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Israel Resource Review |
23rd January, 2001 |
Contents:
Official PA radio news - the P.B.C. VOP (Voice of Palestine) Radio: January 23rd, 2001
Summary and Analysis
Minister of Information Yasser Abd-Rabbo led off the morning new show as
the featured morning interviewee on VOP, underscoring a very pessimistic
view of the state of the talks with Israel. Abd-Rabbo said Israel was
"clinging" to the American formula laid out by Bill Clinton while the
Palestinian Authority was sticking to "international legitimacy"-particularly on two questions: land and refugees.
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Abd-Rabbo made it clear that the PA would not accept large territorial
changes, and he stressed that even minor modifications would have to be
compensated by a trade-off in Israeli territory.
"The Israeli side is clinging to the American ideas as a source
authority, and we say we have stipulations and reservations on these ideas,
and it is impossible to use them as a source authority," declared Abd-Rabbo
at the end of his interview
From VOP's coverage of PA diplomatic undertakings over the last two
weeks, the PA's overarching strategy emerges:
- Arafat himself pursues a deepening European and UN involvement in the
"peace process," while using Saudi influence to get Bush Administration
pressure on Israel;
- The PA's top negotiators-Qreia, Abd-Rabbo, Erikat-try to form a
"paper trail" in Taba that will serve as the basis for talks with the next
Israeli government;
- The Palestinian Authority supports efforts to end the isolation
of Iraq and for increased Arab and Islamic unity (Egypt-Iraq, Syria-Iran,
Syria-Iraq, PA-Iraq, Iraq-Kuwait-Saudi, PA-Saudi, Morocco-Libya) that can be
useful in pressuring Israel.
Quote of the Day
"We asserted what we said in Camp David-that there was no escaping a
withdrawal to the June 4 1967 borders, and any changes or
modifications-light or small-have to be mutual and have to be based on the
exchange of land of equal value and kind."
(Yasser Abd-Rabbo, describing PA negotiating stance during interview January
23, 7:15 a.m., VOP)
Quotes from interview with Yasser Abd-Rabbo (7:10-7:20 a.m.)
Question: "What has so far been accomplished in these talks?"
Answer: "It is difficult to speak about 'accomplishments.' We have started
and continued talks, but the concentration of the talks is in their complete
details. I couldn't speak of incidents of progress up to this moment, but
the atmosphere is really serious. The working committees have been formed,
and the committees set up yesterday are: land, refugees, the Jerusalem
committee and the security committee. We will probably set up additional
committees-the water committee because the subject of water is important
for life. But it all depends on the most important committee, and that's the
first committee, the committee for land, for Jerusalem, for refugees.
(Note: he spoke of one committee and then named three)
Question: "In what you saw in the maps, in the land committee, did you notice
anything new?"
Answer: "There are some light, new things, but not fundamental or substantive.
Therefore we will not accept what has been offered us, and we don't consider
it to be a positive transformation or a substantive change in the Israeli
position. We will continue the discussion on these subjects today."
Question: "There is talk of an Israeli desire to hold on to six percent of the
(West) Bank and some movement on the refugees. Could you clarify these
matters?"
Answer: "We will NOT accept the
idea (unclear word), and we did NOT
accept six
percent or the like. We asserted what we said in Camp David-that there was
no escaping a withdrawal to the June 4 1967 borders, and any changes or
modifications-light or small-have to be mutual and have to be based on the
exchange of land of equal value and kind. That is our stance, and we cling
to our stance. And , naturally, in this, we refer to (Israeli)
colonialization (also Arabic: settlement) and to the settlements. And we
will not accept the settlements being included in regional belts taken from
Palestinian land or being used at the expense of Palestinian land to
partition or to section off that land..These are things we will NOT accept,
and we also will NOT accept Palestinian land being included in what are
called settlement belts. I do NOT wish to go into details in these subjects
(in this interview).but we will have to get into the details of these
subjects (in the talks) because these are the main subjects-a withdrawal to
the June 4 borders and we did NOT get into the details of every individual
settlement in every individual region.
