A tale of shame and darkness

It happened in 2002, at the height of the Israeli anti-terrorist action on the West Bank, following a whole series of suicide bombs that had rocked Israel and murdered hundreds.

One of the Palestinian terror groups was filmed by a Palestinian cameraman seizing and summarily executing a teenage Palestinian boy who they deemed to have collaborated with Israel. The Palestinian cameraman was hidden, and was able to film the whole incident without being seen.

And the appalling scene he filmed was of this boy, begging to phone his mother to say goodbye to her, and then finally screaming out, Mum, I love you! before they shot him out of hand.

This story was posted by Lisa as a dilemma for her readers at On the Face. What would you have done with the film if you had been that cameraman?, she asked.

She had met the cameraman involved at an unpublicized bridge-building conference for Israeli and Palestinian journalists early this year. Amongst the exercises they did was a discussion of the dilemmas they'd faced in covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Each group presented sample dilemmas they had actually faced for the other side to comment on.

She made it clear that this cameraman had faced many dilemmas: both he and his family could have been at risk from revenge killings by the terrorists if they tracked him down.

And there was the issue of the boy's mother. If he released the film, how could he face the prospect of her witnessing the horrific scene of her son begging and then falling lifeless as he was shot?

And then there were loyalty issues. Would releasing a film like that just serve to add to the impression that so many people have of Palestinian lawlessness and gangsterism being the whole of what there is to say about Palestinian culture? It seems from the post that the Palestinian journalists, including the cameraman, did not find it a simple issue of loyalty, since they chose to share with a group of Israeli journalists what is after all a shameful story of the vicious and heartless murder of a teenager .

I think Lisa's approach of presenting this story as a dilemma for readers to supply their answers to was brilliant, for it made the readers put themselves into the shoes of a cameraman who faced the prospect of what were clearly heartless killers hunting them down. It would have been so much easier to strike instantly morally correct poses. And hard to have told the story complete without it being seen instantly ready made for readers as a pro or anti Palestinian story.

It was so interesting to see the way the comments went. There was the reader who thought the Palestinian cameraman would have buried the story, because that's what Palestinians do. Then there was the Palestinian solidarity activist who argued that the story was invented (even though it had come from a Palestinian cameraman) and that Lisa should have just turned the story over to the Palestinian Authority to investigate, instead of publicizing it on her blog. There was a good suggestion that the cameraman could have turned the film over to a human rights organization.

This is what I suggested:

Cameramen don't usually directly broadcast their own material. They can however usually choose who they market or transmit it to. Critical as I am of the BBC, they don't broadcast murders taking place. It's Al-Jazeera and co who do that.

So if I were that cameraman and were free to market it, I would market it to a responsible station which does not broadcast terrorist murderers killing their victims, on condition they witheld my name.

The cameraman had a choice, even if he was tied to working for one station.

Even if he was forced to turn over whatever he filmed to his employers, it's not clear that he would have been identified, as he was filming from a hidden position. He had the choice to give the story of what happened to press agencies and reporters who he could trust not to reveal his identity.

The mother would not have been compelled to watch her son's murder. If my daughter had been murdered and I knew there was a film of it happening, I sure as hell would not have watched it.

So my principle would have been to ensure that the truth about the summary executions got out, but with the least risk to the bereaved mother and myself. I would like to think the cameraman did the same.

Well, it turns out that the cameraman did keep the film, but did not get it broadcast. Yet this decision clearly troubled his conscience, and troubled the conscience of the other Palestinian journalists, too, for it was this story that they offered to their Israeli counterparts.

Think of the hundreds of articles and web pages that have appeared on the subject of the killing of Mohammed al-Dura. Which seems to be a story which has now had the greatest doubt cast on it.

Yet here is an absolutely unambiguous story of a gratuitous murder of a teenager, desperately crying out for his mother's love as his life was blown away. Not a single story has been written about it, other than what has now appeared on Lisa's blog. And we don't even know his name.

Lisa revealed in the comments section that one of the reasons the cameraman had given was that of loyalty to his people and his cause, and not wanting to contribute to the stereotype of Palestinian violence.

Over Shabbos, I had been reading Natan Sharansky's The Case for Democracy. Sharansky gives a brilliant account of why loyalty of this misguided kind is misplaced and wrong. Agreeing to not rock the boat in the name of national unity and the liberation struggle is wrong. And he constantly ties it to his own experience of being a dissident in the Soviet Union. He repeatedly demonstrates how the Palestinian Authority has exactly the same approach to dissidents as had the Soviet Union. And that it was only when the dissidents and the west stood up to the apparently invincible Soviet Union that it crumbled.

