Do TV Cameras Set Off Violence in Middle East ?

RAMALLAH, Israeli-Occupied West Bank —  Is the charge true, some Palestinians were asked, that demonstrators in the occupied areas are motivated by television?

“I think this is nonsense,” Palestinian attorney and writer Raja Shihadeh said in his comfortable office here. “I don’t think the people are doing things for the camera.”

That’s not to say Palestinians protesting against Israel--in ways ranging from chants and insults to throwing stones and firebombs--don’t have at least some instinct for political theater.

“Even a 3-year-old kid knows how to use the media,” insists CNN cameraman Eytan Harris.

Says a Western radio reporter who has been covering the Middle East: “Sometimes I think this is a remarkably sophisticated population. I was talking to one Palestinian youth and he said, ‘We must go on and on and on so that the world will remember.’

“When I told him they did remember after Sabra and Shatilla (in Lebanon), he said, ‘Yes, but they forgot. So we must go on and on until they remember again.’ ”

A Palestinian with Western media connections, moreover, recalls being told upon entering a small West Bank village recently: “We have been demonstrating here for four weeks. Can you find us a journalist?”

The demonstrations and related violence go on, however--reporters or not, cameras or not. So there appears to be little evidence to support charges that the news media are the instigators.

CNN Bureau Chief Robert Wiener was with a camera crew that encountered hundreds of Palestinians already formed for a demonstration, readying flags and setting out nails to hinder the Israeli army.

“When we got out of the car and started taping them, they started chanting ‘PLO, Israel no!’ Does the fact that they started chanting mean that we created the situation? I don’t think so.”

Tuesday morning, the army was again heavily patrolling this town just north of Jerusalem, a routine sight for the many kids milling on the streets.

One, 11-year-old Muhammad, was asked if he was excited by TV cameras.

“Yes,” he replied, surrounded by other children, some only toddlers. Why? “Because TV shows pictures of how they (soldiers) beat kids.”

Is he told to demonstrate for the cameras? “No,” Muhammad answered. “It’s our nature.”

Everyone has a nature here. “What they say to you?” a young Israeli officer wanted to know about the children. He was standing across the street with other troops.

The media “have contributed to the violence,” he said. “What the Arabs want is international TV. How can they get it without the cameras?”

Ironically, the Israeli officer can agree with Shihadeh the Arab on the news media’s positive role as an observer or witness--while still disagreeing on the result.

If not for the media, the army would do “horrors,” Shihadeh said. “They wouldn’t hesitate.”

If not for the media, “the Palestinians would say there is heavy massacre here,” the soldier said. “Now they cannot say it.”

Of course, they do say it anyway. And the scores of Palestinian deaths in this conflict occurred when the media were not present.

Despite what some may say, “very few people here make the connection between a camera and what they expect to see on TV,” said Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab. “They don’t understand so much the power of TV.”

On the road between Ramallah and Nablus is the hilly village of Yutma, where kids, when asked by visitors, cheerfully demonstrate their proficiency at slingshotting rocks toward imaginary Israeli army targets.

The media have not been to Yutma, villagers say. No TV cameras. No still photographers. Not even reporters with notebooks or tape recorders.

But Yutma still demonstrates.

The last time was the Arab observance of Land Day on March 30, during a three-day government ban on media and other outsiders entering the territories.

“We don’t demonstrate for cameras,” Yazeed the cheese merchant said outside his shop. “We would like to go on a march, but soldiers don’t allow us. So it turns into stone throwing.”

Yazeed, 23, does believe that Americans watch the demonstrations on TV, however, “because Americans are interested in Israel.”

About 45 minutes later in the city of Nablus, seven young Palestinian activists, from ages 20 to 34, and with apparent sympathies for Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), sat in a newspaper office, where they agreed to discuss the media on the condition that they not be identified. So the names of those quoted here are not their real names.

The men ranged from a carpenter to a university teacher. Some had spent time in Israeli jails. Some lived in refugee camps.

None would admit to participating in demonstrations, only to “knowing the atmosphere” of demonstrations.

Are demonstrations planned with cameras in mind?

“Absolutely no,” Radwan said.

“Uprisings and demonstrations are made whether there is media or not,” said Ibrahim. “People who are active in uprisings do not have the background of propaganda.”

“I don’t think it’s an issue--to change the slogans for the media,” Yusef said.

Radwan said there was something that needed emphasizing. “It’s the media’s concerns, not mine, to catch the news. It is not our choice (option) to tell the mass media we have a demonstration. You cannot do it. You are not in a democracy here. It is like El Salvador.”

Yes, but surely, if given the chance, don’t they use the media as a stage to reach an international audience?

“The press can play a great role in showing the world who’s the real victim,” Salem said. And there was agreement that international coverage of the uprisings has boosted the Palestinian cause.

But no one here was applauding the media. Said Abu: “The press has a long way to go to balance the biased reporting that has been done against Palestinians so many years.”

“And television still doesn’t show the entire picture,” Ibrahim claimed. “They don’t show the peaceful beginning of a demonstration, only the stones.”

Shihadeh, the philosopher and intellectual in Ramallah, agrees that the media are master of their own reality.

“If something is not picked up by the media, it doesn’t happen,” he said. “The media doesn’t pick up the psychological things. In my own case, I am asked if there have been beatings and things, and of course, the answer is no. But my life is most unimaginable now, because every few hours I get hit by another (piece of) news.

“I get a call from a client. Suddenly he is surrounded and the army is trying to break in. They ask what can I do. Well, what can I do? You’re finished with that and you hear somebody was beaten at a roadblock and a neighbor asks if you can help. And, of course, you can’t help. It goes through your body.”

He is right that TV mostly shows the obvious, not the psychological scars and the underlying daily tensions. Yet the reality that cameras do show here makes them as potent a Palestinian weapon as the stones flying through the air.