Question: "We have heard all kinds of things on the question of Jerusalem. Are
there any new initiatives?"
Answer: "We have NOT heard any of these proposals, absolutely. NOTHING has
been presented to us. And it is possible that it is being floated in the
media .for the sake of Israeli public opinion. But we have absolutely not
heard proposals from this direction. And we consider Jerusalem to be a part
of the question of land, and what applies to the whole (West) Bank applies
as such to Jerusalem, that is, the borders of June 4."
Question: "Could there be a sketching out of what is agreed? Are you working on
that now?"
Answer: "No sir. I do NOT want to get into sketching out things
until we agree on all matters.
And we have to agree on all matters, because I we do not, then
we have not agreed on anything"
Tuesday Morning Round-up Headlines
- Israeli girl accuses the extremist leader of the Israeli Right, Ariel
Sharon, of hurting her father and other fathers in the Lebanon war;
- Israeli war crimes continue;
- His Excellency President Arafat heads to Saudi Arabia today."
Tuesday Morning Headlines, 7 a.m. / 8 a.m. / 9 a.m.
- "His Excellency President Yasser Arafat is heading toward the Kingdom
of Saudi Arabia today for discussions with the Saudi monarch King
Fahd ibn-Abd-al-'Aziz and other senior Saudi officials;
- Mr. Nabil Abu-Irdeineh, President Arafat's advisor, announced that
his excellency (Arafat) would be discussing the most prominent recent
developments overtaking our people in relation to the continuation of
Israeli aggression and siege;
- Mr. Yasser Abd-Rabbo, a member of our delegation to the talks in
Taba said it would NOT be possible to speak of progress in the negotiations
up to this instant, noting that the talks would resume today in four
sub-committees: land, refugees, Jerusalem and security;
- And Abd-Rabbo asserted that our delegation affirmed during the
session yesterday that-as in Camp David-there is NO escaping an Israeli
withdrawal to the June 4, 1967 lines, and stressing that any change or
modification-light or partial-- in those borders would require an exchange
of territory.;
- The Foreign Minister of Sweden Anna Lind announced that the European
Union supports the talks proceeding in Taba between the Palestinian and
Israeli sides;
- Israeli occupation forces open tank fire as well as heavy artillery
and light arms in the Mughraqa area in southwest Gaza;
- And in Salfit last night there were violent confrontations between
citizens on one side and the occupation forces and settlers on the other;
- Minister for Prisoners' Affairs Hisham Abd-al-Razik said he expects
the families of prisoners will be allowed to visit their relatives in
occupation jails beginning next week;
- Saudi officials call on the new Bush Administration to put pressure on
Israel to reach a solution that protects the rights of the Palestinian
people;
- Norway announces its readiness to help in solving the problem of the
Palestinian refugees;
- Tunisia and Syria call for the realization of the rights of
Palestinian refugees to return to their homes as well as the complete
Israeli withdrawal from all occupied Arab lands;
- Syrian President Bashar Assad will head to Teheran today in the first
visit of President Assad to Iran since ascending to power.and he will meet
with Supreme Guide to the Republic Ayatullah Ali Khamenei
and President Muhammad Khatami;
- The Arab League announces its support for any Arab effort to clear the
air between Iraq and Kuwait and Riyadh;
- And UN spokesman Fred Ekhardt predicts a visit by an Iraqi delegation
to New York at the end of next month."
- Bulletin also included final two items on El Salvador death toll and
Lebanese in the Congo
Return to Contents
Lights, Camera, Intifada
The violence in the Mideast has become a war of images,
in which the press is the key to victory
Byline:
Stephanie Gutmann is the author of The Kinder, Gentler Military (Scribner).
