9 December 2011
WHEN THE MOST POWERFUL ARMY IN THE MIDDLE EAST wants to meet for coffee, something is happening. Captain Arye Shalicar, who’d been my guide on ‘children’s day’ at the West Bank military court, phoned to say the army was unhappy with my story about the visit.
We agreed to meet. Just before he hung up, he said: ‘I’ll be bringing my wife.’
By this point I’d been in Israel almost three years – long enough to be suspicious of the IDF. I was worried that Captain Shalicar might later misquote something I said then produce his wife as a witness. I mentioned my concern to Sylvie. ‘Then I can come along too,’ she said.
So, on 2 December, Sylvie and I walked into Masaryk Café in the German Colony. Over the next hour, we would take part in a very strange conversation. But it would also prove to be illuminating in terms of how Israel views international opinion.
Captain Shalicar pulled from his pocket the article I’d written for the Weekend Australian Magazine on 26 November 2011, entitled ‘Stone Cold Justice’.
‘We have a problem with this,’ he said.
‘Are there any factual mistakes in it?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said, ‘we’re not challenging the accuracy, but our concern is that it’s been published outside Israel. If this had appeared in Israel, in Haaretz or Yedioth [Ahronoth], we could live with it. This sort of thing appears quite a lot. But this appeared in Australia.’
I told him I didn’t understand his point.
He explained: ‘People in Israel are committed to the State of Israel. Either they have moved here because they are committed to Israel or have remained here because they are. So when they read a story about Israeli soldiers and Palestinian children they read it in the context that whatever they read, it is not going to shake their commitment. But people in Australia may not have the same commitment. So when they read a story like this they may question their support for Israel. If I was sitting in Australia reading this I would think that Israeli soldiers were brutally treating Palestinian children.’
He paused. I said nothing. He continued. ‘A story like this may damage the view that Australians have of Israel and they don’t have the commitment to Israel to go along with that.’
Captain Shalicar was articulating a view that is widespread among Israelis: they don’t mind if something is printed in Israel, but when it is published more widely they react badly. But to hear these words from an IDF media officer was extraordinary.
I’d faced this mindset ever since I filed my story on the tractor incident during the 2009 Gaza War. I’d endured an even worse barrage from Noga Tarnopolsky following my story about Nasser Jaber. Frequently in the Israeli media I’d read stories about various abuses by the Israeli Army, but the moment I reported them in Australia I was attacked.
When Jewish leaders in Australia complained I asked them: ‘Are you saying Australians should not be able to read what Israelis read?’ I resented the pressure not to report what I saw; I was covering the Middle East as an Australian journalist in the belief that events should be reported as you find them.
As one Australian who moved to Israel told me: ‘The reason some people in the Jewish community in Melbourne don’t want you writing stories about the treatment of Palestinian children is not that they think they’re untrue but because they think that by appearing outside Israel they give Israel’s enemies a weapon.’
Captain Shalicar’s response wouldn’t be the last criticism my story received. In mid-2012, Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr would run into an old friend from the Labor Party, Mary Easson, in the Qantas lounge in Sydney. She was eager to show him something: she had been copied in on an email from Michael Danby, the federal Labor member for Melbourne Ports, to Gerard Henderson, the Executive Director of the Sydney Institute and columnist with my newspaper. By then I’d written several articles about the plight of Palestinian children in the Israeli military court. I had recently written an update about how Carr as Foreign Minister had raised concerns about the plight of Palestinian children in Israeli jails. Danby’s email to Henderson on 28 July 2012 said he was not impressed with Bob Carr’s ‘fawning over John Lyons’s attempts at self justification’.
When Carr read it he was outraged that one of his Labor colleagues would send this to a newspaper columnist and saw it as an attempt to portray his interest in the issue as ‘a cook up’ between him and me. Carr rang Danby, giving him what he now describes as ‘a shot across the bows’. As Carr recalled: ‘I told him that I have seen this [email] and I don’t think that it is very loyal behaviour, especially given that you have not raised the matter with me … I have not had any involvement with Lyons’s stories.’
Carr and I had had dealings when I was editor of the Sydney Morning Herald and he was premier of New South Wales – often about stories he had not liked – but we hadn’t spoken for a decade – the idea that Carr was ‘fawning’ over anything I’d written was ludicrous.
For me, one of the most bizarre aspects of being a correspondent in Israel was that while criticism coming from the Jewish leadership in Melbourne seemed continuous, from Israeli publications the response was much more reasonable. In fact, one of Israel’s leading news websites even referred to the same article that Danby had used to attack me to praise me for my fairness. The Times of Israel website carried a blog post about me entitled ‘An objective journalist – the unicorn of the Middle East’. Of the article about Bob Carr and the Palestinian children in the Weekend Australian, the writer said: ‘I could imagine the pro-Israel lobbyists spitting out their Corn Flakes across the paper. What an anti-Israel, Iran-sympathising terrorist puppet! Why does he care so much about what’s happening in Israel – look at Syria! He probably donates to the New Israel Fund. Shudder.’
The blog post then went on to note that in the very same edition of the paper I had a story about how Hamas was demolishing Palestinian homes in Gaza to sell their land and corruptly take profits. I had reported how when I rang the United Nations for comment they refused to condemn the creation of these new Palestinian refugees. ‘The story was great journalism,’ The Times of Israel item said.
