Shany Littman 'Israelis Didn't Want to See Palestinians as Human Beings': Why This Reporter Felt Rejected by Israel
MIAMI BEACH – Shlomi Eldar hasn’t visited the Gaza
Strip since the Hamas coup there in 2007, but when he arrived at the
Miami Film Festival earlier this month with his new documentary, “Foreign Land,”
a surprise awaited him. An old friend of his wife’s, who’s lived in the
city for two decades, invited the couple for dinner at the home of
relatives of hers, Jacob and Helen Shaham.
Almost 40 years ago, the
Shahams founded a chain of assisted living communities (the Palace
Group), and they became very wealthy. Like many Israelis who immigrated
to America, they recite the blessings over red wine and challah every
Friday evening, “so the children will know who they are.” A regular
Sabbath-eve guest is Mussa Salah, who is in charge of the kitchens and
almost everything relating to personnel in the Shahams’ company. Eldar
knows Salah’s brother well: He’s Ahmed Yousef, a longtime member of Hamas’ political bureau, and a former senior adviser to the organization’s ex-prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh.
The unreal
setting – the Shahams’ gilded home, all but buckling under an overload
of luxury – only heightened the symbolism of what is already a moment of
potential kitsch. When Palestinian dishes prepared by Salah himself
were served, at the hosts’ request, Eldar launched into a brief talk.
“Ahmed Yousef worked for years with another senior Hamas figure, Mousa
Abu Marzook, established Hamas’ political bureau and also raised funds
for the organization. When Ismail Haniyeh became prime minister, he
asked Ahmed Yousef to abandon his career as a researcher in the United
States and serve as his policy adviser in Gaza,” Eldar said.
“I first met him in Gaza,”
he continued. “I think Haniyeh wanted someone with broad horizons, a man
of the world. Because Haniyeh’s intention was not only to be the prime
minister of Gaza but to breach the borders. As we know, that didn’t
happen. What did happen, is that in 2007, after Hamas staged its violent
coup in Gaza and Israel closed the crossing points, Ahmed Yousef and
Razi Hamad, who was Haniyeh’s spokesman, apparently met with Israeli
representatives at the Erez crossing, and news of the meeting got out.
Hamas’ military wing demanded that Haniyeh remove Yousef and Hamad from
Hamas’ center of control in Gaza, and he did so.”
Mussa Salah confirmed the
details, adding that his brother had been very close to Sheikh Ahmed
Yassin, one of the founders of Hamas, and that Yassin had been a
frequent visitor in the family home. "Because he has been living in
America for many years, he doesn't get along with Hamas today," he
noted.
"He left me a message three
years ago, and I didn't return his call. You probably know why," Eldar
told Salah, who replied, "Yes, I know." Later, Eldar explained he didn't
call because he was afraid of wiretapping.
A different Israel
This was the second time Eldar had participated in the Miami Film Festival. His previous movie, “Precious Life”
– about the efforts of an Israeli hospital to save the life of a
Palestinian infant who was suffering from a rare genetic syndrome and
needed a bone-marrow transplant – was widely acclaimed and won the
Israel Film Academy’s prize for best documentary in 2010. The new film,
he explains, is completely different, far more personal.
“Foreign Land” was made
after Eldar emigrated to the United States with his family in 2013 and
began to observe Israel from afar. The film’s editor, Halil Efrat, used
shots of the large bay window in Eldar’s Maryland home, superimposing on
the individual window panes TV screens on which key aspects of Israeli
reality, all of them frightening and despairing, are seen. Eldar’s gaze
in the documentary is reflective, melancholy, though at times gushing
and overly poetic. What’s clear is that he “has no other country,” as
the song goes, but at the same time his fear for Israel’s future is
intensifying.
The foreign land is both
America, to which he has not fully acclimatized, and Israel, which has
morphed into something different from what it was, he says. The foreign
land is also the Israeli-Palestinian Israel of the actor Ghassan Abbas, a
star of the local television sitcom “The Big Restaurant” during the
1980s, who no longer finds his place in Jewish Tel Aviv, but also not in
his hometown of Umm al-Fahm, in Galilee, to which he returned after
encountering racism in the big city. In the movie, both of them describe
the respective processes of alienation they underwent, and then meet in
Israel and talk.
Abbas and Eldar met when the former decided to mount a one-man show based on the story of Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish,
a Palestinian physician from the Gaza Strip, three of whose daughters
were killed before his eyes when an Israeli tank shell struck their home
in Jabaliya during Operation Cast Lead in 2009. The film opens with the
moment – enshrined in the annals of Israeli television – when Abuelaish
called Eldar, then the Arab affairs correspondent for Channel 10, in
the midst of a live broadcast, and shouted that his daughters, as well
as a niece, lay dead in front of him. Another daughter and niece were
also wounded, and they were in immediate need of critical care. Eldar
put him on speaker, and viewers experienced first-hand the physician’s
tragedy as it unfolded.
