People Like Us (14 page)

 

 

S
o as well as covering the Arab world, I went to do another Big Story, and what a story it was. After the September 11 attacks, the Arab world had certainly become “closer” for the Europeans; however, as a diplomat explained, “Arabs and Palestinians are foreign policy; Israel is domestic news.”

I spoke to that diplomat during my first reception at the Dutch embassy in Tel Aviv. In Cairo and Beirut, I’d been to four of these receptions; each time, whenever the Dutch national anthem was played, everyone had stood around sniggering in a typically Dutch way. In Tel Aviv, the same thing happened; but then the Israeli anthem was put on, and many of those present suddenly sang along heartily. This was new—sober Dutch people singing a national anthem with tears in their eyes, and a Dutch embassy playing the anthem of its host country. A while later, one of the guests told me that he sold apartments in Tel Aviv to Dutch Jews who no longer found Amsterdam safe because of its Moroccan youth gangs. Another said that he sold Amsterdam apartments to Dutch Jews who no longer found Tel Aviv safe because of the Palestinian attacks.

Reactions from the Netherlands also showed that my countrymen invested much more emotional capital in Israel and Palestine than in the Arab world. I’d received a few letters in response to my articles about the Arab world, but not many. On one occasion, someone with an Arabic last name
had criticized the skewed image of his home region, and an Arabic embassy had once tried to explain away a human rights violation. Apart from that, it was pretty quiet; if I did receive letters, they were farcical. I’d recently trekked through the Sinai desert like the Israelites had in the Bible—in my case, though, for the travel supplement. They’d roamed around for years and I’d done so just for three days, but I hadn’t been able to wash any more than they had. I’d commented on this, at which a Bible-thumping pensmith had written in to inform me that the people of Israel cannot have stunk because it said in the Bible that they were very clean. I framed this kind of letter on the wall, just as I’d laughed off terse subscription cancellations: “You’re telling me things I don’t want to know! Enough of that paper of yours!”

When it came to Israel and Palestine, the laughter soon stopped. After just a few articles and cross-talks, an unstoppable flood came my way—faxes with crucifixes, threats, and accusations. If I made a factual error about the Arab world, the news floor would occasionally receive a letter saying, “Your correspondent has made a factual error.” If I made a factual error about Israel, five letters would arrive saying, “Your correspondent is anti-Semitic.” One time, I picked up the telephone and heard, “You’re going to die.” Even my colleague in Tel Aviv was attacked by a Dutch-speaking Israeli: “You’re in for it if that Luyendijk carries on writing those articles.”

 

 

I
t was a new world, and not just because my readers and viewers were emotionally involved. I’d occasionally used the words “media war” in an article, but it wasn’t until I was covering Israel and Palestine that I came to understand what
they stood for. In a media war, everything is different, as became clear from my first trip.

The second intifadah had been going on for a few weeks by then. In the beginning, the casualties were mainly Palestinian, but then a crowd in Ramallah lynched two Israeli reservists in front of various camera teams who happened to be in the city. That same evening, Israel bombarded Palestinian cities for the first time since 1967; that was the signal for the world’s press to converge on the Holy Land, and for the
NRC
newspaper and the NOS broadcasting channel to enlist me.

Wide-eyed, I walked around the astonishingly quickly erected, yet superbly equipped press center in the five-star Isrotel in the Jewish part of Jerusalem. I’d seen Hezbollah and Arab dictatorship press centers, but this was of a different order. As I hesitated over free coffee, tea in eight different flavors, three types of fruit juice, and piles of bread-roll sandwiches, young Israeli men and women walked round in olive-green army uniforms handing out sheets of great quotes. In efficient, friendly, and fluent English, they told us about the forthcoming press conference and the briefing later that day to be given by a defense specialist.

It was so professional: Pictures of the lynching, route descriptions to the cemetery where the reservists were buried ... The world’s media were given everything they needed with practiced skill, and more: Rights-free archive material of Israeli soldiers giving first aid to Palestinians; the phone numbers of spokesmen who could explain the government’s perspective in any major language and in the required number of words; dossiers full of information; print-outs of websites, and piles of leaflets entitled “Terror or occupation—which came first?”

