Those Who Forget the Past (20 page)

DR. DAVID ZANGEN

Seven Lies About Jenin

David Zangen views the film Jenin, Jenin

I WAS PRESENT at a private viewing of the film Jenin, Jenin, by Muhammad Bakri, at the Jerusalem Cinematheque. The limited audience included Lia van Leer, Director of the Cinematheque, and some journalists. At the end of the screening, I reacted by pointing out, one by one, the lies and lack of truth shown in the film. One of the participants responded furiously, “If you cannot accept the facts in the film, you apparently do not understand anything, and how can you be a doctor?” For a moment I forgot that I had been in Jenin last April, serving in the capacity of doctor for IDF forces in the area, while this esteemed viewer's information came, at best, from rumors. Bakri has woven together lies and half-truths so skillfully that it is difficult to withstand the temptation to be drawn into the distorted picture he has created.

I failed to convince the Cinematheque's management to cancel the screening. I was told that the images of destroyed houses are authentic and that, therefore, there is truth in the film, and that anyway, the film will be screened throughout the world. I was nevertheless invited to the film's Jerusalem premiere, and I went, so that I could use the opportunity to explain my position to the audience. Following are some of the points that I had hoped to raise.

The director of the hospital in Jenin, Dr. Abu-Rali, claims in the film that the western wing of the hospital was shelled and destroyed, and that the IDF purposely disrupted the supply of water and electricity to the hospital. The truth is that there never was such a wing and, in any case, no part of the hospital was shelled or bombed.

Indeed, IDF soldiers were careful not to enter the hospital grounds, even though we knew that they were being used to shelter wanted persons. We maintained the supply of water, electricity, and oxygen to the hospital throughout the course of the fighting, and helped set up an emergency generator after the electricity grid in the city was damaged.

Bakri himself is seen in the film wandering around the clean, preserved corridors of the hospital, but not in the “bombed” wing. I met him outside the auditorium and asked him if he had visited the western wing. At first he said no, and then immediately corrected himself. “Just a minute, you remember the glass that broke in the film—that was from there.”

It is important to note that Abu-Rali is one of the “authorized sources” on which the claim of a “massacre” is based. At the beginning of the operation, he was interviewed on the TV station Al-Jazeera and spoke of “thousands of casualties.”

Another impressive segment of the film is an interview with a seventy-five-year-old resident of Jenin who, crying bitterly, testified that he had been taken from his bed in the middle of the night and shot in the hand, and, when he failed to obey the soldiers' orders to get up, was shot again in the foot.

This same elderly man was brought to me for treatment after a clean-up operation in one of the houses used by a Hamas cell in the refuge camp. He had indeed sustained a slight injury to the hand and suffered from light abrasions on his leg (although certainly not a bullet wound). IDF soldiers brought him to the station for treating the wounded, and there he was treated, including by me.

One of the army doctors diagnosed heart failure, and we immediately offered to transfer him for treatment to the “Emek” Hospital in Afula. He requested to be treated at the hospital in Jenin since he was not fluent in Hebrew. After the Jenin hospital refused to admit him, we transferred him to Afula. He was in the internal medicine ward for three days and received treatment for heart problems and anemia, from which he suffered as a result of an existing chronic disease.

Another interviewee told the story of a baby hit by a bullet that penetrated the baby's chest, passed through its body, and created a large exit wound in its back. According to the information supplied in the film, the baby died after soldiers prevented his evacuation to hospital. However, the baby's body was never found. Furthermore, if such a wound had been in fact inflicted, it would have certainly been fatal, and evacuation to hospital would not have saved the baby's life. What was the baby's name? What happened to the body?

The same person also claimed that he used his finger to open an airway in a child's neck after he was wounded. Again, this is a total fabrication. It is impossible to perform such an operation with one's finger. This “witness” also told how tanks rolled over people, again and again, crushing them alive—this, too, never happened.

The film mentions mass graves in which the IDF put the Palestinians who were killed. All of the international organizations that investigated this matter are in agreement that a total of fifty-two Palestinians were killed in Jenin, and their bodies were turned over to the Palestinians for burial. Bakri did not even bother to show the location of these so-called mass graves.

The film claims that Israeli planes bombed the city. This is untrue. In order to avoid civilian casualties, only accurate gunfire from helicopters was used.

Another point worth noting is that Bakri was not in Jenin during the operation; he arrived two weeks after its conclusion. The destroyed area in the center of the city was filmed in such a way as to appear substantially bigger than it really was, and the posters of “martyrs” and Jihad slogans that covered the walls during the operation were all gone.