This is the kind of stuff pro-Israel media watchdogs exist for. House demolitions, quite rightly, draw much fire from the Western media when carried out, or threatened to be, by Israel. Identical events undertaken by Hamas, however, apparently do not. This journalist is the exception … Drawing fire from all sides is a signpost of good journalism in the Middle East. Here, this journalist had written two articles that described, in sober but firm terms, violations of what are considered international rights and norms by both Israel and Hamas. In isolation, each article could be viewed by partisans as bias in the extreme. Together, they leave the reader with the impression that both sides do bad stuff. It’s up to the reader from thereon.1
In 2014, when I presented a television report for Four Corners based on my articles in The Australian, it was attacked by hardline Israeli activists in Australia before it even went to air. Some even circulated the link by which viewers could make a formal complaint to the ABC. Being a government broadcaster, the ABC was duty-bound to investigate each complaint, but the accusations proved groundless.
While the program faced a fierce attack by a small group, it was well received by the Australian public. Even the Israeli Government took the report in its stride.
France’s leading current affairs program, Envoyé Special on France 2, decided they also wanted to cover the story, and contacted Sylvie, the co-producer of the Four Corners program. She put six weeks’ research into it – people who could be interviewed were lined up and France 2 in Paris booked accommodation for the team. But two days before filming was due to start, France 2 pulled out. The explanation? The Israeli Army had said it would not give access. Separately, a journalist from Britain’s Daily Mail told me: ‘Your story about Palestinian children is a strong story but there’s no way we could get that into our paper because of the influence of the lobby in the UK.’
Worse still was a media conference held by UNICEF, the UN’s children’s fund, on 6 March 2013, to launch a report on the same topic; Sylvie and I were invited because of the articles we had done together. The conference had been postponed several times, and one UNICEF official I knew had told me: ‘You won’t believe the pressure that has been put on us [by Israel] to cancel this press conference.’ Another UNICEF official had said: ‘We were limited [by Israel] in the number of journalists we could invite.’
Sylvie had brought her video camera, but as the briefing began UNICEF’s Jerusalem chief, Jean Gough, announced that only the first five minutes could be filmed. ‘And we ask that you don’t quote us [by name].’
In the first five minutes, Ms Gough praised Israel. ‘I want to thank them,’ she said, referring to their cooperation with UNICEF. Then she ordered that filming stop.
With the cameras off, UNICEF began to tell the real story. One official said the ill-treatment of Palestinian children was ‘widespread, systematic and institutionalised’; another told how children were sometimes told they would be raped or killed if they did not confess. Another said there was ‘a systemic pattern of abuse and torture’. For the next 90 minutes UNICEF painted a picture of widespread abuse.
I’d never experienced such a schizophrenic press conference. I found it appalling that UNICEF was trying to use us to create a false impression. I sat there wondering how to report such an event. I decided to write both what Ms Gough said in the first five minutes and then what the UNICEF officials said in the next 90 minutes – readers could make up their own minds.
It confirmed for me how cleverly the Israel image-makers play the media. Had UNICEF officials said on camera what was in their report, the story would have echoed around the world. The Israelis had effectively killed any television coverage. And UNICEF had played along.
I discovered that to soften any criticism of Israel, rather than use the word ‘torture’ the UNICEF report had substituted the word ‘duress’. The report admitted that the evidence examined included about 200 documented cases from Defence for Children International (DCI). The DCI cases included a boy who had had his hands tied behind his back for 19 hours; a boy whose handcuffs were so tight that flesh came off; a boy who said he was hit in his testicles; and a boy whose head was slammed against a wall. But these were not in the final UNICEF report. Jean Gough conceded that UNICEF ‘took advice from Israeli lawyers’. I asked if those Israeli lawyers saw the final draft. ‘Of course,’ Ms Gough said. ‘We had discussions on it. That is about ensuring we have a dialogue.’
For me, the final twist came when I emailed Yigal Palmor, the spokesman for Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, asking for a response. Palmor replied: ‘This year Israel has joined the UNICEF board and our working relations and collaboration with the organisation are appreciated by the international community.’ How extraordinary – and, from Israel’s point of view, brilliant. They had joined a board that should be holding them to account over their treatment of children. No other country has as many children under military occupation as Israel: in the West Bank, hundreds of thousands, and that number is growing. Being on the board means Israel can be forewarned of any UNICEF criticisms.
Why do the supporters of Israel want to prevent stories like this one from spreading overseas?
When we arrived in Israel we did not realise the prize that it coveted. It was only by living among Israelis, mixing with them at the local sports club or over a Shabbat dinner, that we came to understand the endgame: formalising the occupation into official annexation and achieving Greater Israel. Scores of foreign journalists, diplomats and businesspeople who have lived in Israel long enough have come to this same conclusion.
For Israel, the prize of Greater Israel far outweighs any criticism it receives. To take this path, the Israeli public have had to convince themselves that ‘the world hates us anyway’ and would criticise anything Israel did. That is, the world is becoming increasingly anti-Semitic.
For Israel to continue pursuing its endgame – annexing the West Bank – it cannot allow the international community to form the view that the occupation is unacceptable. Israel tries to minimise reports of its brutality in the West Bank so that international opinion does not turn against it.
As long as Israel insists on maintaining an occupation there will be tensions between journalists reflecting the values of their host countries and Israelis who want to maintain the occupation. To maintain the course towards Greater Israel, Israel needs to be seen to want a peace agreement. Israel’s problem is that the media sometimes reports the reality: that it is relentlessly growing settlements, encouraged by financial incentives and a free security service, the IDF.
The only way for Israel to manage this is to attack the media. As long as the media is seen as biased, anti-Israel or anti-Semitic, then Israel is not at fault.
There are three battles in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict: the military battle, the settlements battle and the public relations battle. Clearly, Israel has already won the military battle. While it regards Hezbollah in Lebanon as a formidable enemy – backed by the power of Iran’s funding and military assistance – Israel can crush Hamas in Gaza with little effort. Israel has also won the settlements battle. As discussed, settlements and the military bases that go with them are liberally located across the West Bank, strategically placed to prevent a viable Palestinian State.
