James Fallows, June 2003:
For anyone else who knows about Mohammed al-Dura but is not in either of the decided camps - the Arabs who are sure they know what happened, the revisionists who are equally sure - the case will remain in the uncomfortable realm of events that cannot be fully explained or understood.
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The Israeli policy of creating settlements in occupied territory, and the Palestinian policy of terror, are deeper obstacles. There would never have been a showdown at the Netzarim crossroads, or any images of Mohammed al-Dura's shooting to be parsed in different ways, if there were no settlement nearby for IDF soldiers to protect.
Those paragraphs don't make Fallows' bias and skill at innuendo clear as day to most readers in America. They sound, as they're supposed to, unprejudiced and plain, the words of a thoughtful man who will follow reason wherever it leads, with no agenda but a desire for the truth, from which he intends to make a moral judgment once he's found it. But it's evident he went into the story on a slant that was neither unbiased nor truth-seeking, and used his craft to create a deception, an illusion.
This is my premise, that most readers won't see the duplicity and cleverness that created that illusion.
This is why scorn for intellectuals, especially intellectuals who can translate to the vernacular, is damaging to the common American, because no one else will explain this horseshit to them. And it's why that scorn has been so encouraged.
And from that premise this, that there is a responsibility we bear to those less able, that we have to bridge these isolating differences, because they're being exploited. Let alone the obligation we have to speak for the victims of injustice.
Fallows wears the uniform, he carries the tools, but he isn't doing the job.
He says "the Arabs who are sure they know what happened" as if there were no one else in that "decided camp". He says "the revisionists who are equally sure" which places the Arabs, with all the color and fullness of living human beings who have had their portraits drawn consistently as hate-filled irrational beasts, against "revisionists", an abstract group with no location, no ethnicity. Not Arabs against Jews, not Arabs and their sympathizers against Jews and their sympathizers, which is the actual polarity he's drawing on. Arab is to Palestinian as Jew is to Israeli.
I caught that but set it aside as I read the article because I went into it with a kind of mild liking for Fallows as a writer. But on the next page I read the second paragraph.
The Israelis have a "policy of creating settlements", the Palestinians a "policy of terror".
Look, Ma, it's Davy Crockett fightin' with the devil!
Settlement is a word that means home, houses, gardens, good things. Terror, in 2003, was at its height as an electrically shocking word. It was a Pavlovian trigger. It had been redefined in the aftermath of 9/11, stripped to immediate horror, it meant senseless violence motivated by uncaused and unjustly felt hatred. It still does, for too many, but by now lots of basically decent folk have begun to understand that the causes of terrorist acts go much deeper and are far less black and white than we were being led to believe.
Fallows says the event wouldn't have happened "...if there were no settlement nearby for IDF soldiers to protect". What could be more noble than protecting homes?
What's missing is everything. The settlements are built on the rubble of Palestinian homes. On stolen Palestinian land. The Palestinians were removed from those homes by violence, terrorist violence that continues to this day.
It's not hard to make the case that the Palestinians are the ones trying to protect their homes, desperately against a terrifyingly more powerful adversary. That power is coming from the people Fallows wrote for and to. Which is why he writes this the way he does.
What he lays out is a simple thing, a stage with two groups at opposite sides and caught in the middle a man and his young son. The son is killed by a bullet, the death is caught on film. Sympathy in normal human hearts is great, coming naturally from the image of the two helpless figures trying to hide, get down, be small, and the smallest one is killed.
Fallows says - without saying it too directly, because he has to make it sound like he's still searching for whatever truth is there - that research, scientific study, work by professionals whose skills are in the uncovering and clarifying of what really happened in events as chaotic as armed combat, appears to show that Mohammed al-Dura was killed by his own people, and the logical jump is they did it in order to have an image of a martyr to show the world and dishonestly gain its sympathy.
He says this because the recreation of the landscape, and the positions in it held by the two sides, shows that the Israeli soldiers could not have fired the bullet that killed the boy from where they were. Therefore it was someone else somewhere else, therefore it was the Palestinians killing their own.
It doesn't seem to have occurred to him, as it would to anyone with an unbiased view, that a sniper shooting from somewhere other than the building occupied by the IDF might have done it.
Is there a precedent for that kind of inhuman disregard for Palestinian lives in the behavior of the Israelis? There are hundreds of such precedents. Not just Palestinian lives either.
Rachel Corrie, an American, was run down by an American-made bulldozer driven by an Israeli in the act of destroying the home of a Palestinian family, which Corrie put her body and her life on the line to stop.
Canadian Maj. Paeta Hess-von Kruedener was killed when the Israelis bombed a marked United Nations post in Lebanon on July 25, 2006. His wife says shortly before he was killed he had sent her an email "reporting that Israel was bombing schools and waging 'a campaign of terror against the Lebanese people'".
These incidents are distinct because they involve lives that were not driven by a "policy of terror". Rachel Corrie was a pacifist, Maj. Hess-von Kruedener and the other UN observers killed with him were peacekeepers. They were all in the way of the Israeli campaign which describes itself as wounded and in defense, but looks more like ruthless aggression toward empire.
Here's Fallows in October 2007, still crowing from the top of the fence:
Except that there's a conspiracy either way it happened. Except that if it isn't a conspiracy by the Palestinians, it's a conspiracy by the Israelis to blame them for it.Richard Landes, of Boston University, is (to my knowledge) the leading advocate of the idea that the death of Mohammed al-Dura was an elaborately-staged hoax. His blog TheAugeanStables is full of references, updates, videos, forensic reports, and other links supporting his argument that this was in its entirety a "Pallywood" production (Hollywood + Palestine, get it???). A related blog is here, and Natan Sharansky's essay about the latest twists in the case is here.
Charles Enderlin, the long-time Jerusalem correspondent for the TV network France 2 has his own running commentary, in French, at the France 2 blog site. He is a central figure in the story because his initial reports established the idea that the boy Mohammed had been killed by Israeli soldiers. The Landes camp believes that the scenes in his report were staged, and they have pushed relentlessly for release of the full footage France 2 shot that day. Enderlin and France 2 have refused.
My general experience in life makes me skeptical that large-scale conspiracies can be pulled off - and kept secret for seven years, which is how long it has been since the original event. So based on what I have personally seen (not having devoted myself to the story for the last few years), I am not ready to say: Yes, for sure, this was a huge, big-lie, blood-libel, conspiratorial hoax.
These second paragraphs seem to be a balanced presentation of two disagreeing sides. Except most english-speaking readers, even sophisticated readers of James Fallows, aren't going to get much from commentary in french, if they bother hitting that link in the first place. Except he brings the pro-Israeli voice down from the first paragraph and uses it to set up Enderlin and France 2's refusal to release their "full footage".
Fallows says "I am not ready to say: Yes, for sure, this was a huge, big-lie, blood-libel..."
Which is like saying "I'm not ready to say: You're a lying sack of shit."
Sensible folks with enough self-discipline to not over-react will withhold judgment, if they want to know what really happened they'll examine as much information as they can from both sides. Fallows, in his role as information-bringer, acts as if he's done that for his readers, but there is no voice from the other side in any of his writing about the al-Dura case, except in french, once. The 2003 piece has at its center quotes and colorful endearing descriptions of Nahum Shahaf (strongly built; smiling, joking, having fun; hang gliding instructor), an Israeli physicist whose work was at the center of the IDF investigation of the affair.
The Palestinian voice, the Palestinian side, as consistently as ever, goes unheard.