The film repeatedly manipulates visual images, showing tanks that had been photographed in other places juxtaposed artificially with pictures of Palestinian children. This is crude, albeit well-done, manipulation.

At the end of the screening, the hundreds of viewers awarded Bakri and the editor of the film with thunderous applause. Bakri turned to the audience and asked if there were any questions. I introduced myself, ascended the stage, and began to systematically list all the lies and inaccuracies in the film.

At first, there was a rustle in the crowd, and then boos and I was called a “murderer,” “war criminal,” and the like. Before I had even finished my second point, a man from the audience aggressively ascended the stage and tried to grab the microphone from my hand. I decided not to be dragged into violence. I let him take the microphone and walked off the stage. I was surprised that only a few spectators rose to the defense of freedom of speech and freedom of expression. I was amazed that the audience was not willing to hear the facts from someone who had physically been there.

It was painful for me as a man, a father, and a doctor to hear calls of “murderer” from my own people. I said that I hadn't murdered anyone, but the calls intensified. A powerful hatred was directed towards me. I had an unpleasant feeling that I haven't been able to shake.

I do not regret going to the Cinematheque that night, and I am certain that some people present did listen to me and that it changed their ideas a little about the “facts” they had just seen. I am also certain that there were other people who were chagrined at the intolerance demonstrated by the crowd. Still, the fact that they were a silent minority is hard for me to accept.

Permit me, therefore, to say what I did not succeed in saying to those hate-filled people that night. I am proud that I was part of the good and moral forces that operated in Jenin, regular and reserve soldiers with motivation and spirit who went out to destroy the infrastructure of terrorism at its capital. Many of the suicide bombers who murdered old people, women, and children in our city streets came from Jenin.

I am proud that we were there and fought, and proud also of our combat ethics. The camp was not bombed from the air, in order to prevent hurting innocent civilians; neither did we use artillery, although we knew of specific areas in the camp where terrorists were hiding out. The soldiers fought the terrorists, and only the terrorists. Before destroying a house from which heavy gunfire was being directed at our soldiers, several warnings were issued and every possibility was given for civilians to get out safely.

Our medical teams treated every wounded person, even if he had Hamas tattoos on his arms. At no stage was medical care withheld from anyone.

This heroic and at the same time moral fighting cost us dearly in the lives of the best of our fighters. We who were there, the soldiers who fell there, their families, and the IDF, don't deserve to be used by Muhammad Bakri to incite the world to murder and hatred.

TOM GROSS

The Massacre That Never Was

[
Written
after the “massacre” reports were discredited. Did the “massacre”
reporters retract?
]

THE STORY OF the British media and Jenin falls into three parts. First, there was the rush to judgment—judgment against Israel. Then there was the refusal to retract once the true facts became known. Finally, there is the continuing failure to publish adequate corrections of the original reports, even though the United Nations—which even Israel's fiercest critics don't accuse of being unduly sympathetic to the Jewish state—has officially confirmed that no massacre took place in Jenin in April, and that the majority of the fifty-two Palestinians killed there (along with twenty-three Israelis) were armed combatants.

Of course, journalists often get things wrong in the heat of the moment, and there isn't the space—or the need—to correct every mistake. But the extraordinary nature of the falsehoods disseminated during the battle of Jenin surely warrants a little introspection on the part of the journalists responsible. You would have thought they would have been moved to ask themselves how they came to harbor such unfair and unfounded views of Israel.

The language initially used by many reporters and commentators in the British media was sweeping and extreme. Israel's actions in Jenin were “every bit as repellent” as Osama bin Laden's attack on New York on September 11, wrote
The
Guardian
in its editorial of April 17. “We are talking here of massacre, and a cover-up, of genocide,” wrote A. N. Wilson in the
Evening Standard,
on April 15. “Rarely in more than a decade of war reporting from Bosnia, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, have I seen such deliberate destruction, such disrespect for human life,” reported Janine di Giovanni, in
The Times,
on April 16.

The “quality” press spoke with almost wall-to-wall unanimity, backing up their views with horror stories which have turned out to be complete fabrications.
The Daily Telegraph,
for example, ran headlines such as HUNDREDS OF VICTIMS “WERE BURIED BY BULLDOZER IN MASS GRAVE,” and gave graphic and entirely false accounts of Palestinians being “stripped to their underwear, searched, bound hand and foot, placed against a wall and killed with single shots to the head.”

Newspapers devoted page upon page, day after day, to tales of mass murders, common graves, summary executions, and war crimes. Israel was compared to the Nazis, to al Qaeda, and to the Taliban. One report even compared the thousands of supposedly missing Palestinians to the “disappeared” of Argentina.

