Censored 2012 (69 page)

A coordinated attack on Hamas’s civilian apparatus was launched immediately after the takeover in Gaza in June 2007. Major General Gadi Shamni, the head of the Israeli army’s central command, led an initiative to target the base of Hamas’s support in the West Bank. The plan, dubbed the Dawah Strategy, involved pinpointing Hamas’s extensive social welfare apparatus—the lynchpin of their popularity among many Palestinians.

Minutes from a security meeting between Israeli generals and Palestinian security forces leadership attended by Israel’s leading security correspondent, Nahum Barnea, were uniquely blunt:

“Hamas is the enemy, and we have decided to wage an all-out war,” Barnea quoted Majid Faraj, then the head of Palestinian military intelligence,
as telling the Israeli commanders. “We are taking care of every Hamas institution in accordance with your instructions.”
¹⁵

Unlike the first iteration of security forces established by the CIA during the Oslo peace process of the 1990s and staffed by Fatah partisans, this latest manifestation is a strictly apolitical formation where each and every soldier is vetted by Israeli and American intelligence to ensure that there are no factional affiliations in their ranks.

While the 1990s edition was nevertheless indicted for widespread human rights abuses, torture, arbitrary detention, and even extrajudicial killings aimed predominately at Hamas and Islamic Jihad, when the al-Aqsa Intifada broke out in September 2000, many of those trained and armed security men either joined militias or at least redistributed their weapons for use in the armed struggle against Israel.

“What we have created are new men,” Dayton told the audience of policymakers at the WINEP symposium. “For the first time, I think it’s fair to say that the Palestinian security forces feel they are on a winning team.” Namely, firmly on the side of the Israelis.
¹⁶

“I’m an American, I’m here to advance America’s interests,” Dayton told
Ha’aretz
. “But I am also here because of the relationship between your country and mine.”
¹⁷

If there is a standard narrative presented in the media on this conflict, it is one of stagnation—a string of failed peace negotiations, endless shuttle diplomacy by senior diplomats, decade after decade of stalemate in achieving peace. By setting the focus on immediate events, usually without necessary context, the overarching strategic framework escapes attention. In reality, the Israeli occupation is slowly grinding ahead, more Palestinian land is stolen, more Israeli infrastructure—roads and settlement housing—is planted on the ground that Palestinians have rightful claim to in any iteration of internationally recognized peace. Palestinian territory is ever-shrinking, while Israel creates the facts on the ground—namely, the separation barrier—and turns the West Bank into a series of Gaza Strips, isolated from one another, land bisected by Israeli roads and settlements. The strategic vision to establish a Palestinian ghetto-state is happening daily outside the media spotlight.

JON ELMER
is a Canadian journalist who has been based in the Middle East since 2003. He is a contributor to Al Jazeera English and Inter Press Service, among others. He lives in Bethlehem. Jon Elmer’s website is
www.jonelmer.ca
. With additional editing assistance from
NORA BARROWS-FRIEDMAN
.

1
. Tony Karon, “Israel Gets More Comfortable with Status Quo,”
Time
, February 15, 2010,
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1962232,00.html
.

2
. “Olmert Warns of ‘End of Israel,’ ” BBC, November 29, 2007,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7118937.stm
.

3
. David Landau, “Maximum Jews, Minimum Palestinians,”
Ha’aretz
, November 13, 2003,
http://www.haaretz.com/general/maximum-jews-minimum-palestinians-1.105562
.

4
. Ari Shavit, “Top PM Aide: Gaza Plan Aims to Freeze the Peace Process,”
Ha’aretz
, October 8, 2004,
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/top-pm-aide-gaza-plan-aims-to-freeze-the-peace-process-1.136686
.

5
. Akiva Eldar, “EU Sources: Terms Set for Renewal of Israel-PA Talks,”
Ha’aretz, Sep
tember 13, 2009,
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/eu-sources-terms-set-for-renewal-of-israel-pa-talks-1.8008
.

6
. David Horovitz, “Fayyad Builds Palestine,”
Jerusalem Post
, November 19, 2009,
http://fr.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1258624595789&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull
.

7
. Sarah Mishkin, “A Safe Stock Market?”
Financial Times
, May 14, 2011,
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/75886a56-7cbf-11e0-994d-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1
PmPX0fzY.

8
. United Nations Agency for Palestinian Refugees,
Labour Market Briefing: West Bank—Second Half 2010
, East Jerusalem: United Nations Relief and Works Agency, June 8, 2011,
http://www.unrwa.org/userfiles/201106082849.pdf
.

9
. Nathan J. Brown, “Are Palestinians Building a State?”
Carnegie Endowment
, July 1, 2010,
http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=41093
.

10
. Jon Elmer, “Fighting in the Gaza Ghetto,”
Canadian Dimension
42, no. 1 (February 2008): 18–20.

11
. Michael Eisenstadt, “Why the Next President Will be a Wartime Leader,”
Jerusalem Post
, November 4, 2008,
www.jpost.com/Home/Article.aspx?id=119405
.

