What Journalists Get Wrong About Gaza

By Katia Bachko, Columbia Journalism Review. Posted February 21, 2009.

These are people, and I’m giving you names from all sides there, who have weight and reputation and savvy in their sense of what’s happening on the ground or what needs to happen. But one of the things that has happened in the Middle East for the last sixty years is that people have been talking about what has to happen, and nobody has ever made it happen.

KB: What is the conversation like in Australia?

PM: It varies. There is a range of opinion and levels of sympathy for Hamas or for Israel. There’s an attempt to tell both sides of the story. I’ve had the luxury of writing a book and immersing myself in the twenty years of Hamas’s existence. So for me, I’ve been able to come to it with this broad sense of the history as opposed to the daily cut and thrust. And reporters and commentators, a lot of them writing about it these days get locked into that bigger narrative that is being crafted around them and, in quite in a deliberate way, for them.

KB: Talk about what it’s like to report in Gaza. What are the challenges for a reporter working there?

PM: I work with an interpreter, as do most of my colleagues. Gaza is, as a journalist, a rare place. Just because, because it’s so small, it’s very difficult for you not to find the people you want. It’s an easy patch to work for the journalists. People can’t leave. If you go to their office or you go to their home, chances are you’re going to find them. Because they’re all locked in, they’re happy to talk at length about their circumstances and the circumstances of the Palestinian people and what it means. There’s an incredible resilience of the people, and you would have to say that’s one of the traits of the Palestinian people that we have seen over and over. I mean, look at what they have been through in sixty years and they’re still refusing to fall over.

There’s a quote in the book from Yasser Arafat before he died, a hundred years after the Balfour conference. It was a few weeks before he died, Arafat told a reporter, “One-hundred-seven years after the founding of the global Zionist movement at the Balfour conference, Israel has failed to wipe us out. We are here, in Palestine, facing them.” And then he added, and this is the line that would have had great resonance in the U.S., he said, “We are not red Indians.” And that’s what you see in Gaza, you see it in the daily lives, the daily existence of the people. They are still there, despite decades of privation. And they’re not going anywhere. Someday, they’re going to have to be reckoned with. That’s what their history says. One of the lines that many Israeli commentators use is that Israel is still fighting the seventh day of the Six-Day War, with good reason.

KB: I wanted to talk a little bit about the challenge journalists face when reporting on conditions in international affairs that are outside the definitions that are set forward by the governments where their newspapers are located. For example, the American government labels Hamas as a terrorist organization. Do you think it’s a challenge for journalists to throw off those labels that governments put on things and re-examine them, or do you think that it’s something they can’t overcome?

PM: Oh, they can, and they have to. Most journalists would tell you that it’s one of their objectives on a daily basis, to attempt to explain the story behind, the story that illuminates the policy position by various governments. Recently it has been very hard in some ways to do that, because you couldn’t get into Gaza. There was a deliberate decision to prevent the media from going into Gaza during the war. Reporters always need to be looking at the labels that politicians and policymakers use, and to be assessing them to see whether they are the only labels. Invariably, you hear of Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority, the Fatah leader, being described as a moderate. But he is a moderate in terms of what? He is a moderate in terms of the militants in Hamas, but in the eyes of the Palestinian people?

You have to come back to how Palestinians perceive his moderation, and how Palestinians perceive the militancy of Hamas. If you inject some of that into a commentary or an analysis piece, you leave your readers with a different sense. To simply state that somebody is a moderate or somebody is a militant, and expect the reader to use that as the sole description or descriptor of an individual or an organization, doesn’t deliver all that could be delivered. You’re talking about Hamas? Hamas are militants, yes, they are militants who appealed to Palestinians at an election that was supervised by Western observers and deemed to be fair, and Palestinians chose the militants not necessarily because of their militancy, but because of their belief in them on a whole range of issues. And then you have to ask, “if they’re militants, if they are terrorists, how did they get to be allowed to contest an election? Who let them contest an election?” Israelis allowed them to contest the election, Americans allowed them to contest the election, Fatah allowed them to contest the election.

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