I mean it very specifically. It took place tonight. I was there. Here’s my report. Also below.
Category: Palestine
Annapolis
The most succinct bit of commentary about the US/Israel/Palestine talks at Annapolis come from a piece by Laila el-Haddad who is based some of the time in Gaza. She quotes a mother of eight saying:
“We’re already dead, the only thing we need is to be buried, to be pushed into the grave and buried. It’s already been dug up for us.”
Chomsky’s enraged too, though he notes that he’s trying to keep his composure:
“Before saying a word, I’d like to express some severe personal discomfort, because anything I say will be abstract and dry and restrained. The crimes against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and elsewhere, particularly Lebanon, are so shocking that the only emotionally valid reaction is rage and a call for extreme actions. But that does not help the victims. And, in fact, it’s likely to harm them. We have to face the reality that our actions have consequences, and they have to be adapted to real-world circumstances, difficult as it may be to stay calm in the face of shameful crimes in which we are directly and crucially implicated.”
I was in Gaza five years ago now and was amazed by the horror that the Israelis have created there. Every single year it has gotten far worse. It is a complete nightmare. And that makes these sham talks a complete farce.
They would be funny if they were not so tragic. The Toronto Star had a little chart yesterday, with four key issues for the talks – Refugees, Jerusalem, Settlements, Borders. It stated Israeli and Palestinian positions on each of the issues, and “possible solutions” – the possible solutions were the most amusing – each “possible solution” involved the Palestinians giving everything up.
The way the discussion plays out in the media is like an advertisement for the benefits of bad-faith bargaining. Seven years ago the discussion at Camp David was about the same issues, trying to get Palestinians to declare they are happy with their ongoing destruction. Today the destruction is seven years more advanced and the Israelis don’t even have to pretend to give up as much.
Nothing will come out of this summit. Israel doesn’t want anything from it. The US doesn’t want anything from it. The Palestinians can’t get anything from it. Everyone understands that what matters is what the US/Israel do and what they are doing is the same genocidal program that has been unfolding for years. It might help if the media would stop insulting everyone’s intelligence covering this as if it were anything but a sham.
Gaza
It might be better to wait until I know more, but I wanted to say something about what occurred in Gaza on Monday, when a demonstration organized by Fatah to commemorate Arafat was fired upon by the Hamas-controlled police, with seven people killed including one child.
The police claim the shooting was started by someone in the crowd. But this is what police everywhere say when they fire on demonstrators and kill people, so there is no reason to automatically believe it. The stories I read or have seen do not have any explanation of what happened by Hamas.
Knowing a bit of the context might help understand what is going on. Remember that until earlier this year, there was an armed conflict between Hamas, which had won parliamentary elections in 2006, and Fatah, which had traditionally led the Palestinians under Arafat and which was now getting support by the US/Israel to try to oust Hamas. Hamas won the confrontation in Gaza but Fatah won in the West Bank, which caused many remarks about a “two-state solution”, “Gazastan/Hamastan” and “Fatahland”, that would have been clever if they weren’t talking about an unfolding tragedy. The confrontation at the time took the form of an contest between two armed bands.
What might be happening now is that Fatah may have changed its tactics and is trying to topple the Hamas government using political mobilizations and demonstrations, invoking Arafat’s memory and, now, provoking repression which will reveal Hamas to be callous to people’s suffering and to be acting like a repressive government rather than the leaders of a liberation movement. Such tactics could be much more successful, especially if Hamas responds as it has been doing, with not only firing on the demonstrations, but also arresting Fatah members, etc.
What makes this so much more painful to witness is that it is all going on at the same time as Israel’s tortures, destruction of villages, arrests, kidnappings, all continue without any interruption, as a glimpse at IMEMC will show.
From the Nazis at BBC
Khaled Mishal of Hamas in the foreground, and a Nazi swastika in the background. Click on the story and you won’t see anything Nazi. That’s because there’s nothing to do with the Nazis, other than the desire by the BBC and so many others to link the travails of the starving, besieged, imprisoned, tortured, slaughtered Palestinians with the genocidal Nazi regime, the better to continue starving, besieging, imprisoning, and torturing them. To do so subliminally, through disgusting and crude photos like this one, might or might not be what one expects of the BBC. Certainly I will expect much less of them in future. As sick as it is to have this picture on my blog, I want readers to see what the BBC is peddling on its website today. One hopes they are forced to take it down, but it should be here so they can’t erase the memory of what they’ve done. Did some British skinhead Nazi working at BBC just want to put a swastika on the website, and think he could get away with it if he put it behind an Arab?
