By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
Becoming a journalist is like moving into a no-man’s land — the ethics of the profession require that a person put aside his or her allegiances and preconceptions to try to report what each sees as fairly as possible. That does not mean that reporters do not have their own ideas about the events they describe or that they can avoid seeing things from a particular viewpoint — they do, after all, remain human beings with all the faults and failings we all share. But the good ones learn to look beyond their prejudices.
Twenty-seven years ago, Khaled Abu Toameh, a young Israeli Arab who had been working for Yasser Arafat, moved into that strange land, after studying journalism at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He did not give up his Muslim faith or his Arab identity in the process, but he did have to surrender the role of advocate and the belief that the world at large, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in particular, could be understood as a struggle between Good and Evil, or Right vs. Wrong. On April 1, he came to Seattle as part of a 10-day tour of the United States, to deliver a dispatch from that undiscovered country.
“My father is an Arab with Israeli citizenship, my mother is a Palestinian from the West Bank, and my career as a journalist started as working for the PLO,” Toameh said by way of an introduction. “For the past 20 years, I’ve been serving as a consultant, fixer, driver, translator, and advisor to most of the foreign journalists who come to that part of the world to cover what happens in the West Bank and Gaza. When I graduated from university, instead of going back to work for the PLO I went to work for the international media and for the Israeli media. I didn’t feel that what we were doing in the PLO was about real journalism.”
Toameh, who came as a guest of the StandWithUs Israel advocacy organization, has reported for publications like the Jerusalem Post, US News & World Report and the Wall Street Journal.
Despite his appreciation of how journalism is practiced in the West, Toameh is not afraid to be critical, particularly when it comes to the many foreign reporters who drop into the Middle East and send back a distorted picture that frames Israel as the aggressor and the Palestinians as victims.
“Maybe some of them are coming with this perception that in this conflict there are good guys and bad guys, and that’s how we’re going to cover this conflict,” he said. “Others come there with no basic knowledge of the history of the area, of the major powers, they just don’t know….Some of the foreign journalists deliberately choose to side with one side or the other. I think I’m the only person in that part of the world who works for the PLO, the Jewish media and for the international media, so I am able to see it from a different perspective.”
In part, he said, this poor reporting may be because the toll of lives is heavily weighted on the Palestinian side and there are fewer Israeli victims of the violent attacks that provoke a harsh Israeli response. He also faults an attitude on the part of the Israelis who think “the whole world is against us,” and that there is little point in making their case in the court of world opinion.
“I don’t have any agenda; I’m not pro-Palestinian, I’m not pro-Israel, I’m just a reporter. As a reporter I stick to the facts and I tell the story as it is,” he said.
The story Toameh tells, however, is not an optimistic one.
“There is no solution to this problem,” he told JTNews before beginning his public talk at Temple De Hirsch Sinai. “The only thing we can hope for is conflict management. On the Palestinian side, Palestinians have raised an entire generation on hatred for Israel, a glorification of martyrdom and jihad.”
That stands in marked contrast to what he sees as positive changes on the Israeli side, in terms of the chance of an eventual agreement.
“Most Israelis don’t really care about the West Bank and Gaza,” he said. “Many Israeli Jews don’t even care about Jerusalem anymore. The last three governments have openly campaigned for a Palestinian state — more than many Palestinians that I know of.”
What makes him most pessimistic about the possibility of a solution in the short term is that he sees the lack of a credible and capable partner for peace on the Palestinian side. Hamas, he notes, is committed to the destruction of the state of Israel, while the Palestinian Authority, led by Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas, has lost credibility with the Palestinian people due to corruption and incompetent management, with no power to deliver on any peace deal they might make.
He says that polls taken among the Palestinians indicate that if there are free and fair elections next year, that Hamas would win again, not because their hard-line position is supported by the majority but because of the failure of Fatah to reform itself and let the younger generation accede to power within the organization — with the tacit support of the U.S., he added.
At the same time, he said that there is a large problem within Israel as a result of the systematic discrimination felt by the 1.5 million Israeli Arabs.
“It’s a very serious problem, because these Israeli Arabs are feeling that there is a policy of systematic discrimination against them, when it comes to providing them with services, with education and employment. That’s why I think we need an emergency plan for affirmative discrimination,” he said. Not that he believes it is all black and white there, either.
“We’re fighting for integration, not for separation. But you open a newspaper today and you see that 76 percent of the Israeli population favor [deportation] of Arabs,” he said. “I think it’s bad for Israel’s security to pit neighbor against neighbor. If you keep treating your neighbor like this, one day he’ll wake up and kill you.
“What’s really funny,” Toameh said, “is that the Israeli government says, ‘Yes, there is a very serious problem.’ Every prime minister that comes to power says, ‘I’m going to solve the problem of the Arabs.’ Then, they don’t do anything.”