We were at Fink’s, a favored West Jerusalem den of journalists and writers for many years. It is tiny, cramped, and mostly a bar, but you can sit down and eat under the photographs of visitors dating back decades, scrawls of writing and rows of bottles ranked against mirrors. The problems nowadays were getting there, through the most frequently bombed area of Jerusalem, and then sitting there, wondering from time to time if it was an “unnecessary risk,” if the next person to walk in would be carrying a backpack of explosives.
My companion, Uri, wanted to explain Israel’s right to defend herself. “The world glares at Israel. Other Western powers have done far worse.” Uri, an Israeli businessman and a reservist, was incensed: “How dare the West hold Israel to higher moral standards than anyone else?”
It was often uncomfortable talking to Israelis about the situation, in which so many suffered. I could always leave, get out, never think about the place again. In theory. The impact of this conflict goes far beyond just the Holy Land.
“Everyone is proud of their army, whatever the country,” Uri said. “Our pride is no different, except that our army goes far and away beyond any other army’s efforts not to harm civilians. We don’t kill those who are innocent of aggression. And if we do, it is by mistake, and it tortures us when this happens.”
I didn’t raise the recent killing of Salah Shehadah. In order to assassinate one man, the Israeli air force had dropped a one-ton bomb on a civilian area of Gaza, killing sixteen people, nine of them children, and wounding hundreds. Challenged by horrified Israelis, the commander of the air force, Dan Halutz, rated the operation as “excellent,” and later, when asked about how it felt to drop a one-ton bomb on a populated area, he said that the pilot feels a slight shudder of the plane as the weight is released.
“We go so far, in fact, that we end up losing men because we use ground troops where other armies would just bomb the enemy from the air,” my companion said. “Do Western journalists ever admit that?” he asked. Did I know how many times operations had been cancelled because the IDF had received intelligence that there were civilians in the area? I didn’t. Did I know how many soldiers’ mothers had shouted that their sons would be alive if the IDF had chosen to use air power against the terrorists, instead of ground units? I didn’t, but I dreaded to think. One Israeli mother had told me, twice, that “when your son becomes a soldier, every soldier is your son.” You feel and fear for every soldier, wherever you stand politically.
I had ordered goulash, but found it unappetizing. I made the mistake of pushing it around the plate. The manager of the bar was offended and said, “Let me bring you something I know you will like.” He ignored my “No, really, thank you,” insisting light-heartedly, “You will like it. If you don’t like it I’ll eat it myself.” And he hurried off to place the order.
“We weep to see the suffering of other people,” said Uri, “but what can we do?” What Israel was doing was self-defense. That was all. Defending herself against something that I should be able to understand, after 9/11, a little more clearly. “They leave us no choice,” his voice rising slightly, “they make us do it.”
More food arrived, a schnitzel. It lay, limp and orange on the plate, taunting me. I hadn’t had much appetite for the goulash, and now the manager was watching me. I tried.
“Other countries have experienced terrorist campaigns—the IRA campaigns on the British mainland, for example—without giving in to extremism,” I said to Uri.
“Very few of you were affected by that,” he replied. I remarked that Andrew’s cousin was killed in an IRA attack on a troop of cavalry in Hyde Park, my brothers’ school friend was killed in a bombing by the IRA and my uncle was lightly wounded in the Harrods bombing, and did what he could to help the injured. This cut no ice. “It’s not the same. These terrorists are out to kill us because of who we are.”
Because of who you are, or because of what you’re doing in the Occupied Territories? I wondered, struggling with the schnitzel, but I didn’t have to ask.
“It’s because we’re Jews,” he said. “They hate us and they want to destroy us. That’s all there is to it. And it’s spreading. It’s a growth—the Palestinian terror breeds terror all over Islam, including al-Qaeda. We have to destroy the terror. We have to free the world from terror.”
The manager came over, took the plate from me, and ate the schnitzel himself, standing beside our table.
