During the past three years of continuous violence since the start of the second intifada in September 2000, most Israelis have preferred to withdraw into their own cocoon. The average Israeli has experienced a combination of security anxieties and economic concerns, coupled with an aspiration to somehow continue to live a semblance of normal life.
A condition of denial about daily Palestinian suffering in the Occupied Territories is rampant. As Haaretz correspondent Amos Harel noted recently, for most Israelis, whats going on in the West Bank could be happening on the other side of the moon. The collapse of the Oslo process at Camp David in the summer of 2000, the outbreak of the second intifada, the suicide bombers all have deeply affected even many seasoned supporters of the Israeli left and peace movement.
Cooperation across divides: the Palestine-Israel Journal
Hillel Schenker and Zahra Khalidi are journalists who dedicate their professional lives to trying to bridge the chasm between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples. Nothing comes easily to them not even being able to meet for staff discussions. openDemocracy publishes their two accounts of working life, plus two very different articles from the excellent Media and the Second Intifada special edition of the Palestine-Israel Journal to give our readers a chance to share in the exceptional work they are doing.
Read the article by Zahra Khalidi about her experience of working on the Palestine-Israel Journal.
Other related Middle East material in openDemocracy:
- Gadi Wolfsfeld on the lessons of reporting the second intifada
- Abdel Karim Samara on Arab media and the Iraq war
- Andrew Steele of the BBC on professionalism under siege
- Stuart Cohen and others on the roadmap
During precisely this frustrating and critical time, I began commuting a few times a week from Tel Aviv to East Jerusalem to the offices of the Palestine-Israel Journal (PIJ), to help maintain the bi-national team that keeps this unique publication alive.
Founded in more optimistic times, in the winter of 1993-94, the editors set as their goal to publish an independent quarterly, that aims to shed light on, and analyse freely and critically, the complex issues dividing Israelis and Palestinians The Journals purpose is to promote rapprochement and better understanding between peoples, and it strives to discuss all issues without prejudice and without taboos.
Easier said than done. Yet in my view, there is no alternative.
Epics of everyday life
The PIJ office in East Jerusalem is a living, cross-cultural laboratory. As in Noahs Ark, almost everything comes in pairs: two editors, Israeli and Palestinian, two managing editors and an equal number of Israeli and Palestinian members of the editorial board. We even have a Scottish international editor, Sarah McGregor-Wood, wife of the ABC Middle East bureau chief and an excellent journalist in her own right, thrown in to the mix.
The first obstacle that has to be overcome, is that Palestinian editor Ziad Abu-Zayyad, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and former minister for Jerusalem affairs, is not allowed to come into the East Jerusalem office, despite the fact that he lives only a journey of fifteen-twenty minutes away in the suburb of Azariya.
In the Kafkaesque world of Middle Eastern politics, if he lived within the municipal borders of East Jerusalem and had a Jerusalem identity card, he would have no problem. But the previous Israeli minister of internal security, Uzi Landau, who considered Palestinian moderates to be the greatest danger to his goal of preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state, took away his right of passage from the West Bank to East Jerusalem.
So, in order to have bi-weekly staff meetings, we have to take a local East Jerusalem taxi in a roundabout way, travelling on the labyrinthine network of bypass roads established to provide a secure transportation infrastructure for the settlements that dot the West Bank landscape, until we arrive at Azariya.
To return to East Jerusalem, we have to climb over the concrete roadblock that cuts Azariyas main road in two together with women carrying babies, old men with canes, and just plain people trying to get to work, or go via a northern roadblock, which has a gate which may or may not be open. One never knows till you get there.
When we get to the other side, we climb into another Palestinian service (taxi), and within ten minutes find ourselves back at the Damascus Gate alongside the walls of the Old City, just a seven-minute walk from the offices near the far end of Salah A-Din Street. Israeli editor, Daniel Bar-Tal, head of Tel Aviv Universitys research institute on Jewish-Arab relations, always notes after one of these odysseys that it gives us Israelis just a glimpse of the endless obstacle course that Palestinians experience in their daily lives.
Convening a general editorial board meeting is also difficult. Palestinians who live in the West Bank cities of Ramallah, Bethlehem, the university town of Bir-Zeit, or in places like Hebron, have to get a special permit to come to East Jerusalem; while travel within the West Bank itself always takes an incalculable amount of time because of the constant uncertainty of the checkpoints.
On a daily basis, staff members like Palestinian co-managing editor Zahra Khalidi, who lives in Al-Ram, and circulation manager Najat Hirbawi from Azariya, always have to take into account the checkpoints on their way to work, and how they will affect both the time available and their moods (depending upon how they are treated by the young soldiers at their posts).
On the other hand, Israeli editorial board members would be prevented by Israeli Defence forces (IDF) security regulations from entering into any of these West Bank towns for a meeting.
