TIMES OF ISRAEL
AVI ISSACHAROFF
May 17, 2014
A day after The Times of Israel’s Avi Issacharoff was attacked at a Palestinian demonstration, he reflects on a terrible feeling of helplessness, and an abiding conviction to keep on reporting.
Friday’s attempt by several dozen Palestinians to attack this Times of Israel correspondent and his cameraman colleague while we were covering a Nakba Day demonstration next to Beitunia, west of Ramallah, didn’t particularly surprise me. Neither does it surprise my Israeli colleagues. For quite some time, those of us Israeli journalists reporting on the Palestinian scene have been finding it increasingly difficult to be “there” in the heart of the action in the West Bank, in the Palestinian cities. We’ve been threatened increasingly frequently, told to get out, to go away.
What is different, over the past few months, is that our relationship with Palestinian journalists has changed, cracked. My mentor Danny Rubinstein once said that, during the 100 years of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, two sectors maintained their deep cooperation: the criminals and the journalists. And he was right. But the situation has changed of late.
Partly this stems from an initiative of a group of Palestinian journalists, with political pretensions, to “punish” their Israeli colleagues for the fact that they are denied access to Israel. And it should be stressed, the ban on some of the Palestinian reporters from entering Israel is a phenomenon to be condemned and halted. Nonetheless, the means employed by these young Palestinian journalists to protest this ban — by trying to bar Israeli reporters from Palestinians areas — helps no one.
Keeping Israeli journalists from the West Bank’s Area A — fully controlled by the Palestinian Authority — will not lead to the lifting of the ban on Palestinian journalists from Israel, unfortunately.
What these young Palestinian journalists may not recognize is that for the authorities, the entry of Israeli journalists to PA areas is a headache they’d like to be rid of. More than this, the effort to kick Israeli journalists out of PA areas has created a violent, incendiary atmosphere against us. Almost all of my Israeli colleagues have felt, on their flesh, unpleasant incidents, to put it mildly, of late. Myself included.
But on Friday, a certain red line was crossed. On Friday, the threats and the hostile atmosphere escalated into real violence and, in my case, to an attempt to lynch me.
ArchitectGuy on Israel 