A few days later I found myself stuck for longer than usual at Qalandia checkpoint. Hundreds of Palestinians stood in line. I watched, from my air-conditioned car, their daily ordeal in the heat, their ears and eyes and shoes dusted with the sand that was kicked up and swirled about, veils and keffiyehs wound across their faces, children on their hips until put down because they were too heavy, then looking up, dejected. After Qalandia, and then the next one, a-Ram, I thought I was finished with checkpoints for the day when immediately there was another—a temporary checkpoint—and we were stuck again. We had all been checked at a-Ram and now we were stuck for another hour and a half only 500 yards further on: a checkpoint just after you got through a checkpoint.
We made dinner that night for a group of friends. One of them, an Israeli public health researcher, talked about checkpoints and Closure. She was saying that people exaggerated their impact, then she suddenly brought it down to me: “You’ve never had any problems at checkpoints, have you?”
“No.” I said. Then caught myself, shocked at what I had just done. I wanted to rewind, tell her the truth: “Yes, I have, I’ve had endless problems. We all have. Let me start with today...” But it was too late, the moment had gone, and the underlay remained: I am a coward. I dare not say how bad it really is, what it’s really like: not just the checkpoints—the closures, the control, the shootings, everything. I can’t begin to describe how shocking it is. Checkpoints are irritating for me, but they don’t ruin my life: I have a British passport. I have nothing to complain about compared to the Palestinians. But I don’t dare be frank about the situation. I don’t want to be called “anti-Semitic” for objecting to what the Israeli army does to Palestinian civilians. I want to pretend, all the time— but especially when I’m with Israelis—that none of it is true, that there is no repression, no cruelty, that there are no children shot in their classrooms, no East Jerusalem families turned out of their beds at night—for ever, their homes taken over by settlers. I want to believe that there is a way out of this, that Israelis will be free and Palestinians will be free, and maybe we’ll all be better off. But I’d let the smokescreen remain. I had said “no.” It’s easier.
A British magazine asked me to write a piece about life in Jerusalem during the Intifada. I sent it in, and the features editor emailed to say she liked the piece and that the editor was reading it. Later she phoned to say that the editor “didn’t want the politics,” she wanted to know who I saw and what my house was like, but not how the checkpoints hindered life. “Privately,” the features editor said, “I wouldn’t change a thing” but “the reality is, we have to think about the owners.” So I cut out most of the checkpoint reality. The magazine was still hit with complaints—many similar to each other, part of an orchestrated campaign—especially after it came out in the US.
During a coffee break at a conference in Jerusalem, an Israeli talked to me about media bias against Israel. We had been discussing the importance of presentation, and the situation slipped in. “Jenin, for example,” he said, “was not a campaign against a civilian population, it was a battle between Palestinian terrorists and the Israeli army. Almost all the Palestinians killed were terrorists, and we lost a lot of troops. And yet your British journalists called it a ‘massacre.’ We were condemned with no evidence to back them up.”
“And,” he said before I could say anything, “we’re also condemned for the closures. The IDF put the checkpoints up in September 2000 to stop Palestinian suicide bombers from killing Israelis.”
Two more conference-goers joined in. One, an Israeli, said the first was confused: the checkpoints came before the suicide bombs. The first man looked offended, and carried on: “What government would do nothing while its citizens are murdered? What would any army do about terrorists who use civilians as cover, and children to carry weapons—even as bombers?
“We’re condemned whatever we do, however we respond. Even if we took to throwing stones we’d be condemned.” He was irked by the fact that Israel has a free press “and helps the foreign media, while the Arabs don’t even have democracy, let alone a free press.” The PA manipulated the international press, he said. The foreign press has no objectivity—how could it, in the face of threats and kidnappings and when they were made to promise to push the Palestinian line? Anyway the media were more concerned about Palestinians’ right to move around freely than Israelis’ right to life.
I put in that good journalism and balance need an explanation of the context.
“Precisely. You have to remember it was a defensive war that gave us control of the territories—and you have to remember that the Arabs still want to annihilate Israel.”* At this, one of the newcomers muttered about peddling old myths not getting anyone anywhere, and moved away.
