If you wanted to break the cycle, you’d have to practice a radically different kind of journalism. The media wouldn’t limit itself to scores like 8—1, and neither would it give an account of why one team had lost so badly. Instead, the media would explain how those twenty-two players had come to see themselves as divided into two teams and what could be done about it. You wouldn’t have one angry spokeswoman on behalf of one side, faced with an angry spokeswoman on behalf of the other; instead, you’d have somebody from the peace movement. One violent incident would be set, not against another violent one in which victims and perpetrators swapped roles, but against an inspiring story about the 99.99 percent of Palestinians and Israelis who hadn’t committed any violence that day.
Fear can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, but so can hope and trust. What would happen if the news stopped showing fear-inducing spectacles, in favor of mundane things that inspired hope and confidence? And how many people would keep blowing themselves up if they knew that no one would get to hear of their sacrifice, because the media would ignore it?
Y
et I never tried to offer a counterbalancing view, and only once have I written something about it for the opinion pages. There were three reasons I held back. The first is my own view of journalism: If I wanted to change the world instead of showing it, I should hand in my notice and become an activist. I know fellow journalists who have done that, just as I know activists who have made the opposite step. “Everything starts with the media,” they said. “We’re secondary to that.”
This comment showed how little some activists know
about how the news industry works. That was the second reason I didn’t make adjustments or offer a counterbalance: It was almost impossible to do so. The common idea about correspondents is that they “have the story,” but the reality is that the news is a conveyor belt in a bread factory. The correspondents stand at the end of the conveyor belt, pretending we’ve baked that white loaf ourselves, while in fact all we’ve done is put it in its wrapping.
Take those television clips where the correspondent like me is providing a voiceover: “Another bloody day in the Middle East. Israel killed five Palestinians suspected of terrorism. According to the Palestinian Authority, they were ordinary policemen.” The editors and not the correspondent would have made the decision to run something on this particular item. The news agencies have given them a ready-made story with introductory text, images, and filling. The editors have a meeting about it, and only then do I get a call. I can propose subjects myself, but they decide on them, and their accompanying images are primarily based on the themes chosen by the news agencies and CNN.
I had one platform on which I could tell my own version to the general public: The cross-talk item on the television news. “Over to our correspondent in Jerusalem. Joris, what are the consequences for the peace process?” I’d discuss the questions asked in these conversations beforehand so it was possible to steer them. However, the editor-in-chief made sure that my story was linked to the news—and how much can you tell in three forty-five-second slots? A newspaper reader might stare at the ceiling, reflect, re-read, reflect again, and read on. On the all-powerful medium of television, everything is thrown at you at once, and seven minutes of the same talking head doesn’t hold anyone’s attention—not even
that of the talking head himself. You can revise a written text, show it to a colleague, or even abandon it. In a cross-talk, you have to get everything right on your first attempt, off the top of your head, even while you’re aware that the public has no background knowledge about the subject, and that an ill-chosen tie or a slip of the tongue might be so distracting that your entire point is lost. You also know that lobbyists and angry letter-writers are sitting in front of the TV with their notepads and DVD recorders at the ready.
My television colleagues said that a good cross-talk was a question of practice and that I had to learn how to bring things back to their essence. But that’s exactly what the fight in this media war is about. Is the essence of the problem occupation or terror? Is the war about Jewish security or Palestinian freedom? I became practiced, indeed, but this consisted of accepting that I could say how many people had been blown up that day, but not why.
T
he third reason I didn’t try to even things out was the most important: I no longer understood the situation myself. It seemed to me that Israel was taking home nearly all the Oscars every month in this media war, and you might say that I should have offered a counterbalance to that supremacy. There were always prominent compatriots in politics or in the Dutch media who were prepared to explain the events in Israel’s favor. If the Labor Party won the election, Israel had opted for peace; if Likud won, then, because it was so hardline, it would be able to deliver peace. I regularly came across things like this in articles: “My heart is with the Jewish people, but I also think that a
solution
has to be found for the Palestinians.” I rarely heard the opposite: “My heart
is with the Palestinians, but I also think that a solution has to be found for the Jews.” Discussing Israel’s right to exist is practically taboo in the Netherlands, whereas the question of whether the Palestinians should have a state is perfectly acceptable.
