A First hand look at Jenin by a Hollywood filmmaker This is a copy of an op-ed piece submitted to The NY and LA Times by Dan Gordon As someone who has made a living for over thirty years by taking certain facts and ignoring others in order to create dramatic myths on film, I know propaganda when I see it. When I engage in it as a screenwriter it is to write a movie whose first job is to entertain. What has been coming out of Jenin this last week, however, is posing as unbiased journalism whose first obligation is to seek out and report the truth. In some instances the reports have been no less a fiction than what I write for a living. When I write a screenplay, I start out with an agenda. I decide who my hero is first, and who the villain. Then I fashion scenes to build my dramatic case and make it believable. That is, I believe, exactly what occurred with regard to at least one reporter on Tuesday, April 16th of this year in Jenin. I was there. I saw everything they saw, I heard everything they heard, I smelled everything they smelled and did not smell. And the truth is there was no smell of death on that day, and absolutely no bodies were found while the press tour, of which I was a part, was in the Jenin refugee camp. Not one body, not one. For the record, I am biased. I am an Israeli American. I served in the Israel Defense Forces some twenty years ago. I was also and continue to be a peace activist who has held talks with members of the PLO and PFLP long before Oslo. I have had high level and sometimes secret meetings in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza, long before it was legal for an Israeli to do so. I continue to believe that Israel will never have the security it desires without a peaceful Palestinian state next to it, and that the Palestinians will never get the state they want without deciding once and for all to live in peace with Israel. I went to Jenin to find out what happened there. There was a tale told by the Israeli reservists who fought there, of Palestinian suicide bombers, trained, equipped and sent out from Jenin. There was a claim made that the suicide killers sent out from the Jenin refugee camp were responsible for almost half the terrorist bombings that have occurred, including some of the worst attacks in Jerusalem, Haifa, Afula and Netanya, which left over one hundred twenty Israeli civilians blown to pieces in the month of March alone, and four hundred seventy killed in the last eighteen months. That slow and ongoing massacre specifically targeting innocent civilians, men, women and children, infants and the elderly, is not an estimate. Those bodies have already been found and buried. The Israeli reservists who fought in Jenin laid out a strong case, providing hard physical evidence that the Jenin refugee camp was a factory for suicide killers. That evidence was largely omitted or ignored by the reporter and network in question. These were the Israeli's claims, and there was a good deal of evidence in the area to back them up, but the reporter in question didn't bother to refute them. She simply ignored them. The camera starts on piles of rubble, scenes of devastation as we hear the reporter's voice over, "Before the Israeli forces invaded two weeks ago, this was the crowded center of the Jenin refugee camp. There were apartment houses in twisting narrow streets, bustling and busy. That neighborhood is now gone, erased by Israeli bulldozers, turned into a river of concrete and twisted steel spreading over two city blocks. Everywhere there is evidence of life interrupted." Now, let me tell you what there is evidence of. Before one enters the refugee camp, one passes through the very pleasant little town of Jenin. The entrance to the camp is simply another street feeding off the town's main road, and only some one hundred meters from the rest of the town, which is also a residential area, though one decidedly more middle-class. There are handsome single-family homes and yards, businesses and apartments. Not a one of those buildings appears to be touched; no bullet holes from Israeli machine guns, not one house bulldozed, indeed, not even a broken window anywhere in sight. All this is only one hundred meters away from the scene of the fighting. The reason there is no devastation here is quite simple. No one was shooting at the Israeli reservists from these buildings, and so, quite properly, they did not shoot back. And who lives in these suburban homes? Are they of a different racial stock, perhaps, and thus were spared? One reservist sensed the reporter's hostility. He was a soft-spoken man who approached her and introduced himself as the reserve unit's medical officer Dr. David Zangen. He spoke very politely to her and said he was troubled by what he perceived as her bias. He told her that he worked in the trauma unit of Hadassah Hospital. He was the one who took care of most of the suicide bombing victims in Jerusalem, whose killers, they had proof, had been trained, equipped and sent out of the Jenin camp terrorists organizations. His head nurse had a fifteen-year-old daughter who was blown to pieces at the Sbarro Pizza. He knew exactly why he was in Jenin. Moreover, he told her he was a doctor, not a soldier, a reservist, not a regular army man. They were all reservists, fathers with children who were all sitting at home on the first night of Passover, when the suicide bombing in Netanya killed what has now totaled almost thirty people and! wounded dozens more "I do, Madam," he said, "I ask myself why. I can't imagine it. I can't imagine sending one's child out to be a mass murderer who commits suicide to murder women and children." "Well, I can explain it," said the reporter, "For me it all comes down to one word, 'occupation.'" "But Madam," the doctor said, " Jenin hasn't been occupied for nine years." But the reporter just turned and walked away. She was looking for scenes of bodies being pulled from the rubble and was upset, I'm sure, that she hadn't gotten the footage. You see, no bodies were found in Jenin when we were there. So there would have been time for the Doctor's comments, but they didn't fit the script she'd already written. So she simply used footage from another day, footage she hadn't shot, one bare foot sticking out from under a piece of rubble, which she had never seen, which had been shot evidently the day before, when the pickings were better. Now, none of this would matter very much if the subject being reported was the fat content of a particular brand of potato chips. This report, however, and others like it, are not just propaganda. They are dangerous obstacles to peace. There are myths being propagated of five hundred or more civilians killed in cold blood, of war crimes and mass murder, and reports like this, masquerading as truth, serve only to inflame the hatreds that are already there, as are the next crop of suicide bombers, who are waiting to avenge the massacre that I believe never was. |
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