The first man pressed on: “Palestinians want the media to show only what that control feels like, how cruel it is. You can show cruelty in a TV report but you can’t show context. You’ll see scenes of women at checkpoints and endless shots of boys holding stones standing in front of tanks.”
“I’ve seen a few, yes.”
“Except it’s not that simple. The TV doesn’t explain that the checkpoints and the tanks are only in the territories to defend Israelis. When you see a Palestinian child in front of a Merkava, you react. This is all you Europeans see—the innocent against the occupier. And now look—rising anti-Semitism all over Europe. The two are related. It’s Israel’s right to exist that is being questioned.”1
“You can’t blame the media,” said the one remaining newcomer. “It’s what they’re reporting, not how they’re reporting it that’s the problem.”
The next session began, ending our conversation. We went back into the hall and I made a note of the conversation instead of listening to the speaker. Words had taken on a new sensitivity. Israelis loved free speech, and debate, but there were constraints, from the subtle to the forceful. As one Israeli diplomat frankly admitted, “If we hear words we don’t like, like ‘apartheid,’ we stop talking, we won’t listen any more.” Beyond Israel too, the constraints were rigid. Mention the word “transfer” (the policy of removing Palestinians from the Occupied Territories as a solution to Israel’s demographic problems) abroad and people clammed up: “That’s absurd,” a US diplomat who had served in Tel Aviv told me, “of course that can’t happen,” and closed the subject. All I had said was that in Israel, even for some cabinet ministers, it was a real debate.
On the way to school one morning Archie, aged eight, asked: “What’s a fucker?” We were alongside a car pasted with stickers. Before Operation Defensive Shield began we had seen signs of a campaign launched by the minister of tourism, Benny Elon. He announced that he wanted to remind people of transfer and to remove the taboo. “It is intolerable that the Arabs should think that, every time, they can drain our blood and then we will negotiate with them.” He recommended another Nakba as a solution.2 The campaign included interviews on Israeli TV and in newspapers, billboard posters, bumper stickers, and fliers. Some were in English and therefore accessible to us: “No Arabs, No Problem” was a common one. Another stated plainly: “Only transfer will bring peace.” On this car every variety of sticker glared. The one Archie had seen from the car window was: “Deport the Fuckers.” The increasing talk of driving the Palestinians from the Occupied Territories was acceptable in some circles. Israelis I met were, for the most part, horrified.
Why did the prime minister not object to Elon’s campaign? these Israelis complained. His spokesman, Ra’anan Gissin, said Sharon would like to expel the Palestinians but did not believe this could be carried out under the present conditions. “There is a difference between wishful thinking and realpolitik... If the Palestinians would have a change of heart and move elsewhere, okay, but Sharon realizes transfer cannot be done because of the stance of the Israeli public. What Elon is saying is not something that today seems possible.”3 Gissin was a man some Israeli journalists teased (one called him Sharon’s “tea-boy”) and some Palestinians welcomed as an asset to their cause. When I met him at a Norwegian embassy reception in Tel Aviv, he touched his tongue and said it was his best asset. “I’m a great talker,” he added.
Paradoxically, talk, hasbara, and “information,” were all-important in the business of silencing, extending through every sphere of life, the obvious being the media. There were “issues” at almost every stage of the media’s work, with the result that, while journalists saw the injustices played out to both peoples, the Palestinian context was submerged to the point that many abroad were unaware of the military occupation.* Editors in the bureau, editors back home, were acutely sensitive to the supervision of every word and image printed or broadcast on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Influence was pushed at every level both at head office and in the field—visits, lunches, informal meetings, questions, friendly advice and not so friendly criticism, threats to withhold advertising, funding, promotion, career: a relentless, tireless program of monitoring and “guidance.”
In London a senior editor admitted he had been “brought to heel” by his management, and financially he couldn’t risk his position by including unacceptable—to management—balance. A radio journalist told me in Jerusalem: “When I do a Palestinian story my editors are all over me. They tell me I must have an Israeli story to balance it, but when I do an Israeli story, there is no such request.” Sometimes the journalists applied the silencing themselves: “That editor’s visit,” said a Times correspondent, “was a waste of bloody time. Doing a story on the Palestinians, comes all the way to Israel, and refuses to go to the Occupied Territories. Still did the story though. From Tel Aviv.”
