August 2009
IT WAS ONE OF THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY ‘DIRTY TRICKS’ operations I’ve ever witnessed. Over 35 years in journalism, I’ve reported on a few, as they tend to make intriguing stories. But there was something very different about this one: the target was me.
The saga began with a story I’d written for the Weekend Australian Magazine, published on 22 August 2009. It was about a man called Nasser Jaber, a Palestinian travel agent whose family had lived in the Old City of Jerusalem for generations. In 2009, he moved out of his house so it could be renovated. A group of seven armed Jewish settlers living nearby saw that he had moved out, and, at 2.30 in the morning, broke in and changed the locks. They refused to leave. A few days later they put Jaber’s furniture onto the street, and to this day he has not been able to return to his house.
What appealed to me about doing this story for an Australian audience was that it helped explain the daily battle in the Old City of Jerusalem. The aim of some Israeli hardliners is to ‘Judaise’ the Palestinian parts of the Old City – to get as many Jewish families as possible into houses currently occupied by Palestinians. By doing this, they can improve the ‘demographic balance’ of the Old City. There are powerful groups behind this Judaisation, such as Ateret Cohanim, whose funding comes from Jewish groups in countries such as Australia and the US. Ataret Cohanim operates in the shadows – run by an Australian, Daniel Luria. It works to create a Jewish majority in the Old City as well as in East Jerusalem.
My interest in the general issue of evictions had been increased by the eviction a couple of weeks earlier of several Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem to make way for Jewish families. The families had lived in their homes for generations and the evictions meant 19 children were left homeless. Both British and US officials had issued statements of concern. The British Consulate in Jerusalem said: ‘We are appalled by the evictions in East Jerusalem. Israel’s claim that the imposition of extremist Jewish settlers into this ancient Arab neighbourhood is a matter for the court or the municipality is unacceptable. Their actions are incompatible with Israel’s professed desire for peace. We urge Israel not to allow extremists to set the agenda.’
The US State Department said: ‘We urge that the government of Israel and municipal officials refrain from provocative actions in East Jerusalem, including home demolitions and evictions.’
I started following the story of Nasser Jaber 12 hours after his home was invaded by armed settlers and spent four months researching the story, which included going to all the court hearings. I interviewed Jaber, and approached the lawyer representing the settlers at the court hearings. His clients did not want to comment. But I viewed the documents he produced for the court, as well as Jaber’s title deed for the house. The settlers were claiming they had bought the house, but where was their record of purchase? Did they trust this Palestinian man so much that they had paid him a large sum of money but had not asked him for a receipt?
I discovered that the ownership of the house had been challenged in court by Israeli settlers nine years earlier. In that dispute the judge had ruled that under Israeli law the property belonged to Jaber. I interviewed people who lived in the same part of the Old City who confirmed that Jaber’s family had lived there for decades.
The court process seemed to be going Jaber’s way. The judge told the settlers she had two questions for them: what time did they enter the house, and how? Jaber told me after that hearing, ‘When we heard those questions we thought everything would be OK. Obviously if you have good documents you can enter in the light of day.’
But Jaber’s faith in the Israeli legal process was soon eroded. In subsequent hearings, those two questions were never asked again, and at the end of each hearing the judge ordered that the status quo be maintained. This meant the settlers would be able to remain in the house until the case was heard in full. But in Jerusalem these cases often go on for years, so Jaber was locked out of his home indefinitely. ‘If I was Jewish and seven armed Palestinians had broken into my house, the case would have been dealt with within the hour,’ said Jaber.
Jaber’s lawyer argued that in the lead-up to the break-in the Israelis had offered to buy the house. During one court hearing, Jaber’s lawyer asked the settlers: ‘If you say you own the property why are you still making offers to buy it?’ The settlers did not respond.
Three lawyers from the UK were monitoring the case, and one of them remarked to me that given the settlers had entered the property at 2.30am and could not produce any evidence that they had bought the property, the case would be thrown out in almost every jurisdiction in the world. At the very least, he argued, the presumption of ownership would have been given to the man who had lived in the house for 38 years and had produced titles to the property for an Israeli court nine years earlier. On that occasion the judge ruled that the documents the settlers were presenting were fakes and they were ordered to leave immediately. Jaber produced the deeds again in this case.