I came across countless journalists who seemed to find this totally normal as they paced up and down across the rugs, discussing the finer details of what they would produce for their newsroom back home, and when and how, with their mobiles clamped to their ears. Jerusalem Capital Studios, which had the satellite connection that correspondents used for their cross-talks with the news programs, was situated next to the Isrotel. This was handy, since many a reporter was expected to give an account of events that same evening, even though he or she had barely set foot upon Israeli, let alone Palestinian, soil.

What kind of world was this? The intifadah escalated, I shuttled between Lebanon and the Holy Land, and with every trip my astonishment grew. A complete alphabet of “optimistic stories” had been cooked up for the correspondents: Jewish, Christian, and Islamic children together in one school; olive branches from Israelis and Palestinians; joint musical performances. You only had to telephone the Palestinian or Israeli organizers of these hopeful projects ... and the great quotes, checkable information, and striking visual details would be served to you on a plate.

The Israeli government press office called me up. “We’ve got an exclusive for you: A Dutch-speaking Jewish woman who has voluntarily joined the army because she realizes that Israel is in danger; an English-speaking terrorism expert who can explain what that danger consists of; and a settler whose son was killed in one of the attacks.” An American correspondent told me that her TV station only flew in reporters for a couple of weeks. “They’ve got to score, score, score. When someone comes up with a ready-made script, they jump at it.” Next time I saw a settler crying his eyes out on television, I couldn’t stop myself from wondering how many
camera crews he’d already taken to his son’s grave. And how is something like that set up? “You’re speaking to the government press office. Our condolences for the loss of your child. I’ve got three journalists here, and it’s your patriotic duty to talk to them about your grief?”

I visited a six-story block of flats in Gaza that had just been bombed by Israel. I spoke to neighbors and surviving relatives, and looked for clean-cut illustrations of clichés like despair and bewilderment. A woman told me that the thought that she had to get the washing machine repaired was still going round in her mind. “But then I realized that it lay underneath the rubble. Just like my husband.” Bingo, great quote, and as I went off I saw someone laying brand-new babies’ clothes under the debris, for the camera crews who were on their way.

Every few days I experienced something like this, and the most remarkable thing was the openness with which media manipulation was discussed in Israel. After enduring an attack that caused a high civilian death toll, the Israeli government would wait a standard twenty-four hours before retaliating. The world’s press was given time to pause and reflect on Israeli suffering because, as soon as Israel took revenge, that would dominate the headlines. The Hassadah hospital in Jerusalem allowed camera crews to visit victims of terrorism so they could “show as much blood, pain and tears as possible,” to use the words of an Israeli spokesperson. After one exceptionally large Palestinian attack, the bodies of the victims weren’t removed immediately because the prime minister wanted to record his statement in front of a backdrop of eighteen body bags and a burned-out bus. Other examples of the candor with which Israelis discussed influencing the media included an Israeli government minister heartily
complimenting a camera crew who had been clever enough to film a few Palestinians cheering after the September 11 attacks—shot in close-up, it looked like there were quite a lot of them, and the clip was often replayed on American TV; the Israeli government press office proudly announcing that it had forced CNN to make a series about the victims of terrorism to make good for having interviewed the relatives of the perpetrator of an attack; and a Jewish-American businessman bragging to the Israeli media that he’d managed to get rid of the critical correspondent of the Miami Herald by threatening to withdraw advertisements from it.

B
efore I became a correspondent, I saw a journalist as a kind of a fly on the wall, an invisible microphone recording events, like the football commentators who sit somewhere in the stadium following the score, unseen by the players. But while football might be war, war is not football—not where Israel and Palestine are concerned. The media were continually manipulated and influenced by the parties concerned.

