The Information Blockade: The Prism Between Middle Eastern Reality and Americans

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People and the Land by Award winning filmmaker, Tom Hayes. (57 minutes) (1997)

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People and the Land
Tom Hayes, 1997, 57 minutes
"People and the Land" takes viewers into the universe of the occupied people of Palestine, unreeling images of a new form of apartheid based on ethnicity. Challenging US foreign policy, this film examines the concrete realities of Israel's conduct in the West Bank and Gaza, the level of US support for that conduct through foreign aid, and the human cost of that aid in Palestine and the US. The result is a powerful and compelling portrayal of the situation that highlights the human rights violations against the Palestinian community.
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The Information Blockade
The Prism Between Middle Eastern Reality and Americans

Filmmaker Tom Hayes describes the censorship, or information blockade, that he faced in every step of the creation and distribution of his award-winning film ‘Palestine is Still the Issue.’

http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2007/01/1733768.php

by Tom Hayes, Emmy award-winning filmmaker Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2007 at 10:29 PM

Filmmaker Tom Hayes who won an Emmy Award for reporting on the killing fields in Cambodia recounts the enormous difficulties encountered when trying to film and distribute a documentary on Palestinians. "I remember quite clearly the morning I stepped into that black hole marked Palestine. It’s funny how the pivotal moments of our lives are so innocuous, so little preparatory fanfare...."

“Are there really goblins Daddy? Reelee?” It’s already dark in her room. Four, going on five, she’s got a tight grip on my hand, suspecting the answer might be scary. Still in reentry from a couple of months filming in Occupied Palestine, it’s taking me a long time to answer.

Lying here with three tons of hot night on my back in Jenin. Hell-bound Palestinian mosquitoes are relentlessly trying to carry me away. Slapping noises from the other guys’ rooms indicate a multi-pronged attack. The crew and I are staying in a house almost directly across the road from an Israeli military camp. The reason I am awake is not so much the mosquitoes or the heat.

Screams periodically rip through the barbed wire of the camp across the road.

Jenin is a good-sized market town in the northern West Bank. Sweeping down steep slopes leading to an open plain, it is densely lived in, picturesquely compact. Roman aqueducts, occupation, Marlboros. Jenin was slugging it out with the Israeli occupation.

The screams, a man’s screams, come about every 5 minutes. Sometimes closer. He sounds like a large man, the low pitch the screams start with as they uncoil into the darkness of my room.

Co-producer Riad Bahhur and I had traveled up from our base in Jerusalem on a fair bet that Jenin would be the scene of demonstrations the next morning. It would be the anniversary of the Sabra/Shatilla massacre in Israeli-occupied Beirut—and the anniversary of the signing of the Camp David sellout as well. What a stunning coincidence that the massacre took place on the same date as the Camp David signing.

There were the screams themselves—and then the reaction of Jenin’s dogs—that gnawed against my sleep. With each scream that rose from the Army camp, dogs in the neighborhood began baying, and as they bayed, dogs farther away would pick up the cry, then dogs farther yet. The alarm expanded up the slopes of Jenin like waves hitting a reef. A terrible sound: grief and empathy, warning and dread.

Inside the wire there was no sound of empathy all that long scorching night.

Years later I’m sitting in the studio of Detroit’s PBS station doing a program that will immediately follow the broadcast of People and the Land. The follow-up will be a half-hour program to—what, calm people down? “update” the one-hour program? I gather from the moderator’s tone that the real intent is to denigrate my journalistic style. I’m doing my level best to be polite.

A member of the station’s board, who is also associated with the Anti-Defamation League, threatened to resign when his opposition to the broadcast was overridden. Detroit was something like the fifteenth (of 283 PBS affiliate stations) to broadcast People and the Land.

The broadcast of People in Miami seemed to take the ADL League by surprise. Maybe the program director failed to solicit ADL’s approval. Abraham Foxman, ADL’s National Director, issued a press release condemning People and the Land and howling outrage at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for letting it get funded in the first place. The Detroit Jewish press called me an “amateur filmmaker with a history of anti-Israeli films.”

Well you might ask how in God’s name I got my leg caught in this thing.

In the late 70s I made a film about displaced Indochinese people who were eventually resettled in the United States. The documentary followed a single family, the Nouts, starting with their life in the camp and staying with them through their first year in the United States.

My arrival in Thailand coincided with artillery attacks by the Vietnamese Occupation Army in Cambodia against the camps on the Thai side of the border. Khmer Rouge resistance fighters were thought to be stashing their weapons and going into refugee camps where food and medical care were available on a sort of “non-denominational” basis. The fighters would get patched up and fed, then go back into Cambodia and kill Vietnamese soldiers. The Vietnamese Army expressed its displeasure with 122 mm. shells.

Refugee camps are purposely impermanent constructions—places to drain off humanity into the sky. There is no safe place to hide but sewage-filled trenches when high explosives come screaming in. More than half the population of any refugee camp on the planet is children. You connect the dots—refugee camps, artillery, and children—the results are utterly and ruthlessly predictable. That trip left an impression like a tattoo on my neocortex.

The resulting film, Refugee Road, was broadcast nationally on PBS. It was picked up again by WNET, the New York City PBS affiliate, for a series on immigrants that was broadcast during the rededication of the Statue of Liberty. Never once, in all the screenings of Refugee Road I attended, was the term “balance” ever mentioned.

Six months after Refugee Road was released Kamphong Nout, the protagonist, died in agony of complications from surgery. My family and the Nout family had over time melded as one. Kamphong’s death here in the States, after the hell he and his family had already endured, overwhelmed me. I decided filmmaking was a worthless waste of time. I began picking up courses at Ohio State, prerequisites for medical school I had missed as an undergrad. I suppose it was the helplessness I had felt in the face of Kamphong’s pain.

I was supporting myself working freelance on commercials and industrial films, doing school part time. I remember quite clearly the morning I stepped into that black hole marked Palestine. It’s funny how the pivotal moments of our lives are so innocuous, so little preparatory fanfare. I’m having a cup of coffee before class, two newspapers before me—The New York Times and The Columbus Dispatch. I read a story in the Times that goes something like this, “Israel launches air strike against guerrilla stronghold in southern Lebanon, 6 dead.”