I realised that the Israeli lobby in Australia was not going to like this story. But early in my posting, when those first attacks had started arriving, I’d decided that if I were going to pull my punches for fear of the inevitable attacks by AIJAC and other groups then I would be acting as a diplomat rather than a journalist and would be short-changing the readers of The Australian.
I’d written the story and it was going through the production process for the Weekend Australian Magazine. The Editor of the Weekend Australian, Nick Cater, dropped by the office of Steve Waterson, the Editor of the magazine. Waterson told me later that Cater warned him about the possible reaction of Colin Rubenstein, the head of AIJAC: ‘If there’s one mistake in this article Colin will come down on us like a ton of bricks.’
Waterson resented the warning, and said he responded: ‘I was Editor of Time Australia for more than ten years. I check everything. We’re aware of how sensitive this subject is, and we’ve been through the story very carefully. John is a hugely experienced editor and correspondent, and I have no doubt his piece is accurate in every respect. Besides, I don’t report to Colin, I report to Chris [Mitchell].’
As expected, AIJAC was not happy with the story. It unleashed an attack against me, declaring on its website that a key fact in the story – that Israeli police had provided food to the settlers who had moved into the house – was wrong. I began receiving emails from members of the Australian Jewish community who questioned whether Jaber even existed – despite the fact that his photo appeared alongside my article. One emailer told me he believed Jaber was a fake because he’d checked on the internet and could find no reference to his travel agency, and ‘obviously a travel agency would have a social media presence’.
The Israeli Embassy in Canberra joined the attack. Hearing that SBS’s Dateline was soon to run a story by Sophie McNeill on the same issue, Dor Shapira, the embassy’s Political Officer, phoned the Executive Producer of Dateline, Peter Charley. Shapira asked Charley whether he was proceeding with McNeill’s story on Nasser Jaber. Charley was somewhat taken aback but insisted that he was. Shapira told Charley that my story in the Weekend Australian Magazine was ‘inaccurate’ and that he wanted to provide McNeill with contacts in Jerusalem to give the Dateline story ‘balance’. Charley asked McNeill to communicate with Shapira to get these contacts but stressed that she should report the story exactly as she saw it.
Fresh from ringing SBS, Shapira went to Nick Cater and asked that The Australian publish a letter stating that the story contained factual errors. When I heard through a colleague on the paper that Cater was planning to publish it, I contacted Chris Mitchell.
I explained that the letter – which was meant to detail the errors I had made – was itself full of errors. I talked Mitchell through them. Shapira had even got Nasser Jaber’s name wrong, calling him ‘Naber Jasser’. Shapira repeated the criticism made against me by AIJAC: ‘The police never cooperated with the Jewish residents and never supplied them with food.’ I explained to Mitchell that what Shapira didn’t know was that Sophie McNeill had spent several days in the Old City filming the police as they helped the Israelis move goods into the house and took them food. I’d gone through the footage frame by frame. SBS was about to broadcast the vision. The story, ‘Hot Property’, aired on Dateline on 1 November.
Chris Mitchell decided not to run the letter in the paper. That’s the sort of backing that is invaluable for a correspondent. If a story contains errors then the media outlet should correct it quickly, but if the story is correct and the letter is wrong that is, in my view, a different matter.
There was one bizarre aspect of Shapira’s letter: he claimed that my article had harmed the peace process. ‘In publishing this story, the Weekend Australian damages the ability of parties to the peace process to negotiate with trust and credibility.’ In response to Dor Shapira, Steve Waterson wrote: ‘If you really believe that we are the obstacle to the peace process, I fear your priorities are sadly misplaced.’
I’d headed off the attacks from the Israeli Embassy and AIJAC, but now an entirely new assault began – the Dirty Tricks campaign. This new campaign would be led by a mystery Israeli journalist.
The first hint I had of it was when I rang Nasser Jaber in September, a month after my article was published, to check if there were any developments in his case. He told me, ‘I’ve had a call from a woman who says she’s an Australian journalist based in Jerusalem and she wants to do a story on me.’ This intrigued me: there were only three Australian journalists based in Israel, and I knew them all. Jaber continued, ‘She wanted me to say that you misquoted me, and I said you had not.’ Jaber told her that if she wanted to interview him she would need to do it in person. She left her name – Noga – but would not leave her telephone number. Jaber found this odd; why would a journalist not leave a telephone number? She said she’d ring back. When she did call back, she insisted – for a second time – that he had been misquoted in the story. Jaber insisted – for a second time – that he had not been misquoted. This time she left her phone number, which would prove her one mistake when it came to me discovering her identity.
