Reporting from the Front Lines – A Balancing Act / Inge Günther

By Inge Günther

When I started to prepare myself for this workshop I got a bit worried. Speaking about boundaries of free speech is similar to touching them. And maybe there is no other conflict in the world where you can bring yourself into a mess so suddenly, so unforeseenly and sometimes so painfully like the one in the Middle East. It is like getting an electric shock when touching a cow-fence by mistake.

I think we are all quite aware, my correspondent colleagues as well as myself, that you have to be careful in this field – for good reasons and for not so good ones. You can get punished easily or be branded as being “unbalanced” by both sides, Israelis and Palestinians alike. In this regard, things have changed very much in the last ten years – (I started to work as a correspondent covering Israel and the Palestinian territories in 1996, when people were even proud of having friends on the other side).

The big shift was in 2000. Since then, after the outbreak of the militant Intifada, reporting about the Israel-Palestinian conflict became a challenge for foreign journalists insofar as trying to keep the balance, by changing the perspectives, taking a look from different sides, and trying to be fair. That is always hard in a conflict, especially when it is emotional and political and existential as is this long-lasting centeral problem in the Middle East. It is a tradition, which follows bad habits: like producing a lot of dramatic and exciting news while repeating at the core of it the same bloody conflict all over again. But it is even more complicated because both sides have tried and tried again to use you for their interests or attack you or criticize you when you don’t play according to their rules.

When I wrote about Palestinian hardships caused by the siege or the separation barrier, I got strange reactions, especially from people like concerned citizens in Germany who fight to defend Israel in an offensive way (less so now than at the peak of the Intifada). One story was about a village northwest of Ramallah which was completely sealed off in 2001 after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon won the elections. The soldiers there were quite nasty, not allowing an old woman to bring her bag with fresh bread in. I did a simple description of the procedure at that checkpoint which I watched with my own eyes – but for some lobbyists it was enough to write protest letters, accusing me of being biased. The same happened when I wrote a piece about children harmed in the Intifada. One of them, a seven year old boy from Beit Jala, lost his arm when an IDF-rocket hit the yard in front of his house where he was playing by mistake . This was an undeniable fact. But if you mention innocent victims among Palestinians, you are easily but falsely understood as taking a clear side.

No illusion: In that way the pro-Israel lobby and the Palestinian lobby behave in a similar manner. Their pattern is the same. Sometimes it seems as if both sides react jealously when the other side is shown as the victim in a certain way. So when I did a story in 2002 about three Israelis who were badly injured in different Palestinian suicide attacks, it was the other way around. A German reader known for her pro-Palestinian opinion expressed her “disappointment” about me in an email to the editor, even though. in these kinds of stories I always focus on the human side, the individual tragedy, the way the victims deal with their trauma.

We journalists should not write to be loved. It’s part of our assignment to point out critical issues, to enlighten, to raise questions, to provide information and explanations. So our job is not badly done if we manage to raise anger on both sides – it’s a sign that the public could not swallow you. As a correspondent for German dailies, I can say that the criticism of the so-called Israel lobby can cause bigger trouble for you, the reporter. This is not only because editors-in-chief usually are not very happy about bitter letters containing complaints that their Israel correspondent turned out to be ignorant or hostile to Jews, or is even a hidden anti-Semite but also because from time to time I have serious doubts, whether what you want to say is being understood among the readership in the way you meant it. Sometimes there are reactions praising you in a scary way (f.e. “thanks for your article, well done, it confirmed my conviction that Israel does not want peace, never gave anything etc.” Stuff like that really gives me a headache).

The line between a critical approach towards Israeli politics and the outcry: “this is de- legitimization of Israel”, thinned – at least in the reception of media reporting and the discussion about it. Conferences like “is the media hostile” are a reflection of this debate. Some of them were very helpful as to where to draw or define the line, some were unfortunately more a part of media-bashing.

I think that journalism is a reflection of reality. It cannot be 100 per cent objective. There is no such thing. A journalist can try to be objective – I prefer to say – try to be fair.. But which role do we take: observer? analyst? commentator?
Not only is the last role easily looked at as one of an accuser although as well as that, it could be understood as an advocate of the weaker side, or – in other words – of the overlooked part. If that happens, you land in a drawer, even if that is what you tried to avoid.

