May 18, 2003

Suzanne Goldenberg writes of her experience of reporting from Israel and how the censors operate in that country

I THINK for a reporter, it’s all in the variety. When I came to Israel, I loved the fact that I was writing daily news stories because I had done mainly features in India. I like writing both. For a time in India every story I wrote was either 800 words or 1,500 words. It was fine at first but then I wanted some change. You don’t want to do the same thing the same way everyday.

Some of my best stories are because of the tremendous advantage of having a huge network of friends who are academics, or work in NGOs, or as social activists and tell me what they are doing, which is often very interesting. These are people who are close to the ground and know what is going on in a specialized area.

I also read a lot. A lot of times I get story ideas from a paragraph buried deep in a story.

If you read it very quickly, it doesn’t seem like anything. If you pause for a few minutes it will seem like an extraordinary story.

I also think one must not just stay in the capital of any country. Even if you are doing reporting on the phone, talk to the people who are closest to the scene and don’t be swayed by fancy titles. Do you want the head of the organization in the capital? No, you actually want a person with a rather lowly job designation who is in contact with the story on an everyday basis and knows it intimately.

If you want to do rare stories, broaden your contacts out. Don’t just go to diplomats. Don’t just spend your time at press conferences. You need to branch out and look further. I’ve never regretted going off somewhere to get a story even when it didn’t turn out the way I expected.

From India to Israel. This is a much more highly pressurized job for a number of reasons. Everything you write is carefully scrutinized by the public as well as editors, and you hear what people think very regularly through mail, email and otherwise.

In India I was totally left on my own device to come up with my stories. Had I disappeared for 10 days nobody would have noticed. Here I am expected to be in the paper everyday, or almost everyday, and there is no way I can go away for more than a few hours without it being noticed. The second, is that this is a place where news is always breaking so you have to be on alert all the time to see if there is a bombing, a missile attack or something. Events happen around the clock, from early morning to the middle of the night. Suicide bombings tend to happen during morning rush hour.

Political developments tend to break at 9.00 pm. Israeli military retaliation tends to take place between 1.00 am and 5.00 am local time. So I am often working very late into the night. Then I am up by 7.00 am to listen to the radio to find out what has taken place after my deadline, so I can drive to that place that day and get the story, and then come back in time to file.

The other difference is the travel. In India or in Pakistan I would be away a week or 10 days and I would try and do three or four news features together.

Here it is quite rare that I don’t return the same evening except in April 2002 when Israel reoccupied the entire West Bank and Gaza, and I was stuck in various places in the West Bank. I almost always come home and sleep in my bed at night — although it can be pretty late.

It’s so small here. For example, yesterday I had some business in Tel Aviv so I set off in the morning, conducted the business and then managed to be in Gaza city by 11.30 to cover the funeral of 15 people killed in an Israeli missile attack the night before. After I covered the story I went to a friend’s apartment in Gaza and wrote my story and crossed backed from Gaza at 9.30 or 10 o’clock at night.

Everything is so close. The distance from Jerusalem to Nablus is maybe an hour driving time.

You can be in Hebron in an hour and a bit. Jenin takes two hours. That is the farthest point. So it is possible to go from Jerusalem to Jenin and back again through Israel. The safety issue comes in after dark. I don’t feel it is safe to drive in the West Bank at night.

I fear for my personal safety. There have been a number of journalists shot dead by the Israeli army and many more wounded. I never had any safety fear in Pakistan or Afghanistan. I really didn’t feel insecure. Here I have body armour, a helmet. The Guardian is considering buying a bulletproof car, and I have rented an armoured car. Yes, I think about safety a lot.

Almost all reporters based in Jerusalem now know that there is an incredibly well organized propaganda machine maintained by people who I support the actions of the Israeli government no matter what they are. Honest reporting come is a British offshoot of Camera, which is a right wing organization in the US that has been very strident in attacking American newspapers which it sees as critical of Israel. These lobby groups often portray their efforts as an attempt to ensure fair reporting, but I think their real intention is to intimidate news organizations to the extent that they only report the news from a certain point of view. And they have had some success.