One Jerusalem bureau chief was frank. “This is a machine,” he said. “It’s not just the individuals, the officials, the influential friends. There are endless arms of the machine. There’s deciding who gets press passes, who gets recognition as a journalist. There’s singling out individuals for criticism. There’s pressure applied to individual journalists: complaints are made, accusations placed with the bureau or the paper back home. The journalist would know that he or she was a target and would have to deal with the pressure of ‘surveillance’ without jeopardizing either organization or career. The balance is tipped against the journalist if the organization is not supportive: the pressure and constraints are sometimes bad enough for journalists to resign.”
The bureau chief went on, “And there’s the department in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs set up with banks of television screens, to watch, count, time, assess, and report on each one of the networks 24 hours a day, seven days a week.” He was matter-of-fact, “I don’t know if the guys watching are actually using a stopwatch, but if they think that you give more airtime to the Palestinian stories than to Israeli ones, or if the way you present the information doesn’t gel with their interpretation and the way they want the information to be seen, then they get on the phone or come and see you and tell you so. And then of course you have to defend yourself.
“It is endless. However professional we fancy ourselves to be—and we do, by the way—the result is that we are—how shall I put it?—more careful than anywhere else in the world that not one word is out of place, which can’t be a bad thing. But on the other hand, it does affect what we put out and how we do it. Yes, of course it does.”
As a result of the “carefulness”—the censorship and self-censorship—Andrew and I, and the children too, found ourselves saying unexpected goodbyes. One family moved back to Britain when the husband, Sam Kiley, quit a successful career with the Times as a result of wearying criticism and constraints during his Jerusalem posting. He wrote later that while in Jerusalem he was not to refer to “assassinations” of Israel’s opponents, nor to “extrajudicial killings or executions,” he was to call them “just ‘killings,’ or best of all—’targeted killings,’” if he had to write about them at all. His editors did not dispute that settlements were illegal under international law, but to refer to this was “gratuitous.” On the other hand, “the leader writers,” he wrote, “were happy to repeat the canard that Palestinian gunmen were using children as human shields.” A story referring to Sharon’s “hard-line government” and to a Palestinian village “hemmed in on three sides” by settlements was cut after the first edition: these terms were found unacceptable. And when Sam succeeded in tracking down, interviewing, and photographing the unit in the IDF that admitted to killing Mohammed al-Dura, the boy whose death was caught on camera at the beginning of the Intifada, he was asked to file the piece “without mentioning the dead kid.”4 It was at this point that Kiley decided he had had enough silencing and resigned.
Our second child, Xan, was miserable when his best friend Balthazar left in a hurry. His mother, Alexandra Schwartzbrod, was one of a number of journalists removed from their posts: she was the correspondent for Libération. For more than two years she filed story after story with no quibble or query from her editors. Then, suddenly, she was replaced and found herself back in Paris on an unrelated assignment. An investigation of silencing published in Le Monde Diplomatique found that one organization systematically accused her of inciting ethnic hatred and anti-Israeli propaganda, until, on July 14, a headline proclaimed: “Alexandra Schwartzbrod is leaving! Our friends at Libération have confirmed the rumor with some satisfaction, reporting the internal discussions which ended up with her recall...”5 When Alexandra returned to Paris she questioned her bosses about why they had replaced her. They brushed her off, unable to produce anything substantive.
An Israeli journalist who worked for a foreign television network told me he found himself, and his wife and children, threatened with violence and death. The threats came from Israelis who despised the way he covered the Intifada. To protect his family he had to move from his house in Jerusalem to an apartment building with security—security from other Israelis, extremists who continued to threaten him and demonstrate against his coverage. He was worried, he admitted, about the state of Israeli society: “We’re in a terrible place, morally, emotionally. It’s complete confusion. I’ve never had any pressure from the network, only from Israelis.”
