People Like Us: Misrepresenting The Middle East

by Joris Luyendijk

  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.

  Early 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.

  People react to threats by fighting or fleeing, but journalists take neither tack; this meant that I had to negate reality and some of the signals my brain was sending. I went about my business like an overworked policeman ignoring a problem neighborhood. It works for a while, but the lawlessness inevitably spreads from
street to street until the whole city is affected. It must have happened like that to me, too. First, I stopped feeling my fear; but when the threat continued, other parts of my emotional apparatus were affected. A friend in Lebanon told me that the civil war had permanently disrupted his “sense of reality.” He told me, “In order to survive, you have to convince yourself that reality is different from what it is. That works and you survive. But how do you then find out what that reality was ... and is?”

  In the year that I lived there, more journalists were killed in the Holy Land than anywhere else. I checked my blood type, and learned new English words such as shrapnel, stray bullets, and “war-risk insurance”—the policy didn’t pay out for “war damage,” so you had to pay hundreds of euros a day in top-up insurance. I got a bullet-proof vest and a helmet but, well, you know how it is. Those things are dead heavy, and soon I did the same as most of my fellow journalists—when the cameras were rolling I’d put on my helmet and vest, and afterwards I’d quickly drop them off in the car. I felt like such a monkey walking around in them amongst the Palestinians, none of whom wore any protection.

  This was how I pulled through the violence. I now see that I was making out as if the bullet-proof vest wasn’t necessary, as though everything was a show, an amateur dramatics production in which I had to improvise. It was a mind game I continued to play, whatever happened, and quite a lot did.

  I’d been living in my new house in East Jerusalem for a few weeks when a crossroads just 150 meters outside my house was bombed. The target was a bus stop at which Jewish settlers had been waiting for the regular service to their home district. I stood there watching the havoc from my rooftop—a gin and tonic in one hand, the mobile telephone in the other, on the line to the studios: “What did you say? Right in front of your door? Hang on, I’ll ask the chief ... He says that if there are a lot of casualties we’ll do something on it, probably after six-thirty; it depends on whether that parliamentary debate overruns ... damn, sorry, someone else is calling. That’ll be Jakarta—good luck, eh.”

  A couple of weeks later, another bomb went off in the area, and a month later the same crossroads was targeted again. The first time, the bomber was the only one who died, and twenty-five people were wounded. This time, seven Israelis were killed, along with the bomber, and my neighbor found a hand in his garden. “Get out of there,” you might think; but, instead of packing my bags, I studied the behavior and rituals that went with such an attack, just like an anthropologist would.

  It began with a second of silence, the survivors’ shrieks, and then almost instantly the sound of sirens from every point of the compass, as if the city itself was screaming out in pain. Usually the people from Magen David Adorn, “the Red Star of David,” would be the first on the scene. These Jewish Red Cross volunteers would lay colored strips next to the wounded so that the medical teams knew who to treat first. Green was for the slightly wounded; yellow was badly wounded; red was critical; and black was dead. “You have to decide in a split second who you are going to try to save,” one of them told me. “And who you’re not.” The police would screen off the bodies while the spokesmen who’d arrived at lightning speed gave their great quotes to the camera teams who’d also arrived at lightning speed. Next, a handful of chanting activists would arrive: “Death to the Arabs, may the army win, no Arabs means no terrorism.” Once all these people had returned home for their dinner, the Zakah people would arrive, a Jewish organization of volunteers who would scour the vicinity for organs, limbs, and even bloodspots, and bury them according to the laws of their religion. The infrastructure service would clear up the remaining traces at breathtaking speed and so thoroughly that the following day you could drive past without spotting a thing.

  Why didn’t I leave? In his book From Beirut to Jerusalem, the New York Times correspondent Thomas Friedman discusses the bloody Lebanese civil war. He describes a chic dinner in which the hostess asks, “Shall we eat now or wait until the ceasefire?” War and terrorism become normal: You give them a place in your life and you carry on, because that’s what everyone else is doing. Friedman said that this was why the Lebanese didn’t leave when limbs went on flying through the air for years on end—the limbs of people who’d all said the same thing that morning to their partners, “Don’t worry about me, darling. You know I’m always careful.”

  Being careful—as if that had any effect. But I was always on my guard; if I didn’t watch out, I did little else. A single siren was a heart attack; two, a traffic accident; three, an attack. Traffic: Avoid the buses, because if you were next to one at a traffic light, you’d be right next to a potential bomb. Open spaces: Does anyone look Arabic? Is anyone wearing a long coat that could hide a bomb? Is that an abandoned bag? Do I still have my own bag? If you leave anything unattended in Israel you’ll soon see a special robot blow up your shopping behind a quickly erected barrier. It becomes so automatic that during one short trip back to the Netherlands, I went up to the security guard at the department store entrance to have my bag checked.