I didn’t think much of it. There wasn’t much of it—an inch of copy. I’d seen hundreds of nearly identical inch-long stories without blinking. I reach for the Dispatch: “Israel launches air strike against Rashidiyya, a Palestinian guerrilla stronghold in southern Lebanon.” And I look up. Just across the dining room table I’ve tacked up a map of all the refugee camps.

And I’m looking right at the word Rashidiyya with a little symbol that says it’s a refugee camp. My mind travels at the speed of light back to the Cambodian border, and I’m confused. Israel—the Israel I was so smugly sure of—would never bomb a refugee camp. I know from bombing refugee camps. The shining city on the hill simply wouldn’t do that. And I seemed to sense the camouflage that the term “guerrilla stronghold” provided to the act of bombing men, women and children in a refugee camp. I became very curious about who these Palestinians were and how they happened to be in refugee camps and why was the English language evading these journalists?

So I read everything I could get my hands on, from Menachem Begin to Fawaz Turki. I sought out Palestinians and talked to them about what I’d read and about their lives. If you know anyone who’s doing that—informing themselves on this issue, and talking to actual Palestinians—warn them: ROAD CLOSED, PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK. Knowledge may very well be power; I have bet my life on that premise. But ignorance may provide a better night’s sleep.

Sleep escaped me all through that long night of screaming in Jenin. It was over breakfast a couple of hours later that the shooting started. I’d heard shooting before. I learned the basic rhythm of heavy artillery in Thailand: whump, wait, sweat, slam. It’s peculiar how your threshold of terror rises, and amazing how quickly it can fall. That’s where all that reading and talking to actual Palestinians will land you.

The more I had read, the weirder the world seemed to have gotten. Strange stuff about displaced people not being allowed to return to their homes, two-tier legal systems, international law being used as toilet paper.

The more I dug up, the more peculiar I found the stories that came out of the public (NPR/PBS) and corporate media—as though a huge crevasse had swallowed all reality relating to Palestine.

Palestine was not alone in that respect. In 1981 there wasn’t a serious national dialogue on South African apartheid either. This reality gap—and I’ve met lots of Palestine veterans who have experienced the sensation—is a constant irritation. Like all your underwear is too tight. You can’t pick up a paper, or watch the news without the deformity of language hitting you in the face. An Orwellian soiree: war is peace, “occupation” tethered to “benign,” state terrorism cloaked in “security.”

While I was working on Refugee Road I had a long look at how selfless individual Americans could be when they knew the truth. Three quarters of a million people were resettled, in a volunteer effort, from those terrible camps to America. It was something.

And why? Because Americans met those folks through their televisions, and they heard their stories and saw their living conditions. Other issues aside, my people had reached out and at least ameliorated a human catastrophe.

That was the context that brought me to consider producing a documentary about the situation of Palestinian refugees. It was really two decisions.

I wasn’t just setting out to clue up Americans who I had faith would respond when they had information on the human side of these issues. I was also setting out to test the hypothesis that there was some kind of too-tight tourniquet on information about the Palestinian experience. Don’t get me wrong, I was still incredibly naive in 1981 about the power I was poking at.

During the fund-raising period of that project (released as Native Sons: Palestinians in Exile) I had my first encounter with what I have come to think of as The Information Blockade—yes capitalized, definitely.

I was a credible applicant, having had Refugee Road broadcast nationally. As difficulties arose in raising funds to film in Lebanon, I talked extensively with PBS about their strictures on funding from what they like to call “sources with a direct interest in the topic.” To PBS, the more “controversial” the content of a program, the more inadmissible funding from “sources with a direct interest in the topic.” Of course what constitutes “controversial” is a wholly subjective and fundamentally political judgment.

A program on Indochinese refugees was not “controversial” because it was positive on government-endorsed resettlement. I intended to approach a program on the Palestinian refugee experience in the same way I had approached Refugee Road—portraits of individuals’ lives. But this was seen as controversial. Same filmmaker, same human issues. Different ethnic group, different definition.

PBS’s tolerance of funding sources with a “direct interest” is applied on a sliding scale. For example if you watch “This Old House” you may see an Owens/Corning funding credit. Oddly enough the logo on insulation going into the walls of that old house has the funder’s name on it. You couldn’t fantasize a funder with a more direct interest in the program.

PBS let me know that funding for Native Sons from any organization with even a peripheral “interest” in the topic would “taint” such a “controversial” program.

This sliding scale at PBS sounds like good policy for “protecting” the viewer, but in fact it narrows the diversity of viewpoints. The problem is that information on some issues, like Palestinian human rights, has been so systematically distorted that virtually no funder without a direct interest is going to touch it.

Jo Franklin-Trout was publicly crucified for allegedly accepting “tainted funding” when she brought her program on the intifada, Days of Rage, to PBS. Fortunately she had a prior commitment to air from PBS, which felt compelled to begin the program with a graphic detailing the allegations against her.

It took two years to generate enough “clean” funding (spell that n-o-n-A-r-a-b) to go into production on Native Sons. Most of the grants were from the Ohio Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. Hoorah for peer panel review. UNRWA was providing some logistical support and I had borrowed heavily against our home to make up the balance of the budget.

With nine months of colloquial Arabic study under my belt, I took off for Lebanon, to be followed in two weeks by the soundman and the rest of the equipment. It seems crazy in retrospect. I didn’t have any real contacts, had never visited the country before. Six people had died in shelling at the Beirut airport the day before I flew into it.

Like many non-Palestinians I’ve met who do solidarity work for Palestinian human rights (they’re a kind of Abe Lincoln Brigade, ala Spain), there is a sense that history will not allow you to walk away; that once the lights go on you bear a responsibility to yourself and your fellow beings to do the work. Doesn’t mean you’re not afraid, you just have to swallow it. Gandhi articulated the issue perfectly: “When you know the truth, the truth makes you a soldier.”

