Yesterday we did a piece hammering on the fact that obits of Anthony Shadid, the New York Times correspondent who died in Syria last month, have elided the fact that the Israelis nearly killed him in 2002. The obits say he was shot in 2002. A little like saying Rachel Corrie was killed by a bulldozer. This is from Dave Kindred's fine piece on Anthony Shadid in GQ.
Until the Israeli sniper shot him, it had been a good day. Shadid's notebook was full because he had been eyewitness to a drama that was a perfect metaphor for the latest Israel-Palestine war. He started a long walk back to the hotel. There he would write for his newspaper, The Boston Globe. He was looking at his notes when he realized that his body was falling. He was halfway to the ground before he heard the gunshot.
It was March 31, 2002. Shadid remembered the sky over Ramallah as cemetery gray. Once the bustling hub of a new Palestine, the city was cloaked in silence. War in its third day had emptied the streets. That day, as on all days, Shadid was driven by a reporter's questions: Why? How do I put the pieces of the puzzle together? Here in Ramallah, why did Israel's army wage war against civilians when the nation's prime minister said the objective was to eliminate a' "terrorist infrastructure"?
Shadid had gone to Ramallah Hospital to interview doctors, nurses, ambulances drivers, and humanitarian workers. He wanted to talk to people who had found themselves in harm's way by leading their everyday lives. As he arrived, so did the roar of war. A tank rolled up, and two armored personnel carriers unloaded soldiers. The soldiers rushed toward the hospital with rifles leveled on people who had come outside. Someone said, "This is a hospital!" The soldiers, seemingly in search of an enemy, shouted, "Everyone back, everybody inside!"
Shadid saw it all. The scene spoke to the asymmetry of the conflict Here were doctors in white smocks facing soldiers with M-16s. As an Israeli lieutenant talked to the hospital chief, Shadid listened. In their confrontation, he saw the war. The lieutenant was an army that had to search among civilians for the enemy. The hospital chief was Ramallah, powerless against power.
"The doctor and this Israeli were face-to-face and they were yelling at each other," Shadid said. "I'm standing right next to them. And I'm writing down every word. This was one of those moments. Through it, I could tell the entire story of this fifty-year conflict. I was so excited. This is it. You could see how the entire story would be structured. So excited."
When a peaceful compromise was made, Shadid headed back to his hotel with a colleague, Said al-Ghazali. They walked in the middle of the street lest they raise suspicion by moving along walls. Both wore white flak jackets marked on the back with red-taped "TV," the best-known symbol for international press. He had his notebook in his hands, flipping pages to read notes.
Then he was falling before he heard the gunshot. "It was deafening, like they shot next to my ear," he said. "Probably twenty-five feet away." On the street, he couldn't move. He first thought someone had thrown a stun grenade, a weapon that momentarily paralyzes its target. Then he felt pain on his spine. "Said," he said to his friend, "I think I was shot."
Al-Ghazali was down on the pavement with Shadid, searching for blood. "I don't see anything," he said. Shadid now reached behind his flak jacket and brought back a bloody hand. He thought to tell his wife and infant daughter good-bye. He thought of ambulances that couldn't move on Ramallah's streets. He also thought, "I'll die if I wait for help."
Al-Ghazali carried him twenty yards before they fell. "Journalists!" Al-Ghazali shouted. "Help! Bring us a car!" There was no one in the street, no one could hear them, no one except perhaps the Israeli who shot him. Shadid thought that man might now be watching him struggle toward a vehicle in the street ahead.
"He's wounded!" al-Ghazali shouted.
An Israeli said, "Show us!"
Al-Ghazali turned Shadid so the soldier could see the white flak jacket red with blood. The bullet had passed through Shadid's left shoulder, sheared off part of a spinal column vertebra, and burst through his right shoulder, a classic M-16 wound: tiny on entry, huge on exit. Twelve pieces of shrapnel remained inside the reporter's back. In his Boston apartment years later, I asked Shadid, "Did the guy intend to shoot you?"