In my own commute from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, I only have to be concerned with navigating the uncertainties of the Israeli public transport system. I take a direct bus from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, followed by an inner city Jerusalem bus, one of the favourite targets of the suicide bombers. I reassure myself that no politically-aware suicide bomber would strike at the number 23 bus, which services both Jews and Palestinians.
It follows a truly eclectic route winding down from the central bus station via Jaffa Road (location of six horrible suicide bombings in the past year), turning left via the ultra-Orthodox Meah Shearim neighborhood, passing through the spot where the fabled Mandelbaum Gate once stood dividing East and West Jerusalem. I get off in the Palestinian Sheikh Jarah neighbourhood at the end of Salah A-Din Street, two blocks from the office. The bus then continues on its way for another ten minutes, till it reaches Mount Scopus, site of the new/old Hebrew University campus.
Thats just the physical side of things.
An experiment in cooperation
Although we are a joint journal, our two societies are at very different stages of development: and this has a clear impact on our work. The State of Israel has been in existence for 55 years, it has the fourth strongest army in the world and a relatively strong economy (despite the recession we have been experiencing in the past few years).
Given the widespread assumption that peace is the key to security, the preservation of Israeli democracy and economic, social, cultural, educational and individual progress, it is not difficult for the Israeli editors to find many academics, journalists and activists who are ready to write articles that are thoughtful, innovative and frequently critical of Israeli government policy.
The Israeli editors actually make an extra effort to find authors who reflect a more establishment position within Israeli society, so as not to project an overly idealised image of Israeli thought. Thus Likud ministers Moshe Arens and Dan Meridor have been interviewed, and centrist and even moderately right-wing academics have written and participated in the journals forums.
Since the Palestinians are still in the midst of their initial struggle for national liberation, their society is much more actively mobilised, and potential writers will have a greater tendency to take into consideration the needs of the national movement. Therefore, Palestinian authors tend to downplay the level of criticism that might be expressed about official Palestinian Authority policy for the sake of the national struggle. This was the same stage that most of the Israeli media experienced in 1948 and the early years of the state.
Despite these differences, we manage to fill every 128-page issue with an equal number of Israeli and Palestinian articles, most of them at a very high level. Most Israelis would be extremely surprised to discover the amount of self-criticism that is expressed by Palestinian authors.
The PIJ functions on the basis of the mutual right to self-determination. That means that both sides, the Israelis and the Palestinians, bring their own authors to the drawing board. We do consult with each other, make recommendations and mutually review manuscripts, editing out terms, misunderstood concepts and even name spellings that may be unnecessarily insulting to the other community.
The roundtable route to understanding
One of the most dynamic and stimulating aspects of the PIJ is the roundtable discussions for publication held on the central focus theme of each issue. Such roundtables create an opportunity to seriously probe issues of mutual concern, and to establish cooperative working relations for the future.
Last week we held a profound and painful discussion on Human Rights in the shadow of the conflict and particularly the past few years of mutual violence. The Israeli participants were Jessica Montel, director of B'tselem (the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories), and Dan Yakir, legal adviser to Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI).
The Palestinians were lawyer Mohammad Kadah of the Jerusalem Center for Economic and Social Rights and Maha Abu Daya, from the Womens Center for Legal Aid & Counseling. It was very capably moderated by Benjamin Pogrund, former Deputy Editor of the (anti-apartheid) Rand Daily Mail, who currently heads the Yakar Center for Social Concern in Jerusalem.
At our previous roundtable on Media and the Second Intifada, moderated by Simon Wilson of the BBCs Middle East bureau, Ronni Shaked, the mass circulation daily Yediot Aharonot correspondent for the Occupied Territories, asked: where are the Palestinian journalists? He was referring to the fact that the two Palestinian participants, Elias Zananiri and Khaled Abu Aker earn their living primarily from foreign news organisations. They do this clearly for job security, but Zananiri continues to write opinion pieces for Palestinian media while Abu Aker runs an independent Palestinian news website in Arabic and English.
Would journalists who work for the Palestinian media have felt more constrained in their comments? Did those who were invited not come because they were unable to get permits to East Jerusalem? The fact is that the roundtable was a fascinating exchange of opinion on how Israeli and Palestinian media have been relating to the second intifada.
Despite all the obstacles, the joint staff has produced issues devoted to Violence and its Alternatives, National Identity, Right of Return, Jerusalem, Women in the Conflict, Separation or Conciliation, Peace Economics, Children of the Conflict, Education in Times of Conflict, Post-Oslo: Impasse and Options, The Two Narratives of 1948, The Search for Regional Cooperation, and many other themes that are crucial to the quest for a fair, non-violent political resolution of this festering, bloody conflict.
Funds permitting, we intend to continue to perform this critical role.