Palestinian journalists had other worries, like being granted press passes. Many worked for foreign media and were often targeted. Their reporting was directly affected by the closures: checkpoints made life so difficult for journalists that they became a real impediment to covering news. “We can’t cover the stories because we just can’t get there in time any more,” said one. “Getting to Jenin has become an all-day journey—even somewhere as close as Nablus can be out of reach.”
There was also intimidation. Some was actual: an attempt was made by Palestinians to kidnap James Bennett of the New York Times while he was covering an IDF assault on Gaza, and Josh Hammer of Newsweek was kidnapped there for a few hours in the first months of the Intifada. Some was manipulated in order to deter journalists from going to hot spots: reports would go out of threats from Palestinians against journalists who were working in the Occupied Territories, but on further follow-up the rumors were found to be baseless.
One Palestinian complained about some journalists’ ignorance of context: “Some of these correspondents coming in on short assignments hardly know what region they’re in, let alone the substance of what they’re writing about. The other day one wanted to go to al-Aqsa and Qalandia. Except that what he said was “I wanna see the Alaska mosque and the Columbia checkpoint.” She laughed angrily: “There you have it: between the Alaska mosque and the Columbia checkpoint, we are lost!”
From time to time we would head through Qalandia by night on our way to Ramallah, perhaps for a drink at the apartment of a French friend—all spartan minimalism and blocks of color—then dinner at an Italian restaurant buzzing with young Palestinians trying to lead normal lives, all of them ready in a second to decamp to another restaurant if the IDF started bombing. The atmosphere was not so different from the equivalent Jerusalem scene: in West Jerusalem with Israeli friends drinking and eating well in the quarter off Jaffa Road, its quaintness buzzing with young Israelis having fun. In both places, Ramallah and West Jerusalem, everyone wondering if we would be unlucky and get bombed that night.
For a safe bet, there was always dinner at the Maronite convent in the Old City: parking inside Jaffa Gate, walking through the narrow lanes, not far, around a dim-lit corner to the sound of our padding footfalls on the limestone, to ring a distant bell at a low door and into the fortress of the convent. The sisters’ welcome in the courtyard would transport us a hundred miles from any trouble, and we would duck under the arched doorway and into a low vaulted dining room to sit at long tables overhung with bright neon lamps. A feast prepared by the sisters would involve plates of aromatic food, raw filet of beef that I couldn’t eat when I had been pregnant, tumblers of illicit arak (aniseed and grapes, distilled somewhere in Lebanon), then rosewater tea— “white coffee”—in white china. Talk all the while, safe unhindered wise talk, from old hands who had watched the situation play out down the years, and finally perhaps an invitation to see the view from the bishop’s roof. Then we were out again, into the dark, other, Jerusalem.
On the way back through the alleys, one of the newer hands pointed out a somber truth: getting editors to take a story from Gaza was much easier than getting them to take one from Congo or Rwanda. “Do you know how many blacks have to die before they’ll print something back home?” he asked. “Hundreds. We know that every dead Israeli is news, but at least the Palestinians get in the frame in single figures, or tens at any rate.” He was bitter, both for Africans and for Palestinians.
And 9/11 had changed the atmosphere for reporting on the Middle East conflict, sharpening racism from blinkers into blindness. It was not just that the bombing of Afghanistan was better television than yet more stories from Nablus or Haifa— “We try to find angles to make it new,” said one journalist, “like the Palestinian kids who collect Intifada cards of the ‘martyrs,’ instead of soccer stars or Pokemon cards”—it was also the syndrome of “them” and “us.” “We” had been attacked, and “they” were being bombed back. We, the West, against “them,” the Muslims. Never mind that many of the Palestinians being bombed were Christian, not Muslim at all. This was a “crusade.” Israelis were us: they looked like us and lived like us. They built skyscrapers like us and liked the beach like us; they liked the same movies and music and restaurants and shopped in the same shopping centers. And in those shopping centers, Israelis were being attacked by “them.” “They,” we were continually being told, had different values and morals, the lowest of motivations. And besides, they were just, well, different. Their dress, their music, the way they treated their children, their women, and the way they ate. They were different. Different from us.
