People Like Us

by Luyendijk, Joris

  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

  And 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.

  This 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 ... ?

  You 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.

  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?

  Yet 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.

  The 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.