Tanya Reinhart
I received news that Tanya Reinhart died suddenly in New York. She was always one of my guides on Israel/Palestine. When I went there in 2002 she was very helpful to me, personally, and I only didn’t get to visit her in person because I fell sick. It is far too soon for her to be gone – we all needed her for a lot more years.
Jamal Zahalka quoted Hannah Arendt in Toronto
It’s true. In his talk, “Debunking the Myth of Israeli Democracy”, Jamal Zahalka quoted Hannah Arendt. I think. He might or might not have quoted Hegel, I can’t remember. He definitely quoted Hannah Arendt. He also quoted Spiro Agnew, which was weird. He definitely didn’t quote Hitler though, which is apparently what they’ve started saying about him back in Israel. The group that brought him, “Students Against Israeli Apartheid”, are in the process of getting the video of his talk ready and available on the internet so everyone can see for themselves that the vicious and all-too unsurprising rumors that are being spread about him are not true. The real message, I suppose, is that Palestinians shouldn’t be given platforms to speak. They should be denied any opportunity to tell their story, from any platform. Having been pretty thoroughly shut out of the media (you might see one interview with this member of the Israeli parliament published besides the one on ZNet, and that other one will be in a small alternative news magazine in Toronto), Palestinians like Zahalka can’t even talk invited by small campus groups to audiences of a few hundred without being subjected to vicious campaigns of defamation. It isn’t enough to dispossess them, starve them, imprison thousands of them, kill hundreds of them. We also have to prevent them from talking about it.
So in the spirit of letting Zahalka’s words speak for themselves, here is the interview I did with him the day after his talk in Toronto, in which we recap many of the issues he raised in his talk.
A State of all its Citizens: an interview with Jamal Zahalka
http://www.zcommunications.org/a-state-of-all-its-citizens-by-jamal-zahalka
Jamal Zahalka is a member of the Israeli Knesset as part of the Balad Party list that includes Wasil Taha and Azmi Bishara. He was in Toronto delivering the keynote address at Israeli Apartheid Week at the University of Toronto on February 16, 2007. His talk, “Debunking the Myth of Israeli Democracyâ€, discussed discrimination against Palestinians living inside Israel. I interviewed him the following day in Toronto.
Continue reading “A State of all its Citizens: an interview with Jamal Zahalka”
Enjoying my chorus of one…
One trick of writing on the internet: if you want feedback, leave your email at the bottom of the article, and if you don’t, don’t. Sometimes you forget, as I did with my open letter to Mitch Potter. His reply to me, you’ll recall, was basically to remind me that he has a larger audience than I do (“Enjoy your chorus of one”) thanks to his employer, Torstar, being somewhat larger than ZNet or killingtrain.com, and also to remind me of a further constraint on fair coverage (“those of us on print deadlines”). When you’re on deadlines, it’s easier to go to the sources in the rolodex, and if you’re in Israel/Palestine, those are think-tanks close to the state and military officials.
In any case I forgot to put my email at the bottom which means that people who wanted to write to me had to look it up. Not hard, in my case, at all, but I was very pleasantly surprised by the feedback over the past few days:
I just read your Open Letter. Solid, hard-hitting piece of work.
Impressive. Damn.
*
Brilliant. Thank you.
*
I just wanted to say that I’ve been keeping up on reading your work, and I’m glad that you’ve been keeping up with writing it. Your open letter to Mitch Potter was particularly strong, and it’s nice to see people on our side sticking to their position like you did.
*
I just finished reading an email I received containing a letter you wrote to Mitch Potter. All I can say is well done and more power to you!!
One hopes that the rest of the citizens of the world will play a more active role in an effort to expose the truth… because we (the Palestinians) are not valued as equals when it comes to the dispersal of humanity from the western world, any reports that humanise our cause are all but buried, but those that glorify any act of resistance, thus leading to any harm whatsoever to the Israelis, is plastered across the news bulletins of the world. Keep up the great work!
This is more feedback than I usually get. I think people have been frustrated by subtler and cruder patterns of racism that they take in over long periods of time watching “liberal” media, so the chance to see it named and exposed is vindicating.