But the third battle the Israelis have still not won, and in fact are losing: the battle for international public opinion. The challenge for Israel, through its embassies and lobby groups, is how to make sure that foreign journalists do not stop the creeping annexation of the West Bank from continuing. Israel needs to portray itself as the vulnerable one, even though it has the most powerful military in the Middle East, with an arsenal that includes at least 220 nuclear warheads.
We live at a time when more people are trying to shape reality than report it. The collapse of the traditional newspaper model means there are more people in public relations than journalism, and Israel operates one of the most effective public relations machines in the world. There’s a Hebrew word for it: hasbara, or ‘propaganda’. Hasbara is even the name of a government unit. Because Israel so brilliantly manages its reality, many people – tourists, diplomats and journalists (me included) – are shocked when they come to Israel and see the occupation up close. Philippe Agret, the former Jerusalem bureau chief of Agence France Press, arrived in the Middle East ‘with a completely free mind’. ‘I bought, to a certain extent, this story of “plucky Israel” fighting against a hostile world. I had some admiration for the building of the State of Israel, what they’d done since 1948. I was 50–50.’ But the reality Agret encountered was very different.
Britain’s Sky News correspondent Dominic Waghorn said that in managing their message the Israelis are ‘peerless’. Yet despite its massive spending on hasbara, Israel has failed to convince the world to accept its settlements.
Philippe Agret said: ‘At the end it doesn’t work, it cannot work, because the cause is wrong. When I mean the “cause” I mean occupation, colonisation, discrimination. You might have the best hasbara in the world, the best propaganda machine in the world, but you still have the root of the problem: occupation. The injustice is there and you cannot fight a fact of injustice even with the best propaganda machine. Look what happened to the Americans in Vietnam. It’s a bit similar – they lost the propaganda war because the cause was wrong.’
Agret said he was shocked by what he found in Israel. ‘For me the best example is the one you see the first time and which you see every day – it is young Israeli soldiers, new migrants, “Boris and Galina” coming from, say, Russia and Ukraine, checking, body searching and taking the identity cards of Khaled and Ahmed who have been farming in Nablus for many generations. This is the basic proof, the daily evidence that there is something wrong. Why are Galina and Boris checking, pestering and humiliating Ahmed and Khaled whose fathers and grandfathers have been in this place for centuries? There is something wrong.’
Reuters’ Crispian Balmer agreed: ‘However much PR you throw at it, you’re never going to make this thing look good. The occupation is an absolute fucking disaster for this country. I see it as a growth on the State of Israel that they have to remove but they can’t bring themselves to remove it and it might well be too late to remove it.’
Balmer added: ‘For Israel, which has done and achieved astonishing things in its [70] years, there’s no denying it – if you look at where this country has come from, there can be few others that have achieved as much – it’s morally corrosive and politically and diplomatically devastating to be clinging on to huge swathes of territory. If they were saying “We will annex it all and everybody will be a citizen with equal rights, equal access to airports, everything,” that’s a different thing. But they’re not saying that. You cannot justify subjugating a people indefinitely.’
New technologies are worsening the situation for Israel. Smartphones mean that more people than ever can capture images of brutality committed by the occupier. The mobile phone has been damaging for Israel’s reputation. Crispian Balmer said: ‘Incidents that stick in my mind include when the soldier rammed his gun into a guy’s face. There was a bike protest and they were trying to cycle one way [in the West Bank] and this guy for no reason just smacked him in the face. Without that image that incident wouldn’t have been an incident. The mobile phone has the potential to turn these incidents into global stories because they’re everywhere.’
Balmer’s four years in Israel coincided with the rise of social media: ‘When I came here I didn’t really know what Twitter was about. I saw some people who used it but I had no real concept, I didn’t have it myself. That has opened up a whole new direct front in the dialogue.’
Perhaps the biggest threat to the occupation is the internet. Anyone can visit the website of Haaretz and read the material that many supporters of Israel want to keep from foreigners.
This is one of the longest military occupations in history, with 2017 marking its 50th year. It is one of the few left. The world today does not like occupations, and few are able to endure.
In Europe in particular, opinion is increasingly hostile. Up until the occupation began, countries such as France considered Israel a close friend. Those friendships have steadily crumbled as the European public finds it increasingly difficult to condone the occupation.
So deeply has Israel alienated Europe that even in Germany – which has been reluctant to criticise Israel since the Second World War – attitudes are changing. Gil Yaron, correspondent for Germany’s influential Die Welt newspaper, said Chancellor Angela Merkel ‘hates’ Netanyahu, as do many Germans. ‘They feel lied to and have no understanding of his policy of settlement constructions.’ Yaron said Netanyahu could be ‘mesmerising’ when he assures German politicians he wants peace. ‘I think they are exasperated with his talk about peace, they just do not believe him.’ Yaron said criticism in Germany of Israel’s settlements is ‘still muted but I’m not sure they are going to remain that way. People who are 15 to 20 years will have completely different commitments to Israel than those who are in power now.’
Things are very different in the US. Dominic Waghorn said television networks there had ‘caved in’. Reuters’ Crispian Balmer concurred: ‘I think most criticism [of the media] would come from America, most of it from pro-Netanyahu Zionist organisations.’
During my years in the Middle East, Judi Rudoren held what is, without doubt, the most sensitive position in international journalism: Jerusalem Bureau Chief of the New York Times. The US is Israel’s most important ally, and this is the newspaper that matters to the American elite. The job has left incumbent after incumbent battered, bruised and sometimes bitter.
