Journalism in Jenin: No Honor Among Thieves

(Jenin, 27 April 2002) --The reality left behind by the Israelis in Jenin Refuge Camp defies even the most vicious imagination. One after another, the people of Jenin have been trying to tell anyone in the world who will listen what they have witnessed and lived through since the beginning of their most recent tragedy on April 3, 2002. Even though the Israeli checkpoints have been turning back aid workers, human rights monitors and journalists, some have made it through and as April ends, the horror of Jenin is left painfully visible for all who dare to look.

I went as a journalist, and it was as a journalist that I must say that some of the most disparaging things I saw were the actions of representatives of the English-speaking and other Western media. Not because the wreckage that had been the homes and livelihoods of thousands of people, or the stories of death, destruction and dehumanization, were not as awful as the most paranoid among us would imagine, but precisely because they were. Yet, to most of the journalists I encountered during my three days in Jenin, the people of Jenin and what remained of their world were secondary to the “real story.” It would seem that the journalists who made it into Jenin had already writen their stories in advance with the assistance of the Israeli government while they were kept from setting foot in the camp; it was as if their only reason for going to the camp was to obtain visuals and carefully contrived soundbytes.

I watched as an English-speaking French journalist spent 15 minutes manipulating a 10-year-old boy into saying, “I want to be a fighter. I will kill Jews with my kalishnikov.” It was quite a labor for him to get the child to enunciate “kalishnikov” clearly enough to suit his eager cameraman. I saw an American photojournalist pressure a clean-up crew with one of the rare and much-needed bulldozers working to find bodies in one house to stop their work there and move to another area in order to get a “better shot.”

More than anything, I saw journalist after journalist ask person after person who came to them with their story, “Are you a fighter?” When the answer was, “No, I’m just a regular person,” the journalist moved on.