Body
Day after day the seemingly incontrovertible
evidence of Israel's brutality rolls in. The snippets
of videotape bounced around the world by CNN, BBC World
News, and Sky TV are nearly always the same: A mob of
dark-skinned teenagers armed with rocks pit themselves
against phalanxes of faceless soldiers who respond by
aiming rifles. Often, newscasts then cut from the
videotape (as Ted Koppel's Nightline did recently) to
Palestinian spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi thundering, "You
cannot shoot our children and get away with it," or
Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat decrying the "daily
massacre of Palestinians by Israel," and TV delivers a
message that hits adrenal systems around the world like
a dose of amyl nitrate. As a foreign news-following
acquaintance puts it, in a typical reaction: How can
Israel want peace, when "all I see is the IDF shooting
children?"
Spokesmen for Israel's foreign ministry, its police,
and its military (the Israeli Defense Force, or IDF)
who set up a 24/7 press center in early October to cope
with the flood of journalists there to cover Intifada
II say they're "fighting a war on two fronts." There is
the actual shooting war, where aggression is direct,
weapons conventional, and damage visible and
measurable. The other front is in the ethersphere, the
digital bazaar where freelance photographers offer
their most dramatic images and footage to the
publication or agency that bids highest. More than
almost any other commodity, the trade in images is
truly global. Photos are ready for sale faster than
news copy, and they need no translation and fewer
intermediaries.
The Al Aksa Intifada as it is called (because it
started when Ariel Sharon marched at a religious site
known as Al Aksa) has been fought with images -- the
picture of the father and his dying son plastered
against a wall to escape cross-fire, the Palestinian
man proudly displaying his hands covered with the blood
of the Israeli soldier -- and on this front, Israelis
admit they are getting clobbered.
But there are many reasons why the ubiquitous
boys-throwing-stones-at-faceless-rifle-toting-soldiers
photo does not tell the whole story. If we had a John
Madden of the Intifada, with a grease pencil and a
transparent overlay, he could freeze the frame and
annotate the pictures. He could draw an arrow to the
upper right-hand corner of the frame, for instance, and
point out a smudge of black -- an inch of rifle barrel
protruding from a nearby minaret, a sign that a sniper
is perched there. He might draw a circle around a man
in the dense center of a crowd, a man who (one can see
on closer inspection) is older and armed with something
more than a slingshot. (Terrorist groups and ragtag
rebel armies from Somalia to Iraq have learned to
surround themselves with civilians, both for cover and
to discourage the other side from shooting.) He might
analyze minute differences in clothing and bearing and
show us that some of these young boys are not just
"children" drawn by what looks like a game, but militia
who have been groomed Hitler Youth-style to kill Jews
or die trying. He might point out that the Palestinian
Authority ambulance parked on the side of the
rock-throwing action is here not just to ferry the
wounded; PA ambulances have been used as command and
control vehicles, actually delivering "troops" and
carrying the makings of Molotov cocktails.
There's another element one has to understand to
make sense of the kids-versus-soldiers tableau. "It is
a subject that no reporters want to talk about," says
Noam Katz, a spokesman for Israel's foreign ministry
press center and a man who has known most of the
region's bureau chiefs for years. One has to
understand that photographers and to a much smaller
extent print reporters (everyone recognizes that
pictures are more important) operate under unwritten
rules of engagement when they work in troubled areas
like the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Reporting in a
combat zone is dangerous to begin with, of course.
Camera crews often go out wearing crash helmets and
body armor (during the first two months of Intifada II,
two newspeople were shot and seriously wounded). But
fear is amplified (and the investigative spirit
curdled) by a pattern of intimidation of journalists
who get connected -- sometimes very loosely -- with
stories the terrorist groups who control these areas
don't like. Take the photos the militiamen want and
you are generally fine, even helpfully ushered around;
take pictures that show Palestinians in roles other
than victim, and things can get nasty quite fast.
