Here are bits from two articles in the Columbia Journalism Review dealing with the war in Gaza this winter.
First, from the Israeli side:
The most extraordinary incident involved Dr. Izz el-Deen Aboul Aish of Jebalyah Refugee Camp. The Hebrew-speaking gynecologist and peace activist was one of the few Gazans allowed regularly into Israel, where he performed research at a hospital. A widowed father of six daughters, he was frequently interviewed for Israeli television, offering eyewitness reports from embattled Gaza in his fluent Hebrew. During the final days of the campaign, just a few minutes before he was scheduled to be interviewed on Channel 10, his house was hit by a tank mortar. Dr. Aboul Aish’s niece and three of his six daughters were killed instantly; two additional daughters were severely wounded. Shrieking with raw grief, he called Channel 10 reporter Shlomi Eldar to beg for help.And here is a bit from the Gaza point of view:
Eldar, who was on air at the time, bowed his head and activated the speaker function on his mobile phone. For the first time, Israelis were able to put a familiar human face and voice to the suffering of Gazan civilians. Prior to the Aboul Aish incident, domestic television had broadcast only brief, sterile clips from Gaza, usually showing damaged infrastructure that was identified as Hamas hideouts or weapons caches. On at least one occasion, footage of wounded women and children being treated in a hospital emergency room was narrated by the Channel 2 afternoon broadcaster as a tragedy that would surely be used as anti-Israel propaganda.
But even the compelling case of Dr. Aboul Aish failed to make a strong or lasting impact on many Israelis. One middle-aged woman, typically middle class in her speech and appearance, attacked him during a press conference at Tel Hashomer Hospital, where his wounded daughters were being treated. Screaming in front of the cameras and refusing to be silenced, she said that it was a disgrace to give the Palestinian doctor publicity in an Israeli hospital. He must have had weapons in his house, she insisted, because her sons were in the army and they would never shoot a civilian house. While many Israelis expressed abhorrence for her insensitivity to the doctor’s grief, there was wide agreement—lent credence by the army’s initial explanation, later retracted—that the army would not have shot at the physician’s house without a reason. Perhaps he had been unaware of Hamas gunmen shooting from his house? Dr. Aboul Aish rejected this explanation vehemently: speaking to Israeli television reporters from the hospital bedside of one of his wounded daughters, he insisted there had been no shooting either from his house or near his house.
Why were Israelis—both journalists and news consumers—so willing to accept the IDF’s version of events in Gaza? Why did Israeli reporters, normally cynical and irreverent to a fault, fail to ask critical questions during the military operation? Every journalist I spoke with gave the same explanation: the attitude toward covering the Gaza war was a direct reaction to the Second Lebanon War and the way it was reported.
The media had nearly unfettered access to the front lines during the July-August 2006 Lebanon War. Reporters walked right up to soldiers sitting around on the Lebanese border, interviewed them, and broadcast complaints about officers who gave contradictory orders, or about being called up for reserve duty and then kept waiting for days without instructions. A Channel 10 camera crew caught two high-ranking IDF officers as they discussed, in what they thought was a private conversation, their commanding officer’s apparent inability to function as a wartime leader. There were several reports about reserve soldiers who were sent into battle with inadequate equipment.
In response to post-war calls for an investigation into its military and political decision-making, the government appointed an independent commission, chaired by retired judge Eliyahu Winograd. The Winograd Commission’s report shocked the nation with its detailed findings of serious failures in the army’s tactics, communication, and preparedness. The IDF was perceived to have lost its power of deterrence. Israelis felt vulnerable. Somehow, the public absorbed the message that the media had been critical of the war while it was going on, thus exposing IDF maneuvers to Hezbollah, which monitors the Israeli media. And the media—which in fact had supported the war as a cause, only criticizing its tactics when victory proved elusive—felt chastened. Several of my colleagues worried aloud that their reports about failures in the IDF’s functioning had an adverse effect on home front morale. Others expressed guilt at having possibly risked the lives of soldiers by reporting too many details about IDF military moves.