Maybe contrary to expectations, the easiest thing for many international correspondents in Israel is dealing with military censorship. If we have to face it at all, it relates to things which make some sense and can be accepted: such as not describing the exact location of a Scud in the Gulf war or a Katjusha which hit close to the harbor in Haifa during the Second Lebanon War.

Much more problematic is the censor in your own brain. For example, most of the time I know from the start which story will cause you problems and which could bring you a warm thank you from your editors. The story about the Palestinian father in the Northern part of the Westbank approximately a year ago, who donated the organs of his dead son killed by Israelis soldiers to save the life of other children whether Jewish, Christians or Moslem is a safe bet. It has drama, a human touch, and fulfills the German wish for reconciliation. A story about daily life between checkpoints has much less potential. People are fed up hearing about the Palestinian misery. Sometimes I feel people are even fed up hearing about this unsolved conflict and about politicians, be they Israeli or Palestinian, who are either incapable or not courageous enough to solve it. By the way, it can be boring for the journalist too if there is a lot of empty talk about how to restart the peace process – although it seems to me that the newspapers would never miss an article plus a commentary about an “important” handshake and a meeting even though nobody expects any results.

You have to work/move under those conditions which certainly influences you in one way or other as to how you choose your story. I thought I would be able to ignore it, but I became more aware of it when I myself faced some problems with my B-1 visa (the working permit for journalists in Israel) in September 2006. At exactly that time, the story about foreigners in the Westbank who are married to Palestinians or are themselves Palestinians with foreign passports but are refused re-entry to Israel came up . I was thinking twice about doing the story because I somehow wanted to be on the safe side and avoid anything that could bring somebody up against me in my own visa case. I finally overcame my hesitations and put all my energy into that story, presenting the human cases and the main arguments of both sides.

Let’s face tougher problems. Most of us will remember the lynch of two Israeli reservists in front of a police station in Ramallah a few weeks after the Intifada started in September 2000. An Italian TV-team filmed the bloody event which was taking place under the applause of a hysterical hateful crowd. After the TV-team brought the tape out of the country,it became prime news and was shown all over the world. Every one could see how a mob of angry young Palestinians turned murderous, some of them even proudly holding up their hands covered in blood – an embarrassing act for the image of the Palestinian Authorities which had been unable to prevent this lynch of two Israelis in the custody of the Palestinian police. So the anger among Palestinians turned against the Italian TV-team. In the days which followed, anonymous threats were sent out against nearly all Italian journalists in Israel blaming them for the damage done to the national Palestinian image. It was blank fear and in addition a good portion of opportunism which led another Italian correspondent from RAI 2 to make a “Kotau” in the form of a written letter to the Palestinian Authorities afterwards. No misunderstanding: he apologized for something that another journalist did under personal risk: bringing a videotape out of Ramallah that showed the killing and the participants in it. The RAI 2 journalist didn’t want to be part of it, so he distanced himself from his colleagues in order to be on the safe side. His lack of solidarity (other called it cowardice) became a hot debate among foreign correspondents. In the end, RAI 2 recalled him. One thing is for sure: a model for civil courage he was not.

But most of the time it is not fear for life that we are facing. A sole word or a term can be dangerous to use sometime at least in respect to your future career. The controversy about Jimmy Carter’s book “Peace or Apartheid” is a good example for this claim. The discussion about it became an ideological battleground. Most of the time there was not much talk about facts which do or do not support the Apartheid analogy. On one hand there was the outcry of the pro-Israel camp that Carter dared to use this word, which as Eliahu Salpeter said in Haaretz, “associates the Israeli occupation in the territories with the racist white minority government in South Africa”. Or in the opposite camp, there was the radical left which tried to embrace Carter as their new forerunner. He himself meanwhile tried his utmost to renew a dialogue with the Jewish community in the States. Robert Cohen in the International Herald Tribune belonged to the few exceptions who argued with the apartheid thesis and Carter s book in a non-polemical manner. In my eyes Cohen’ s article proves that you can deal with such sensitive issues in an open-minded way. But when doing so, you probably have to swim against the mainstream.

At the same time, I myself am no big fan of provocative language. Because at the end you fight about strong terms while the reality gets lost or left behind. The debate about the Middle East conflict is already full of wrong associations, Nazi parallels etc. Before becoming a journalist, I was a teacher. Maybe that’s the reason that while writing I think more about how to make people understand instead of how to arouse their excitement. Is this a boundary or more a condition of free speech?