People Like Us (15 page)

 

 

A
t university I had memorized stuff about the medium being the message—the theory that form determines content in television—but the extent to which circumstances effect what you do or don’t get to show on the box was something I didn’t really get until I’d been to Lebanon to film there myself.

The reportage was supposed to be about Palestinian reactions to former general Ariel Sharon’s comeback in Israeli politics. Sharon had been the brains behind the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, twenty years previously, when Israeli troops were in control of the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, and a Lebanese Christian militia had slaughtered
twelve hundred people. The militia had been armed, trained, and bankrolled by Israel, and had been allowed to do its thing for two days and two nights, lit by Israeli flares. The bloodbath had made Sabra and Shatila world famous and had cost Sharon his place in politics, but he was back. In the words of a Palestinian ice cream salesman: “In former Yugoslavia, war criminals get locked up; in Israel, they get made prime minister.”

The Hilversum studios sent over an NOS colleague to show me the ropes. We hired a local camera team, proceeded to the camps, and that’s when I made a mistake I’m still ashamed of. Talking with camp inhabitants, I stumbled across some “inconvenient data,” as anthropologists call it—information that doesn’t fit with your story. Palestinians told me that the so-called War against the Camps a few years later had been much worse than the infamous refugee-camp bloodbath. “That was terrible,” they said, “but it only lasted two days.” The war for control over the camps years later, on the other hand, had lasted months: They talked about starvation, and described nauseating acts of brutality perpetrated by Syrians and the Amal Shiite militia
(amal
means “hope” in Arabic).

Then I slipped up as a journalist. I should have changed the angle of the story, or at least worked this part of it into the reportage. But I’d come to do a story about Sharon’s comeback, and I simply missed the double standards that kept indirect Israeli responsibility for twelve hundred deaths in the news for twenty years, while a much larger massacre by Syrians or Lebanese was forgotten.

We carried on looking for people who’d lost family members in the right bloodbath. The soundman came up with a chap whose two nephews had been murdered. Was that
enough? After an awkward conversation, we discovered that he hadn’t been there during the massacre. A direct witness would be much better, but how could we say that politely? We encountered Soha, a young women in her mid-twenties. She’d gone to look at the Israeli soldiers at the time: “Everyone said the Jews had horns, and I wanted to see that.” The militia missed Soha while she was out of the camp, but her family had less luck. Mobile telephones off, camera, action! And Soha began to cry. She told the story through her tears, then the camera was switched off and she recovered herself. “Shall I act out how I hid from the militia?” She pulled a childish face and mimed peering out from behind an imaginary wall. “That’s what I did for French television.”

Hello, everybody!
That’s why the cameraman had chatted so casually with Soha—he knew her from previous recordings. We carried on our search and crossed our fingers for some good interviews. Then we had to go to the editing suite, and that’s where the difference between television and the newspapers really became clear. I also wrote an article for the
NRC
about the Palestinian refugees in Sabra and Shatila. It began like this:

Meryam Abdelhadi was the most appealing case in the camp, and that old radio provided a good opening. It was an everyday example which illustrated that Palestinians never realized what was hanging over their heads; holding onto that radio symbolized their perseverance.

But Abdelhadi didn’t make the television news. Her radio was at a friend’s house, and he wasn’t home. She wanted to tell the story of her murdered sisters, but she kept digressing and lost herself in details. There was a buzzing sound from the shop downstairs, and her house was much too dark for our equipment. Once she understood that we could only film her if we were able to move the cupboard, the chairs, the television, and the sofa, she politely asked us to find someone else.

There went our piece for the TV news. Her story, and the phone number of the friend who had the radio, were enough for me to be able to write an article—I could check the facts beforehand—but television has to show the radio in question. In the paper, I could use the great quote from the ice cream seller about the difference between Yugoslav and Israeli war criminals; but for the TV news he’d have to say it on camera, and he was nowhere to be found.

Abdelhadi’s chaotic way of talking was not a problem for the
NRC
because I could cut, summarize, and extract things from what she had said. I was able to put together a story with words, and my word processor allowed me to take it in any direction. With television montage, though, you have to make do with what you’ve got on film. After all, you tell the story with images—so it’s quite logical that if you don’t have an image, you don’t have a story. “Can’t I explain it in words then, if we don’t have the images?” I asked my colleague (the one showing me the ropes). But that was terribly difficult on television because of the Law of the Scissors.

My colleague had to explain it to me, because I’d only learned to analyze texts, never images, at secondary school. The Law of the Scissors describes the effect that images have on people. Images take precedence over sound, so if the voice-over explains something different from the images, the viewer follows only the images. If you read out, “We are learning more and more about the way Palestinians were ethnically cleansed during the creation of Israel” while showing footage of goals scored by FC Maccabi Tel Aviv, the content of the voice-over won’t sink in. “The scissors are open,” TV producers say. If you exchange the goals for footage of Palestinians fleeing, the blades of the scissors come closer together. Image and sound support each other. This is television at its best, more powerful than any newspaper article. The problem, of course, is that many things in the world can’t be filmed. Leaving the screen blank and reading out the text isn’t an option for television, but any image you put “behind” the spoken word will push aside the verbal account.

 

 

O
n television, the Law of the Scissors reduced reality to what was filmable, and the consequences of this were evident when a media battle erupted over suicide bombings. There were two very different stories to tell about the people who committed such attacks. You might say that the lives of those freedom fighters were obviously so devoid of hope that they were prepared to die for their cause; it must be terrible to live under occupation. You might also say that these terrorists clearly hated Israelis more than they loved their own lives; ergo, Palestinians must be terrible people.