Veteran New York Times Jerusalem correspondent Clyde Haberman – himself Jewish, like Rudoren – has said every NYT correspondent has been subjected to ‘non-stop assault’ and therefore few on the paper want the job. ‘We’ve had decades of correspondents that, no matter how different they’ve been one from the other, no matter how talented they are or how many Pulitzer Prizes they have to their name, always end up being accused of being either anti-Semites or self-hating Jews. At some point, this seeps into the DNA of the newspaper. This is what you can expect if you go there – to have your integrity hurled back in your face every single day.’ But, said Haberman dryly, he finally discovered how to placate Israeli hardliners: ‘If I didn’t want to be accused of hating Israel, I should start every story with: “50 years after 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, Israel yesterday did one thing or the other.”’2
Jodi Rudoren has taken hits from all sides. Rudoren and I became friends by spending time on the road together, including two assignments in Gaza. ‘Americans by and large accept that Israel is a different type of place,’ she says. ‘They don’t apply their standards, they buy this idea of Israel as a Jewish State created out of the worst moment of history and that it may be an anomalous ethnocracy that they are willing to accept, even though they don’t think ethnocracies are a great idea, but to be an ethnocracy that has fairness and justice and whatever. They simply buy this Jewish–Israeli consensus notion of a Jewish and democratic State.’
Ultimately, though, there is pressure on all foreign journalists to sugar-coat their reporting. As Gil Yaron said: ‘There are two societies at war and you cannot expect either one to be comfortable with equal reporting, because when you are at war you are looking for allies, you are not looking for a judge.’
Jodi Rudoren admitted to ‘defensive writing’ about Israel; Die Welt requires as a condition of employment that its journalists ‘support the vital rights of the people of Israel’; Reuters has a special rule book for what wording must be used.
The Guardian’s Chris McGreal agreed that some journalists provided a flattering portrayal of Israel because they did not want to have to defend tougher reporting. ‘I think there are newspapers which steer clear of controversy on Israel. I think that has less to do with the reporters on the ground who see the situation for themselves than senior editors trying to avoid controversy. It’s evidence that the harassment can work if not resisted.’
The pressures on a journalist, said Crispian Balmer, meant that reporting could become ‘unbelievably dull, a ping-pong of “he said, she said”. Every fact is disputed and there is a binary narrative like train tracks that never meet. There is no simple story that you can write in a fluid and fluent fashion because every other line is “But the other side says no.” There’s a danger that people working here do stick to certain formula[e] because they know it’s gone through before and they know they can defend it.’
I also noticed a pattern where Israel would delay any confirmation of serious allegations until the media lost interest. If it is reported without official confirmation, only those who are staunchly anti-Israel will believe it. One case I became aware of was in Gaza during the 2009 war. Doctors there were saying, ‘People are coming into our hospitals and we believe that they have been exposed to white phosphorus.’ White phosphorus can be used in the desert to highlight army targets but also burns the skin, and it is considered a war crime to drop it onto a populated area. I rang the IDF’s spokeswoman Avital Leibovich to get her response to that and she said, ‘How dare you accuse us of doing something like that! It’s offensive and outrageous that you would buy that sort of propaganda.’ Several months later, the army quietly admitted that it had used ‘limited’ white phosphorus. By then, though, no one wanted to follow it up.
Uffe Taudal from Berlingske, a conservative Danish newspaper supportive of Israel, said every word in Israel was politicised, ‘so if you write Jerusalem [as the capital] it means you accept the annexation, if you write “Israelis think” then 20 per cent of the population – Palestinians living in Israel as Israeli citizens – are excluded from the political life.’
Most correspondents I knew in Israel said that pressure came from self-appointed pro-Israel groups rather than the Israeli Government. I believe the government effectively ‘outsources’ that pressure, which allows it to maintain workable relations with correspondents on the spot while the pressure is applied on the journalist’s editors. This was certainly what I found with the Australian pro-Israel lobby.
Journalists based in Israel often faced a backlash back home. ‘I did not get many complaints from the Israeli Government, very few actually, but a fair lot from pressure groups outside Israel,’ says Philippe Agret, who believes the aim was partly to exhaust journalists.
‘The biggest message you’ll get from me,’ said Jodi Rudoren, ‘is that all of this noise and activism is based on a very strange set of criteria that have nothing to do with how we actually operate …
I really have come to see that it’s not a tiny number of people but it’s a finite number of people mostly talking to each other and it’s really not journalistic in its understanding, its assessments, its goals. It’s political and you just have to try as hard as you can to turn back to people who share your values, who ask journalistic questions about the story and what you’ve written and who you can trust as to whether you’re tilting in one direction or another … anybody who knows anything about journalism or politics or the situation knows that articles aren’t critical of Israel or somebody else. Most articles are probably both, most sentences are probably both and most of it probably depends who’s reading it, how they view something … Good for the Jews, bad for the Jews – that’s not how I’m writing. Most things that happen here are not that simple.
Often Western countries argue that the status quo is preferable to a further deterioration in the situation. Taudal says: ‘There are 600,000 settlers and more all the time … The idea of status quo is another smokescreen.’
According to Jodi Rudoren, the fact that the occupation has gone on for so long has meant it has started to look ‘a lot like apartheid’. And it is not just the reality of Palestinians in the West Bank which looks like apartheid, said Rudoren, but for those in Israel also. ‘I actually think the issue of apartheid is more relevant to how Arab Israelis are treated within the framework of the country,’ she said.
Yet Crispian Balmer said: ‘I suspect that the public around the world by and large sees what it wants to see because it’s such a polarised story.’
For Taudal, the gap between the reality and the international perception means a media failure: ‘In many ways we in the media have collectively failed in our reporting of Israel. There was a Danish TV journalist who came here, he was not used to being here, and he did a story about Israeli settlers in Hebron spitting at Palestinians and it made a huge fuss in Denmark but that’s an everyday occurrence. But [when] he put it on TV it was like “Is this going on?” Nobody in the West believes what’s going on here unless they see it with their own eyes because there are so many people back home saying it’s not true.’ Because the reality of what Israel is doing is only occasionally glimpsed, when violence breaks out many people around the world assume this is just the reaction of Palestinians who will never accept Israel’s existence.