A good book I read a year or so ago is called “The Genocide Machine in Canada”. One of the strategic principles the authors advocate is confronting individuals with the consequences of what they do and support. Feelings will get hurt in this process, and the individuals may not change their minds. But it is still an important part of trying to honestly face these problems and our participation in them.
My reply to Mitch Potter
My reply to Mitch Potter’s letter (see two blog posts ago) is published at ZNet.
I sent it to him, and he replied quickly, saying:
> You take months to compose what those of us on print deadlines do
> daily and you manage only to add “lazy” to my glossary of sins?
>
> Pathetic.
>
> Enjoy your chorus of one.
>
> Mitch Potter
I replied simply:
Good to read that you got it, even if you didn’t read it.
Cheers Mitch.
-J.
He replied:
Read it. Wounded by it. Have no intention of engaging further as you seem only interested in selectively distorting the spirit of my work to inflict further pain.
You are off-base in branding me racist. If you knew me you would soon come to understand how wrong you are.
Mitch Potter
I replied to that, too, saying that I had set out to wound, out of frustration at not being able to do anything to change the imbalance of the situation and its misrepresentation. I also acknowledged that I didn’t think he was a racist in the sense of hating a group of people and being a bigot against them, but that he, like I, participated in a system that leads to their suppression and ongoing destruction, and that we’re going along with it, not doing enough to fight it. I also worried that I may have personalized it too much, such that the wider points about the bias in the coverage and the patterns and frames for the discussion of Israel/Palestine have may have gotten lost.
I suppose that is the end of my interaction with Mitch Potter.
My article is below.
Dear Mitch Potter,
It has been some time since you wrote me on September 10, 2006, in response to my blog post at killingtrain.com of July 28, 2006. You wrote me with serious concerns that I had maligned your reputation – attaching, in your words, a slur to your name, and doing so “cavalierly”. I should have replied sooner, and for that I apologize.
I cannot, however, apologize for what I called you, “a truly disgusting racist”. In fact, going over your work over the past six months, I have to add that you are lazy, a liar, and a cliché-ridden writer.
I looked at your work on the Israel/Palestine conflict, including the Lebanon war but excluding solely domestic issues in Israel, from June 29 2006 to December 18 2006. That is 44 stories.
If the stories are an indication, you were in the region from June 29 – July 25, then again from September 2-September 16, again from October 30 – December 18. During that six month period you filed 4 stories from Gaza and 4 from Ramallah. You filed one from Pesagot Settlement in the West Bank and another from Haifa. You filed the other 34 stories from Jerusalem. If, as you suggest, it was premature to call you a truly disgusting racist after reading one story in which you liken Palestinians to rodents, perhaps we can agree that 44 stories (over 80,000 words) is enough to start to discern patterns.
The strong language (“truly disgusting racist”) came to mind for two reasons after reading your article (“After Hamas, another Somalia?”, July 9, 2006). First, because I knew instantly upon reading it that you would never liken Israelis to rodents, nor indeed to any other kind of animal, and you did not ever do so in any of the 44 stories I read, though you did use many disparaging terms to describe Palestinians and Lebanese (I’ll return to that below). Second, and more importantly, because your flippant use of language throughout your reporting obscures Israel’s genocidal policies towards the Palestinians.
Disgusting racism: Obscuring the disparity, causes, and consequences
“Genocidal” is another strong word. It means, according to the UN Genocide Convention, attempts to destroy a group of people. Most people only accept the definition if it also includes attempts to physically destroy a group, not just to culturally destroy them and displace them. With the whole world, starting with Canada, assisting in Israel’s starvation of the Palestinians, while Israel casually (should I say “cavalierly”?) kills dozens of Palestinians every week, and given the direction of Israel’s political and military changes, I think the label genocidal applies. So does Ilan Pappe, a historian at Haifa University, and one of the diverse Israeli expert sources that are readily available that you don’t speak to, favouring a homogeneous group of military and strategic studies experts from think-tanks close to the state.
