People Like Us (21 page)

Read People Like Us Online

Authors: Joris Luyendijk

For instance, before the second intifadah, many Palestinian homosexuals used to secretly visit Tel Aviv bars. The Israeli secret service took photos of them, and then threatened to distribute them around the Palestinians’ home villages if they didn’t go to work for them. A story like this illustrates how ruthlessly an occupying force crushes people—but just try capturing this on film. The homosexual won’t appear on television because, if his proclivities or collaboration come out, he’s in for it; and the secret services will always deny everything or refer to “state secrets.” At the most, you’ll get an Israeli human rights activist to talk about it. Hardly gripping.
For every bomb, you had one image that gave the essence of the situation according to Israel. The image of a burned-out bus or blackened restaurant could be endlessly repeated, and each time the message was clear within two seconds—this is terror. But occupation ... it didn’t get any further than
shots of tanks, soldiers checking papers, and long queues of civilians. How could correspondents portray the misery, repression, and injustice behind such scenes? You could only
recount
this and, as we know, the most you can do with words is get something into your viewer’s heads; if you’ve got images of an attack, you can get them in the guts.
In the first three years of the second intifadah, more than three times as many Palestinian civilians died from Israeli violence than vice versa—and still the talk was of “the bloody attacks,” rarely of the “bloody occupation.” After a Palestinian attack with six Israeli victims, “tensions were rising” in the Middle East; but a week in which fifteen Palestinian civilians died due to Israeli violence was brushed aside as “a period of relative calm.” The Palestinian Authority had to continually explain whether it was “doing enough against terrorism.” Israeli politicians never had to explain if they were “doing enough against the occupation.” On the BBC website, surfers discussed “how to stop terror”; there was no forum on “how to stop the occupation.”
If you compared terror with occupation, things were so skewed that you couldn’t straighten them out, not even in the newspapers. I could write “humiliation,” but a word like that didn’t mean anything—at least it hadn’t to me until I experienced it firsthand. When I did experience it, I wrote the following article. A reader wrote in angrily that I’d crossed “journalistic boundaries.” He was right, because “humiliation” isn’t something you can explain within journalistic boundaries:
I was kneeling before a full toilet bowl when a hand passed me a fork and I had to pick turds out of the water and eat them, to much hilarity. I’d had this nightmare last year and
I’d forgotten it, as is typical with dreams, but yesterday I was at a roadblock and the dream came back in full detail.
It was a completely ordinary roadblock, a long queue of Palestinian cars facing four Israeli soldiers of around eighteen years old with trendy haircuts and the latest mobile phones. One of the soldiers repeatedly signaled cars in the early evening dusk with a torch bigger than his forearm. All male passengers had to get out and bare their chests to the cold wind in order to prove that they weren’t hiding a bomb. The other soldiers kept the remaining passengers in the car—older women and small children—covered by their hypermodern weapons.
Finally one Palestinian had had enough. He started off by obligingly lifting up his jumper, but once he’d turned around he dropped his trousers, to the great hilarity of the Palestinians waiting in their cars. When he’d got back in his car, the man with the giant torch had him wind down his window, gave him three blows to the head, and gestured for him to drive on.
That was when I remembered my nightmare. The day before, I’d been to Jenin with a Palestinian associate. When we went to leave the city, we got stuck at an Israeli roadblock where it turned out that my associate should never have been admitted. We were starving and desperate for the loo, but the soldiers made us wait for two hours. After that we could drive on, without explanation. At least that’s what we thought. Two hundred meters further up there was another roadblock; this time, the border police. “But the army have just let us through,” we said. “Call them, or we can go back there with you.” The policeman walked off and we half froze to death in the bitter December cold for another two hours, pacing up and down
with our arms behind our backs. What do you do at such a time? Go along with it and crack jokes or, alternatively, kick up a scene with the risk that my associate could be sent to “administrative detention”—the Israeli PR term for imprisonment without trial—for six months or more? You can go now, the policeman nodded to me. Finally we could drive on, yet again without explanation. The whole way back my usually cheerful associate remained silent while I tried to sort out my feelings.
Yesterday at the roadblock I understood what those feelings had been and how my unconscious has translated them—humiliation. The kind of experience I had in Jenin only happened to me once, but imagine what it would be like to be browbeaten by Israeli kids for thirty-five years? After a while, it must result in more than just angry dreams.
13
A
nd now another joke: Two Israelis are sitting on the beach in Tel Aviv, reading. One has got a quality newspaper; the other, an anti-Semitic rag. “Why on earth are you reading that?” the one asks. “I used to read a quality newspaper like you,” the other says, “but I couldn’t handle it anymore—the suicide bombers and weapons of mass destruction and the collapsing economy and anti-Israel demonstrations in Europe...” He points to the anti-Semitic rag. “Now that I read this, I feel much better. It turns out that there’s a Jewish global conspiracy and we actually control the whole world.”
Chapter Eleven
The Middleman’s Dilemma
Even the Holy Land has its quiet periods when there’s not much news, and one of the human interest stories you can use as a potential filler is the Jerusalem syndrome. It’s a condition that has been written about in serious medical journals. The long and short of it is that dozens of tourists visiting Jerusalem’s Old City become gripped by the idea that the Messiah is coming. The majority of them can return home after a few days of nursing, but others spend years lodging in hostels around the place where the Messiah is supposed to appear. I wanted to know what kind of people they were, and looked up the owner of one of the hostels. “It’s very simple,” he said. “My guests have a problem. They can’t solve it themselves, and have invested their hope in the idea that someone else
can—the Messiah.” The owner was a sensible man who, when I asked about his faith, answered: “My parents are Muslim.” His gaze went to the guest list where some people had signed in as “the prophet Yesaya,” and he muttered, “If I was the Messiah, I wouldn’t be happy with followers like that.”
It was difficult not to think of the Jerusalem syndrome when I followed discussions about peace in the Middle East on the Internet or via the satellite dish. Everyone seemed caught up in this syndrome—not only Arabs, but also Jews and Westerners. It was always the case that
someone else
had to do something because
someone else
was the problem; if
their
behavior improved, everything would get better. Ordinary Palestinians looked to their leaders, to Arab countries, Europe, or America—on Arabic channels, it was always Western policy that needed to change. Israel explained away its problems with the rest of the world as anti-Semitism. And, since 9/11, an increasing number of Western commentators kept saying, “Islam needs to go through an Enlightenment, Muslims need to do this, or that.”
Seeing everyone abdicating their responsibilities wasn’t very hope-inspiring, but during my final year as a correspondent I sometimes wondered whether I was any different. Should I try to counterbalance any distortions I came across? If a football team has won a match 8—1, you might say that a TV journalist should show the goals, and that’s all. The losers should simply have played better.
But what if the pitch was sloping, one of the linesmen was a relative of the winning team, and some of the fouls were hardly penalized, or not at all, because the winning team was much better at hoodwinking the referee? What if the losers’ coach was there against the will of many of the fans, or had
even been hired with the help of the other team? Arafat, at any rate, had been designated “exclusive representative of the Palestinian people” by Israel and the West, at the expense of the democratically inclined leaders of the first intifadah. Europe, America, and Israel helped him to build up his “security apparatus” (the terminology!) for years so that he could kick all the rival coaches out of the game.
Shouldn’t correspondents look beyond the scores and show why the team had under-performed and how it might play if other players were brought in? A journalist who limits himself to the role of middleman is actually siding with the team that is best able to influence the news cycle.
 
