cameras. I saw him perfectly. I beheld his soldierliness, and expected the same recognition when I tried to get out of the way of his aim. It was a slow and deliberate error and not at all something done in the chaos of battle. I also wonder why there was not a single rubber bullet, or warning shot, or anything proportional to match the threat posed by the incompetent Palestinian boys with stones.

Some Israelis say that Palestinian snipers employ the boys as bait to get the soldiers to come into the line of fire. Things have gotten much worse. Neither side appears innocent or driven by a beautiful cause.

Still, there was no reason to shoot that day. The Israeli army's excuse was that they thought I was a Palestinian. But if, as had happened on previous occasions, the boy of about fourteen at my side had been shot instead of me, it would have been a boy with a nascent mustache and a wry sense of humor, a boy who had introduced himself as Ariel Sharon when I asked him his name.

I studied literature before I became a photographer and was always taken with the Aristotelian definition of tragedy, which results when a hero makes a mistake and a whole sad chain of inevitable events follows. Mistakes are in our nature. But they grow more liberally, more lushly, in Israel's desert and its urban oases than anywhere else I've seen.

I returned to Israel in May in search of the soldier who shot me. Not because I want to confront him, or even shoot him with a camera as he shot me with a gun, but because I want to unpack the dubious unnecessary inevitability of what was a sad event without an evident cause.

There is so much happenstance, resignation, abdication of agency in what goes on in Israel and Palestine. This is how the conflict marches forward, each mistake validating the next.

I have not yet found the soldier, but in my pursuit of him, I managed to track down the grieving family of Shahar, the Israeli soldier whose death the IDF cited as a factor in my injury. His father and sister, Hilla, agreed to meet me for coffee at a mall in Lod, just off the road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Lod is one of those nowhere towns between cities, sprawling, featureless, melancholy.

Shahar's whole family has a proud history of elite military service, his father explained: he, his wife, and four of their five children have distinguished themselves in elite IDF units. Now Hilla, nineteen and vibrant, has just begun serving in an elite frontline unit. In contrast to her traditional Sephardic father, she seems headstrong and free, an attractive girl, sexy in her olive-colored military uniform.

They tried to be stoic. This is war. All sorts of things happen in war, and certainly a wounded American photographer is nothing compared to a dead son and brother. But we were all there then, sitting in the fluorescent space of a mall café, another devastating suicide bombing just around the corner. We were united by tragedy, and by a flawed sense of duty. Hilla's father admitted that he would have preferred for his youngest daughter not to serve in the West Bank, but Hilla has another year and intends to complete it. "Whether or not you like it," she says, "you have to go. And if you are lucky enough, you will come out alive."

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