Making 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.
It was enough to drive you mad, and it became even clearer why Western correspondents fell back on their fixers. These correspondents would make a day trip to Palestine from their home base in Israel and be met by a fixer who had a list ready for them: “I’ve got a collaborator who is on death row, a mother whose child was shot dead for throwing stones, a woman who had a miscarriage at a checkpoint, a farmer who has lost his land, a tortured detainee, four sisters who opened up a sewing factory after their home was destroyed ...”
Fixers get at least a hundred dollars a day, and it’s likely that the people on their lists get a share of this. In which case, who could guarantee that they wouldn’t just say the things that had gone down so well with the previous Western camera crews? Most of the fixers worked for the Palestinian Authority in their daily lives, with the consequence that they weren’t available to them just when they were needed the most. That’s like the official heads of all the important Dutch ministries moonlighting for CNN right after a local disaster.
When I first found out about fixers, I found it scandalous. But after I’d tried making television a few times myself, my shock waned. With television you had to adapt as best you could to the circumstances as they were, if only because the warring parties were doing that, too. Those manipulating the media knew about the Law of the Scissors, and realized that I was in their hands as long as I only had footage that made them look good.
Manipulation of this kind became easier the greater the time pressure on us, which I experienced firsthand when I had to go to Ramallah again. Israel had killed the leader of a Palestinian splinter group; members of that group had taken revenge by murdering an Israeli minister; Israel had ordered the murderers be given up, which the then-leader, Arafat, had refused to do; and so Israeli tanks had besieged Arafat’s headquarters. Film crews could still get in, and Arafat gave a statement by candlelight that he wouldn’t yield under pressure and would leave as a “martyr” if necessary—powerful images shown endlessly by Arabic broadcasters.
The stalemate lasted until Israel and Arafat reached a complicated compromise in which the leaders of the splinter group would be imprisoned but in a Palestinian jail, under British supervision. The tanks withdrew, and Palestinian spokespersons crowed about their victory. “The humiliating siege is over and Arafat is a national hero.” This became the stuff of news agency reports, to which the opposition in Israel exclaimed: “Look how stupid our government is—Arafat’s been made a national hero.”
These reactions became news agency reports, too, just like Arafat’s victory tour through Ramallah that morning, with triumphant Palestinians on the roadsides and a class of children who sang: “We support you with our blood and our souls, dear Arafat.” CNN and the BBC took up these images, complete with the victorious statements given by the Palestinian spokespersons. My editors in Hilversum had seen this and put together a storyline: Siege broken—survival artist Arafat pulls it off again. It looked like a straightforward story, and I hurried to Ramallah. The plan was to get a few quotes from ordinary Palestinians, link everything together in a piece-to-camera, and then shoot back to the studio in West Jerusalem for the montage.
But nobody in Ramallah would talk to the camera, I didn’t see any revelry or spontaneous demonstrations, and the atmosphere was subdued. I made a few calls, dropped in on my usual juice, newspaper, and shish-kebab people, and everything I heard suggested that ordinary Ramallah residents were not at all happy or proud. They were disillusioned because they felt that their leader had given into Israeli demands yet again. Arafat’s victory tour had been a set-up for the cameras, and the triumphant crowds had been made up of perhaps a hundred Palestinian Authority employees drummed up for the occasion.
As a newspaper journalist, I could cover the other story at such moments, but where would I find the images to tell that different story on television? My report had been booked to screen that evening, and thousands of euros had been spent on the camera crew, on hours in the montage suite, and on the radio link. I was in competition with other reporters, who I could imagine saying, “That Luyendijk can’t cope with real work, and now he’s saying CNN has got it wrong.” In the end, I put together as noncommittal a report as possible, like a politician who lies not by telling falsehoods, but by keeping silent about a crucial part of the truth.
Chapter Nine
“They Are Killing Innocent Jews”
The Holy Land was a new world, and I resolved to be extra cautious and always objective. I knew how strongly different members of the Dutch community empathized with each side, how eager the fighting parties were to manipulate the media, and how vulnerable television in particular was to this.
But was it even possible to be objective? I hadn’t worried about it all beforehand, because didn’t the second-largest American news channel, Fox News, say, “We report, you decide”? Didn’t Al-Jazeera advertise its strategy as “giving both sides of the story”? And didn’t my own paper, the NRC, promise “a clear separation between fact and opinion”? Wasn’t this the essence of quality journalism—to give the facts as they were, and offer both sides of the argument when reporting people’s opinions? This was how you presented an objective picture of a conflict, I thought.
But, quite quickly, doubts set in, and they would only grow in the years that followed. It began with my choice of words. In the Arab world, I’d already been exposed to partisan language: Muslims who based their political orientation on their faith were “fundamentalists,” whereas, in most Western media reports, an American presidential candidate with the same religious convictions would be labeled “evangelical” or “deeply religious.” If that American won the election, almost nobody would say that Christianity was marching forwards; but when Muslims who were inspired in their politics by the Koran came out on top, many a Western commentator would say that Islam was on the march. If an Arab leader clashed with a Western government, he was “anti-Western”; Western governments were never “anti-Arab.”