That aside, the Palestinian camps in Lebanon were a soul-crushing experience. Maybe it was the proximity to artillery impacts, or that smell that would come out of the ground in Shatilla Camp on hot days. The thousand awful things . . . its not always the big things that chew your brain.

“It’s okay, it’s going to be okay, honey.” My wife is shaking me, trying to bring me up. I’ve been yelling in my sleep again. Sitting up in bed I’m trembling, sweat dripping off my elbows. For nearly a year after returning I was having a recurrent nightmare of an experience in Beirut, altered slightly to include members of my family.

Late August 1983. The Lebanese Army is randomly shelling West Beirut to put the Amal militia back in its place. The morning started with a small arms battle around the apartment building where John McClintock (the other half of the crew) and I are staying. We’re sitting behind equipment cases stacked in front of the windows to keep flying glass out of our bodies.

There’s the thump of the artillery piece sending a shell our way. “Three,” pause, ”two,” long pull on a cigarette, we count the shell down. The sound of ripping air then a tremendous explosion in an upper floor of a building two doors away. There are the initial startled screams that follow every close hit and then another sound starts.

“UmmiUmmiUmmi!”—“MommyMommyMommy!” Hysterical cries of two young children erupt from the wrecked apartment. It’s very close. We can hear that they are young, probably preschoolers. They don’t stop crying and calling for their mother. They just don’t stop.

There seems to be a lull in the shelling and I resolve to go over, hoping there’s something I can do. There must be something. The pain and terror in the children’s cries, the not knowing. Are they trapped in the rubble? Is their mother?

I never made the 50 feet to the door of their building. Walking into the street I see another man up at the corner. Two thumps from the artillery pieces. We glance toward each other, a momentary exchange, a look that says “what do we do now?” He ducks around the corner. I jump for the cover of some parked cars. The first shell hits at the corner killing him.

The second shell explodes behind me, the shock wave seeming to hammer the dust in the air straight through my skin. Shrapnel holes the cars. Gasoline pours from ruptured gas tanks into the gutter and ignites. Cars are exploding one after the other, chasing the burning gas, coming toward me like giant footsteps. I run. Not knowing where I’m going, not knowing that I’m running.

Past the corner, he’s lying there, a wet mess in the rubble of the street. Some people are trying to drag him out of the street. More thumps from the guns. Someone is yelling at me “two-by-two, they’re sending them in two-by-two!” People peering out windows duck for cover. Everyone scatters and I run faster.

Finally I’m pulled off the street and into a basement by some Nigerian students who press cigarettes and bottled water on me. Completely lost in the city, it takes me a long time to quit shaking.

It was that man’s last look, and that corner, and the cries of those children that came clawing into my dreams night after night when I got back to the States. It would be my brother on that corner, or my mom in that apartment. I was afraid of sleep for a while. It took about a year for me to be comfortable back here in Disneyland, to quit flinching when doors slammed behind me. To quit wanting to strangle Americans who whined to me about their “problems”—the landlord, their shitty job, a big cable bill. I live in wonder at my freedom and the modest comfort of my life. The absence of artillery, or automatic weapons fire, having a real roof, being able to work to feed my family. They’re not little things.

One of the families that I filmed in Lebanon lived in Rashidiyya camp. It was, after all, news about that camp that had beckoned me to the topic in the first place. Abu Hussein’s family had one son studying in the U.S. and the rest of the family was working to keep him in school.

The Israeli Army occupied Rashidiyya at that time, so the family went to pains to hide John and me when foot patrols came through.

One day Yehyah, one of the older sons, took John and me for a walk. We passed some flattened PLO sentry posts and made our way to a great stone-walled pool that some previous occupier had left behind centuries before. It still held water. As we tight rope walked the stones along the edge of the reservoir, Yehyah began explaining his life to me.

He couldn’t work because he was Palestinian, not Lebanese. He couldn’t own property for the same reason. He couldn’t go to school in Beirut because he wouldn’t make it past the Israeli and Phalange checkpoints. At that point even leaving the country was impossible. As a young Palestinian male, he wouldn’t survive a trip to Beirut or Damascus. His life was stuck like a bug in amber, legally null-and-void.

Rashidiyya Camp was my point of entry into the Palestinian culture of the Exile—the Catastrophe—and a stereotype shatterer as well.

One night when I was there, nearly a dozen high-school-age Palestinians broke curfew and dodged the Israeli foot patrols so they could sit with John and me and discuss questions from their English literature text. It seems absurd to tell, but those kids were so intent on their education that they risked beatings and bullets to quiz “native speakers.” The boys sat on one side of the vine-covered courtyard, the girls on the other. Munching fresh grapes, we mulled over their questions. Such serious questions, such pointed interest in the nuance of language. Oh, that my own children may become such careful stewards of their minds.

Prior to Lebanon I had never encountered Palestinian hospitality. My Arabic teacher had insisted I learn how to eat, and drink, and about basic manners, but the idea of a culture of hospitality had evaded me.

Yehyah’s family was large, thirteen children in the house, and keeping all those tummies full was no small task for his father, Abu Hussein. Yet the day John and I wrapped up the filming with them, the family cooked up one of their five chickens, a good layer, in our honor. I felt terrible. Here they were in this dread situation blowing their limited resources on a couple of pampered Americans. Well, it really was their pleasure so we all enjoyed it.

There have been so many experiences like that over the years that accepting hospitality became, by necessity, part of the production schedule: “first we’ll have coffee, then film a little. Then we’ll have juice, and film a little. Then we’ll turn off the camera and just talk through a carton or so of smokes. Then dinner. So we can’t travel tonight.”

Once while filming in Deheisha Camp during the intifada, Dorothy Thigpen, assistant cameraperson on that trip, commented that the tray our juice had been served on was lovely. The next thing she knew the tray was being handed to her. “We want you to have it. No, we insist!” Dorothy was mortified at the time, but she has that tray today. There was no escape without it.

One day we dragged our equipment to the edge of a wind blown precipice that gave a good angle on the newly built Wadi Naar (Valley of Fire) road. Israel cut the road to route non-chosen humans around Jerusalem. It plunges into a desert valley so steep and menacing that I wouldn’t drive it without a parachute. If your brakes go you’ll be airborne.