We who live outside the former Soviet Union too easily forget to compare arguments like these about the need to defend Palestinian liberation struggles with those used by all those western radical intellectuals of the thirties, forties and fifties. They kept silent about the Gulags and the atrocities of the Chinese communists in the name of defending the cause of the revolution and the class struggle.

And in the context of the birth of the state of Israel, I think the moral issue was exactly the same with the atrocities committed by the Stern Gang and the Irgun. But as far as I know, there was no shortage of vehement criticism and denunciation of their terrorist actions by the Jews of pre-state Palestine.

I will know that the Palestinians will have turned a corner when their leaders repeatedly make speeches like this one by David Ben Gurion. It was made in 1944, when he denounced the Irgun and Lehi, the terror groups whose leaders later led the Likud party, at the height of the struggle that led to the founding of the state of Israel:

There is no compromise, no equivocation. The way of terror, or the way of Zionism, gangsterism or an organised Yishuv (community); murder from ambush and banditry in darkness, or the voluntary self-discipline of youth movements, of farmers and industrialists, a union of freedom and co-operation in argument, decision and act.

Whenever and wherever there is a self-governing community of free men, gangsters find no place. If gangsters rule-- free men are homeless.
Take up your choice-- violence and repression, or constitutional liberties...let us rise up against terror and its agencies, and smite them. The time for words are past.

And Ben-Gurion's orders on the action that needed to be taken against the terrorists of his own side left no room for the sort of moral equivocation that issues from Mahmoud Abbas and Saab Erekat after each suicide bombing:

Every organised group must spew them out... refuge and shelter must be denied these wild mean... It is our hearts-- not the heart of Britain--- that the terrorist iron has entered. Our hands then, no others, must pluck it out.

(quoted on page 32 of Colin Shindler's The Land Beyond Promise: Israel, Likud and the Zionist Dream, London, I B Tauris, 2002)

I have a great deal of sympathy for the isolated cameraman and his story. The fact that he could bring himself to tell it to this company of Israeli and Palestinian journalists showed that he wanted to do something beyond just keeping the film and burying the story. 

It is the case that the few brave Palestinians who speak out about Palestinian gangsterism do sometimes lose their lives. And when more bloggers and the mainstream news media start ceaselessly publicizing the brutality of gangsterism like this, the few will become many, and it will no longer be possible to isolate and intimidate them.

Comments

[George]

Bravo. And bravo for Ben Gurion too.

[anonymous]

i doubt that the people involved would have had difficult figuring out who took the footage even if the cameraman had given or sold the film to someone a few degrees removed from him.

people involved in the killing would have known who was close by and it wouldn't have been very hard to figure out who to blame.

he has a family to protect. and the pa is a madhouse.

[Judy]

Anonymous-- you may or may not be right. According to the story, the cameraman followed the terrorists in his car (so for some considerable distance) and remained hidden during the atrocity. In the chaos that was around at the time, I doubt if they were keeping tabs on the large numbers of press around.

He also had the choice of giving the story to a press agency and using the video in confidence to verify it. In his own accounts, according to Lisa's comments, he mentioned loyalty (in the sense of the broad loyalty to wanting to avoid giving Palestinians an even more negative image)as one of the key issues.

He himself didn't cite reprisal as the key issue. After all, it could still operate to this day, but he chose to present the story and show the video to the journalists, and the other Palestinian journalists supported him.

There are Palestinian journalists and human rights workers now who are risking their lives to report gangsterism and intimidation despite the risks and their obvious identifiability.

The fact that the media (apart from the Jerusalem Post and sometimes Ha'aretz) doesn't publicise their battles makes it easier for the gangsters and terrorists to win.

[Ben-David]

While I certainly endore Ben-Gurion's fine words, the reality back then was not nearly as clear-cut as this (admittedly condensed, tangential) mention implies.

The "organized yishuv" ran its own clandestine militia at the time, and engaged in anti-British activities as well.

Isn't it a bit late to dredge up this old smear, implying that the Likud is somehow not legit? From here in Israel, it's clear to many that the self-righteousness projected by Israel's Labor/left factions have been hamstringing our progress to a healthy, combative, truly democratic civic culture for more than half a century now.

Currently, the Likud is striving mightily to liberalize our economy and introduce much-needed transparency in our political system. And what are the other options on offer in the upcoming elections? A throwback to (Ben-Gurion's!) socialist cronyocracy, or a move "forward" (Kadima) to unscrupled fascism.

Yummy!

