People Like Us (18 page)

I couldn’t see any conspiracy; it was more like a number of trump cards that the Israeli government played. Not only did they have more resources, but the Israeli government also profited from the fact that the average Westerner, whatever his or her political leanings, had more sympathy for Israel. This was not so much because the country is Jewish, but because it is Western. Israel produces Western literature and films, has famous classical musicians, competes in the football Champions League, and joins in the Eurovision Song Contest. Indigenous Europeans look more like Israelis than Palestinians, and that’s why Israeli suffering is easier to understand.
The New York Times’s
Opinion page often features articles from Jewish settlers about living in the shadow of terrorism. “Everyone’s on a diet here because our weight is the only thing we can control,” one settler wrote. An allusion like this is recognizable to Western readers who also diet from time to time.

Palestinians showed their suffering in other ways. One Gaza aid organization asked Palestinians and Western expats to select photographs that symbolized the intifadah for them. The Westerners chose morning mothers, crying children, and devastated properties; the Palestinians came up with marching men and clenched fists. I’ve often been to Palestinian demonstrations, and in Western PR terms they were disasters: A father shouting angrily, “Is this justice? Is this justice? My daughter was eleven! Is this justice?”—the body being carried aloft, the shots in the air, the chanting ...

Jewish Israelis usually bury their dead with calm ceremony, to the accompaniment of sobbing attendants and the composed words of a family member. Westerners understand these images. But how can correspondents show the sorrow hiding behind the hysterical chaos into which Palestinian burials often degenerate? Vulnerability is not shown: Arabs mourn at home, away from the cameras.

 

 

I
srael had another trump card, and I noticed it every time I was back home discussing the situation with colleagues. If I ever wanted to defend Israel during such conversations, one phrase was sufficient: The Holocaust. Most people understood immediately, and if not I added a couple of sentences of explanation, “For more than two thousand years, Jews have been discriminated against, persecuted, and massacred by non-Jews, culminating in the gas chambers. Obviously the Jewish people can only be safe when they have their own country, and what is more logical than the place which was a Jewish nation two thousand years ago, according to the Old Testament?”

Then I’d try to put the Palestinian perspective across, and ten sentences were never enough. Central to them was not the Holocaust, but centuries-long Western interference in their area. This began with the crusades, was advanced by colonialism, and was completed by the establishment, at the heart of the Arab world and at the cost of the people who had been living there, of a strange, Western country—Israel.

The handicap for the Palestinians is that the crusades and colonization are less prominent in the Western collective consciousness than the Holocaust, and I learned that I could only convey the Palestinian perspective by turning things
around. Imagine a lunatic becoming president of America, and rounding up and slaughtering everyone with a Friesian grandfather. [Friesia is a semi-autonomous province in the Netherlands, with its own language.] It turns into a massacre of unimaginable proportions; then, when the anti-Friesian regime finally falls, it’s clear that the surviving Friesians don’t want to live in America anymore. A plan is devised in which the Friesians will get their own country, and where more logical than the place that according to old documents used to be Friesian. Despite Dutch resistance, the UN votes the plan through, and people from all over the world with a Friesian grandfather arrive in the new Friesian nation, generously subsidized by America. The remaining Dutch people protest that they’ve never had a problem with the Friesians; but, in international public opinion, sympathy for the Friesians holds sway. A proposal is made: Half of the country will become Friesia, and the Dutch can live in the other half.

The Dutch don’t accept this; there’s a war, which the Friesians win with American help, and an even larger part of the Netherlands falls into Friesian hands. Hundreds of thousands of non-Friesian refugees flood into the major Dutch cities, and tensions rise, particularly because small groups of Dutch people have instigated guerrilla warfare against the Friesians. Friesian spokespeople cry “terrorism” on CNN and that “They are killing innocent Friesians!”

Meanwhile, the Dutch people are beginning to wonder what kind of leaders they have. A military coup follows, and when the Netherlands tries to get weapons from abroad, the young Friesian state takes over the rest of the Netherlands, as well as parts of Germany and Belgium, in a “preventative attack.” Droves of non-Friesian Dutch people flee over
the borders into Germany and Belgium, where coups follow: “We’ve got to prevent the Friesians from getting us.” In the interim, the Friesian army governs the occupied Dutch provinces with a heavy hand, strangles the economy, and confiscates the most beautiful areas for settlements and special roads from the settlements to Friesia. A peace process follows, and the Netherlands is offered three out of the twelve Dutch provinces: Limburg, a piece of Brabant, and one of the Zeeland islands. These fragments cannot be called the Netherlands, the Netherlands is not allowed an army, and all the borders are to be guarded by Friesian troops.

 

 

O
ne of the pitfalls of a correspondent’s post in the Holy Land is becoming cynical, so in an article about the Palestinian view of the conflict I deleted the sentence: “In PR terms, the Holocaust is gold for Israel.” You can’t put it like that in the paper, because you run the risk of one of the survivors of the Jewish persecution reading it and taking it the wrong way. Nevertheless, the historical connection with the West gave Israel a starting point for its campaigns, and every week there I saw an example of this. Every now and then, an Arab country would buy missiles from China or Russia, and press conferences and briefings would be convened immediately in Israel. “These missiles could reach Tel Aviv!”—the implication being that there was a threat of a new Holocaust. In the meantime, Israel received billions of dollars of “military assistance” from America, giving it countless times more destructive power than all of its neighbors put together. There weren’t any briefings about that.