News photographers have been harassed by Israelis as
well. The Committee to Protect Journalists reports
that Israeli settlers threw stones at a car driven by
two Arab photographers, breaking a window and hitting
one of the men in the shoulder. The photographers said
IDF soldiers stood nearby and did nothing. Palestinian
and Arab journalists are reportedly challenged and
detained rather often, although it should be kept in
mind that Palestinians as a group are subject to
restrictions instituted by Israel to combat terrorism.
Western photographers have complained of being kept
out of certain areas by IDF soldiers. The Committee to
Protect Journalists reports also that a number of
reporters and cameramen who have been grazed or hit by
bullets claim IDF soldiers intentionally aimed at them.
But there is still a clear difference between working
in Israel-controlled areas and Palestinian ones.
Israel, though of course not perfect, is still a
modern, Western-style democracy, and there are channels
of accountability.
In mid-November, an American photographer was
seriously wounded by an IDF bullet aimed directly at
her. Yola Monakhov was looking for pictures in
Bethlehem. A squad of IDF soldiers were also there,
because of a riot that had taken place earlier in the
day. Monakhov was with a small group of Palestinian
boys who were breaking pieces of concrete into
throwable chunks when the IDF squad appeared from
around a corner. A boy yelled "run" and Monakhov
instinctively bolted in the direction everyone else was
running. One of the soldiers fired a shot and hit
Monakhov in the back. But IDF soldiers are not allowed
to shoot live rounds (as opposed to rubber bullets)
unless they are in mortal danger. As a result, the
soldier and his commanding officer are being
court-martialed, and the Israelis are paying Monakhov's
hospital bills.
The territories, on the other hand, are like the
Wild West. Police protection is at best unreliable.
Self-interest and brute force rule -- as Jean Pierre
Martin, a Belgian producer, found out one day in early
October. Martin, who works for RTL TV1 (Radio TV
Luxembourg), and his crew were on their way to
Ramallah. They were at a Palestinian-Israeli clash
site when four young men pulled up in "a blue Chrysler
van" and began to give orders to stone-throwing
children. Then the men produced Molotov cocktails from
their car and began handing them out. (Kids on the
scene later told Martin that the men were from Al
Fatah, Yasser Arafat's faction of the Palestine
Liberation Organization.) Other crews on hand
apparently didn't see this development or didn't
consider it newsworthy, because Martin was the only
producer who told his crew to begin filming.
After a few seconds, one of the young men saw the
filming and strode over; several seconds after that,
all the people on the scene, including the
stone-throwing children, surrounded the crew. The men
took the camera from the hands of the cameraman and
disappeared with it. Meanwhile the crowd began to
surge around them, trying to hit them. One youth got
his hands around Martin's neck and started choking him.
A Palestinian cameraman who had been on the scene
working for an American company came "to rescue us,"
Martin says. Finally the Palestinian cameraman was
able to calm "this very nervous situation." Martin and
his crew were taken to see the PA chief of police.
Their camera was already there. Once again, the
Palestinian cameraman began to argue on their behalf --
eventually, after they assured everyone that the tape
of the "cocktail incident" had been erased, the
policeman agreed to return the camera. That night,
Martin opened his segment by saying, "This is what you
would have seen if we still had the tape . . ."
Martin continued to return to the area, but about
two weeks later, just after he and his crew passed the
Israeli guard shack at the border checkpoint on the way
to Ramallah, they noticed that a white jeep without
markings was tailing them. The car followed them to
their filming site. There the men in the jeep parked
and gave orders to the PA police at the scene (which
led Martin to think they were from Palestinian
intelligence). This time they didn't wait for him to
begin filming; they began to search his vehicle; again
they erased his film, and they smashed one of the still
cameras belonging to the crew. The men then told
Martin to leave and tailed him back to the border. Just
as Martin and crew pulled up to the Israeli checkpoint,
a bullet fired from the Palestinian side whizzed by.