The Israeli PR machine propagated the latter explanation,
of course, and was helped enormously by the parents of the suicide bombers. As soon as someone blew himself up, the news agency camera crews raced to the parents’ homes, and often they would say how proud they were, and that they would stand behind any other children who did the same.

I visited a family like this: The Abu Kweiks in Gaza. Their twenty-one-year-old son, Arafat, a final-year education student at the Islamic University of Gaza, had charged at some Israeli soldiers, his body packed with explosives. Now the Abu Kweiks were sitting in front of their stinking concrete hovel in the refugee camp called “The Beach,” and were being congratulated by their neighbors.

Father Qassam told us that Arafat had even bid him farewell. “I was half asleep. He stuck his head around the corner and said a quick goodbye.” He paused. “If I’d have known, I’d have given him a hug.” A neighbor came past, and Qassam said, “My son is not dead; martyrs go straight to heaven and live on there. May my other sons become martyrs, too, and may I join them. Death to all Jews!” He related that he was going to donate the ten thousand dollars that Saddam Hussein gave to every “martyr’s” family to the mosque. “If my son had wanted money he’d have become a collaborator,” he told everybody. “My son is a hero and he is in heaven.” A Hamas functionary dropped off the poster of Mohammed that was being circulated. The father politely accepted it; one minute you’ve got a son; the next, a martyr. Dates were passed around, Coca-Cola, copies of Arafat’s farewell letter and tea—with sugar, because this death was not bitter.

After recounting how creative, pious, and studious his son was, Qassam gave me a tour of the ruins he called his home. Arafat’s brother Yasser came with us. He was now the
oldest son of the household, a big responsibility in such a large family. “I want to show you something,” he whispered to me, “but not in my father’s presence.” He went towards his own room; his father made to follow him, but Yasser gestured “no.” I hadn’t seen a Palestinian son do this before. Yasser closed the door firmly, picked up a plastic bin bag, and began to take some clothes out of it. “I got these from Hamas,” he explained. They were the clothes that Arafat had worn for the attack. A terrible stench filled the room. Yasser fingered the myriad bullet holes in the trousers. The top part of the jacket was missing, because Arafat’s body had been ripped apart by a grenade before he’d even been able to get close to the Israeli soldiers. “I’ve got no idea what to do with these,” Yasser whispered. “It was Arafat’s own decision.” We stood there numbly, and I stared at his posters of an Egyptian football team and a Lebanese singer. Yasser put the bag away, and we were about to leave when I asked him why his father couldn’t come with us. Yasser blinked. “My father is only just holding it together. If he saw these clothes, the bullet holes and that torn jacket ... it would kill him.”

Hello, everybody!
From the Internet, I got the name of one of the few psychiatrists in Gaza, the internationally renowned human rights activist, Iyad Serraj. He’d just been beaten up by guerrillas from the Palestinian authority because he’d criticized the Leader, but he still wanted to see me.

“I’m often in touch with the Voo,” he said over the phone. What? Oh, the VU, the Vrije Universiteit (Free University) in Amsterdam! According to Serraj, Arafat’s parents were demonstrating a classic reaction to trauma: Denial. “Of course they are saying they’re happy. It’s a way of delaying mourning, and that’s normal, but once the cameras have gone, the anger and depression hit. Then they come here—on occasion,
because psychiatric problems are taboo.” With a skillfulness that betrayed the fact he’d told this story a few times already, Serraj told me that Hamas records a farewell video as soon as anyone offers themselves up as a suicide bomber, and then they’re not allowed to tell anyone about it. “Months can go by before Hamas calls up the volunteer,” Serraj said. “But the video is a kind of contract that it is hard to go back on. Why does Hamas put volunteers under so much pressure? Why can’t they talk to anyone about it? If their parents were really happy about it, wouldn’t they encourage such an act?”

I tried to check up on Serraj’s story. Psychiatric problems amongst Palestinians did indeed appear to be taboo: No figures were kept, and there was almost no support available. I visited a few families who’d lost someone in the preceding months. One father showed me the home renovations he’d had done with Saddam Hussein’s martyrs’ payout; another recounted how months went by before Hamas came to tell them that their son had blown himself up. Nobody seemed delighted or proud, and one mother referred to her son’s suicide as, “the umpteenth disaster in my life.”

Serraj seemed to have a point, and he was more than happy to appear on TV Sometimes I saw him on Western or Arabic channels, but his story turned out to be incommensurably less powerful than the images of proud and delighted Palestinian parents. Ideally, you wouldn’t have Serraj but the depressed parents or, better still, Arafat Abu Kweik’s brother saying what it was really like. But they only told their stories when the camera was turned off. And, of course, if there were no images, there was no story.

M
aking television is a time-consuming exercise, and I wasn’t very good at it. I also felt intensely constrained because circumstances governed what I could or couldn’t show. Palestinians were clearly not used to television: They gave five-minute answers to every question, while the entire piece-to-air had a limit of three minutes and twelve seconds. “We can cut it, though, can’t we?” I asked the first time. But that would make the image jump, and this is so distracting that you lose the viewer’s attention. Often, the Palestinians only dared to talk about interesting things—the corruption within their authorities, for example—once the cameras were turned off. I could overcome this problem by mentioning it myself (we call it a
stand-upper
in the jargon; but I could only do this once, and even then it had less impact than if it had come out of a Palestinian’s mouth—and what could you do if you wanted to bring up three more cases that people would only talk about off the record? No pictures, no story.