We’d been standing on this lonely ridge filming the cars and taxis struggling up and down that roller coaster road for half an hour when a young boy appeared, tromping over a distant rise with a tray of hot coffee (little cups, lots of cardamom—sensational) and a pack of smokes. For us. Out of thin air. Like some great hospitality genie dropped him from the sky. We had to laugh . . . and drink coffee, and share a smoke.

It is such an important lesson, experiencing Palestinian hospitality, one of those “facts on the ground” that anyone can test. And when you’ve tested it then you’re really confronted with the steepness of the slant in American media, the depth of the cultural slander. I am, after all, a member of the community directly responsible for their oppression. Those gracious expressions of acceptance I experienced somehow make the whole situation even sadder—that this culture of all cultures should be singled out for the role of demon.

Within the Occupied Territories there is a broad sense among Palestinians that the most powerful weapon in their hands is the truth. The camera was not only welcome, but people would take considerable personal risk to make sure we got out with our film.

It is the morning after the night of the screaming in Jenin. Riad, John and I are having coffee on the front porch when we hear that characteristic crackle of M-16 fire. It sounds like someone slapping two-by-fours together, not at all the throaty thud of a Kalishnakov.

It wasn’t long before a neighbor woman came up the front walk shaking with sobs. She told us that a neighborhood boy, Imad Arqawi, had been killed by Israeli troops. Several other people were badly wounded.

A Palestinian journalist drove up and asked if we wanted to go over to the clinic, or up to Imad’s house. We opted for Imad’s house in Jenin Camp. By this time burning tires are pushing black fingers into the sky all over Jenin.

There was no question we were at the right house as we unloaded our equipment. All the neighbor ladies had come to be with Imad’s mother. The collective grief that poured from that courtyard was a sound from hell.

In Islam, as in Judaism, it is customary to bury the dead the same day they die, and martyrs are buried in the clothing they were wearing when they were killed. The Israeli Army, in its role of harasser of things non-Jewish, regularly confiscates the bodies of martyrs for a few days and performs unauthorized autopsies to prevent the observance of this religious custom.

We followed Imad’s family to the cemetery, a bowl-shaped field to the east of the camp. It looked like all of Jenin was involved—crowds numbering in the hundreds, chanting for freedom and liberation, pouring down the roads and paths leading to the cemetery.

Imad lay beneath a Palestinian flag in the center of the field, his friends and family kneeling beside him, saying goodbye. The townspeople gathered, surrounding them like a great protecting wall. Neighbor ladies escorted his mother to the shade of an olive tree. One of the women cried out to Umm Imad, “All the boys in Palestine are your sons now.” It was then that I started to cry. The waste of that young life. Never to marry, never to share grandchildren with his parents, never to have lived free for even an instant of his life. His mother held an olive branch in her hand. An olive branch!

The distance between a news item “One Palestinian Killed” and the human meaning of the murder is such a terrible unbridgeable distance.

There was a feeling I couldn’t shake at that funeral that made me recall tales I had heard of slave funerals in the old South. Imad was free at last, safe beyond the oppressors’ long reach.

We had gone down through the crowd to where Imad’s body lay. As non-Arabs, we were instantly identified with the occupation. Some people directed their rage at us, but others came forward to lead us to where Imad rested.

I’m not unaware of the ghoulish reputation that “the media” have. “If it bleeds it leads.” But frankly I was so sick of listening to denials of the violence against Palestinians—the so-called “benign occupation”—that I felt compelled to film what we were seeing. Imad had a bullet hole just at the base of his throat, and another about four inches away near his left armpit.

As I bent close to that young body there was a smell. Not the smell of death, he had only been dead an hour or so. It was a strange sweet smell, like a baby’s smell. I kept smelling that smell for a long time afterwards, like it was fastened to me. Even months later it would just appear in my nose.

We shot all the film we had brought with us. Boys we’d never met, friends of Imad, urged us to get the hell out of there because the Army was going to be attracted to such a large gathering. They held a quick logistical discussion.

One group took off to scout the road. There was no telling which direction or directions the Army would come from. The boys were absolutely intent that we not lose our film to the Israelis. We followed in a second car a half mile behind. The cemetery was actually no more than a quarter mile from where we were staying, but we took a long circuitous route back to the house. When we got there, the boys asked us for the film and took off through back yards. The footage wound up buried in a garden for two weeks before we could get back to retrieve it.

Then we heard automatic weapons fire from the direction of the cemetery. Usually you hear a burst or two, then it’s over. This shooting didn’t stop. The Army had come to seize Imad’s body. I loaded audiotape into the deck and started recording. As I was trying to describe the sounds coming from the distance, I couldn’t shake the image of Imad’s mother, sitting under that tree, all those other Palestinian mothers gathered around her. Even in death, Imad was pursued. Even in her grief, his mother endured another assault.

What kind of people shoot into crowds at a funeral? What manner of human being? Murdering Imad wasn’t satisfying enough? They had to terrorize his family and friends during the funeral?

The unarmed crowd succeeded in holding off the soldiers long enough for Imad to be buried. Another boy, 13, died as a result of chest wounds incurred in the attack. More than a dozen Palestinians were seriously wounded.

Tell me those fairy tales of “Israeli democracy.” I’ll be looking at you like you just escaped from a mental hospital. Tell me about that shining city on the hill.

Tell me I don’t have a balanced viewpoint.

Then balance for me the Khmer Rouge tale with the refugees’ tale. I didn’t give the Khmer Rouge any face time at all in Refugee Road. Not one second. Yet in the 50 plus screenings of Refugee Road I attended no one ever whispered the word “balance.”

Balance me apartheid, or the Cheyenne, or the Japanese-Americans’ experience during World War II, the slave’s tale with the slave owner’s.

Truth exists beyond balance. It is “justice” that is associated with balance, as in “the scales of.” The sound of those high-powered assault rifles being used against a funeral crowd, recorded on my tape, is truth that nothing is going to balance.

The salient question is How Is Such Distorted Mythology Perpetuated?