You were in Gaza in July 2006. To get there you would have had to go through various checkpoints and fortified walls, something most Palestinians are not allowed to do. You were in a place where, by now, probably the majority of children are chronically malnourished and will suffer long-term developmental problems because of it. The two references to Gaza’s children that I found in your stories, though, were as follows. First, you noted how, because Israel had destroyed all the electricity supply in Gaza, that “entrepreneurial street kids who normally can be found hawking gum yesterday switched to candles at Gaza City intersections” (“The war of nerves in Gaza”, June 30, 2006). Second, that after Israeli planes flew over Gaza to create sonic booms (a story I will return to) you could hear children crying, which was “hardly surprising, given that half of the territory’s 1.4 million Palestinians are 15 or younger.” (“Sonic onslaught in Gaza”, July 1, 2006)
At any time, you could have looked around and seen what some (no one you would talk to, perhaps) call the Apartheid Wall but which you referred to, when you wrote about it (before July 2006), as the “separation barrier” or the “security barrier”. Does being Middle East Bureau Chief mean you have some say over the selection of graphics? Could you have published maps of the wall and the checkpoints, the cantonization of the West Bank, the locations of the artillery strikes in Gaza, or the cluster bombs in Lebanon? Could you have published them alongside the locations where all the Qassams or Katyushas landed in Israel? Could you have published the lists and numbers of casualties on both sides?
All this might have given your readers a better chance to understand what Israel is doing. And what Israel is doing is controlling every detail of Palestinian life, including such details as whether a person will live or die, watch their child or parent live or die, be taken off to prison to be tortured, watch their child or parent be taken, be allowed to leave their home, be allowed to leave their town through a massive gate in the massive wall, be allowed to see a loved one, be allowed to see a doctor, have food or fuel or medicine. These details are missing from your stories. So is the agenda behind them missing, which is to take the land of the Palestinians, remove them from it, and destroy those who resist. Both the details and the agenda are things you are in a position to know. The consequences are so serious for so many (starving, murdered, terrorized) people that presenting the conflict as if there is parity, the way you do in some stories, or from the point of view of Israel, the way you do in others, is not innocent deception, but complicity in a major, ongoing crime. That is what is truly disgusting about what you have done.
Human rights organizations document the disparity. According to B’Tselem, from the beginning of the second intifada in September 2000 to the end of January 2007, Palestinians had killed 1020 Israelis, 704 of whom were civilians, 119 of whom were children. According to the PCHR, up until September 2006, when you sent me your email, Israel had killed 3859 Palestinians, 3069 of whom were unarmed, 724 of whom were children. It had completely demolished 2831 Palestinian homes and partially destroyed 2427. It had leveled 37 square kilometers (an area 10% the size of Gaza) and destroyed 677 industrial facilities.
You also must know that the disparity has grown in recent years. For the period during which I looked at your work (July 2006 – December 2006), Israeli forces killed 479 Palestinians, wounded 1650, and arrested 1570. By contrast, Palestinians killed 4 Israeli security personnel and 2 Israeli civilians.
In your two stories on Louise Arbour’s visit to the region on November 22 and 23, you framed the issue in a way that assumed parity even as you reported massive disparity, with paragraphs like: “As Qassams keep falling (eight more yesterday, landing without causing injury) and Israel Defense Forces operations against Palestinian rocket-launchers in Gaza intensify (five dead yesterday, two of them civilians) Arbour diagnoses the violent stalemate as an acute ‘protection-of-civilians deficit,’” and “One day after decrying ‘massive’ Israeli violations of human rights against Palestinian civilians, Canadian Louise Arbour got a close-up view of Israeli suffering yesterday”. Here you made sure to put the word “massive” in quotes, perhaps to ensure that you not be seen calling Israeli human rights violations “massive” (what would be “massive” in your opinion, I wonder?). You separated Arbour’s words from your own when she was calling Israeli human rights violations “massive”, but you were willing to paraphrase her giving advice to the victims: “To paraphrase Arbour’s approach, a different message to the Palestinians might be, ‘Behave like a state. Be legal. Respect and enforce the law, including international law against rocket attacks on civilians.’” How you or Arbour thinks that imprisoned Palestinians suffering periodic massacres who starve at the whim of an occupying power that periodically massacres them can “behave like a state” is unclear – but a lack of clarity about the situation is precisely what your stories induce. But the worst line in your stories on Arbour is your approving introduction to Arbour’s most repulsive statements: “in that spirit, she is not about to be drawn into debate about the uneven death toll of the continuing violence.” Mitch, the uneven death toll matters. It matters on its own merits, and it matters as a clue to the causes, effects, and possibilities for a solution to the conflict. Your presentation, your endorsement, of Arbour’s cowardly refusal to “be drawn into debate” about this basic and fundamental point, helps obscure clear thinking and understanding about what is being done to the Palestinians.