12
. Rory McCarthy, “Six Die as Palestinian Police Clash with Hamas in West Bank,”
Guardian
, May 31, 2009,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/31/palestinians-killed-west-bank-hamas
.

13
. Lieutenant General Keith Dayton, Michael Stein Address on US Middle East Policy (keynote address, Soref Symposium, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Washington, DC, May 7, 2009).

14
. Ibid.

15
. Nahum Barnea, “Report on Israeli-PA Security Coordination Meeting, 19 September 2008 (excerpts),”
Journal of Palestine Studies
38, no. 2 (Winter 2009): 202.

16
. Lieutenant General Keith Dayton, Michael Stein Address on US Middle East Policy (keynote address, Soref Symposium, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Washington, DC, May 7, 2009).

17
. Aluf Benn, “Top US General Lays Foundation for Palestinian State,”
Ha’aretz, Au
gust 8, 2008,
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1009578.html
.

by Robin Andersen

Five years after the storm that flooded 80 percent of New Orleans and devastated the Gulf Coast, killing 1,800 people, author Rebecca Solnit observed that evaluating the media coverage of Hurricane Katrina is important because “getting the story right matters for survival as well as for justice and history.”
¹
That same year, in April 2010, a few months before the storm’s fifth anniversary, the first episode of the fictional series
Treme
, set in post-Katrina New Orleans, aired on HBO. Veteran television producers David Simon and Eric Overmyer of
The Wire
begin their drama three months after the storm, chronicling the lives of ten main characters who stubbornly reinhabit a city they refuse to let die. By doing so the producers of
Treme
breathed life into a story that was by then all but dead in the United States press. As early as 2006, Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting noted in a piece titled “Katrina’s Vanishing Victims” that the recovery of New Orleans had lost its news value.
²
After a steady decline, the story was relegated to an “anniversary event,” and by 2008 the Tyndall Report found that Katrina was no longer among the top twenty stories on TV news. There were only six hurricane-related stories on TV in the first seven months of 2009.
³

Treme
revives the story of the storm, a story many—especially those formerly in “official” positions—would rather forget. The filming of
Treme
looks eerily real, and people and places are shot in ways that foreground a city in distress. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the opening scenes of the series that are at once beautiful and disturbing. Mold spores on walls visually measure the high water marks of interior spaces; it is real footage, the same used in Spike Lee’s
When the Levees Broke
. Along with the aerial images of
floodwaters that surge into doorways and places where water should never be, the eye of the storm hits viewers week after week.

The program does not mince words about the flooding. From the beginning
Treme’s
spotlight has been harsh. Early on, the disaster that hit New Orleans is described in this way by the memorable character Creighton Bernette (played by actor John Goodman): “What hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast was a natural disaster; a hurricane pure and simple. The flooding of New Orleans is a manmade catastrophe, a federal f** up of epic proportion, and decades in the making.” The intensity of Bernette’s ongoing blog posts, his hilarious profanity, and biting criticism of the forces unwilling to rebuild one of the country’s “great cities,” indicate from the start that the writers of
Treme
intended to rekindle a national dialogue about the disaster and its consequences. Indeed, it has also challenged the news coverage of the storm and its aftermath, and what better way to illustrate that than by having Bernette, a character who portrays a Tulane University professor, throw the microphone of a British television news anchor into the lake?

The series’ writers are determined to closely follow events as they actually unfolded in post-Katrina New Orleans. Lolis Eric Elie, story editor for the series and a former
Times-Picayune
journalist, said, “We have a timeline of the events as they occurred hanging on the wall of our conference room. We use it as an outline and fill it in with personal stories of people’s lives.” For example, “We wanted to describe what it was like to come back and see your flooded house for the first time.”
⁴
Other residents of New Orleans—authors, DJs, musicians, chefs, lawyers, and even Mardi Gras Indians—also populate this series both on- and off-screen. Many work behind the scenes as consultants and writers, while others appear in cameo roles and as extras in order to create a complex, compelling, vérité view of post-Katrina New Orleans, and to demonstrate to the rest of the country, in the words of New Orleans author and
Treme
scriptwriter Tom Piazza, “Why New Orleans Matters.”
⁵

In the same way it tracks events, the program also tracks the news
discourse of the time, challenging past news reporting and journalism in just about every way: in detail, theme, point of view, and most importantly when it comes to telling the stories of the musicians, culture, and communities of New Orleans. After watching the first two episodes of season two (set fourteen months after the storm) at the premier in New York City, Eric Overmyer confirmed in an interview that they have an interest in “setting the record straight.”
⁶
In doing so they offer an ideal lens through which to look at the multiple, evolving narratives of a disaster of epic proportions, one that can teach us much about how to cope with humanitarian crises, and how to represent the indignities of ongoing racial and economic inequalities.
Treme
creates alternative narratives that reveal a media system either unwilling or unable to fulfill the promise made by one significant broadcaster, NBC’s Brian Williams: “If we come out of this crisis and in the next couple of years don’t have a national conversation on the following issues—race, class, petroleum, the environment—then we, the news media, will have failed by not keeping people’s feet to the fire.”
⁷