People and the Land addresses two forms of information control vis-a-vis the human rights situation in Palestine. In fact there are really four distinct pinch points on information before it hits the breakfast table: Funding, filming, getting the footage out of Israel, and dissemination.

The amount of money required for a broadcast quality media production is staggering. It can take years to mount a project and funding may be needed from any number of sources to fill in the fiscal recipe. Probably 80 percent of an independent filmmaker’s time is spent hacking out proposals. When you finally go into production it’s like being released from a cage.

On People and the Land Riad and I were fortunate to get the nod from the Independent Television Service (ITVS). Congress mandated the creation of ITVS through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to serve under-served minorities and increase programming diversity on PBS.

The total annual budget for ITVS is equivalent to six hours of aid to Israel, or three 30-second Super Bowl commercials. ITVS provides full funding for productions precisely to accommodate PBS funding “concerns.”

That makes the process sound so simple: one grant, full funding, out the door. It’s anything but simple. It took two years to raise enough money to go into production on Native Sons. Five years on People and the Land.

Generally you only get one opportunity per year on a specific grant, an annual panel meeting. You can go through whole years turning out nothing but bad paper, the grant-writing days and weeks like pieces of your life sucked into the word processor, then spit into oblivion. A little frustrating. ITVS receives in excess of 2,000 proposals a year. If 20 get funded it’s a good year.

Our relationship with ITVS began stormy in 1991, and continues so to this day.

It was July 1991 when ITVS called. They had just completed their first grant panel meeting and the entire film community was holding its collective breath, each of us praying that the project that was consuming each of us was going to be recommended for funding. I had trouble controlling bodily fluids when I was told that our project had been selected. The next sentence that came scratching out of the phone dropped a sinker in my stomach: “We have some questions.”

When you have spent a few years doing information work on Palestine, the sound of a qualifying remark from a grant administrator is an icicle to the heart.

“Some questions” from ITVS staff, mostly in the person of John Schott, then Executive Director, turned into 18 months of battling to keep the grant. Multi-page lists of questions streamed in from their offices in Minneapolis. The paper interrogation boiled down to “where did you get every penny that went into shooting the sample work submitted for this grant?” ITVS burrowed through the project records, mining for a justification to kill the funding.

The lasting mental image I have from that 18 months is of my feet pacing my office night after night, trying to figure out how ITVS could pull such a stunt, scoping the next move in that slow chess game.

There was plenty of time for soul-searching. For me, work on Palestine was a test of the relevance of independent filmmaking. If you couldn’t get funding and dissemination for work about super-power culpability in cultural genocide, then what exactly was the point of independent film making? Entertainment? Media titillation?

I’m not interested in entertainment nor am I interested in the programming philosophy embedded in most PBS shows: “If it’s dead, shoot it.” PBS runs lots of interesting documentaries, nearly all of them about dead people, dead artists, and dead issues. Their one current affairs documentary series, Front Line, is squeezed through the corporate filter of WGBH in Boston, a single Executive Producer exercising final cut on the entire series. Not a recipe for diversity in the market place of ideas.

According to the ITVS grant panel, what I had brought to the table fit its congressional mandate of providing diversity and serving an under-served audience.

It is worth noting that PBS, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and ITVS, were looking at reauthorization hearings on Capitol Hill within the year. What John Schott described as “administrative diligence” appeared to me like a monster cop-out, an attempt to protect ITVS funding by not having to defend a Palestine project before Congress.

At one point I was told that the project had been disqualified because a Palestinian-American community organization had provided plane tickets and lodgings in Palestine for production trips funded by the Ohio Arts Council. Schott defined that as support from an organization with a direct interest in the topic. “I’d really like to see this project funded but those are the PBS rules, we can’t do anything about it.”

Ironically, at the very same time, the Ohio Arts Council was saying that it was going to reduce the final payment on one of our grants because we had not generated adequate matching funds. Their justification was that the travel assistance we had received had no monetary value—the same travel assistance ITVS was defining as having a monetary value that disqualified the project.

Schott’s “administrative diligence” with the project was the source of ongoing discussion and division on the ITVS board. At one point, Jackie Shearer, a member of the founding ITVS board, threatened to resign over the affair. She had herself come under the Zionist swatter when she produced a human interest story for a Boston station about Palestinians in America. Jackie knew precisely what was going on.

In December 1992 she became president of the ITVS board. Four months later the pre-production payment for People and the Land arrived from ITVS. Jackie Shearer died of a chronic illness some months later. Without her dedication to the principles of diversity and artistic freedom People and the Land would not exist.

With funding in hand, we were ready to film in Occupied Palestine. You learn quickly that cameras are not wanted. It’s completely understandable. If you were committing war crimes would you want camera crews following you around? Israeli antagonism to foreign camera crews is justified on the premise that the entire world is anti-Semitic and therefore only Israelis should be making images for export of the Jewish State in action.

The media obstacle course begins long before entering Israel. The geography of this maze says a lot about the “why” of prevailing Mideast mythology. It starts with domestic issues: equipment, and a document called a carnet.

Once a project is funded, you rent the production equipment. Of course renting anything from a car to a camera is going to require either proof of insurance, or the renter himself will sell you the insurance. But “all-risk” insurance is not available for media equipment that is going to be used under Israeli jurisdiction. I don’t know why exactly, but it may have to do with Israeli guys with machine guns taking and breaking crews’ camera gear. Not even Lloyd’s of London would write insurance against confiscation on equipment going into Israel.

The impact of this insurance problem is a financial bullet big enough to stop a project. Since no one is going to rent you equipment, you have to buy it. This is an expense on the order of buying a house. In light of the kind of resources this equipment consumes, I am very fortunate that my wife and family have been supportive of this work. The lack of insurance means that if the equipment is seized or damaged by the Army you’re looking at financial devastation.

Getting the film, the crew, and the equipment into Israel is another ball of worms. The carnet is sort of a passport for the equipment. It makes possible the duty free import/export of the gear. In addition to the carnet, Israel requires a deposit on entry equal to the full value of the equipment you’re bringing in. We’re talking in excess of $40,000. At that time there were only three countries in the world that demanded a 100 percent deposit on media equipment: South Korea, South Africa, and Israel.