Colin Rubenstein is the man who runs AIJAC and is hugely influential in shaping the opinion of the Australian Jewish community, and Australian politicians and journalists. I would only fully appreciate his views when I read on AIJAC’s website a speech he made in Melbourne during the 2014 Gaza War. Rubenstein told the audience on the steps of the Victorian Parliament: ‘Israel does more than any other country to avoid killing civilians.’
It revealed something to me about AIJAC. In effect, Rubenstein was saying that he believed that the Israeli Army acted according to higher moral values than other countries, including his own.
I’ve always had the view as a journalist that each story, each government and each country should be judged on its merits. Countries, armies and governments can change; they can improve or deteriorate. To make a blanket statement like ‘Israel does more than any other country to avoid killing civilians’ flies in the face of logic. The media regularly place the US, Australian and other armies under scrutiny and sometimes find their behaviour unacceptable. Yet somehow the Israeli Army is better than these armies.
During the ‘golden period’ soon after my arrival in Israel, I got invited to lunch by an American-born Israeli who runs a Jerusalem-based lobby group designed to influence foreign media and closely aligned with the Israeli Government. He wanted to convince me of several things. One of them was the special status of the Israeli Army.
I asked him why the Israeli Army had higher moral standards than the Australian Army.
He talked about the codes of conduct of the Israeli Army. I replied that while I didn’t unconditionally defend the Australian Army – that they had sometimes been involved in bad behaviour – they also had a strict code of behaviour.
Finally, the lobbyist came to the point. ‘Because the Israeli Army has Jewish values,’ he said.
I asked prominent Israeli journalist Gideon Levy what he thought of the idea that the Israeli Army has higher values because they are Jewish values.
‘It’s like claiming it’s the most moral army in the world,’ he responded. ‘Most Israelis surely believe in that … the denial and self-cheating [are] so deep that it doesn’t matter that there are 2200 or whatever civilians killed, that half of Gaza is destroyed, they’re all terrorists and not human beings.’
I pointed out that if someone claimed the Australian or US Army was the most moral in the world, no one would believe it, so why could people get away with saying it about Israel?
Levy answered: ‘Because it is the chosen people. I tell you “the chosen people” is a key thing here. It explains a lot.’
He told me that ‘the notion that we are the chosen people is very deep-rooted in this place, much more than people tend to see. Most Israelis are deeply convinced that they stand for the chosen people – most Israelis are deeply convinced that after the Holocaust the Jews have the right to do whatever they want. Most Israelis are deeply convinced that international law applies to any country in the world except Israel because Israel is special. These are all things you get here from childhood.’
Levy said the sense of being ‘the chosen people’ was taught to Israeli children in many ways.
‘You don’t have to call it the chosen people but you may call it “Israel is something else”.’
Since the occupation began, the messianic right of Israeli politics has convinced the public that ‘Judea and Samaria’ were given to them by God. And for non-religious Israelis, the mantra for an endless occupation has been security – a claim that can be debunked with the simple question: if the West Bank is so dangerous, why has Israel given financial incentives to more than 600,000 citizens to move there since 1967?
Both the right and the centre of Israeli politics are now hooked on occupation. For the right, it represents a completion of the biblical circle in which they have finally returned home. For the centre, it represents cheap housing. If Israel were ever forced to end the occupation it would not be a security crisis it would have to deal with – no other country better knows how to deal with security – but a housing crisis. Suddenly, 600,000 Israelis would have to be housed in Israel.
To understand the mindset of Israelis, one needs to consider their view of the international community. They argue that when the Nazis were engaging in their State-sponsored campaign to kill Jews, the world did nothing. They watched as trainloads of their fellow Jews were being taken to concentration camps. They watched as, in the heart of Europe, their people were almost extinguished. Israelis frequently ask: do we trust the international community?
Israeli land expert Dror Etkes said:
We have to understand the human drama in this story. Think about Israel in 1967. This is 22 years after Auschwitz was liberated and Holocaust survivors were still in Israel. The vision of the Jewish Israeli leadership was still very much shaped by the Second World War and of course 1948 and the huge events and demographic transitions that took place in historic Palestine in 1948, 1949 and 1950. There were Palestinians who became refugees who vanished in 18 months – it had never happened in the history of Islam that this amount of people had been transferred in such an efficient and compressed period of time out of their country. The minute this encounter between modern Israel and the West Bank occurred there was almost an inevitable explosion of emotions and ideological aspirations [by Jews] which could not be fulfilled.
Legendary New York Times journalist Clyde Haberman wrote that the verbal attacks on successive NYT correspondents have been because ‘Jews still don’t believe that the world won’t turn on them. It’s hardwired into their systems. They can’t accept that the Holocaust is a distant memory for most of the world’s population and they get upset when they are not perceived as perennial victims, even though they hardly look like victims anymore.’3
Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar said: ‘Ezer Weizman, our former President, used to say, “The Jews left the ghetto but the ghetto did not leave the Jews.” The ghetto mentality is inside us … We love to be victims and we will not give the Palestinians even the benefit of the doubt that they are victims. If you listen to people from the left they will tell you that we are also victims of the occupation. The occupier is the victim of the occupation also.’