Presenting massive disparity in victimization and crimes as if there is parity helps the victimizers. Helping victimizers who are conducting a campaign of massacre and ethnic cleansing is disgusting racism.
Disgusting racism: The partisan use of language
Another element of your racism comes from your use of language.
You likened Palestinians to rodents, something I cannot let you off the hook for even when you accompany it with quotations from sociologists. Not when you never used any animal analogies about Israelis, and never would.
You describe the Palestinian capture of an Israeli tank gunner by saying they “seized” him (September 12 and November 9). But the 1019 people Israel seized to take off to prisons, many of whom were children, many of whom were tortured, were “arrested” or “detained”, never “seized”.
Further on your use of the word “seized”, you use it elsewhere to make reactions to Israel’s aggression and destruction sound opportunistic. Hizbollah “seized” the leadership (July 16, quoting Buttu) and “seized” the moment (July 14). Indeed, when Israeli shelling killed 7 members of the same family, Palestinians “seized on” this, too, to end a ceasefire (how awful of them to treat the massacre of a family as a sign of the end of a ceasefire).
When you describe Palestinians’ Qassam rockets, which you know and have stated are militarily ineffective and basically a gesture of defiance, you describe them as a “scourge” (November 26) and a “blight” (November 28). You never used such words for Israeli shelling, bombing, and gunfire, which regularly kill dozens of people. These you usually describe as “errant” (November 10 and November 23), although once, and only once, you used the world “horrific” (November 13) to describe the massacre of 19 people by shellfire you elsewhere called “errant”.
By far your most disgraceful use of language comes from the story (July 1) in which you make light of Israeli sonic booms to terrorize Gaza’s population, already starving in the dark. This is so repugnant that readers might not believe it unless quoted at length:
“Then, two teeth-rattling whumps course through your body at thousandth-of-a-second intervals, packing so colossal a wallop they simply defy description. Whump-whump. You, my friend, have just been carpet-boomed. Something in the neighbourhood of 139 decibels of wakey-wakey courtesy of your friendly, neighbourhood Israeli F-16 warplane… How to explain the oomph of a sonic boom in Toronto terms? Say that someone chops down the CN Tower and it lands beside your head. Say they chop down a second CN Tower and it lands on the other side a nanosecond later. And say that, at the very moment of impact, a cardiac surgical team shouts, “Charging to 120 – Clear!” and proceeds to defibrillate your torso…You laugh at the alarm clock on the bedside table, and your earlier worries you might sleep through its ring. Not to worry. Another F-16 should be by in an hour or so. And another after that.”
“Wakey-wakey”, “Oomph”, “Whump-whump”, “boom-boom”, and “carpet-boomed”, are how you write about the threatening actions of an air force that destroyed Gaza’s infrastructure, dropped 500-pound bombs into crowded apartment complexes, and has killed hundreds of people in the very zone from where you wrote your clever quips.
Compare this story to your piece on people in Haifa on July 15, who were going through “fretful days” because Hizbollah’s rockets, which you had described as “terrifying” (July 14) had fallen on them. You celebrated the “resilience of the thriving port city” and the “resilience” of its mayor. I saw no references to Palestinian “resilience” in the 44 stories of yours that I read. Nor did I see any reference to Israel’s sonic booms, to say nothing of its artillery and bombing attacks, being “terrifying”.
As for the mayor of Haifa, who in your eyes exemplifies Haifa’s resilience, you quote him saying about the Palestinians and Lebanese that “now we have the right to take them hostage. We have the right to destroy them.” You let this pass without comment, but you referred to Nasrallah’s speeches (July 16) as “invective rich” and “counterfactual bluster”.
On July 22, you explained an alliance between Hamas and Hizbollah by using a “timeworn Arabic adage, ‘Me and my brother against my cousin.’ What the Hamas-Hezbollah dynamic augurs now is the possibility of a religious realignment that could introduce the other half of that parable: ‘Me and my cousin against the world.’ Or, if not the world, Israel.“ Would it ever occur to you to explain Israeli politics or alliances by reference to timeworn Hebrew adages, or would that seem to you to be anti-semitic? It would, to me.
