Before going to Cairo last month, I made it a point to seek out Ashraf Khalil, whose journalism on the conflict in the LA Times earned him a wide reputation for fairness. A man of large spirit, Khalil (left) introduced me to other journalists, brought me to a place I could actually get a beer, and made me feel completely at home. Last week we picked up a piece by Mohammed Omer, the Palestinian journalist who was tortured by Israeli border security on returning to Gaza from England last year after winning the Martha Gellhorn prize. Omer referred to Khalil's coverage of the episode— in fact the best piece to appear in American mainstream media– though he criticized Khalil for including an Israeli explanation of certain injuries. I asked Ashraf if he had anything to say. He writes:
The case of Mohammed Omer was my first sobering glimpse of what it’s really like to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for a major western news outfit. In the end, it proved to be a window into why stories like this simply don’t get told very often.
When the first reports emerged, it seemed like a hot-button story that much of the massive Jerusalem press core would jump on: A prominent Gazan journalist returns fresh from a European tour where he received a prestigious award and met with several European parliamentarians.
He enters the Allenby Bridge border crossing between Jordan and the occupied West Bank with a Dutch diplomat waiting on the West Bank side to escort him back to Gaza. He emerges from the terminal in a wheelchair, semi-coherent, and is never quite the same again.
Hot stuff, right? Well, no.
The media coverage of the incident was genuinely puzzling to me. A couple of angry articles from European leftists who took Omer’s entire account as gospel truth and a few matter-of-fact mainstream accounts that were basically glorified briefs. But nobody seemed inclined to actually investigate the issue.
I was just a few months into what would turn out to be a one-year run as Jerusalem correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. Perhaps my more seasoned colleagues recognized quickly what I was still too new and naïve to grasp. Put simply, the story was a swamp—something that would require months of investigation to properly unravel, then prompt a horrendous clash with their editors and probably never see daylight in any kind of satisfying form.
And that’s exactly what it turned out to be.
I couldn’t prove what happened to Omer inside the Allenby terminal, so I didn’t even try. What I COULD prove, after months of digging, was that the resulting Israeli investigation of the incident was a threadbare joke.
The official Israeli report on the incident essentially called Omer an attention-seeking liar. Omer’s claims were “found to be without foundation” and the report expresses “doubts about the sincerity of the situation.” Translation: he made it all up.
But the Israeli authorities never even attempted to interview Omer, and never interviewed the paramedic who brought Omer from the Allenby terminal to a nearby hospital. As far as I could tell, the Israeli government basically interviewed its own officers. One Israeli official told me with a straight face that they didn’t really need to interview the victim of the alleged assault since they could just read his account in the various news reports.
So after fussing over the story for more than a month, knowing that something like this had to be airtight to protect against a CAMERA campaign, I filed a story calling the Israeli investigation of the incident “insincere” and “deeply flawed at best.”
My editors hated it, prompting a several-week staring contest while the story sat in limbo. One editor (my single favorite editor on the foreign desk and someone I would love to work with again) found it to be hopelessly biased. I argued, to no avail, that if the exact same set of circumstances and evidence surrounded a Los Angeles Police Department investigation of a high-profile abuse allegation, we would have crucified them on the front page.
In the end, the truth of what happened to Mohammed Omer was sacrificed on the altar of the false deity known as “balance”. He’s hardly alone, and the basic steps of the process are grindingly familiar to all observers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
*Alleged Palestinian Victim X makes such and such claims of abuse, discrimination or torture.
*The Israeli government “investigates” and releases an official report on nice shiny letterhead concluding that the alleged victim’s claims are unfounded.
*It all just fades away into the murky mists of “conflicting accounts.”
But here’s the thing: Can it really be “conflicting accounts” if one of the sides is lying and you can prove it?
The same process applies in the diplomatic sphere. The Dutch government (under whose protection Omer
was permitted to travel from Gaza) was livid about what happened and demanded an inquiry. But once the Israelis countered with their investigation results, the Dutch were trapped. The government could either fold or prompt a full-scale diplomatic dispute by publicly calling the Israelis liars. Naturally they folded.
Eventually I came to an agreement with my editors, and a heavily truncated version of my article ran more than three months after the incident. The resulting article, while it went much further than any other report, still leaves me feeling dissatisfied. It feels like it was written by a diligent and conscientious robot.
Bear in mind, the LAT has the most balanced coverage of Israel/Palestine of any of the big American papers. The flaws and constraints I'm pointing to are systemic.
Reading it again more than a year after the incident, it’s still frustrating and dispiriting. What’s worse is the suspicion that if I had stayed on in Jerusalem and was presented with similar abuse allegation, I might not have taken up the case with such tenacity.
Knowing how these things turn out, it simply wouldn’t have been worth the effort.