My initial impression was that the Netherlands was pro-Israel. But in my final year as a correspondent I heard prominent Dutchies comparing Israel to the Nazis, and a major survey in Europe showed that a large percentage of those questioned considered Israel to be “one of the greatest dangers to world peace.” What was this all about? What was the main distortion in the Holy Land, actually—the media moves of the Israeli regime, or the disproportionate focus on Israeli human rights violations, which apparently gave people the idea that really horrific things were happening in the Holy Land?
So for once, after yet another comparison had been made to the Nazis, I wrote that angry opinion piece. I really needed to vent my belief that this comparison was totally beside the point and only increased existential fear amongst Israeli Jews—look, those goys are at it again. I was also worried that my own work had contributed to the image of Israel as the nastiest state in the Middle East. I’d written pages and pages listing Israeli outrages, but the far greater repressions and massacres perpetrated by dictators in neighboring regions were hardly represented, or were heavily filtered.
That’s why I felt the need to point out that the Nazis murdered more Jews per month than the total Palestinian civilian death-toll in half a century; that the Israeli regime has never tried to wipe out Palestinians; that the Israeli press and politicians do indeed “dehumanize” Palestinians and set them apart as an inferior group of people; but that, equally, the
million Palestinians living in Israel enjoy more of the rule of law than Arabs living anywhere else in the region. Israel broke the rules, but the Arab dictators didn’t have any rules. You were better off being a Palestinian under Israeli rule than a Kurd under Saddam, or a South Sudanese under the Khartoum regime.
It was a big article, and I regretted it right away. Not only did it engender angry reactions: “What right does your correspondent think he has to diagnose existential fear in the hearts of ‘the’ Jews?” At a dinner party, a columnist slapped me on the back and said, “That comment you wrote about Palestinians having more rights in Israel than in any other Arab world was very useful to me. Good work!” I blanched, and said that I’d written about the legal certainty of Israeli Arabs, not about Palestinians in occupied areas. But the man didn’t listen at all. The media war was a game for him, his standpoint was fixed, and he was looking for arguments in support of it.
It didn’t make much difference, because I’d already handed in my notice. I was just waiting for my dessert after those five exciting years—the American invasion of Iraq.
Chapter Twelve
Absurd and Bizarre
Arabs talk about the straw that breaks the camel’s back; the Dutch, about drops into a bucket of water. I didn’t have a breaking point, but all of a sudden felt I’d had enough, and I decided to stop. After all these years, I wanted to live in my own country again for a while. Someone from the editorial team asked why—couldn’t I handle it anymore? My answer was no.
That wasn’t it. Or perhaps it was. What I couldn’t handle anymore was that I was getting better at handling it. The Holy Land confronted me with screaming injustices, absurdities, and mortal fear. In the beginning, I was deeply concerned about them; but after a while that wore off. Then I found my being used to it unacceptable for a while—until that wore off,
too, and in a moment of clarity I asked myself how numb I was prepared to become.
E
arly on, I’d been very shocked in the Holy Land. I was angry about the iron-cast resistance of many Israelis to seeing themselves as perpetrators, too; about the racism against the Arabs; the hysterical nationalism that the Jewish state displayed now and again ... I was also angry about the fact that Palestinian television endlessly repeated images of toddlers shot to pieces, that Hamas’s handicraft department reconstructed in Nablus the pizzeria which had just been blown up in Jerusalem, complete with papier-mâché bodies. That whole cult around suicide bombers—how could you believe that someone who’d done that would go to heaven?
I found it disgusting, at first. But then I got used to it, just like I’d gotten used to not even noticing the beggars of my father’s age in the Arab world, the lies of the regimes, or the habit that Egyptian journalists had of calling homosexuals “deviants.” To be sure, my interaction with ordinary Arabs was always good; and, in terms of the cost of living, my salary was excellent. There I was, enjoying luxury and freedom in the heart of poverty and repression. I found that objectionable; but after a while that feeling wore off, which was what was really objectionable.
