Friday, April 13, 2007

‘You get your film and go home’ (that's show biz...)

From The Spectator, 7/4/07, by Rod Liddle ....

Hebron: ‘So, are you happy now?’ the young Israeli soldier with the machinegun and the sneer asked me, as the Palestinian kid was bundled into the back of a police paddy wagon .... We stood in the middle, not entirely sure what to do. The cameraman, Brian, stopped filming.

... Apparently, some Palestinians were building a large house on this hill when, late one night, some 200 settlers swooped down and took it over, evicting the Palestinians, who have since erected a tent to one side of the dwelling with the Israeli soldiers in between (although not of course, ideologically speaking, really in the middle). Both sides claim legal rights to the land and property, and I have had sufficient dealings with lawyers in the last four years not to delve too deeply into the rectitude of each claim. Just to say that in a normal world, when you buy a house, you exchange contracts and send round a removal van when the last people have left; you don’t creep along in the dead of night with 198 of your friends armed with baseball bats. Also, you usually move in when the house is finished, rather than when there’s no roof.

....What happened on this occasion was this: undoubtedly emboldened by our camera, one Palestinian kid — 15 years old — crosses a line he is not supposed to cross. He walks a bit nearer the house than he should. The cameras are rolling. The soldiers surround him and tell him to clear off, back to his tent. He refuses. He says something vainglorious and declamatory in Arabic about refusing ever to move, and then maybe throws in a few obscenities at one of the soldiers ....At which point, he gets kicked, hard, in the balls, punched in the stomach and shoved in the back of a van.

In the world league-table of atrocities this is small beer — and, for film crews used to operating in tense and dangerous parts of the globe, a familiar and perhaps minor ethical problem. The Israeli soldier was right, though, in his implication: if we had not been there, this would not have happened. If you build it, they will come, etc. The kid was grandstanding for the cameras and, as a result, will get a beating. If we — or some other TV monkeys — had not been there, it would not have happened. We were there to witness injustice; and also, if possible, exacerbate it for the benefit of the viewing public.

The Israeli government is rightly worried that the Palestinians have captured the moral high ground by precisely such tactics, if they are tactics. It is aware that the Palestinian PR machine wins hands down, as it has done since the first Intifada, back in the late 1980s — kids with rocks versus a professional army with heavy ordnance and, behind even that, the USA. And when the TV crews, or the international observers are around, the Palestinians play it up for all it is worth; they know how it will go down with an international audience.

....A little later the Israeli soldier who sneeringly asked if I was happy now returned to where I was standing, smoking and shuffling my feet and, very much off the record, spoke for a while. ...‘I never sleep,’ he said. ‘I just want everything to be quiet, for nobody to get hurt. You turn up and you show this...’ he gestured to Brian, with the camera, ‘but you don’t show the other side. And you know what will happen, when you turn up here with your camera. There will be trouble. And you get your film and you go home. I stay here.’

....I tried to tell him that I hadn’t wanted the kid to go berserk and end up in a police van, that this is journalism and it has to be done so that the world can see what’s going on and make up its own mind. ‘Yes,’ he nodded, ‘it’s what you do, isn’t it? And this is what I do.’...

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