In Cairo I’d collected a few examples, and in the Holy Land the list grew rapidly: Hamas is “anti-Israeli”; Jewish settlers are not “anti-Palestinian.” Palestinians who use violence against Israeli citizens are “terrorists”; Israelis who use violence against Palestinian citizens are “hawks” or “hard-liners.” Israeli politicians who seek a peaceful resolution are “doves”; their Palestinian equivalents are “moderates”—implying that deep down all Palestinians are fanatics. You could see the double standards more clearly if you turned things around: “Moderate Jew Shimon Peres’s anti-Islamic speech has caused great unrest amongst Palestinian doves.”
This was how you could be biased, purely by labeling comparable cases differently for each camp. But in the Holy Land it didn’t stop at this kind of “asymmetrical word use.”
In the Arab dictatorships there was usually just one word for everything, which kept things simple. Everyone just calls Egypt “Egypt,” but Israel could also be called “the Zionist entity” or “occupied Palestine.” Were the areas in question “occupied,” “disputed,” or “lib
erated,” or rather the West Bank of the Jordan River, or Judea and Samaria, or the Palestinian territories? Were they Jewish villages, Jewish settlements, or illegal Jewish settlements? Should I talk about Jews, Zionists, or Israelis? Not all Zionists are Jews, not all Jews are Israelis, and not all Israelis are Jewish. Were they Arabs, Palestinians, or Muslims? Not all Arabs are Palestinians, not all Palestinians are Muslim, and not all Muslims are Palestinian.
This was the first problem in the Holy Land: If you wanted to be objective, there were no neutral terms. And you couldn’t just list all the terms: “Today in Ramallah, on the occupied or disputed or liberated West Bank of the Jordan River or Samaria, two Palestinians or Muslims or Arab newcomers or terrorists or freedom fighters were killed or slaughtered by Israeli soldiers or Israeli defense forces or Zionist occupying troops ...”
When I only covered the Arab world and followed the Holy Land through the media, I’d noticed that there was more than just one word for everything. I’d regarded it as a local custom, a good topic for the culture section: Did they argue even about that? But stuck in the middle of it, I realized that that was precisely what they were arguing about. Those words used together made up a viewpoint, and there were so many words because there were so many viewpoints.
There was something else that made the Holy Land a new world—you could work there as a correspondent and be able to observe all the viewpoints. Israel is a democracy, with the complete freedom of expression that goes with that. I didn’t speak Hebrew, but you had English-language newspapers, and sometimes Israeli TV programs were subtitled in Arabic—at the end of the day, it was the country’s second language. The Palestinians, in turn, lived under a remarkable combination of an indirect Israeli occupation and the semi-dictatorship of the Palestinian Authority. The Authority had ministers, police, and security services, and enjoyed the “limited self-government” of a handful of enclaves. For the Palestinians it was a mixture of two types of repression, which differed per enclave, but there was so much space that most Palestinians did want to talk, certainly if I arrived with sufficient time on my hands and no interpreter.
In this way I was able to pick out different standpoints and compare them, and quite quickly I became embarrassed about the view I’d previously had of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, which was that you had supporters of peace and opponents of peace—the most exciting question being who was going to win.
Now I could talk to those “opponents of peace,” and not one of them said: “Peace? Are you crazy? That’s not what we want.” These people dreamed of an end to the conflict, too; they just had different ideas about what was needed to bring it about and whose fault it was that no peace agreement could be reached.
“Peace can only hold out if it’s a fair peace,” people from Hamas and the Islamic Jihad said. “Fair” would mean that all of the Palestinian refugees could return to the homes they’d fled or been chased from when Israel was founded. Hamas said that Israel wasn’t a country but an artificial establishment, a “Zionist entity.” The peace process was going to create a powerless reserve; after that, the world would forget the Palestinians, and Israel would discreetly finish them off. This was why Hamas didn’t talk about an amaliyit issalam, a peace process, but an amaliyit al-istislam, a capitulation process.
When Hamas and the Jihad used the words “peace process,” they put them between quotation marks. It was a tendency they shared with right-wing Israelis—although the latter didn’t appreciate me saying that. According to Likud, the “peace process” was a deadly blunder by the Israelis. Arabs would carry on fighting to destroy the Jewish state. Some at Likud spoke of a piece process instead of a peace process: Israel was being given away piece by piece to its enemies.
The peace process’s most fierce opponents were probably the fundamentalist Jewish settlers. They believed that God had given them the Promised Land, not just Israel but also Gaza, East Jerusalem, and Judea and Samaria—the West Bank of the Jordan River. These places were not “occupied” but “liberated” and, according to the fundamentalist Jewish settlers, a “peace process” in which even a square meter of land would be transferred to the “Arabic newcomers” would bring not peace but God’s wrath. Everything was permissible in order to prevent this—even shooting your own prime minister dead, as the settler Yigar Amir proved in 1995 when he assassinated Yitzak Rabin.