Abuelaish and Eldar had
already known each other, but from that moment their fates were
inextricably entwined. Eldar admits to being a highly emotional person,
but emphasizes that during that broadcast he made a point of not
bursting into tears.
“I cry at a Van Morrison
song, and every time I talk to my father,” he says. “But at that moment I
wanted to save what remained of his family. I understood that a
broadcast like this would force the army to open the Erez checkpoint in
order to get him out of there. So maybe they [the wounded girls] are
alive thanks to the second when I answered the phone and decided to put
him on speaker.”
Many others were wounded and died in Gaza, and no one opened the checkpoint for them.
“Of course. The next day
Haaretz ran a cartoon of a family whose home was demolished, and the
wife says to the husband, ‘Call Shlomi Eldar.’ On the day that
Abuelaish’s family was killed, a mother and her five children were also
killed in Khan Yunis. No one heard about them.”
Years later, he relates,
Abuelaish told him that he felt he had destroyed Eldar’s career. “He
said, ‘I knew that from that moment Israeli viewers would always look at
you as an Arab lover.’ I told him that I was a little angry at him,
because from that instant all my journalistic work was wiped out. The
only thing people remember about me is that moment.”
(Today, Abuelaish, a
widower, lives in Canada with his five surviving children, and is a
professor at the University of Toronto’s school of public health.)
Nevertheless, Eldar’s TV
career lasted three more years, until November 2012, when he decided to
leave Channel 10. He felt that something had changed, he recalls, and
that what he wanted to convey was not what the Israeli public wanted to
hear.
“My sense was that the
Israeli public had lost the hope for peace and that the Palestinians’
plight no longer interested them. They didn’t want to see them as human
beings anymore, because they’d internalized the assertion that ‘there is
no partner.’ I felt that my reports were gradually being moved to the
fringes of the newscast – that my status on the editorial staff was
deteriorating. I arrived at the realization that I could no longer exert
influence or persuade. I was also no longer able to enter the Gaza
Strip [following the Hamas takeover], so everything was being done by
remote.”
The breaking point came
after he’d done a report about the flourishing of a market for mules in
Gaza, because of the shortage of gasoline for cars. “No one wanted to
hear about people in Gaza dying because the hospitals had no electric
power. You could only show curiosities. I felt that after 20 years in
the profession, I was no longer willing to do that.”
Outside the world of being a
daily reporter, things went pretty well for Eldar. His first film was a
worldwide success, and was screened at numerous festivals, and he
accompanied it to a host of countries. His Hebrew-language book “Getting
to Know Hamas” also made waves. Eldar decided that he wanted to make a
documentary series about society in Israel, left Channel 10 and pitched
his idea to Reshet. The Channel 2 franchisee accepted happily and the
sides were about to sign a contract for five episodes.
The series was to open with a
critical moment in Eldar’s career, from 1997. “I was 20 centimeters
from the ear of Rabbi [Yitzhak] Kedouri
when [Prime Minister] Netanyahu whispered to him, ‘The left has
forgotten what it is to be Jewish.’ I was then a political correspondent
for Channel 1. Kedouri was 92. It’s not clear whether he even heard
Netanyahu or understood who it was that was standing next to him. That
was the point at which I discerned that Netanyahu was promoting
incitement and factionalism in the Israeli society. That was the point
at which I wanted to open the series, because since then he has divided
my nation. You can argue about his policy, but what he’s done to Israeli
society is undeniable.”
Although a broadcast date
had already been set, the series somehow never got off the ground;
Reshet backed off. Eldar thinks it might have taken fright at his
critical stance. For example, he referred in the series to the vast sums
of money being spent on roads and other basic infrastructure for the
settlements, in contrast to the neglect of peripheral locales within
sovereign Israel. At around the same time, in 2012, Eldar received a
research grant from the Woodrow Wilson International Center, a
Washington-based federal think tank, to do research on Hamas.
How do you do that from afar, without entering Gaza?
“Through newspapers,
conversations, books. I am an Arab affairs commentator for Al-Monitor
[an English-language site about Middle Eastern news], I read a lot and I
am able to identify processes. It was the same with the book I wrote in
2012, five years after the coup, when I was not able to enter Gaza. I
did send people there to conduct interviews for me. But I knew that in
order to know Hamas, I mainly had to talk to decision makers in Israel,
because in most cases, Hamas reacted to processes in Israel.”