Somehow this story reached the Israeli government,
which described the incident at one of its daily press
briefings. Martin says he is angry that the Israeli
government "exploited" the story. And he complains
that he now appears to be allied with the Israeli
government. "They have made it very hard for me to go
back," he says.
Shifting anger from the actual perpetrators to the
Israeli government is common. News bureaus in
Jerusalem either downplay or refuse to talk about such
incidents because, as one bureau chief who wanted to
remain anonymous told me, they are afraid of becoming
tools of "Israeli propaganda." "They are trying to
make out that we're allies of the Israeli government --
thank you very much," spat a wire service editor I
observed reading an Israeli government press release.
All newspeople hate to think that they're being used as
tools -- whether to sell a movie star or to support a
government -- and the struggle to maintain balance is
endless. But the fear of being seen as "allied with
Israel" seemed near phobic among the press people I
observed on the job in Jerusalem.
My sense is that, rather than jeopardize their
already tenuous access to the Palestinian territories
or endanger their employees by appearing to collaborate
with the enemy, many of the media covering the Intifada
adjust by simply "not seeing" things or by finding
elaborate justifications for ignoring stories that
would displease their hosts in the territories. I was
in Israel for several weeks during a lull in the
violence, staying in a hotel in downtown Jerusalem full
of press attracted by a special $80 a night
"journalist's rate" and by the Israeli press center on
the ground floor, which offered free Internet
connections, juice, cake, and espresso. Filling their
plates at the sumptuous buffet breakfast (part of the
"journalist's special"), producers groused about the
lull and about the American elections, which had kicked
their beat off the front pages. But I didn't meet
anyone who was using the slowdown in daily news to
investigate, say, the crucial question of whether the
Palestinian Authority police were trying to enforce a
recently declared cease-fire -- which didn't seem to be
working very well.
Some photographers are simply so polite that they
end up inadvertently influencing news coverage: One
freelancer for "the majors" told me he'd never had a
problem working in the territories. On the contrary,
he bristled, the Palestinian people were only too happy
to have him take pictures. At funerals for instance --
which tend to be heavily attended by reporters -- "they
will ask you to take pictures. Here, 'Take a picture
of the body,' they will say; they'll actually push you
to the front." It's different at night he commented; "I
wouldn't take a picture of a guy with an automatic
weapon at night." Why not? "Because he wouldn't want me
to, and I never take pictures of people unless they
want me to." It's a policy that springs from a good
heart. Still, what may seem like decency and fellow
feeling to the photographer has the perverse effect of
punishing democracies that do not censor media
coverage, like Israel, and rewarding the authoritarian
governments that strictly control imagery.
Have many journalists in the Mideast begun to
practice this kind of quiet, even largely unconscious
self-censorship? Does the access problem and, let's
face it, the I-don't-want-to-end-up-getting-torn-to-
pieces-by-a-mob problem, encourage a kind of Stockholm
syndrome, an identification with those you are
threatened by? The ingredients are certainly there in
the petri dish.
On November 2, for instance, a letter appeared in
Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, a Palestinian daily, ostensibly
from "The Palestinian Journalists' Union." The "Union"
announced that it had informed the Associated Press
bureau in Israel that it believed AP had an intentional
policy of presenting a false picture of the "just
struggle of the Palestinians against the Israeli
Occupation and its aggressive and inhuman actions which
contradict all international human rights conventions."
The letter went on to say that if the bureau did not
change its coverage, the group would adopt "all
necessary measures against AP staffers."
The journalists' union did not return the calls
placed to verify the Israeli Press Office's translation
of the letter from Arabic, and the AP says -- via a
spokesman in New York -- that this is "not an issue
we're going to address at all." In fact most newspapers
receive a steady stream of communiques contesting their
coverage and even implying violence -- though in the
United States the threats don't often correspond with
real-life beatings and seizures of equipment.