...
Two months after the ceasefire went into effect, Haaretz and Maariv newspapers published the first reports in Hebrew about possible misdeeds on the part of Israeli soldiers in Gaza. There were allegations about loose rules of engagement that resulted in a sniper shooting an old woman, and a child accompanied by his mother. There were also reports about unnecessary destruction of civilian property, and photographs of racist graffiti on the walls of homes that had been commandeered by soldiers.
Some people were disturbed, but the prevailing reactions were disbelief, and a tendency to discredit the sources—a leftist newspaper (Haaretz) and “leftist” IDF officer. Major Danny Zamir, the reserve officer who compiled the report, is a self-described Social-Democratic Zionist who opposes the occupation of the West Bank. As a soldier, he was once jailed for refusing an order to guard a West Bank settlement; this fact was widely reported in the uproar that ensued after his report was published. Few considered that a former career officer who defined himself as a Zionist might have been motivated by patriotism and a commitment to the IDF’s purity of arms.
I had observed the First Intifada, covered the Second Intifada, and covered the internal conflict between Hamas and Fatah, but this is different. I find my driver and make sure he has enough fuel to help me cover the war.
People want to talk. There are those who support Hamas, and those who do not. There are others who monitor what people say. I need to be quick and patient and respectful. The story is all around me.
Israel did not let any international journalists into Gaza, so I feel the weight of responsibility, the need to explain to the world what is happening. And that is one of several kinds of pressure: I want to maintain my credibility, so I work hard not to exclude any element of the story. I deal with Hamas watchers and fighters, which I know how to do. I feel the pressure of possible death from Israeli drones, F16s, helicopters, and tanks.
There are moments of fear, when I file; for a few seconds, I think, What if Israel does not like what I say? There is so much pressure from all sides—Israeli, Palestinian, American. I don’t understand why some reporters become “politically correct” in front of American officials.
There is also the pressure that comes from the people. One woman—fleeing the Israeli shelling with her children—expresses anger at the New York Times coverage, which she says is not balanced. I worry that her loud complaints will bring others. Luckily there are those who respect my work, and respect that I will go to places that many journalists avoid.
Al-Shifa is the main hospital in Gaza City, and there are faces and voices there I don’t forget. A girl declares loudly—in conservative Gaza run by an Islamic movement—that she is losing her faith in God. She blames her mother for the loss of her sister’s leg. I ask the crying mother why, and she explains that she thought it would be safer to send the girl to her uncle’s home because it is built of concrete. The concrete wasn’t much protection.
Another mother wishes aloud for the extermination of Hamas, having seen her daughter cut in half by an Israeli bomb. I pretend I didn’t hear that sentence, and then security guards ask the woman’s relatives to take her out of the hospital.
A father searches for his son, who he says is twenty-two. I listen to him talking quietly to God: I always prayed. Please save him. He is my only son. I know the guards will show sympathy when the man learns his son is dead. “He is a martyr,” they tell him later. But the father doesn’t stop talking to himself. I will cry until I die, my dear son.
Second Day I am in the hospital interviewing a nurse. A young man orders a woman to leave. She begs to see her injured husband. I step outside and four drones are hovering above the hospital; the rumor is that the hospital will be bombed.
Suddenly, between two buildings, I hear shooting and run toward it. I find a man on a stretcher, shot in the right side of his head, his brain emerging from the left side. I express horror, and a young man—the one who had ordered the woman to leave—scolds me: “Are you horrified for an Israeli collaborator who killed resistance fighters and civilians?” I learn that the dead man is the husband of the woman who was ordered to leave; she had come to the hospital after Israel bombed Al-Saraya (the site of Gaza’s central prison), where collaborators were held.
Another man takes me aside and tells me firmly: “You never saw anything.”
“What’s his name?” I ask.
He repeats, “You never saw anything. You won’t report that.”
“No way,” I say. I thought, You don’t know who you are talking to.
No comments:
Post a Comment