This reality leaves offhand phrases like "the terror groups whose leaders later led the Likud party" naked and blushing... not to mention inaccurate, as Netanyahu never was in the underground.

[Judy]

I had no intention of implying the Likud is not legit. I am not expressing any opinions on the Likud itself, which anyway was only constituted long after the establishment of the state of Israel. I also understand the Ben Gurion comment to have referred to particular acts of terrorism.

I think it is no accident that the former terrorist associations of key Likud leaders of the past were what helped to keep them out of power for thirty years after the founding of the state of Israel. Of course I do not refer to Netanyahu, only to the particular people in the leadership of Irgun and Lehi who subsequently became the leaders of the Likud of their day.

I quote Ben Gurion, because I think he was absolutely right, and continues to be right, on the issue of totally and unequivocally renouncing terrorism and organizing to root it out from one's own side.

In doing so, I do not advocate him or his policies. My post is not about that. In fact, the discussion grows out of my admiration of the stance taken by Sharansky on this matter. He served in a Likud-led coalition, but that's neither here nor there to me. His understanding of what democracy is, and what it has to be, are central to my political views. That doesn't necessarily imply my endorsement of other political positions he may advocate.

As you will see if you have read my post on Amir Peretz, I am not taking a particular stance on him as a leader either.

This post is not about the Israeli elections. It is about the need for all of us to unite against terrorism,and not take up mistaken loyalty positions in order to preserve the supposed honour or reputation of our own side.

[Ben-David]

I agree, and I also admire and share Sharansky's positions. I also understand that this was tangential to your main point.

... but articulate folks like Sharansky are being sidelined in Israeli politics (at least partially) by the lingering ghosts of the old Mapai/Likud stereotypes. Peretz in particular is a conjuring/divining/lightning rod for long-simmering racial and political divisions.

The preoccupation with these old rivalries - particularly by the left-tilting media - has pushed the debate about Israel's democratic character to the margins of public awareness.

And the persistence of these stereotypes/historical memes - and their deployment by the leftist elite to bolster their aura of inevitability - has a direct impact on the ability of people like Sharansky and Netanyahu to lead when they ARE elected, and to carry forward the structural reforms we so desperately need.

[Haitham]

It is unfortunate to see that you are simply doing something that you think should be perceived good, while denouncing those of Palestinians and pro-Palestine. If you give yourself the right to speak and just crimes such as Mohammad al-Durra's and show it as fake, I (don't)wonder where and who on earth would be those who believe/create/spread such lies?

I can't even think of comparing such a lie to true stories and facts represented by activists like thecutter and umkahlil. I always said, truth hurts, and I guess this is what you are suffering from. While on Yale's blog you say "... I would like to let you know how I dealt successfully with attacks on Lisa and myself (and others) by Umkhalil. She was forced to remove the offending pages. It is also a decisive way of dealing with offensive commenters..." Instead of accepting facts as facts, you go on calling true challenges as hate, offensive and trolls. Of course you will not feel short of finding support to such claims, specially that it distracts everyone from the moral of the stories they present, to a personal attacks and flames.

Tell me, how did you force umkahlil to take off her post? Why are you so sure that she can put it back? What makes you proud of suppressing a human voice? ..... I know the answer.... you will call them (and me) hate and racist and antisemitic and blah blah blah... pathetic!

Wouldn't it be fair and just to try to see others as "humans with rights", just like yours, just for a while? or you believe Ben Gurion's "..let us rise up against terror and its agencies, and smite them..." is your right, but the same by Palestinians suffering from Israeli terror and massacres is not right?!

Wakeup, look with two eyes, one on your side, one on other side!

[Abigail]

This book is so brazenly pro-Arab and anti-Israel, so patziran in its selection of facts, as to be utterly breathtaking. While the back material says that the book is relentlessly fair , it is certainly not. Nor is it, as the title suggests, some neutral bit of history for beginners, an Arabs and Israel for Dummies kind of book.The first page says, I swear to you, I cannot see how any fair-minded person with an IQ over fifty can believe the Zionist/Jewish/Israeli version of what happened in the Middle-East. The last paragraph of the book has this conclusion: Although I don't think that Israel benefits anyone, including the Jewish people, I don't expect Israel to quit the Middle East. So what do I want? I want a few famous American Jews Norman Mailer Woody Allen to stand up and say, let's quit lying to the world and to ourselves. We stole Palestine. We stole it.' While there are plenty of pro-Israel, anti-Arab books that are just as biased, if you're looking for balance, this isn't the book for you. The only value this book has is to learn a decidedly and profoundly pro-Arab point of view.