Israeli-French journalist Sylvain Cypel wrote: ‘“Them against us” is the mode of mental functioning that explains why so many Israelis know deep down or perceive privately that crimes against the Palestinians are committed in their name yet refuse to admit this, at least publicly, in front of the “others”, since this would mean betraying the fundamental affiliation and running the risk of expulsion from the cocoon that ensures their loved ones’ solidarity … the IDF, its leaders keep repeating, remain the most moral army in the world.’4
The majority of Israelis today were either born into the occupation or migrated into it. Israelis now entering the army at 18 were born a generation after the occupation began. Unlike their grandparents, who often had relationships with Palestinians, the only Palestinians young Israelis know are those they have met at checkpoints, or those that they have read about as terrorists. They have been educated to believe that they are the victims rather than the occupiers. Famous Israeli historian Benny Morris has echoed this sentiment: ‘We are the greater victims in the course of history and we are also the greater potential victim. Even though we are oppressing the Palestinians, we are the weaker side here.’5
‘I think the real danger in this country,’ said Crispian Balmer, ‘is that if you arrived in Tel Aviv and that’s where you stay then this country is a great country.
Who wouldn’t want to live down there by comparison to anywhere else in the Middle East? It’s fantastic. But most people have no idea that 60 kilometres away there’s some [Israeli soldier] kid at a checkpoint humiliating a little old [Palestinian] lady – I’ve seen it happen – getting a little old lady out of a car to stand there … That is just a half-hour drive from the beaches of Tel Aviv. I think one of the problems of modern-day Israel is that most people have absolutely no contact with Palestinians whatsoever so a lot of people are in total denial with what’s going on, they bury their heads in the sand and assume it’s not so bad. They say, ‘Well, it’s much worse in Syria.’ They’re right – who wouldn’t prefer to live in Ramallah [in the West Bank] than Damascus? – but that’s not the point. The point is there’s a continuous occupation for which there’s no end in sight and you have a political class here that really has no vision, no united vision whatsoever, as to how to end this occupation.
We weren’t prepared for the amount of racism we encountered in Israel. It seemed particularly entrenched among younger Israelis. One poll found that 56 per cent say that their fellow citizens who are Arabs should not be allowed to vote in Israel’s national democratic elections; 52 per cent of schoolchildren say that Arabs should be banned from the Knesset; and 48 per cent of Israeli Jews want Arabs transferred out of the country.6
Often leading rabbis drive racism. The King’s Torah, a 2009 book written by two prominent rabbis, told Israelis that ‘there is justification for killing [Palestinian] babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us [Jews]’. A year after we arrived in Jerusalem, 50 leading rabbis signed a letter urging Jews not to rent apartments to Arabs, which would be bad for property prices. It said: ‘Among [Gentiles] are those who are bitter and hateful toward us and who meddle into our lives to the point where they are a danger.’ Any Jew who did rent to an Arab should be ostracised: ‘The neighbours and acquaintances must distance themselves from the Jew, refrain from doing business with him, deny him the right to read from the Torah and similarly [ostracise] him.’ All 50 rabbis were government-paid, but not one was reprimanded.
In Israel’s Yellow Pages phone directory, some companies advertise ‘Avodah Ivrit’ – ‘Hebrew Labour’. A Tel Aviv cleaning company offers its customers different hourly rates according to the race of its cleaners – African, Eastern European or Western European; Arab workers are not offered.7 Many carers for elderly Israelis are Filipinas who talk to each other in Tagalog. Even though there are hundreds of young Palestinian women in the villages of the West Bank, Israelis would rather spend thousands of dollars arranging visas for Filipinas.8
I’ve always loved sport. As a boy in Melbourne I’d go with my father on Saturdays to watch our AFL team, Fitzroy. To me sport is something you throw yourself into. In early 2013 I went to a game of soccer in Jerusalem involving Beitar Jerusalem, which had just recruited two Muslim players from Chechnya. When one of the Muslims got the ball, the crowd jeered. So angry were some supporters that police had to take them away. Israeli media reported that at one game on the day the players were signed, fans of the club displayed a banner bearing the words ‘Beitar – pure forever’ and ‘chanted anti-Arab slogans’, leading to four arrests. On 8 February 2013, two fans set fire to the club’s offices, apparently in response to the new players from Chechnya. On 3 March, one of them scored his first goal for Beitar, prompting hundreds of the team’s fans to leave the stadium. At the game I attended I asked one Beitar supporter: ‘If the score was level, would you prefer one of the Muslim players to score a goal or for your team to lose?’
‘That’s a hard one,’ he said.
But of all the discrimination we saw in Jerusalem, there was one situation that appalled me every time: soldiers at checkpoints making Palestinian ambulances wait. In contrast, Israeli ambulances were always waved straight through. I’d often see soldiers smoking or on their phones, as Palestinian ambulances, their lights flashing, just sat there. The Israeli media reported how on one occasion soldiers sat around eating pizza while a Palestinian boy who urgently needed dialysis was made to wait. Journalist Gideon Levy told me about a story he wrote of a Bedouin woman in labour who was rejected at one checkpoint after another, and finally lost her baby giving birth in the car. The reaction was a public scandal.
A report by Physicians for Human Rights in 2015 found infant mortality in the occupied territories was 18.8 per 1000 births compared with 3.7 in Israel. The maternal death rate in the occupied territories was 28 per 100,000 births in contrast with seven in Israel. The average life expectancy was 10 years lower and the gap had increased in recent years. The major factor was the Israeli limitation on the freedom of movement of patients, medical professionals, ambulances and medications.9
For years, leaders of the Australian Jewish community kept telling me the Israeli Supreme Court was a stronghold of justice. Living in Israel soon dispelled this myth. While Israelis become used to stories of legal disparities, they stood out for us. One case involved an Israeli woman and Palestinian man who had consensual sex. Sabbar Kashur, a 30-year-old Palestinian from East Jerusalem, was a delivery man for a legal firm. He met a Jewish woman while doing his rounds and they agreed to adjourn somewhere for sex. The woman apparently assumed he was Jewish, but later discovered he was an Arab. Six weeks later the police placed him under house arrest and eventually he was sentenced to 18 months’ jail.