You even get used to the feeling of alienation. I often had the impression that I was stepping in and out of parallel worlds: My conception of reality, the Palestinian conception, the Israeli conception, and that of the Western media. My filler words changed, unnoticed, from “foolish” and “crazy” to “absurd” and “bizarre.” Two particular experiences stood out.
Israel regularly set up roadblocks inside Palestinian areas.
The newsreader would say something like, “Following the attacks, Israel immediately stepped up security measures”—accompanied by images of soldiers inspecting Palestinian identity cards. I often stood and watched one of those roadblocks in my own street. Palestinian cars would queue up, sometimes for hours. However, once a car reached the head of the line, the Israeli soldiers didn’t even look inside it. The boot wasn’t inspected, nor any other place where a terrorist might hide a bomb. Pedestrians could also go through without showing their ID. And it got crazier still. While part of “the” traffic was stuck in a long, snaking queue at the checkpoint, another part cut through the area next to it. Here the drivers weaved through small alleyways, which led to congestion. Ultimately, both routes would take just as long; it was easy to compare them, because the not-so-secret detour came out a hundred and fifty meters behind the checkpoint, in full sight of the Israeli soldiers and of me.
These were the “security measures” that disrupted the lives of ordinary Palestinians—sometimes with deadly consequences, because ambulances would get stuck, too. I endlessly described the true reality of these checkpoints; but as long as the news agencies reported on roadblocks as “security measures,” the editors of all-powerful television news programs continued to see and to broadcast to the world through that distorted lens.
I sometimes went for walks around Ramallah to take in the atmosphere. Were there any expensive cars on the street? Was there a lot of traffic? What kind of looks did people give you? On one of those walks, I went past the City Inn hotel. I’d been there quite often, but always in the context of “clashes between Palestinian stone-throwers and the Israeli army.” Now it was deserted. At that time, no Israeli soldier
could enter Ramallah, and the City Inn hotel stood on the municipal border. I don’t know which came first but, suddenly, in quick succession, Israeli jeeps appeared—they must have had to leave their barracks specially to do so—and then Palestinian schoolboys, quite a long walk from their school. A few spectators turned up, an ambulance, a falafel stand, and a camera crew. Then the boys began to throw stones, and the Israelis fired into the air. The boys dared to go closer, and the Israeli soldiers shot one of them down—with the ambulance wailing, the boys chanting, and the cameras rolling.
Hello, everybody!
Were the cameras there because something was happening, or did something happen because the cameras were there? I sometimes felt like I was working for
Spy TV
or
Candid Camera.
The producers and the viewers know something that the people being filmed don’t, and that’s funny. The news in the Middle East was like that, too, except with a forty-five degree rotation. Now the producers and the players were in view, and the joke was on the viewers at home. In Arab dictatorships, correspondents weren’t open about the things they didn’t know; but in Israel and Palestine, correspondents kept their mouths shut about the things they did know. In any case, I never read or heard a statement such as, “The Israeli government suggested we use this settler on-air” or “This surviving relative has been provided to us by the Palestinian Authority.”
I couldn’t get upset about it anymore, just as that feeling of powerlessness became quite ordinary. People in the Holy Land were suffering. I noticed it in the way they crossed the street, in their blank stares on the bus, by the way they rammed their shopping trolley into yours ... or by how elderly Jewish ladies hobbled to cross the street when an Arab-looking man approached, or Palestinian schoolchildren hid
their fear when an Israeli helicopter flew over, because fear was not cool. The faces of so many people were screaming for a solution, and I couldn’t do anything. Others—settlers, peace activists, fundamentalists from both religions—worked hard on their solutions. They all knew what had to happen, and saw it as their God-given duty to push as hard as they could; and the harder one element pushed, the harder the opposing element pushed back. It was exhausting for a while, but then I got used to it.