  The danger had me permanently on my guard but, paradoxically, I became less and less aware of it. I knew that people were dying each day, but I learned to bargain with the Grim Reaper. This gave me my sense of control and safety back—as long as I didn’t really think about it, of course. Should I drive home from Ben-Gurion airport along the road through Israel that is sometimes jammed for hours, or should I take the road for Jewish settlers that goes right through the occupied zone? That one is quicker, but there are Palestinian snipers around who don’t check first to see whether it’s a Jewish settler driving the car—they’ll find out later on the news. On the other hand, what are the chances of my car being shot at? Should I get a taxi to the beach in Tel Aviv, or take the ten-times-cheaper bus, knowing that there is a 0.0001 percent chance of it being blown to smithereens? Should I go to the Palestinian shop that often doesn’t have things and is expensive, or to the cheaper Israeli supermarket where they’ve got everything, but which has a minuscule chance of being a target?

  That was the numb state I got myself into, and everyone had their own way of achieving it. A friend, a theoretical physicist, once invited me to dinner in Jewish—and thus unsafe—West Jerusalem. How should a tough correspondent respond to that? He sensed my hesitation, and reassured me that he knew what he was doing. We drove through West Jerusalem, and when we passed a restaurant with enormous windows right next to the road he shouted, “That place is death! Look, it’s so easy to get into—people who eat there must be suicidal!” According to him, terrorists had a list of places with blow-up potential. “One of their guys drives around noting down targets. Well, that restaurant has got a star!” He listed his criteria for a safe meal: The place should be well tucked away, and the doorkeeper should be at a good distance from the diners, otherwise the terrorist would just throw himself at him. It helps if Israeli Arabs eat there, too, and basements and enclosed spaces should be avoided—an explosion that can’t “get out” carries on reverberating, which is the reason that terrorists prefer narrow alleyways to squares. As we ate, my friend told me casually, after an hour and a half of discussing football, women, and the laws of gravity, that the week before he’d had a coffee in his local café, had paid and left, heard a rumble and turned round, and it had been blown up. “I wasn’t expecting that,” he said. “But it was logical. The prime minister’s office is in the area—they wanted to send a message. I should have thought of it.”

  Everything was different in the shadow of terrorism, but then again it wasn’t; looking back on it, that was what was most alarming. Despite the permanent threat, I’d had the same trivial thoughts as always. Would the butcher have any chicken fillets left? Had I offended the ambassador’s wife with my drunken behavior? Had that garage owner screwed me? The topic of conversation at an expat party could slip seamlessly from sports to tips about hidden restaurants, a back road that never had any snipers along it, or the café with new security and the best latte in town. You di
dn’t call to say you’d survived an attack, because the network would be down afterwards, but text messages would get through. There was the same tone as in Amsterdam, and the same inclination to trump the other guests with the latest hot tips. And yet there was also an ever-present anxiety, which everyone denied. I was just as enthusiastic in my denial, and it carried over to my work.

  There was that time in Rafah in the Gaza Strip. I can still picture myself nodding at my colleague as he cried out angrily: “We’re getting out of here. We’re getting out of here NOW!” Yes, yes, I nodded again, just let me finish this phone call—you know how difficult it is to get an international connection in Gaza. But the gunshots close by got so noisy that it became impossible to hold a telephone conversation anyway, and I had to hang up. Only then did I realize what was going on: There was a shoot-out going on, twenty-five meters away. Naturally, we knew that Palestinian fighters and Israel border troops often “came to blows” here, even during the daytime. That’s what we’d come for, and there were signs of it everywhere—bulldozered Palestinian houses, bullet holes, and rocket strikes ... I’d seen it so often in television dramas that I just couldn’t imagine that, amongst these concrete ruins, Palestinian men my own age were trying to shoot their Israeli peers in the watchtowers just further up, and vice versa.

  Real bullets were flying about, but the people in the vicinity didn’t seem to be bothered—if they weren’t running away, it obviously wasn’t dangerous, and I could just finish my call. My colleague, though, let his fear show, and was shaking all over. The local kids fetched him a chair, and showed him all the stickers they’d got from the foreign camera teams they’d met. Then they got bored, and began to imitate my colleague’s quivering lip. One of the children shouted “Boo!” and the rest of them pulled frightened faces: “Oh, how scary!”