‘No hope’ for peace
Shlomi Eldar was born in
Herzliya in 1958, the youngest of four siblings. After serving in the
Israel Defense Forces Intelligence Corps, he did an undergraduate degree
in Middle Eastern studies and political science at Tel Aviv University.
In 1990, he was accepted to an Israel Television course for reporters.
One of his reports as ITV’s education correspondent embarrassed the
education minister at the time, Zevulun Hammer, he relates, and Hammer
demanded his dismissal. Instead, he was reassigned as the correspondent
in the south – which is how he started reporting on the Gaza Strip.
He eventually held a range
of positions in ITV, among them editing the daily prime-time newscast
and the weekly newsmagazine. At the same time, he obtained a master’s
degree at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, writing a thesis on the
role of security prisoners in the peace process with Israel, based on an
analysis of notebooks written by prisoners in jail. “I argued that the
peace process began in the prisons, when the psychological barriers
between the Israeli warders and the Palestinian prisoners were
breached,” he says. “Both groups started to view the other side as human
beings.”
A 2002 report he did on the Erez checkpoint between Israel and Gaza led to a clash with his superiors.
“I thought the second
intifada wasn’t being covered properly, that it was necessary to show
the other side, too,” Eldar recalls. “In a report on the Erez crossing, I
showed the Palestinians waiting there the whole night and being
squeezed by the barrier. The director general of the Israel Broadcasting
Authority at the time, Yosef Barel, called me after [Prime Minister]
Ariel Sharon had spoken to him about the report. Barel told me, ‘Read
the Nakdi document [referring to ethical guidelines for the Israeli
broadcast industry] carefully, from now on you’re not allowed to talk to
Palestinians. Bye, pal’ – and he hung up.”
What did he mean?
“That the report was
supposedly not balanced. In an interview Barel gave a few months later,
he said that there wasn’t one Palestinian whom Shlomi Eldar hadn’t
interviewed, and that he was considering bringing in people from Egypt
for me.”
In late 2002, Eldar received
an offer to join Israel’s second commercial television station, Channel
10, which was then being established, and be responsible for covering
the Strip. On the first day he reported from there, there was an IDF
operation to destroy lathes.
“The IDF didn’t know how to
cope with the problem of the Qassam rockets, so they decided to fight
the lathe workshops, claiming they were producing the casings for the
Qassams. That was idiotic I showed that the IDF had taken on something
it didn’t know how to cope with,” Eldar says.”
What are the
implications of the fact that you and your style of reporting are being
marginalized, while the current Channel 10 Arab affairs correspondent,
Zvi Yehezkeli, with his very different style, is flourishing and
popular?
“Channel 10 explicitly preferred the voice of Zvi Yehezkeli,
because that’s what the public wants to hear. He’s a true professional
and knows television, and he’s articulate and knows how to present
himself to the camera.”
How would you describe the ‘voice of Zvi Yehezkeli’?
“The Israeli media bought
the narrative of Netanyahu that there is no partner for making peace.
There was a fruitful network of cooperation with Abu Mazen [Palestinian
President Mahmoud Abbas], but the Israel public didn’t hear about it,
because for Netanyahu it was convenient to tell the Israelis that Abu
Mazen was inciting to terror, and that’s the narrative that was chosen.
The Channel 10 editors also lent a hand to that. It was convenient for
them to say that the Palestinians are peace rejectionists. After
Operation Protective Edge [in Gaza, in 2014], Hamas wanted to enter into
a long hudna [cease-fire] and arrive at decisive understandings, but
Israel rejected the proposals, because you can’t make an agreement in
Gaza when you don’t want to make an agreement in the West Bank and when a
West Bank agreement carries a price: the toppling of the [Israeli]
government.”
He himself, Eldar says, did
not intend to fight for his place. “After ‘Precious Life,’ I was a star.
So I decided that my being a correspondent on Channel 10 in that period
was of no interest either to me or the Israeli public, and that I
wanted to do other things. So instead of all that I spent what was a
fascinating time for me in the United States, doing the rounds of
research institutes and making another film.”
Do you think that the media demonizes the Palestinians?
“I definitely think that Abu
Mazen is a dictator. Look what he did to his opponents – he removed
them all and some of them are in prison. You can’t say a word against
him. But I regret that in all of my whole journalistic work, whenever
the topic of Palestinian corruption came up, I would say, ‘It’s their
business, let them deal with it.’ I didn’t know that Palestinian
corruption would also have political implications, because Hamas was
elected in the wake of the corruption of [Yasser] Arafat and his
cohorts. It was my strategic mistake as a journalist that I didn’t
understand the impact that corruption would have on the election of
Hamas.”