Many camera crews, for instance, were able to record
the notorious lynching last fall of two Israeli
reservists by a Palestinian mob. Only one came back
with footage. Mark Seager, a 29-year-old photographer
from Britain, was on the scene that day:
"I was getting into a taxi on the main road to go to
Nablus, where there was a funeral that I wanted to
film, when all of a sudden there came a big crowd of
Palestinians shouting and running down the hill from
the police station. I got out of the car to see what
was happening and saw that they were dragging something
behind them. Within moments they were in front of me
and . . . I saw that it was a body, a man they were
dragging by the feet. The lower part of his body was
on fire and the upper part had been shot at and the
head beaten so badly that it was a pulp, like red
jelly. I thought he was a soldier because I could see
the remains of khaki trousers and boots . . . .
Instinctively I reached for my camera. I was composing
the picture when I was punched in the face . . . A
melee began in which one guy just pulled the camera off
me and smashed it to the floor. The worst thing was
that I realized the anger that they were directing at
me was the same as that which they'd had toward the
soldier before. Somehow I escaped and ran and ran, not
knowing where I was going."
The only crew to get out with footage -- the bodies
being tossed out a second-floor window to a mob waiting
below -- was an Italian TV crew working for a network
called Mediaset. There was also a crew on hand
representing RAI, another Italian network, led by a
producer named Riccardo Christiano. Apparently fearing
that Palestinians would think he was responsible for
the terrible images that began to saturate news
coverage, Christiano wrote a letter to the Palestinian
daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida. "Let us emphasize that it is
not the case [that we disseminated the video], as we
respect the work arrangements between journalists and
the Palestinian Authority," Christiano wrote. "Thank
you and rest assured that this is not our way and we
would never do such a thing." Acutely embarrassed for
this abject promise of favoritism, Christiano's
superiors recalled him to Italy and then recalled the
rest of their Jerusalem correspondents. Israel
suspended Christiano's official press card. A friend
of Christiano's defended him to the Jerusalem Post,
saying that the letter may have been inaccurately
translated from English ("Riccardo's third language")
to Arabic, but then offered the not terribly helpful
explanation that Christiano had been rattled by recent
trauma. Christiano had been severely beaten in the
Jaffa riots in early October, she told the Jerusalem
Post. "His ribs were broken; his cheek caved in, there
were fears that a lung might be punctured . . . . Of all
the foreign reporters, he got beaten the worst." Poor
Christiano was even vilified by his colleagues -- for
exposing the fact that they were responsible for the
videotape. Several days after RAI recalled Christiano,
Mediaset recalled Anna Mignotto, the producer who,
along with a Palestinian cameraman, had produced the
surviving lynching footage. "As of today," Mediaset
editor Enrico Mentana explained, "our correspondents
can no longer work [in Israel]. We know whom to
thank."
Most of the time, incidents like these don't get
much attention. In early November, three young
freelancers -- two from Britain, one from Singapore --
made a foray into Palestinian-controlled Bethlehem just
looking for some good shots:
"We'd met a local lad -- he takes us through the
back alley. There was a group of guys standing near a
house, kind of huddled together talking," explained
26-year-old Chris Dearden of Britain. "Without
thinking I snapped them. They all dive out, and
several of them have guns."
One of the men shoved a gun barrel into Dearden's
face. They strong-armed the three into a stairwell and
kept them penned there while they discussed what to do.
"There's a lot of shouting, they take the camera;
there was a lot of talking among themselves. The
interesting thing was, there was no unity of opinion.
There was one with a gun who had to be held back; then
they hand the camera back, to my complete surprise. I
open it up real fast; take the film out, [saying]
'There, it's yours!'"
To Dearden's relief and surprise, the men let the
photographers go. "We were just about to walk away,
when someone came up and kicked the guy who'd been
leading us around; he turned around and gets one in the
face and then there's like a complete melee."