I checked through the list of journalists in Israel. The only Noga was Noga Tarnopolsky. It would not be her – we’d spent our second Friday night in Jerusalem having Shabbat dinner at her place with a mutual friend, and Noga had been to our house for lunch.
I would subsequently uncover the movements of this ‘Noga’ in the weeks after my article was published. She was aware that there was a television program on the ABC in Australia called Media Watch, dedicated to keeping journalists accountable. But how would she get material to them without revealing her identity? She knew a journalist at the Sydney Morning Herald, Asher Moses, so she decided to use him as a middle man. She told him that she thought my story had been made up. Moses would later tell me that Noga had told him that for many Palestinians, the fabrication of facts was considered normal. It was clear she believed that Nasser Jaber was one of these Palestinians. Moses told me that Noga said: ‘It’s a world view in which “facts” do not exist independently, but as objects one can manipulate to one’s benefit, thus racking up points in a long-term struggle.’ In contrast, Israel had an admirable approach to correcting anything that it said that was wrong. She sent Moses material to pass on to Media Watch, but told him that to protect her identity she would use the name of a friend, Lydia Rener, a bag designer. Noga, who was apparently part of the foreign journalists’ community, didn’t want her fingerprints anywhere near what she was about to do.
Moses then got in touch with Mark Franklin, a producer at Media Watch, to tell him that he would soon be contacted by someone with strong credentials – a leading journalist who had written for the Jerusalem Post and the New York Times, among other publications. But the need for secrecy was paramount. Moses wrote, ‘I won’t tell anyone else about it before you broadcast.’
Noga then sent Moses material that she hoped would discredit both me and Jaber, exposing me as the typical biased foreign journalist and Jaber as the typical Palestinian with a flexible view of the truth. She explained that Micky Rosenfeld, the official spokesman for the Israeli Police, knew nothing about the Jaber case. Noga didn’t realise that the police who attended Nasser Jaber’s house were the Border Police – who come under the army, not the police.
She had also contacted Israeli human rights group Ir Amim. ‘Very significantly, Ir Amim has no record of this case at all,’ she wrote to Asher Moses. Ir Amim, however, had never had anything to do with the case. Peace Now was the human rights group that had been attending the court hearings. Had she rung them her entire attack would have collapsed.
But Noga was convinced that the whole story was a fabrication. She wrote to Asher Moses: ‘It really appears that The Weekend Australian simply got the story wrong – the heart of the story, not just tangential details. In other words, it’s not the story of the midnight highway robbery of a house, it’s the complicated story of one member of an Arab family screwing another member, and a Jewish non-profit organisation taking advantage of that situation. Life in the Middle East (and especially in the Old City of Jerusalem) is filled with complexities, and superficial or not properly researched stories just muck things up.’
Moses passed the information on to Media Watch in Sydney. He pointed out to me later, ‘My only involvement was forwarding an email.’ One day in early September, Noga took a bus from Jerusalem to Lydia Rener’s house in Tel Aviv. Using Lydia’s email address, she wrote to Mark Franklin at Media Watch: ‘I am glad that Asher [Moses] forwarded you all the phone numbers and info I had sent him. Great news.’ Noga wanted her material on me to be seen not just as an isolated story but as an illustration of how the foreign media in general cover Israel. ‘The contacts that I sent along will be useful for you and grant legitimacy to any other incident that might arise from Israeli news coverage’, she told Franklin. She talked about ‘the general failures in Israel coverage’.
Noga also told Franklin, ‘I am personally friendly with Foreign Ministry personnel who were involved with drafting the Israeli response [to my article].’ I’d heard separately from a contact inside the Israeli Foreign Ministry that its legal team had indeed been told to attempt to find faults in the story.
On 22 September, Noga made another bus trip from Jerusalem to Lydia Rener in Tel Aviv. She wanted to give Franklin a push-along. Her email read: ‘Hi Mark, Shana Tova [Happy Jewish New Year]! Any progress? Any interest? All best, Lydia.’
Franklin was nervous about having Media Watch base an attack on someone not prepared to use their real name. He was worried that because ‘Lydia’ had concealed her identity she might not be accountable for the information she provided. Franklin told ‘Lydia’: ‘I have to say … it troubles me that you are using a false name. I have to be suspicious of sources who ask for anonymity and I can see no good reason why you won’t even tell me your name. How do I know that you’re a journalist who has been published in the J-Post and NYT? Really, I’m only pursuing this story on the strength of your credentials, and I can’t even verify those.’