Do you think there’s still a chance of achieving a political agreement with the Palestinians?
“I have no hope. Everyone
understands today that there will not be peace. The two-state solution
can’t happen, because facts have been created on the ground. I don’t see
Netanyahu or his successor being able to remove 400,000 settlers and
bringing them back within the pre-1967 lines. Both sides have grown
extreme. I am against the partition of Jerusalem. I don’t see the
Palestinians being successful at ruling over part of Jerusalem.”
You say you were taught
on Channel 1 to stay behind the camera, but your new film is very
personal and speaks in the first person.
“Yes, I was taken through a
process. For the Americans this is a very Israeli story, in contrast to
‘Precious Life,’ which was universal. The new film is painful, personal
and sensitive, and it will touch Israelis more than it will touch
Americans. Here I knew that the process is not mine and not Ghassan’s,
but that of the state. Ghassan and Abuelaish and I are in the same place
that we were in, and the radicalization process is taking place in the
Israeli society. Americans don’t know who [Culture Minister] Miri Regev
is, and they can’t understand how it is that Miri Regev can stifle
culture in Israel, because here culture is a private matter, not public.
Maybe they’ll understand that we are people who are talking about loss,
loss of a place that we think can be a lot better for all of us.”
Since the movie was acquired
by the new public broadcasting corporation Kan (it was broadcast on
March 21), it might have been suspected of not being controversial
enough. But then Culture Minister Regev went into action and did the
film the same favor she’s done for quite a few films and other works
lately, by labeling it anti-patriotic. Eldar notes that he also
recognized and remembers the moment that journalists began to be
depicted as the enemies of the state.
“As a diplomatic
correspondent, I found myself with Netanyahu and [his wife] Sara alone
in the Prime Minister’s Office after he lost the 1999 election, when all
the reporters who a moment before were surrounding him now rushed off
to interview Ehud Barak [who won the election]. It was a heartrending
moment. I told him that I wanted to apologize to him, for having asked
him two years earlier, in the presence of Jordan’s King Hussein, about
the investigation of the Amedi affair [referring to gifts Netanyahu had
received as prime minister which he took home], in front of TV cameras
from around the world. I told him I thought I hadn’t acted properly.
“Netanyahu replied, ‘You
[journalists] were never fair to me.’ I think that was the moment that
his obsession with the media sprouted. He decided that from then on he
would control the media so that the media would be fair to him. I saw
him in his ‘They are afraid’
period [a referrence to his 1999 speech] and in the period when he was
ready to incite against everything. Three days before the [1999]
election, he held a press conference and invited professional cheerers
for Likud to the Prime Minister’s Office. I think that was the first
time he crossed the boundary lines – and that was child’s play compared
to what’s happening now.”
Coming home
Eldar describes himself as
being on the side of the losers now. But despite this pessimistic
outlook, he and his wife, the playwright and journalist Michal Aharoni,
and their two young children (Eldar has three adult children from his
first marriage), are planning to return to Israel in a few months.
In light of all you’ve said, how can you come back?
“Because it’s mine, after all.”
So you prefer to go down with the ship?
“I have two choices – to
become an American citizen, but to always be an immigrant who’s not
fluent in the language, like many Israelis who after 40 years here still
‘live’ Israel – or to return home, to a reality that has already been
forged and which will be very difficult to change. Peace there won’t be;
I am a realist. But it would be desirable for Israel to be a more
empathetic place, with less hatred. Hatred that I know who’s responsible
for and where it began. To save his skin, Netanyahu is ready to trample
the police and the whole world. One day a journalist will be
assassinated in the name of the prime minister, as Arye Golan [veteran
Kan radio newsman] said this month against the background of the
incitement against journalists. People who think differently from Miri
Regev, from Netanyahu and from [Education Minister Naftali] Bennett have
their Israeliness called into doubt. It’s very easy to be considered a
traitor.”
A hard choice, then.
“With all my anger and
pessimism, Israel is my home, my language and my culture, and maybe
there are a few more people who will want to listen to me. When I give
talks here, I sometimes find myself defending things I don’t really
believe in. I started to teach American Jews what it means to love
Israel. That you can be critical of the place you live in, out of love. I
was astounded at how little Jews here know about Israel. I learned that
in another generation in America, there will no longer be a Jewish
pro-Israel lobby. On the other hand, there will be a very broad American
public that will remind Israel that it was taken in thrall by this very
controversial president, Trump.”
Shany Littman
Haaretz Contributor
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