This was the confusing reality behind the simplistic concept of “opponents of peace.” The longer I worked on it, the more viewpoints I encountered. The Christian fundamentalists, who numbered at least 30 million in America, believed that the End Time would come at the moment the West Bank was inhabited exclusively by Jews. The atheist wing of the Palestinian—Israeli peace movement strove for a single state for Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Arab nationalists wanted a single Arab Union for Arabic Muslims, Christians, and Jews to cover the region from Iraq to Morocco. The proponents of Greater Israel dreamed of a Jewish state extending from the Tigris in Iraq to the Nile in Egypt. And there was the ultra-orthodox Jews of Shas, the country’s third party, who backed out of military service and considered the Holocaust to have been God’s punishment for the European Jews’ assimilation.
In the Arab world, I’d had to continually guess at the beliefs and opinions of people and of political parties—the blank spots on the map of any dictatorship. In the case of Israel and Palestine, I had at least seven or eight maps, complete with glossaries. I went from guessing to drowning in a sea of information. After an attack, the announcement of a new settlement, or a diplomatic breakthrough, how could you list the reactions of the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic fundamentalists, and of the Israeli government, and of the Palestinian Authority, and of the ultra-orthodox Jews, and of the atheist wing of the peace moment?
It was impossible, and the problem didn’t stop there—something I noticed after I’d spent a few evenings surfing the TV channels. The things some broadcasters went big on were not even mentioned on other channels, or were presented completely differently. An attack in Israel might have the headline “Entire country deeply shocked by massacres that killed eight,” followed by footage of horrible images, distraught relatives, and the functionally angry spokesperson: “They are killing innocent Jews!” But you could also mention such an incident in the news in brief: “Today, opposition to the Israeli occupation flared up, leading to the deaths of eight Israelis in Tel Aviv.” When the Israeli government announced new settlements, it could be done in a business-like fashion with a map of the area showing the new zone in cross-hatching and, at the most, a statement like, “The Palestinian Authority called the expansion a new attack on the peace process.” But you could also make it into a big piece with distraught Palestinians whose land had been taken, and a functionally angry Palestinian spokesperson: “How can Israel exchange land for peace if it’s going to fill up that land with settlements where only Jews can live?”
Radically different stories could be told about the same events. The Western media had to choose between them, and during my time they opted for the opinions and issues that were relevant to the two parties at the negotiating table. Their priorities dominated the news, and their positions were set against each other’s: “According to the Israeli government, the attack proves once again that the Palestinians don’t want peace. The Palestinian Authority says the occupation is the problem.”
This was how the international media made sense of it all, and with them their viewers, readers, and listeners. But this narrowing of vision brought with it a new problem—that of “objectivity.” You could promise to present “just the facts,” but which facts? You can show off about getting both sides of the story, but what if there are more than two sides to that story? And then you still have the problem of partisan vocabulary, even if you only put two players under the spotlight. The story of the moment was the derailing of the peace process. Spokespersons from the Palestinian Authority said, “The peace process is about land in exchange for peace. We demand therefo
re that the ‘illegal Jewish settlements’ be dismantled and the occupied areas be given back. How can Israel ‘negotiate’ over land that it doesn’t own?”
Israel spokespersons said, “The peace process is land in exchange for peace. This is what we are negotiating—in exchange for Palestinian concessions, Israel gives up part of the disputed territories while other ‘Jewish settlements’ will stay with us. Negotiation always involves give and take.” Both positions sounded reasonable; but, depending on whose terms the media used, one or the other party came out of it better.
There were more, many more, problems if you wanted to report on the situation objectively. A media war is also about the sympathy vote. The public generally identify with the weaker power, and so both parties wanted to maneuver themselves into the position of the underdog. They tried to get the blood of their own dead and wounded onto the television as much as possible, while making their opponents look as bad as they could. It was logical but, for the concerned correspondent who wanted to be as objective as he could, it was a new problem. What if one side was able to display its suffering much better than the other? I encountered this right away, on my first trip to the Holy Land, and only later did I realize what I had seen.
It happened during that very first time in the Holy Land, when the Palestinian lynching in Ramallah had sent me rushing over, together with hundreds of colleagues from all over the world. When I arrived I had to go to the sophisticated press center in the Isotel for my press pass. A predigested version of the events was waiting for me there: These two people were torn to pieces by rampaging mobs; look what kind of blind hatred Israel has to defend itself against. Everything—the images, the great quotes, the information dossiers—was tailored to deliver the same message: “They are killing innocent Jews; the problem is Palestinian hatred and terrorism.”
People Like Us: Misrepresenting The Middle East Page 12