It was a new world, and fellow journalists explained to me what lay behind it. I’d thought that a media war was a war with a lot of media attention, but it went further than that. Compare the second intifadah with the border conflict being fought at the same time between Ethiopia and Eritrea, colleagues said. That was a classic war: Two parties fight each other with all the military might they have; the strongest wins; and the media report on that. But the conflict between Israel and Palestine is orchestrated differently. If they both threw everything they had into it, the case would be instantly
settled. Israel rules supreme with its nuclear weapons, smart bombs, hyper-advanced tanks, fighter jets, helicopters, battle-ships, surveillance satellites, and submarines. Within twenty-four hours, it could drive off the Palestinians and, if it wanted to, all of its neighbors, too. This is something that some Israeli media and politicians regularly advocate. But it won’t happen, and you can’t separate that from the enormous media attention devoted to this area and the involvement of public opinion worldwide. And this public opinion is largely formed by what people see in the media.

Hello, everybody!
As an Israeli PR manager said, “It’s not about what happens, but how it is presented on CNN.” In the Holy Land, newspaper pages and television screens weren’t just windows on the conflict—they were also a stage on which the conflict was being fought.

My next stop was Ramallah, and I was scared. A Palestinian crowd had lynched two Israeli reservists, leading to the first Israeli bombing of Palestinian cities since 1967. The images I’d seen on every channel! First, cheering Palestinians hold up part of an Israeli corpse, and then the shelling starts—people walk happily along the street, they look up in surprise, there’s an enormous bang and clouds of smoke, and people run in all directions.

But when I arrived in Ramallah, it was all business as usual. The market had been set up, taxis tooted at customers and, yes, if you turn right at the end of the street and right again at the hoarding advertising Persil washing powder, you’ll find the one police station that Israel has meticulously
bombed ... You know what, I’ll come along with you. That was the atmosphere the day after the lynching and the bombing—but if I switched on Arab or Western stations, reporters were excitedly talking about “tension on the streets of Ramallah,” “boiling rage,” and “enormous concern,” followed by footage of the lynching and the bombing.

It was in Ramallah that I first noticed how television determines your view of reality: You don’t know what you are not being shown, and what you are shown makes a much larger impression than newspaper articles or radio programs. A colleague of mine neatly summed it up: Words target your mind; images hit you in the gut. Once in a cross-talk with the television news team, I related how young girls in Gaza stopped menstruating after the Israeli bombings. Puberty was reversed by stress. I knew about this because I’d just written two big stories about the psychological effects of Israeli violence on Palestinian schoolchildren. They’d been given prominent spots in the
NRC;
but, in the days following the news broadcast, various editors called up to ask whether I couldn’t write a story about the psychological effects of Israeli violence on Palestinian schoolchildren. Didn’t you read my articles, I asked. And often the answer was, “Well, now that you mention it ...”

Television was king in the media war being played out in the Holy Land, but it turned out to have its weak points. Before I’d seen television crews at work, I’d always watched the news with a fairly trusting attitude. I’d had no idea what was out of shot when a Palestinian woman stood in front of the ruins of her bombarded house, raised her hands to the heavens, and cried: “My children!” The emotion might well be authentic, but when I saw a shot like that being filmed in Gaza, I realized that viewers were watching something
other than a private emotional outburst. The woman was crying out “My children!” while, two feet away from her, a muscular bloke was trying to angle his camera so that the raised hands didn’t get in the way of the close-up of her face. There was a mike dangling two feet above the crying woman’s head, and around her you’d have an interviewer, his interpreter, and often a gathering—camera teams draw people like bread draws ducks. How had the team found this woman? Of course, it could be that the cameraman had spotted her and taken the shot without her permission. But it was more likely that an interviewer had chosen one woman from a small group; that there’ d been a bit of chat while the light was being measured; that she’d been positioned so the sun didn’t produce any backlighting, and the rubble was visible but not dominating; that the neighborhood rascals had been persuaded to be quiet; and that, after a gesture from the soundman, the interviewer had asked, via the interpreter, “What happened to your children?”