I had a history of unsullied carnet use so I was able to secure a surety bond for considerably less than $40,000. Still it’s not hard to see how these two issues, carnet and insurance, can limit attempts by independents to document the situation in the Occupied Territories.

Then you have to get through Ben Gurion airport. A word to the wise: treat your entrance onto the plane for Tel Aviv as entry into an Israeli military base. Don’t discuss your purpose with your crew or anyone else. Just watch the movie and keep your mouth shut.

For a trip in 1989 we had secured letters from the Governor of Ohio and Senator John Glenn stating that we were producing a film for PBS and to please extend all normal journalistic courtesies and clearances to the crew. At some point in the flight Dorothy Thigpen, Riad Bahhur and I checked over the contents of the Letters Envelope. Each of us had a full set of originals. When we got into Tel Aviv the three of us were immediately escorted to the “Welcome To Israel” wing (otherwise known as the Arab Room) where we were taken to separate interrogation rooms. The first thing out of my interrogator’s mouth was “let’s see the letters.”

The management of Interrogations-Are-Us concentrated on Dorothy, the assistant cameraperson. “Who are their contacts?” “Who’s helping?” “What did they tell you about where they’ll be filming?” She enjoyed their company longer than either Riad or I.

We quit traveling together to Israel after that. An Arab surname, even in a U.S. passport, plus a camera is an irresistible red flag. Entry without Riad was somewhat easier. And we briefed the crew on subsequent trips: no shop talk.

An interesting thing happened after our trip to the Arab Room. Dorothy called her parents to tell them we had arrived unscathed. The moment she said, “The airport was really weird,” her call was cut off.

It sends you a simple message—we’re listening. In some ways that is what I found most oppressive about working in the Territories. You’d come back into Jerusalem after a few days in the trenches witnessing God-knows-what-new-horror and you’d be dying to talk with your family, hungry for the touch of their support. But you couldn’t go near the phone. You don’t want the Army to know what you have on film, or where you’ve been, or what you saw. Over time the sense of living under siege became palpable, a ringing loneliness.

By 1993 Israel had put a new twist on keeping down improper image creation. I’m standing in the immigration queue at Ben Gurion. I hand my documents to the young woman in her nice blue uniform and she glances at them. “You are a journalist?” “Yes, a journalist.” “You cannot enter, you don’t have a visa. You should have contacted us ahead of time.”

Usual politics of intimidation, thought I. “I don’t need a visa, I’m an American citizen. I can enter when I want.” She throws me a poisonous glance, stamps the passport and motions me through. After all, I’m white. I didn’t find out until a couple of days later what she was talking about.

We had embarked on the ritual of the Journalist’s Credentials. This entails traveling into West Jerusalem to the National Baloney Factory, otherwise known as the Government Press Office at Beit Agroan. This had to be weirdest for Riad—requesting a document from New Yorkers to be able to film in his homeland without getting beat up.

The crew is sitting around filling out applications for press credentials, part of which acknowledges our understanding that as journalists we can’t make a phone call or send a fax that discusses the situation on the ground without first getting content cleared through the military censor.

I do most of the camera work, but this time I just wrote director as my job description. Barry Congrove, assistant cameraperson on that trip, completed his form and hands it to the clerk. The guy looks at the form and narrows his eyes at the five of us. “Which of you will be handling camera equipment?” Barry puts up his hand. “There’s a new law. Foreign camera operators can only have credentials for two weeks.” He proceeds to explain that the videographers union persuaded the government to protect Israeli jobs by limiting the amount of time a given project could use non-Israeli camera operators.

On its face this seems pretty reasonable, and it would be reasonable if the Army service requirements were different in Israel. Virtually every male between 18 and 50 performs active duty with the Israeli military once a year. Which means that any Israeli cameraman you hire may have—just the week before—been kicking the shit out of the people you’re filming.

American networks abide by the law. We would frequently see convoys of Israeli crews in their armored Volvos rolling in from Jerusalem after clashes.

The implications are profound of this policy that “only our people are allowed to interpret our image to the world.” The image conduit to the U.S. is, by law, narrowed to the perspective of Israeli reservists. This is not to say that every Israeli cameraperson is a slack-jawed lackey to the Army. On the other hand, if you are raised in a segregationist society your world view is going to be shaped by your environment. The obscene is normal and you may treat it as such in your work.

Mr. Credentials said one other very interesting thing. “You don’t need credentials in the Territories, only if you want to film inside Israel.” This is a classic bit of Orwellian speak. He may as well have said “we don’t object to you putting your tongue in that light socket.” Press credentials are the only protection against the Army that you’ve got in the Territories. And a puny bit of protection it is.

With the camera running, I asked the Keeper of the Credentials, the Army Spokesman, and the General who runs the “Civil Administration,” exactly what the credentials enabled us to do in the Territories. Their answers were the same: “Oh, anything you want.” I show their responses in the film as an example of the abyss between official Israeli government pronouncements and the situation on the ground.

The credential itself clips inside your passport. It’s worthless plastic in terms of allowing you to do your work, but it can save your skin.

On our first trip into the Territories in 1988, Riad, John, and I decided to enter as tourists. We had letters from the Governor of Ohio and a Congressman basically saying we were artists working with Ohio Arts Council funds and not to beat us up. We decided to steer clear of the Government Press Office and try to work without credentials. The Army was routinely seizing footage and equipment from journalists. We thought we might be able to move more easily if we weren’t identified with the press.

One afternoon we shot an interview in Ramallah with a human rights caseworker from AlHaq (Law in the Service of Man). The shoot dragged on until after dark. Once finished, we brought the car around and surreptitiously began loading the equipment. We had learned early in the game that if the Army saw a crew entering or leaving a home they would make a point of visiting the family later, either to smash up the place, or to detain the person suspected of talking to the press.

We were making the last turn out of Ramallah for Jerusalem when two Army jeeps pulled in front of us and forced us to stop. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?” the leader of the pack yells into my face. “Trying to get back to Jerusalem.” “WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?” “Uh, Nazareth.” When we traveled we’d work out our story ahead of time; always use tourist towns for points of departure and destination. “GIVE US YOUR PASSPORTS!”