Kashur later told the media: ‘If I were Jewish, they wouldn’t have even questioned me.’ But the judges were steadfast: ‘The court is obliged to protect the public interest from sophisticated, smooth-tongued criminals who can deceive innocent victims at an unbearable price – the sanctity of their bodies and souls. When the very basis of trust between human beings drops, especially when matters at hand are so intimate, sensitive and fateful, the court is required to stand firmly at the side of the victims – actual and potential – to protect their wellbeing.’ The judges acknowledged the sex was consensual, but they found Kashur guilty of ‘rape by deception’.
Israeli journalist Gideon Levy said: ‘Do the eminent judges understand the social and racist meaning of their florid verdict? Don’t they realise that their verdict has the uncomfortable smell of racial purity, of “Don’t touch our daughters?” The court had established a precedent for rape by deception based on race.’
Living in Israel, I saw discrimination everywhere. One of the reasons I thought it best to leave after six years was that daily humiliation against Palestinians almost became unremarkable – at that point I think a foreign correspondent faces the danger of ‘going native’ and can fail to notice the extraordinariness of events around them.
Gideon Levy has been writing about the occupation for 30 years. He has noticed that while some Israelis used to feel a sense of injustice at the treatment of Palestinians, this has largely dissipated. In 2012 he wrote a story revealing how Israeli military officials had calculated the minimum number of calories a Palestinian in Gaza needed so as not to starve: 2279 per day. After its calculation, the army added another 34 tons of food a day as a charity to ensure toddlers did not starve. Israel has a naval blockade around Gaza and decides which goods come in and out. They allow virtually no goods to leave for export and only limited goods to enter. Levy wrote: ‘Who came up with the idea of calculating the caloric intake for 1.5 million people under siege? What train of thought even gives Israel the right to enter the mouths and invade the stomachs of the people living under its jackboots? So now it’s not just their bedrooms that are brutally broken into every night; now it’s also their digestive system.’
The document was prepared by the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, who said it was just a ‘working paper’. Levy wrote:
The very fact that such a document was composed, whether it was used or not, points to a satanic way of thinking. But the reason the army didn’t want this document made public had nothing to do with its diabolical content. Nor did it fear a public storm [in Israel], which it knew wasn’t likely to happen in a country afflicted with blindness. The reason the Israeli Defence Forces was reluctant to publicise this document was because it would make Israel look even worse in world opinion than it already does. It’s a matter of image, you know: the goyim [non-Jews] shouldn’t find out. It’s not nice for the goyim to know how low Israeli racism could sink.10
Israelis now regard it as normal that their army practices on real Palestinians. For training purposes, Israeli soldiers storm into the houses of Palestinians at two or three in the morning, throwing stun grenades and shouting. Terrified residents, including children, have no idea what is going on. One Israeli newspaper accompanied Israeli soldiers on such an exercise in Bir Zeit, a Palestinian village near Jerusalem, which is home to the largest Palestinian university. The journalist reported that for the exercise the army needed to land at a nearby Jewish settlement, Beit Arye. When an attack helicopter landed without prior warning, the public relations man from the settlement angrily complained to the army, saying that it ‘woke up children and caused panic among the inhabitants’. The army apologised and explained that the helicopter was meant to have landed next to a nearby Palestinian village. The reporter noted: ‘After almost 48 years of occupation, it seems that only an outsider is taken aback by situations the IDF blithely accepts … the Palestinian residents become extras who are not asked whether they want to take part in the dress rehearsal and receive no warning of what is about to take place. Their homes are targets for night visits, searches and the family’s coerced awakening.’11
One case of racism in the Israeli Army suggested a culture that had been allowed to develop. It involved Colonel Itai Virov who, when defending one of his soldiers for assaulting Palestinians, explained that ‘a slap, sometimes a blow to the neck or chest or sometimes choking to calm down [a suspect] is reasonable’. Such violence, he said, was sometimes necessary for ‘completing the mission’.
The response to Virov’s statements was typical of what often happens in Israel – publicly, he was rebuked and a criminal investigation launched against him. Privately, his career went from strength to strength – the criminal case was dismissed for ‘lack of evidence’, even though his own words had condoned the use of violence. Two years later Itai Virov was promoted to brigadier general and made commander of the Gaza Division – responsible for the behaviour of Israeli soldiers in Gaza.
This contrasted with the treatment of Shachar Berrin, a 19-year-old Australian-born soldier who, in a public forum on the subject ‘The Occupation is Destroying Israel’, said: ‘I serve in the Jordan Valley and we see every day how soldiers … look at these people [Palestinians] not as human beings, not as someone who is equal, but someone who is less than them. And to think that we can just leave the racism and xenophobia – that they will only be racist when they humiliate Palestinians – of course not … I think that once you are conditioned to think something, you bring it back with you [to Israel] and that it deeply affects Israeli society and causes, as our President [Reuven Rivlin] says, to be more racist.’
