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Tuesday 2 December 2008

‘You get your film and go home’

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. It is no coincidence that almost all of the anti-Israeli graffiti daubed on the buildings in Arab Hebron and Ramallah and Bethlehem, and also on the side of the crude and shocking wall the Israelis have built to divide the Arab West Bank from the Israeli West Bank, is written in English, rather than Arabic. The anti-Arab graffiti is written in Hebrew. They know, the Palestinians, that the force — the external force at least — is with them. The Orthodox Jews, the settlers, know that only a rapidly diminishing proportion of their own citizens support the cause to reclaim the proper Israel — those bits redolent of the Bible and the Torah, rather than that low strip adjoining the Mediterranean coast.

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. He was a decent, thoughtful, clever kid — a conscript from the agreeable town of Haifa —who had felt as impotent in front of the cameras as he did in front of the settlers, to whom he felt no great allegiance, defending the scarcely defensible. This, I suspected, was not his idea of Israel, any more than it had been Ben Gurion’s.

‘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.’

He wouldn’t be drawn on the politics, of course. ‘I have my political beliefs but... I put them aside when I am called up to the army. I don’t want to save the Prime Minister either, though — I just have to do my job.’

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.’

The kid was taken to a police station. We tried to find out what happened to him, but without much luck.

More articles from: Rod Liddle | this section

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