"Hopefully our guy got away," Dearden said, but as they
hustled toward the border, he looked back and saw that
"somebody got the absolute bejesus kicked out of him."
Of the "handful of Arabic words he knows," Dearden
says the most important is now the word for picture.
"I always say, 'Sura?' If it's, 'Sura,' fine; if it's,
'No,' I drop it really fast."
A number of photographers have had problems with the
Israelis, as well -- in general their anecdotes were
about being told that they couldn't pass a checkpoint.
By law Israeli officials are supposed to give
journalists complete access, except when access -- say
to a hidden missile site -- could endanger national
security. Dearden and the other two photographers
agreed that the Israelis generally leave them alone.
"The Israelis don't really care what you do unless you
get right into their face when they're trying to shoot,
" chuckled Renga Subbiah, a 30-year-old photographer
from Singapore who spoke like an upper-class Englishman
except when he affected a working-class accent for
dramatic purposes. "I got one with a fooking IDF bloke
pointing his rifle right into the middle of the frame."
Operating under the venerable TV news slogan "If it
bleeds it leads," the brash young journalistic
mercenary had filled his film satchel with "very good
stuff." This included a "dead guy" ("right up in his
face I got"), a wounded child, and a lot of "people
shooting."
And throwing stones? In that particular week, that
was the big action in town. "Course I got kids
throwing stones," he said, bragging about one in
particular who looked about 6 years old.
With national, international, and local news
coverage having become a sort of daily grievance parade
-- the daily displaying of stumps and wounds by victims
of all kinds of real and alleged injustice as if in
front of a global godfather -- the Palestinians have
learned to excel at bleeding. Or at least, the
authoritarian leadership has found plenty of civilians
it can cajole into doing the bleeding. (In contrast,
the Israelis have made it a point of national pride to
avoid signs of weakness, and now show a kind of
distaste for displaying wounds.) A Palestinian leader
recently told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, for
instance, that the Palestinians would win this current
round of Intifada because "our ability to die is
greater than the Israeli ability to go on killing us."
"They want you to show their side," which means showing
"people dead and injured. What they have that the
Israeli side doesn't is lots of dead people," explains
Subbiah amiably.
It would have been more accurate for the Palestinian
leader to say "our ability to sacrifice civilians is
greater" -- as most Palestinian leaders keep themselves
well above the fray. In this, they are like the
leaders of lots of developing nations. With plenty of
passion and smarts but few armaments and even less high
technology, the bleeding civilian has become the most
potent weapon in the arsenal against liberal,
media-saturated Westernized countries.
To the extent that civilians prove useful for their
ability to die on camera for a world audience, we will
undoubtedly see increasing use of the civilian body as
both propaganda weapon and literal shield. In
Mogadishu, for instance, American special forces
soldiers found themselves facing a grotesque
apparition: Rebels would seize a woman from a crowd
(alive but usually very doped up), stick their arms
under her armpits, so she hung in front of them, and
then move towards the enemy line while hiding behind
her voluminously-skirted body, and firing with both
hands. We saw the civilian- as-sandbag (against
bullets and world disfavor) technique immediately after
the Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein established his base
of operations in the middle of a palace mostly
inhabited by women and children. And we see it now
abundantly in the Intifada, where Yasser Arafat (who
stays very far away from the "front-lines" himself) can
be quite confident that Palestinian parents will
proffer their children to draw Israeli fire -- mainly
for the benefit of the Western media.
In fact, the problem of the civilian pawn is
transforming Western war strategy and our image of "the
threat." The Marines now train for "urban combat" and
the "three block war," and military scientists are hard
at work developing all kinds of non-lethal weapons to
deal with the crowds of civilians who will inevitably
-- knowingly or not -- surround the armed terrorist.
Now if the strategists could only figure out what to do
about the camera.
This article ran in the Weekly Standard on January 1, 2001
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You can contact us on media@actcom.co.il.
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