Within 12 hours of speaking those words, Berrin was ordered back to his barracks, tried, convicted and sent to a military prison.12
One ruling in the Jerusalem District Court highlighted the way racism is often a factor in court decisions. Judge Moshe Drori heard the case of Itamar Biton, who did not want to pay 18 shekels for his parking ticket as he left a car park. On 1 January 2006, when the attendant, Ethiopian-born Noga Zoraish, insisted he pay, he rammed her. She screamed but he kept driving, so fast that she fell from the car’s bonnet and was seriously injured. He drove off. Biton pleaded guilty but Judge Drori acquitted him – he said he did not want to give Biton a criminal record and harm his chance of becoming a rabbinical court judge. While publicly the system acted – the Supreme Court in August 2009 overturned the verdict. The Supreme Court issued a suspended sentence. Biton did not serve a day in prison.13
The Supreme Court’s verdict in the case of an apartment block in Jaffa, near Tel Aviv, was also revealing. A property developer had marketed apartments for Jews only. The marketing was clearly discriminatory, something that technically is illegal in Israel. The residents had conclusive evidence – the marketing brochures. The Supreme Court agreed the marketing was discriminatory. The President of the court, Dorit Beinisch, said the project was ‘wrongful discrimination’. However, the Supreme Court allowed it. The marketing project was too far advanced to be stopped – it was ‘a done deal’, the court ruled, so any suggestion of taking the land off the developer was ‘theoretical’, Beinisch ruled. The fact that the Supreme Court had allowed an illegal deal to proceed meant a precedent had been established – if a Jewish-only development could become advanced enough before anyone appealed then developers could argue that the Supreme Court had set a precedent.
While the Supreme Court rhetorically argues against discrimination and sometimes makes decisions that entrench it, some Israeli leaders are open about their racism. The chairman of the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, David Rotem, has said: ‘In my opinion, every Jewish town needs at least one Arab. What would happen if my refrigerator stopped working on a Saturday?’14
The case of 19-year-old Maysam Abu Alqian demonstrates how shocking the racism can be. To earn money, he worked at two jobs in Tel Aviv – one at Burger King and one at the Super Yuda supermarket. On 22 May 2016, while working at the supermarket, he took some rubbish outside. Two men – one dressed in shorts – demanded Alqian’s ID. According to eyewitness Erez Krispin, Alqian replied: ‘The ID is inside, who are you?’ Krispin says: ‘Before he even finishes speaking, he’s being beaten senseless, a beating like you’ve never seen, teeth flying through the air. The Arab is crushed.’
Krispin said that an elderly woman tried to intervene, but one of the men yelled: ‘Fuck off before we finish you too!’ Krispin said police arrived and joined in – there were five men beating Alqian. The store manager, Kobi Cohen, said other employees who intervened were also hit. ‘They hit him mercilessly until he was incapacitated,’ Cohen said. ‘Everyone is shocked by what happened. And there’s only one reason for it – the guy was Arab.’15
Despite the existence of videos and eyewitness accounts, the head of the Israeli Police media department, Chief Inspector Sharon Yamincha, called for a boycott of the supermarket on Facebook. ‘I don’t shop at a supermarket whose employees beat cops,’ he wrote. Yamincha’s post drew support from other police.16
Israeli writer Ari Shavit wrote in Haaretz newspaper:
An evil wind is blowing in this country. First it was the rabbis who prohibited the renting of apartments to Arabs. Then it was Jewish youths who attacked Arab passersby … A series of incidents that are ostensibly unrelated, and aren’t even similar, have created a new atmosphere of xenophobia. They have turned Israel into a country that exudes a xenophobic stench. What’s happening to us? Why have dark forces that always bubbled beneath the surface suddenly erupted into the city square? Why has racism reared its head … Instead of arguing about the foreigners who surround us, we’re arguing about the foreigners who live among us.17
In Haaretz newspaper, under the headline ‘Berlin 1933, Jerusalem 2014’, Israeli journalist Chemi Shalev wrote that as the son of parents who lost their families in the Second World War he needed no convincing that the Holocaust was a crime unique in its evil. ‘But I am a Jew … and when I saw the videos and pictures of gangs of right-wing Jewish racists running through the streets of Jerusalem chanting “Death to the Arabs”, hunting for random Arabs, picking them out by their appearance or by their accents, chasing them in broad daylight, drooling like hysterical beasts and then beating them up before the police could arrive, the historical association was automatic’, he wrote. This public racism was ‘growing by the day, encompassing ever-larger segments of Israeli society, nurtured in a public environment of resentment, insularity and victimhood, fostered and fed by politicians and pundits – some cynical, some sincere – who have grown weary of democracy and its foibles and who long for an Israel, not to put too fine a point on it, of one state, one nation and, somewhere down the line, one leader.’18
Despite my first bizarre meeting with Captain Shalicar at the café in the German Colony, the Israeli Army did not give up trying to pressure me. That first meeting was friendly, but a few months later Captain Shalicar phoned me again
‘John, I want to let you know the IDF is considering banning you.’
‘Banning me?’ I replied. ‘What does that mean?’
‘It would mean you would not have access to the IDF.’
Over 35 years in journalism, I’d upset some powerful people, but this was the crudest attempt at intimidation I’d experienced. ‘Arye, could you please let me know when you do ban me?’
Shalicar seemed surprised by my response. ‘Why do you want to know?’ he asked.
‘Because I think I can get a page one story out of this.’
‘You wouldn’t actually write about being banned, would you?’ he asked.
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘When we met at that café in the German Colony you told me you had no problems with the facts of my reporting. You still have not indicated you have any problem with that. My editors would not appreciate us being banned for doing nothing wrong.’
Shalicar quickly changed tack: ‘We’re not going to ban you, but we’ve been talking about it.’
Through my six years in the Middle East I’d come under constant pressure from Israeli Army lobby groups to pull my punches. I realised from many discussions with other foreign journalists that this pressure was applied in many countries around the world. Essentially, the Israeli Government, Army and lobby groups did not want the reality of the occupation reported. Of the many hours of discussions I had with my colleagues in the foreign media, one comment shocked me. It was when I asked Philippe Agret, the bureau chief of Agence France Press, a question. AFP is one of the most powerful news agencies in the world. It is highly regarded as credible and independent. It is famous for resisting pressure in whichever country it operates. Agret and I were discussing how some media groups censored their reporting out of Israel in a way that they did in no other country. I asked him who he thought was self-censoring out of Israel. Without hesitation, he replied: ‘Everybody.’