"There were rumors that Palestinians were posing as Red Cross workers and journalists. I don't think if they knew I was an American journalist that I'd have been shot. They might have, who knows? They can be rough on journalists. I think they wanted to teach a lesson. 'Here's what we're going to do to people acting as journalists.'"
"God," I said.
"A cold-blooded execution."
"From point-blank range," I said.
"They were looking to kill me. Crazy, but reading my notes may have saved my life. I think they were aiming at my head, and I moved my head down looking at my notes."
"The M-16 wound makes you sure an Israeli did it?"
"Yes. And the Israelis were in complete control of that area that day."
It seems it’s much safer to not look Palestinian, whatever that means. Although in our case here, it may have been media that was targeted and not “the enemy”.
Shooting Palestinian civilians is Israeli policy. Don’t just lay the blame on ill-disciplined IDF troops.
“Ali Murad Abu Shaweesh was 12 when Israeli soldiers shot him in the back. Ali was killed on the same day in June, 2001 that Sharon refused to let the Israeli foreign minister, Shimon Peres, meet with Yasir Arafat, yet his death also went unnoticed by American television news. But not entirely unnoticed, since the Israeli soldiers, who taunted the Palestinian boys over loudspeakers outside the Khan Yunis refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, goading them to come out and throw rocks, did so under the gaze of Chris Hedges, a reporter for the New York Times.
“Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered–death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights…in Sarajevo–but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport,” Hedges wrote. His account, coolly factual yet full of passionate intensity, was written not for his own paper but for Harper’s Magazine, which sent Hedges to Gaza on his vacation.” The Nation, March 11, 2002
Perhaps it bears reminding that Mr. Shadid died while trying to cover the slaughter in Syria.
yes, and please do not presume to he would have filed the kind of report you would have been happy with. for anyone following events from syria would know the opposition is not entirely homegrown, not in the least. who is it who supports arabs killing eachother and is currently pressuring obama to invade?
Annie. Your comment above is rather opaque and I could not follow.
Could you please be a little more precise as to ‘who it is who supports Arabs killing each other and is currently pressuring Obama to invade?’
link to thecable.foreignpolicy.com
if you would like to learn more about Foundation for the Defense of Democracies:
link to sourcewatch.org
note the reference to National Endowment for Democracy:
link to sourcewatch.org
Mr. Shadid showed his great animus towards Israel, when he falsely included the Israel-Palestine conflict as a cause of the Arab Spring revolt.
link to nytimes.com
Oh no, great animus towards Israel! How dare he??
Animus towards Israel and indifference to Arab on Arab violence are the two entrees to Mondoweiss.
In your fantasy world.
alleged arab violence. don’t forget you are arguing downthread it is justified to kill someone based on merely the suspicion of a possibility of terrorism. the casualness with which you defend the indefensible is alarming really.
indifference to Arab on Arab violence
a staple of hasbara, divert away from israel’s constant violent intransigence.
I wasn’t arguing or defending anything downthread. I was only highlighting what Shadid himself speculated were the reasons why he had been shot.
“..a staple of hasbara, divert away from Israel’s constant violent intransigence.”
According to the prime minister of the P.A., the Arab Spring is diverting attention away from the Palestinians, not hasbarists.
“The biggest challenge we face — apart from occupation — is marginalization,” Salam Fayyad, prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, said in an interview. “This is a direct consequence of the Arab Spring where people are preoccupied with their own domestic affairs. The United States is in an election year and has economic problems, Europe has its worries. We’re in a corner.”