In the same story of July 22 you demonstrated your mind-reading capacities: “Hezbollah, with its daily shower of random rocket fire into northern Israeli towns and cities, is clearly intent upon killing civilians.” I saw no statement from you about what Israel’s intent was in all the massacres of civilians that have occurred while you have written about the conflict. As you may know (but haven’t yet reported that I saw), estimates of deaths in the Israel-Lebanon war of 2006 are that Israel killed over 1100 Lebanese, most of whom were civilians, and that Hizbollah killed 119 Israeli soldiers and 43 Israeli civilians. And yet, even now, I bet you are willing to stand behind your statement that Hizbollah was “intent on killing civilians” but that Israel was not. You are willing to impute motives and intent to some, but not others.
These are all signs of racism, and they are disgusting.
Laziness, lies, and clichés
It would be too much to expect you to cover the carnage proportionately by reporting on Palestinian suffering 80 times as much as Israeli suffering (of course 80 times underestimates the disparity, since Israelis control every detail of Palestinian life and use that control to abuse, humiliate, and degrade at whim). But rather than fail to capture this incredible disparity, you inverted the relationship and gave a disproportionate voice to the victimizers. In your 44 stories, you used about 170 sources. 100 of these were Israeli, 39 were Palestinian, and 31 were other (Lebanese, US, or European). To say you used 39 Palestinian sources overstates the case: You used two sources (Diana Buttu and Saeb Erekat) 3 times each, and another (Ghassan Khatib) twice: all three of these are on the same negotiating team and members of the same political faction. You have about a half-dozen other sources (businessmen Sam Bahour and Ali Abu Shahla, academics Naji Shurab and Nader Izzat Said, mental health spokesman Marwan Diab), and another half-dozen “man-on-the-street” interviews. The rest of the Palestinian voices in your articles come second-hand, from television or other media.
Your list of Israeli contacts seems much more impressive, by contrast, particularly in think tanks and universities. The majority of your stories, even on Palestinian questions, are anchored by analysts at Israeli think tanks (Shalem Center, Jaffee Center, Reut Center), by Israeli analysts writing in newspapers (Alex Fishman in Yediot Aharonot), or Israeli academics (at Tel Aviv University or the Hebrew University in Jerusalem). Most of your stories follow a predictable pattern: Some news reported from wire services or media, followed by some analysis by an Israeli columnist in Ma’ariv or Yediot Aharonot, concluding with some analysis by an Israeli expert at a think-tank or university. Recent stories following this pattern are December 18, December 15, December 1, and November 28. Your recourse to Israeli experts and Palestinians close to President Abbas, and the absence of government officials from Hamas, leads to an especially unbalanced view of the fighting in Gaza between Hamas and Fatah. Do you consider yourself to be part of the boycott against the government the Palestinians elected? You frequently mention how Hamas is supported by various Muslim countries, but I didn’t see (I may have missed) references to the supply of cash and weapons to Fatah in Gaza by the US. In the context of starvation, that supply and support makes the conflict in Gaza more of a proxy war than a civil war. But that perspective, widely understood by many Palestinians and Israelis, people both inside and outside the region, is unavailable to your readers. Because of you. At best, this is laziness. Regardless of cause, it has serious consequences.
Though most of your lies are by omission and were discussed above, the article by Daniel Freeman-Maloy, which I referred to in my original blog post shows one direct lie:
“On June 30… Potter made the following assertion: ‘Despite five days of international headlines there has been but a single death – that of kidnapped 18-year-old Israeli hitchhiker Eliyahu Asheri.’”
Freeman-Maloy pointed out that two children aged 2 and 17 had been killed on June 28 at Khan Yunis by unexploded shells. The New York Times caught these deaths, though you didn’t. On June 22, Israeli special forces assassinated a member of the al-Aqsa Martys Brigades in Ramallah. In the week June 22-28, Israeli forces wounded 6 Palestinians, including 3 children, according to PCHR. Asserting a single death was dishonest, given how much violence had been meted out to Palestinians over the summer. Not correcting it in light of information makes it a lie, the worse because several Palestinians were killed even as Canadians were reading your story of a single death.
As for your use of clichés, I have already pointed out how your story of July 1 made light of the terror of Israel’s sonic booms. But your writing is replete with clichés, of Palestinians “enflamed” with “militant rhetoric”, of Hizbollah “well-armed, well-trained and well-acquainted with the promise of martyrdom” conducting an “unprovoked kidnap raid”, of Hamas “sworn to Israel’s destruction”, of Israeli soldiers “getting their boots dirty”, Israelis worrying about “a thousand pound gorilla of a question”. All these clichés, and this is but a small sample, have the same effect: debasing the gravity of the situation, defiling and dehumanizing the victims, and confusing readers as to causes and possible solutions.