But references to the anti-Semitism of the past could also present Israel as the underdog, as a vulnerable country that
wants peace but is surrounded by “masses of Arabs” who “want to drive all the Jews into the sea.” In these representations, Palestinians and Arabs were driven by the same hatred as the Nazis. All Israel wants is “a place in the sun,” and the neighbors need to prove that they no longer hate the Jews. That’s what makes “They are killing innocent Jews” such a brilliant quote. “They” means “All Palestinians are guilty”; “Innocent” means “The motive is hatred”; and “Jews” means “It’s not about Israelis or Zionism; this is just one more slaughter of the Jews.”

It was an incredibly strong message, and in many reports in the Western media one could hear the echoes of Israel as the peace-loving underdog. The record shows that Jewish groups committed bloody terrorist attacks during the British colonial occupation, in the 1948 war, and afterwards. They murdered a UN envoy, tried to blow up the British foreign minister, and chased Palestinians from their villages on a large scale, sometimes with accompanying violence. Yet Western media mostly describe these groups as “the Jewish underground.” In 1956, 1967, and 1982, Israel attacked one of its neighbors, but these invasions are often labeled “preventive attacks.” The occupation of South Lebanon created a “security zone” in which Israeli
Defense
Forces were “present.” This army doesn’t “attack” but “acts,” “enters,” or “intervenes.” “Security forces” perform “operations” in which “elements” are “eliminated.” Assassinations are “preventive military strikes,” and civilian casualties are “blunders.”

There was a lot of grumbling amongst journalists about the Israeli government’s use of the Holocaust, but how can you ask Israel to ignore the greatest catastrophe in the history of the Jewish people? Imagine, you’ve got a trump card that enables you to present yourself as a vulnerable underdog in
a sound bite of around ten seconds, and with which you can write off the critics who see this differently as the worst kind of scoundrels. Of course you’re going to use such a trump card—especially if you think you’re caught up in a life-or-death conflict.

It was all quite logical, but the cultural and historical connection between Israel and the West did bring to light a new weak spot in the showing-both-sides principle of objective journalism. What to do if, all the manipulation aside, the Israeli one-minute slot on television hit home with the public much more than the Palestinian one-minute slot did?

I
n the Holy Land, I covered the Palestinians, and that meant a lot of on-the-ground reporting. I visited a Palestinian family whose mentally handicapped son had been shot dead by Israeli marksmen. There had been a curfew—but try explaining that to their son. I visited families whose houses had been bulldozed because Jewish settlements had been fired on from their neighborhood, and listened to the lady of the household say groggily, “Go talk to the neighbors, son—they’re much worse off. We were given five minutes by the Jews to get our stuff out of the house, so we still have our gold and Grandfather’s medicine.” In Ramallah, I met the computer nerds who made the posters honoring the martyrs and victims of the intifadah. There they were, playing around with photos of the dead and the Aqsa mosque, text boxes with dates and causes of death, and often a verse from the Koran. “If we make the Aqsa mosque a little bit smaller, we’ll be able to fit in the verse.”

In Qalqilya, I hung around with Palestinian IT students.
Because of the Israeli cordons around their town, they could no longer get to the university in Ramallah; they killed time looking up the credit card details of settlers online, and ordering inordinate quantities of porn for them. In Jerusalem, I spoke to Palestinians who resold settlers’ cars. The latter reported their cars to the insurance companies as stolen, the cars would be driven along back roads to a Palestinian city that the Israeli police weren’t allowed to enter, and were then resold there with new number plates. In Bethlehem, a gravedigger told me that he could hardly cope with demand, and in Gaza I got drunk with a Palestinian businessman whose factory had been plundered by settlers and afterwards razed by bulldozers ... along with his stables, with his horse still in them.

 

 

T
hose kinds of human interest stories did well, but political news was central to this conflict. Telling both sides was part of this, and when I watched CNN I couldn’t escape the impression that the Palestinian spokesmen were missing chances to make their case. I saw it happen with every political development: The periodic “visionary speech” from Washington, Israeli elections, broken-off and re-instigated peace discussions ... A polished Israeli spokesman who rammed home a single point: Israel wants peace, but they are killing innocent Jews. Then the Palestinian spokesman: “Clearly ... the Palestinian nation ... will never accept the barbaric Israeli crimes ... which are, of course, totally rejected.” Tirades such as this would give no answer to the presenter’s questions, and would leave viewers with confusing improvisations and incomprehensible quotes about international legitimacy.

In the beginning, I thought that the Palestinians couldn’t do any better. But for my human interest stories, I often spoke to prominent Palestinians from outside the Authority—doctors, human rights activists, businessmen, academics. These were talented people, well-read, articulate, and ironic. Why didn’t I see these people on CNN? I decided to ask each and every one of them whether they realized how bad their media image was, and why nothing was being done about it.

They were happy to talk about it, I noticed, and their answers nearly always began with three points: We’ve got less money than Israel; Westerners are racist because you consider an Israeli death to be more important than a Palestinian one; and you let yourselves be blackmailed with the Holocaust. I would patiently sit out the list and remark that this didn’t explain why the Palestinians didn’t make the most of the chances they did have. Then I’d ask, “Why don’t I see you, instead of the spokespeople from the Palestinian Authority, on CNN?”

Often there’d be a deep sigh, followed by a hurricane of frustration. “Our authorities are incompetent and don’t want to improve. They are incompetent because Arafat gave all the senior positions to confidants from his PLO period,” was what nearly every prominent Palestinian said. Those confidants had lived as fugitive nomads for decades, and they had very limited experience with Western democracies. That’s why spokesmen on CNN always started to talk about resolution 4-7-whatever and “international legitimacy.” Western policymakers understood that they were offering peace in accordance with UN resolutions, and the Palestinian spokespersons aimed their speeches at these Western policymakers. Arafat’s head honchos could not imagine that you could get your own way in a democracy by convincing the masses who elected those policymakers.