 
T
his was more than an abstract question in the ethics module, worth two points in a degree in communication studies. In a media war, journalistic approaches have political consequences. I saw that happen during the biggest media onslaught I’ve ever witnessed—the failure of the peace negotiations at Camp David. In the summer of 2000, the then leaders Barak and Arafat spoke over peace. The negotiations faltered, and the Israeli government immediately put forward a well-prepared story: With “unprecedented generosity,” Barak had offered to give back more than 95 percent of the occupied zones; the Palestinian rejection of this proved that they had never wanted peace in the first place—their only goal was to destroy Israel. Shortly thereafter, the second intifadah broke out, and it was seamlessly incorporated into the story: Now they’re fighting openly. Palestinian spokesmen could do no better than offer improvisations about “barbaric Israeli crimes” and “international legitimacy”—the familiar babble.
Approximately one year later, an American former policy-worker released details about Camp David. The “95 percent” turned out to have been a misleading calculation, because East Jerusalem and the areas around West Jerusalem were not counted as occupied zones. The 5 percent that Israel would have hung onto was made up of strips of land that ran right through Palestine. The Palestinian city would have become a patchwork cloth rather than an inhabitable area, because the borders, too, would have remained in Israeli hands. As a diplomat commented, “Prisoners control 95 percent of a jail, too.”
This was the “unusually generous offer” that the Israeli government had made, but the Palestinian spokespersons had never explained their leader’s rejection of it, let alone given their own version of Camp David. The consequence was that many Israeli peace activists became deflated—if Palestinians wanted peace, why had they turned down Israel’s unusually generous offer?
The inadequate representation of the Palestinian perspective had political consequences, and it was not an isolated incident. In the spring of 2002, the Arab League offered Israel complete peace in exchange for a total withdrawal from the occupied zones. There was a hidden catch (providing for the Palestinian right of return), but it was the first time in history that the league had made such an offer. That same evening, Hamas made the headlines with a large attack on Israel, and after that the American and Israeli governments shut up shop on the Arab Peace Initiative, as it came to be known. The Israelis didn’t address the catch or come up with a counter-offer; instead, they completely ignored it. Without a powerful media lobby in the West, the Arab lands couldn’t get the offer back on the agenda. It disappeared from the Western news
cycle, and Hamas got free rein in the Arabic media—if Israel and the West wanted peace, why had they ignored this offer?
At times like these, you saw the gulf between East and West, and between Israel and Palestine, widen. Should I have intervened and said that the Israeli spokesperson was spinning the facts? That the Palestinian spokesperson might be incomprehensible, but what he wanted to say, and what he meant by “international legitimacy,” was this ... ?
 
 
Y
ou could go a level deeper still. It was often said that the conflict was irresolvable, and that Jews and Muslims were destined to fight. But why did they get on for more than a thousand years then? In the Middle Ages, the only place a Jew was reasonably safe (apart from the Netherlands) was in the Islamic world. Right up to the middle of the twentieth century, there were millions of Jews living in the Arab world, in Turkey, and in Iran. The technology to build gas chambers was readily available, but the Muslims never built them.
When talking to ordinary Palestinians and Israelis, I always noted how they talked about each other in near-identical terms: “They hate us.”
“All right,” I’d say. “Do you hate them, too?”
“Of course not,” the answer would come back. “We want peace.”
I didn’t get this answer ten times, nor even a hundred times, but every single time I asked one side if it hated the other. The problem seemed to be that nobody dared to show their fear, not wanting the other side to think that they were weak. This led to a downward spiral in which one party’s self-defense was interpreted by the other party as aggression, thus confirming their anxieties, and so on.

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