Why bother?
My original intention was to look at all of your work since the second intifada began. But I had neither the time nor the stomach for such an exercise, so instead I confined myself to the 44 stories you filed on Israel/Palestine over the past 6 months. I think we both know this was a fruitless exercise on my part in any case. Each of the things I pointed out, you will minimize, rationalize, or find some excuse for. I could tell you how to do your job better. I could give you lists of people, Palestinians and Israelis, you could interview to diversify your sources considerably, facts and arguments you could read, ideas you could expose yourself to so that you could decide where you stood and report both the range of views and justify honestly why you hold yours.
But we both know what would happen if you were fair: if you interviewed a more diverse set of sources, conveyed the massive disparities and the power interests at work, and showed something other than contempt for the lives and thoughts of Palestinians. We know that a person who was fair would not sit long as Middle East Bureau Chief for the Toronto Star, but would face pressure for being, in your words, “overempathetic to the plight of Palestinians” (Interesting that you used “plight” in your email to me. In the past six months you used the word “plight” three times, always to describe Israelis – air force commander Halutz, Israel in general, and tank gunner Shalit, never to describe Palestinians). That pressure would eventually cost such a person his or her job. And whatever you have done with it, no doubt it is a comfortable and interesting job. In the society we’re in, to get and keep such a job requires either overt or covert partisanship for the powerful. Your reporting is a mix of both, and neither you nor our society are going to change any time soon. My hope is not for you, then, but for your readers. I hope that some of them realize that going to you for information on the Israel/Palestine conflict is a good way to be deceived and confused, and that there are far better sources.
Sincerely,
Justin Podur
Amu the Film
Last night I went to the preview screening of the Toronto opening of Amu the Film. It was a treat because the director, Shonali Bose, and the producer were there for Q & A afterwards. It is actually a very clever political film because it is very strong and honest as a film and the politics are not at all contrived. The opposite is true, in fact: the politics are conveyed through a very human story that is also a very political story.
I won’t get into the plot or spoil it, since it is a suspense film and a detective story. But this is a good place to talk about the politics of this political film.
This is a detective story in which the detectives are a couple of youths. No state-sponsored police piecing together the story here, and that stands to reason, because it is the state that is the criminal. The political events the characters deal with, decades later, are the pogroms against Sikhs that took place in New Delhi in 1984 after the assassination of Indira Gandhi. The film is an indictment of the state, because the pogroms that occurred could not have occurred without the active organization of the state. Politicians provided electoral lists and organized mobs to pull Sikhs out of their homes and kill them. Police stood by or participated in the killing. And decades later there has been no justice. Instead, the killers and organizers walk in impunity, after thousands of people were killed.
Impunity, Bose understands, is a recipe for the repetition of atrocities. And a very similar pattern of state-organized terror and massacre occurred in Mumbai in 1992-1993 after activists from the Hindu right party destroyed the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya. The Mumbai riots altered the demography of the city and set the stage for bombings and brutal gang violence that continues today, and is documented remarkably in Suketu Mehta’s book on Mumbai, ‘Maximum City’.
It happened again in Gujarat in February 2002, just about five years ago now, starting with the burning of a train and culminating in a series of massacres of several thousand. One of the most searing political essays ever written is Arundhati Roy’s article on this Gujarat pogrom. Bose refers to this, again cleverly and subtly, in Amu.
Bose leaves no doubt that these events were not ‘communal riots’ between religious communities, but state-orchestrated terrorism serving very specific political agendas. She has another message as well, and that is a celebration of the courage of the people who resisted, who hid people from the killers, who risked their own lives to save others. This kind of courage was rampant in India in these moments, and Bose’s film celebrates some of those who showed it. Finally, by putting the film out there, Bose is making her own attempt to fight impunity, to prevent us from forgetting who committed these atrocities and who they served. India will continue to be distorted by this kind of violence until the truth, and justice, are served. Bose’s film is a step in that direction, and she has had no favours from the Indian authorities in taking that step. The censors cut parts of her film, and whether people see the film or not will depend on grassroots efforts. Watch it, get others to watch it, discuss it.