Shadid was more nuanced than you. You don’t think Arabs in general couldn’t have been disgusted with multiple things? For instance, that Egyptians weren’t disgusted with Mubarak’s collaboration with Israel in the Gaza siege? It’s possible to hold two thoughts in your head at once, pz77. Ordinary Arabs are probably concerned first and foremost with their own domestic affairs, but it doesn’t mean that, in the case of Egypt, they weren’t concerned about the I/P conflict and their own government’s role in it.
pz, multiple polls have revealed the i/p conflict is a major thorn in the side of populations across the middle east. it cannot be ignored. to alleged the arab spring was not impacted by the relationship of people’s repressive governments to those governments relationship with the US with the intention of protecting israel is silly.
shadid wasn’t wrong, he was prescient. less than ten days after he wrote the article you linked to the palestinian papers were released, on janurary 23. according to link to en.wikipedia.org ” Mubarak resigned on 11 February 2011 after 18 days of massive protests.”
can you count? palestinians are not divorced from the arab spring and neither is israel. the release of those documents rippled across the world. just because our msm ignored them doesn’t mean we did or everyone else did. and even had they not been released the angst is there, present everyday all across the region. there is resentment for americas support for israel and what that support has meant, repression for the people from their dictators we prop up.
and why shouldn’t he show his animus for israel? why shouldn’t all decent honorable people show their animus for war crimes and apartheid and the inhumane treatment of palestinians from the criminal state of israel. just because israel is coddled by our msm doesn’t mean rational people should coddle israel.
RE: “That day, as on all days, Shadid was driven by a reporter’s questions: Why? How do I put the pieces of the puzzle together? Here in Ramallah, why did Israel’s army wage war against civilians when the nation’s prime minister said the objective was to eliminate a’ ‘terrorist infrastructure’?” ~ Kindred in GQ
FROM WIKIPEDIA:
ALSO SEE: Jenin Jenin (VIDEO, 53:56) – link to youtube.com
FROM YouTube:
RE: “‘Jenin Jenin’ shows the extent to which the prolonged oppression and terror has affected the state of mind of the Palestinian inhabitants of Jenin.” ~ from YouTube, above
FROM ALISTAIR CROOKE, London Review of Books, 03/03/11:
SOURCE – link to lrb.co.uk
ALSO SEE: Learned helplessness - link to en.wikipedia.org
“There were rumors that Palestinians were posing as Red Cross workers and journalists. I don’t think if they knew I was an American journalist that I’d have been shot.”
Assuming Israeli troops shot Mr. Shadid, they shot him because they suspected he might be a terrorist.
suspicion of a possibility– what a beautiful standard of proof you are defending, proud, for the death penalty
I’m not defending anything. I’m merely pointing out the nugget of truth in your anti-Israel screed.
and you reveal the truth about the racist apartheid policies of the state of israel
they shot him because they suspected he might be a terrorist.
that is preemption, but israel always frames it as responding. reminds me of link to mondoweiss.net
I very much doubt they thought he was a terrorist, with TV emblazoned on his flak jacket. Israel has plenty form in targetting journalists, particularly those who report the truth as they witness it. Anybody is fair game for Israeli snipers for the simple reason that they are immune to any punishment, and will always find a justification/feeble excuse for their actions. Tom Hurndall, James Miller, Rachel Corrie ,Ala Mortija, Nael Shyouki, Mohammed Omer, Imad Ghanem, UN observers…the list goes on
link to ajr.org
PZ777, suspecting Shadid of being a “terrorist” might be a defense if it weren’t that people like you (I mean many zionists) believe that unborn Palestinians children are terrorists, and justify killing pregnant women on that basis.
Here’s ‘fun fact’ Phil isn’t likely to post.
March 14, 2002, two weeks before Mr. Shadid was shot, a group of journalists traveling in an AP armored car came under fire from Palestinian gunmen in Ramallah. According to the AP, the gunmen fired on the car for about 30 seconds, puncturing the vehicle’s tires. No one was injured. The gunmen later told the reporters that they had opened fire after hearing a report that Israeli soldiers were driving around in a vehicle with “TV” markings–a rumor Israeli officials vehemently denied.
link to ajr.org
PZ, according to your ajr link, 12 incidents, 8/12 and almost certainly 9/12 the perpetrators of violence against journalists were Israeli soldiers, some of them lethal. 2/12 by Palestinians, one clearly violence by Palestinians, another, the Palestinians confiscated some news footage. 1/12 was violence by unknown perpetrators.
Your link clearly shows who perpetrates most of the violence against journalists in the West Bank. It’s the Israelis.