‘Lydia’ replied: ‘I understand the suspicions you feel. For many reasons, both personal and professional, it is inappropriate for me to be involved in this story. I know both the journalist involved and his competitors … also, I know the Australian media world is a firey and divey thing.’
She continued: ‘I feel very awkward, of course, because I have published in the NYT and other fab places! But truly, this has nothing to do with my ego or my credentials, or, you know, anything other than your own professional judgment about whether this story is worth pursuing for your very excellent program. If so, let me know, I’ll be happy to help, and I trust we’ll find a way around my temporary anonymity. Incidentally, I am a real Media Watch admirer, and under my own name will be happy to assist you with other stuff should you ever require some local footwork.’
‘Lydia Rener’ added a note of intrigue. She told Franklin: ‘Just to let you know, the AJN have contacted me and have a researcher working on this case.’ How would the Australian Jewish News know to contact someone who was hiding her identity about a story with which she had no association?
About the same time, I got a call from Bob Magid, the owner of the Australian Jewish News. I didn’t know him but he was in Jerusalem for Shimon Peres’s presidential conference and wanted to meet. When we met at the conference, he told me that he’d engaged Haviv Rettig-Gur, a journalist with the Jerusalem Post, to check the veracity of my story about Nasser Jaber. Rettig-Gur was attending the conference, so I suggested that the three of us get together so I could answer any questions they had.
The three of us sat down together. The next 20 minutes were truly odd. To find out what research Rettig-Gur had done, I asked him whether he’d checked the court records, including the statement of claim of both sides. He said no. I asked whether he had spoken to Nasser Jaber. He said no. (I gave him Jaber’s phone number.) I asked whether he had been to look at the house in the Old City. He said no. The expression on Magid’s face when Rettig-Gur kept saying no to all my questions was one of ‘Then what am I paying you for?’ Rettig-Gur said that if I could help him prove that the story was true then ‘perhaps the Jerusalem Post can campaign on behalf of Nasser Jaber’. I told him I did four months’ research into the story and we proved it was true; that was why we published it. I also found his comment about the Jerusalem Post campaigning on behalf of a dispossessed Palestinian ludicrous. I never heard from Rettig-Gur again.
For weeks I’d refused to believe that the ‘Noga’ running the campaign could be Noga Tarnopolsky. It was inconceivable that someone who knew Sylvie and me would engage in such a cloak-and-dagger operation. But a nagging doubt grew in my mind.
I telephoned Nasser Jaber and asked if he still had the telephone number that Noga, the ‘Australian journalist’, had given. He looked around for the piece of paper then rang me back.
It was Noga Tarnopolsky’s telephone number. The whole campaign had been run by Noga – our friend.
I decided that she and I should meet and discuss what it was that she was upset about. We sat down in a café in the German Colony and I told her I knew all about her operation.
She looked stunned.
‘Why did you do it? I asked.
‘I think the foreign media cover Israel unfairly and I thought you were doing the same thing,’ she said.
Over the next hour, she explained the whole operation. She said that when Micky Rosenfeld knew nothing about the Israelis who had moved into Jaber’s home she became suspicious that it had never happened. When she called Ir Amin and they, too, knew nothing about it, it seemed to confirm to her that the whole thing had been made up. She said if she’d known it was the Border Police, rather than the regular police, and that it was Peace Now, rather than Ir Amim, she would never have pursued the operation to feed material to Media Watch.
‘But couldn’t you have rung me and asked me?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said, clearly embarrassed.
The whole saga confirmed something about Israel that I had begun to understand. If a foreign correspondent writes about ‘Palestinians’ as a generic group there is no problem. But if a journalist gives a Palestinian a name as I did – an identity, an ambition, a profession, a life – it can bring down the wrath of Israel’s supporters, even acquaintances such as Noga Tarnopolsky.
A few months later, a leader of the Melbourne Jewish community visited Israel. Over lunch, I asked him why he thought the Nasser Jaber story had caused such a fuss.
‘You portrayed him as a professional, middle-class Palestinian,’ he told me.
‘But he is a professional, middle-class Palestinian,’ I replied. ‘It’s just that now he’s a professional, middle-class Palestinian who can’t live in his own home.’