We hand over our passports. Riad is sitting in the back seat trying to make himself invisible. We’ve stuffed all of the production equipment into the trunk so we’re looking pretty touristy.

The unit commander flips through the three passports. When he gets to Riad’s he steps to his window. “WHAT WAS YOUR WHORE MOTHER DOING IN ARGENTINA?” Riad’s passport indicates that he holds American citizenship but was born in Argentina. Riad answers “My family moved to Argentina before going to the States.” “SPEAK ARABIC!” screams the unit commander. “My Arabic isn’t very good.” The commander, now very agitated, is yelling Arabic. “HAKI ARABI IBN SHARMOOTA.” “SPEAK ARABIC YOU SON OF A WHORE.”

He yells a clipped order in Hebrew. Two soldiers step to either side of the car and point their M-16s at John and me. Two more throw open Riad’s door and drag him by his clothing onto the deserted street. The few cars that do approach the intersection are waved through. We are alone in the dark and at their mercy. My knees have started shaking for real.

“Is there a problem? What’s the problem?” I go for my door latch and the soldier covering me sights down his rifle as if to say “one more inch and you won’t need that head.” They are dragging Riad around in the street like a dead animal, the commander screaming at him. Finally they stand him up, shove a rifle in his stomach and say something I can’t catch in Arabic. Riad turns and says, quietly, “He’s ordering me into the jeep. He says they’re going to teach me manners.”

I had read enough reports of young Palestinian men found in olive groves with their heads stove in to know I would probably never see Riad again if he got into that jeep. I looked the soldier who was covering me in the eye, prayed, and stepped out of the car. Hanging onto the door—my knees don’t seem to be cooperating—I’m yelling as loud as I can yell. “THIS MAN IS AN AMERICAN CITIZEN. I WANT TO SEE YOUR COMMANDING OFFICER. THIS MAN IS AN AMERICAN CITIZEN. WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?” I’m terrified and very glad to have the door to support myself.

Riad pulls out his letter from the Governor of Ohio and hands it to the commander. He looks at it, tears it up and throws it in the street.

While I’m hanging off the car yelling, the other soldier tells John to pop the trunk. He does. They see the camera and tell the commander. Now it’s my turn. I’m shoved over to the jeep. “YOU ARE JOURNALIST?” “Well, uh, media artist, yes.” He shoves his face into mine. He’s out of control, his spit hitting me in the face. “YOUR PICTURES ARE MAKING A LOT OF TROUBLE FOR US!”

You learn quickly in the Territories that carefully measured audacity can be salvation. Never show these punks fear, it just makes them feel more powerful. “THIS MAN IS AN AMERICAN CITIZEN. I WANT TO SEE YOUR COMMANDING OFFICER,” I yell back. What’s to lose at this point? I figured we were all in for it.

He gives me this weird look like “the sub-human must have some juice or he wouldn’t talk to me like that.” “I WANT YOU OUT OF HERE NOW!” “Yes, sir, we’re gone.” John reaches over and plucks the passports from the commander’s hand and heads back to the car. The other soldiers look to their boss for orders. He says nothing. Riad and I jump in the car and take off, holding our breaths, waiting for the crack of the rifles. Nothing.

We decided that Israeli journalist credentials might not be a bad idea in the future. And we made a hard rule. No traveling in the Territories after dark. Be gone before dark, or stay where you are. The wolf packs come out at night.

Many a long night after that I lay in the darkness of my room polishing that sword named fear. What tomorrow? Will we all get out of here alive?

A year later when we went to get journalist credentials, Mr. Credentials was disturbed by the number of letters from U.S. Senators and Congressmen we dropped on his desk. “I’ve never had anyone bring in a letter from a Senator before, why do you have one?”

I explained that Riad and I had a very unpleasant interaction with Israeli troops on a previous trip and that I had no intention of repeating that experience, and neither had Senator Glenn.

We got our credentials, but had to listen to Mr. Credentials’ excuses for why Israeli troops can’t control themselves at the sight of an Arab surname. “You don’t know what happened to those soldiers before you got there!” That kind of denial is like nails on a blackboard. “I was there. Tell me, do you think there’s any excuse for an agent of government to call someone’s mother a whore?”

So you’ve got some funding, equipment and credentials—and you’re in the Territories. This is where it gets tough.

The Army will do anything to prevent you from capturing their tactics on film. And the Palestinian community has little reason to either trust you or to put any value in what you are trying to accomplish. Fortunately some Palestinians are committed to outreach work and are willing to help journalists. Still, developing contacts can take years. Riad, as a member of the community, was able to do a great deal in this regard, but we faced a siege atmosphere in many Palestinian communities: trust people you grew up with, and keep an eye on some of them.

Risk and benefit. Those were two issues we saw weighed before us daily. As Jad Isak, a member of the Palestinian negotiating team and a veteran of Israeli prisons, said, “The sword of administrative detention hangs over the neck of every Palestinian.”

You can go to jail for breathing if you’re Palestinian in the Territories. Helping out journalists was a pretty good way to guarantee a trip to Ansar III. I think many of the people who did help us make contacts, or who appeared in the film, were convinced enough about the power of video to risk paying the price. The price got very high.

Of the people who helped us on our 1989 trip, 18 received administrative detention and four were shot. Zacharia Talamas almost paid with his life for helping us and his tale says much about the Army’s attitude toward journalists. The logic is transparent. If someone can help film Palestinian resistance, then they must be part of the resistance, and must be taken out of circulation.

We are filming in Gaza in December 1989 and staying at Marna House (otherwise known as the Palestinian Foreign Ministry). We are making daily forays into the camps with the help of local journalists. Gaza was red hot. You could barely move without dropping into the middle of a clash. The further you are from the press headquarters in Jerusalem, the more out of control the Army.