Differences, even when superficial or not real at all, were played on, and likenesses ignored. When a suicide bomb went off, we could all see how vile a crime it was. The buses looked like our buses, the restaurants like our restaurants. When a Gazan refugee camp was bombed, things looked alien to some. Tragic, but alien—those twisted piles of concrete, women in long black dresses and veils beating their breasts and wailing, the dusty children, the old men in keffiyehs. Perhaps being “alien” to us, and similar to those targeted in “the war on terror,” helped explain why such events often failed to register and were ignored. One Israeli cabinet minister, registering the effects of one wave of IDF bombing in Gaza, said that the scenes of old women and children picking through the rubble afterward reminded him of his grandmother (who had died in Auschwitz). He was excoriated for saying this.
All over the world journalists find much of what they see hard to take, but there was something else about this conflict. Journalists were sickened at the sight of dead Israelis—children, mothers, old people, youngsters, laid out lifeless in or out of body bags, depending on how soon after the event the journalist arrived; and they were sickened by the sight of buried, blasted, collaterally damaged, bombed, and shot Palestinians—children, mothers, old people, youngsters. But, they said, reporting the dead Palestinians was not as straightforward as reporting the dead Israelis.
I saw what they meant in September 2002 when Ramallah came under fire again: I did not get to the office for a while. Tanks invaded Arafat’s compound again in response to two suicide bombings against Israelis after a six-week period of quiet. At least, the month and a half was reported as “quiet”—in fact 75 Palestinians were killed in IDF actions during this period. “Six weeks of ‘quiet,’” muttered one colleague on the phone. “What Colin Powell and the Israeli government mean by ‘quiet’ is when no Israelis die. Dead Palestinians don’t count.”
As another example, in October 2003 Hamas suspended bombing. On Christmas Day, the “calm” ended for Israelis when a suicide bomb in a Tel Aviv suburb killed four Israelis, the first suicide bomb since October 4. For the New York Times, “The suicide bomb attack in Petah Tikva broke a tense sort of relative calm that has existed on both sides since October.”6
Yet since October, during this “relative calm,” the IDF had killed 117 Palestinians. They had also bulldozed nearly 500 Palestinian homes, leaving thousands homeless. Even at the beginning of the “lull,” the IDF attacked Rafah with more than eighty tanks, armored bulldozers, and helicopters, killing eight Palestinians, including three children, wounding fifty-three and destroying seventy homes. In two assassinations a few days later, eleven people were killed (eight were passers-by, including a child and an on-duty doctor) and fifty wounded (eleven of them children). Within a few days the IDF opened fire on three people driving to a family Eid celebration: one and a half hours later the army allowed ambulances through, but by then two were dead and the third moribund. Israeli media said the car had been carrying weapons; the IDF admitted they were unarmed and had been killed by mistake. Only the day before the Christmas suicide bomb “broke the calm,” the IDF attacked Rafah, killing nine, injuring thirty-seven (eight of them children), and making 116 families homeless.
Still, for media organizations this was “relative calm” or “quiet.”7 In nearly four years of the Intifada, the longest period when no Palestinian was killed by Israelis had been one week: July 9–15, 2003. Organizations monitoring the numbers injured and dead showed that Palestinians were killed or injured almost every day. The fact that the “calm,” in which so many Palestinians were killed and injured ended only when Israelis were killed persuaded some Palestinians that in Western eyes the lives of Israelis were more valuable than their own.
* It is often said that the Six Day War of 1967 was defensive despite the statements of, among others, the then Chief of Staff, and another future prime minister. Yitzhak Rabin, chief of staff, told Le Monde, February 28, 1968: “Nasser didn’t want war. The two divisions he sent to Sinai would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive war. He knew it and we knew it.” Menachim Begin told the New York Times, August 21, 1982: “In June 1967 we again had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in Sinai did not prove Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”
* A Glasgow University study of TV reporting between 2000 and 2002 found that among British students sampled only 10 percent were aware of the occupation. The Israeli perspective, particularly the government perspective, dominated.