CNN had changed its coverage because of criticism as have other news organizations. These lobby groups have managed to change the vocabulary used to describe the conflict for example the word ‘settlement’ which describes a Jewish outpost built on land occupied by Israel since the 1967 war.

Most countries think that they are illegal and yet under pressure from these lobby groups some organizations like CNN have taken to referring to these places not as settlements but as communities, or neighbourhoods, adopting the terminology of the Israeli government.

The media campaign has stepped up and there is an increasing intolerance inside and outside Israel of criticism of the Israeli government.

I don’t think my credibility is hurt by attacks from these organizations because it is so obvious they are pursuing a specific political agenda. In fact I think they have damaged their own agenda by being so aggressive. They over stepped their mark and have ceased to be seen as critics who must be paid attention to but really as people attempting to censor.

Certainly it forces you to develop a rather thick skin. I have been really lucky The Guardian has supported me and stood by me. That cannot be underestimated. They could have caved in to these groups and organizations and said “Well, we don’t really agree with them but they are going to pull advertising or we don’t really agree with them but they are making a lot of noise”. But The Guardian didn’t do that.

At the same time, while right wing Israelis once would single out The Guardian for being anti-Israel, now the situation is such that CNN and New York Times are seen as being anti-Israel. All the journalists are under the same pressure now.

Every journalist who comes to Israel has to sign a form saying he will submit his material to the Israel government censor. This is the form you sign when you apply for your press card.

By law you have to submit all articles which touch on the military to the army censor, but in practice I have never submitted anything.

On another level, the Israeli army will not grant requests for interviews with high ranking people if they think you are not going to tow the line, and they are not going to invite you to press trips. The same thing is certainly true for the foreign ministry.

But on the whole, the efforts to control what you write are far more physical than legalistic. On the ground Israeli military will declare certain areas in the West Bank “closed military zones” for the specific purpose of keeping journalists out. Even when you are officially permitted to visit an area, a soldier at a roadblock might turn you back on a whim, forcing you to take the back roads or a dirt road to get to the story.

The risk of being shot also serves as a form of censorship. The Israeli army has often not differentiated between combatants or civilians and journalists. There are reports of soldiers opening fire on journalists wearing flak jackets with PRESS emblazoned across their chests just to see whether the vest really was bullet proof.

You can take any part of your identity and say that this is an advantage or a disadvantage. People also ask me whether it helps or is a disadvantage to be a woman. I have no idea of course as I have never gone through life as a man. I just don’t see the point in thinking along those lines. Being Jewish is probably an advantage in some ways, and it may be a disadvantage in others.

Palestinians, although they live quite near Israelis and Jews and they know Israel much better than the Israelis know Palestinians, don’t really react when they hear my Jewish surname. I ring up leaders from Hamas and Islamic groups quite often.

I go to see them, they know my last name and I have never been denied access to things. I have overheard anti-Semitic remarks from Hamas people and others. So they don’t bend over backwards to spare my feelings either.

Maybe people don’t monitor names so much and don’t identify it’s a Jewish name. A foreigner is a foreigner. I’m not an Israeli so that’s all that matters. I don’t feel like I am treated with undue suspicion. Palestinians are generally quite welcoming to the press. They seek international media attention as crucial to letting the world know about their fight to get an independent country.

I don’t think Israelis cloak the fact that I have got a Jewish name all that often either. When you are interviewing people, they tend to focus on the name of the publication not the name of the reporter. If I’m conducting the interview in Hebrew, they probably assume I am Jewish but nobody has really commented on the fact. I think the piece of journalism which I am most proud of is a two part series that ran in the paper in June 2002 on suicide bombers. I talked to the families of 20 or so suicide bombers, to Palestinian militant commanders and Israeli intelligence officials and pieced together a portrait of the forces motivating suicide bombers, looked at the organizations sending them and how they are recruited. For me that was satisfying. To see in print a project I had started months ago and worked at in between covering the daily news. That is the best thing I have done here.

 

Excerpted with permission from

Journos on Journalism

Edited by Kamal Siddiqi

CeLTS, Monash University, Churchill, Victoria, Australia.

Email: kamal.siddiqi@arts.monash.edu.au

ISBN 0-7326-2222-0

154pp. Price not listed

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