The television coverage was, if anything, worse. The BBC's Orla Guerin cited Palestinians saying that Israelis troops “were scooping dead bodies with bulldozers” and that they had shot Palestinians dead “as they tended sheep.”

But Guerin's language (“Israel is prepared to go all the way,” Israel is committing “terror from above,” “nothing is sacred” for Israel, and so on) reveals only one element of her misreporting. The choice of camera angles, her tone of voice, her facial expressions, the leading questions she asked of Palestinians (“Are you afraid he is going to die?” etc.)—all these gave viewers a very inaccurate picture of what was actually going on.

In comparison, little air time was given to the Israeli version of events, which was available, in meticulous detail, throughout the operation, and scant attention was paid to the twenty-three Israeli deaths in Jenin—still less to the fact that they were evidence of the dangers which the Israeli forces incurred in order to avoid collateral damage to Palestinian civilians. At the same time, Yasser Arafat's representatives were given ample opportunity to air their incredible tales of Israeli atrocities, while both TV and print journalists forgot to remind their viewers that Arafat's spokespeople, like those of the other totalitarian regimes that surround Israel, have a habit of lying a lot.

It is not as if the evidence wasn't there at the time. Some foreign journalists, especially Americans, presented an accurate picture. On April 16, for example, Phil Reeves in
The Independent
was reporting that “A monstrous war crime that Israel has tried to cover up for a fortnight has finally been exposed.” On the same day,
Newsday
's reporter in Jenin, Edward Gargan, wrote: “There is little evidence to suggest that Israeli troops conducted a massacre of the dimensions alleged by Palestinian officials.” Molly Moore of
The Washington Post
reported: “No evidence has yet surfaced to support allegations by Palestinian groups and aid organizations of large-scale massacres or executions.”

The
Los Angeles Times
reported that Palestinians in Jenin “painted a picture of a vicious house-to-house battle in which Israeli soldiers faced Palestinian gunmen intermixed with the camp's civilian population.” Even Egyptian newspapers like
Al-Ahram
provided similar accounts. But not the British media— or, for that matter, the media elsewhere in Western Europe, who with very few exceptions were equally biased.

Few of us find it easy to admit that we have been wrong, so perhaps it is not surprising that apologies weren't forthcoming in April. But with the passage of time one might have hoped for some soul-searching, above all now that the UN report has officially concluded that no massacre took place and charged Palestinian militants with deliberately putting their fighters and equipment in civilian areas in violation of international law. Instead, the perpetrators have just dug themselves in deeper.

In an editorial last Friday (subtitled “Israel is still wanted for questioning”),
The Guardian
wrote: “Israel resorted to random, vengeful acts of terror involving civilians” and added “As we said last April, the destruction wrought in Jenin looked and smelled like a crime. On the basis of the UN's findings, it still does.”

The editorial didn't make mention that the UN report— compiled with input from UN officials, the mayor of Jenin, five UN member states, private relief organizations, and international groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch—stated that the number of Palestinian civilians who died in Jenin was somewhere between 14 and 22, i.e., less than the 29 Israeli civilians killed in the Passover massacre, and the hundreds of others murdered by the 27 other suicide bombers dispatched from Jenin in the months that preceded Israel's incursion.

Likewise
The Independent
. On Saturday, the paper's chief Jerusalem correspondent, Phil Reeves, whose news reports from Jenin in April had extended to 3,000 words, wrote a comment piece on the subject. Reeves could have just said: “Sorry,
Independent
readers, for so badly misleading you.”

But he didn't. Instead he offered up such excuses for his misreporting as: “My report that day—written by candle-light in the damaged refugee home in the camp, where we spent the night—was highly personalised.”

In Israel, Reeves is known for the angry letters he dispatches to those publications which have charged him with bias—not just the rightist
Jerusalem Post,
but the leftist
Ha'aretz,
and the left-leaning
Jerusalem Report
magazine. Instead of being so dismissive of such a wide range of critics, perhaps Reeves should ask himself why his (unedited) news reports from
The Independent,
as well as those of Robert Fisk and some other British journalists, are regularly reproduced alongside articles by David Irving–style American Holocaust deniers in Arab newspapers such as
Asharq Al-Awsat
.

For those of us familiar with the working methods and attitudes of the international media in Israel (I reported there for British and American papers between 1995 and 2001), the rush to false judgment over Jenin came as no surprise. It fits into a deeper pattern of false reporting and systematic bias. But whatever the motives, the damage is likely to be long lasting. Myths have a way of living on, even when the true facts become known; and the myth of Jenin—the massacre that never was— may well continue to poison the atmosphere for years to come.