We’d had an endless afternoon in Shati Camp trying to get some footage without catching a round. It was a strike day so the soldiers had been cruising the camp in jeeps and on foot. Shooting people. Zacharia had gotten us onto a rooftop near an intersection so we had a decent vantage point. The shooting was heavy enough that Palestinian ambulances were cruising about a block behind the Army jeeps, picking up wounded like buses picking up passengers.

Filming through a crack between cinder blocks, I was trying to get a shot of a patrol that had emerged from one of the narrow paths in the camp. School girls, third and fourth graders from the look of them, wearing those cute blue and white striped school uniforms, were headed right toward the oncoming patrol.

The girls stopped in their tracks then, after a little discussion, proceeded forward. When they were 20 feet past the patrol, one of the soldiers raises his rifle and starts to chase them. Little feet fly. Blue and white dresses billow as tiny hands clutch each other. The soldier stops and looks back to his fellows. They all get a good laugh.

The footage, a group of girls running, a pan to a man with a machine gun slowing and turning away, is not all that dramatic. No arms or legs flew off, none of the stuff of evening news. But I must have watched that footage 50 times in my editing room. I ask myself the same question over and over: what would I do if a man with a machine gun chased my daughter on her way home from school, just for the pleasure of seeing her fear? What would any American do?

Getting out of the camp is more difficult than getting in. The shooting was picking up toward dusk. I was losing my light so we decided to split. Soldiers are all over the place, shooting on the slightest pretext. We walked out of the house into the street and shots cracked almost immediately. We started running up the sand road, very exposed, easy targets.

An old woman watching through a crack in her door runs out, pulls the white scarf from her head and waves it frantically at the troops as a truce flag. “Yalla, Yalla.” “Come on.” She hustles us through her house, into the garden. Of course a quick drinking of the juice is required, then we take off again, climbing over walls, and dodging through gardens trying to get back to our car. Zacharia had driven it away from the house and dropped it near the entrance of the camp to keep our presence inconspicuous. As we were climbing through another yard, I rolled camera, asked Riad to roll sound, and began describing the situation. “We are in Beach Camp, trying to get out without losing our film.” “Or our lives,” says Dorothy, her voice shaking.

The old lady had given us her white scarf as a protective talisman. We got out of the camp intact, waving the white scarf for all we were worth. We later made a press flag for the car out of it. I think we had the only hand-embroidered press flag in Palestine.

We made it back to Marna House at dark and the proprietor, Madame Shouwa, immediately tucked us into a good dinner. Zacharia said he had to get home and off he went. Dinners at Marna house were almost always intense. All the guests ate together at what we came to call the Captain’s Table. Madame Shouwa was the Captain, of course, and you didn’t get much respect at that table if you hadn’t put your head all the way into the proverbial lion’s mouth.

Halfway through dinner Zacharia comes stumbling into the room. The right side of his face is red and puffy as though he’s burned it. “Sit down, what’s up, you okay?”

An Army patrol had grabbed him as he stepped out of the gate at Marna House. He was stuffed in a jeep and taken to Central Prison where he was beaten up, then hauled before an officer. “He told me, ?You better quit this journalism bullshit.’ Then they brought me back here.” We fed him coffee and sweets until he regained his composure, then he headed home. He was going to be doing some taping for NBC the next day, so we arranged to work in Khan Yunis with a friend named Saud who was doing legwork for Associated Press.

It was a fairly uneventful day and we got back to Marna house early. Three hours later Saud returned, obviously shaken. “Zacharia’s been shot in the stomach. I was with him.”

They had gone to tape in one of the camps but nothing much was going on. Zacharia was standing in the street panning around with a small Hi8 camera when a jeep pulled up. A soldier got out, went down on one knee, shot Zach in the stomach, then drove away. Saud and another cameraman carried Zach to the car, which got stuck in the sand. It took them quite a while to get him to hospital.

This was not a chance or accidental shooting. The camp was calm. Two journalists I know and respect were with him when it happened. The Army warned him, and they carried through.

In August 1988 the Israeli Army spokesman waxed uncharacteristically candid in a press briefing. “This isn’t just a war of stones. This is a war of stones and photographs.”

The early years of the intifada were the toughest in terms of direct assaults on camera crews. Confiscation of film and equipment, beatings, and shootings were all on the menu. Palestinian journalists were most heavily targeted. Their newspaper offices were welded shut and a great many were given administrative detention running into years without charge, trial, or family visits.

One of the first people we interviewed in 1988 was Kamel, a Palestinian journalist. He had just been released after a year of administrative detention at Ansar III, the concentration camp in the Negev desert. His wife was six months pregnant with their first child when troops broke into their house and dragged him off into the night. His son was six months old before he met his father.

As foreign journalists, we didn’t have to worry too much about being jailed unless we tried to film military prison camps, which would be interpreted as an act of spying. Making the Army really angry can result in the Israeli government’s declaring you persona non grata—you’re out for good. If the Army arrests you, that’s it. Avoiding arrest and trying to do your work is a knife-edge you walk daily.

The primary problem was a sort of geographic censorship. If the Army spotted our crew a soldier would pull out a closure order, wave it in our face, and order us to leave the town. If a journalist was caught in a “closed area” the minimum retribution was arrest and a pink slip out of the country. Some American journalists weren’t so lucky. Neal Cassidy, who photographed for the New York City newspaper Front Line, was shot in Nablus. Photographer Bill Biggart, who did work for The Village Voice and The Christian Science Monitor, was caught alone by Israeli troops and thoroughly stomped.

In the course of our filming, we experienced an exciting range of Army hospitality. We were shot at and targeted for gassing. Or a soldier would attempt to slam the camera through the back of my head. It’s a simple technique: shove the lens hard enough and the eyepiece will try to spoon the cameraman’s eyeball out.

At first the troops can intimidate you into leaving simply by stating, “This is a closed military area, you have to leave.” After a while we got wise to the fact that soldiers would lay this line us whether we were in a closed area or not. We started demanding to see the closure order. This was partly for our own entertainment, and partly a step in the dance of intimidation and defiance.

We were in Ramallah one day unloading our equipment to film a follow-up interview at the AlHaq human rights monitoring office. We had already hauled one load up to their fourth floor offices. When we returned to our car, two Army jeeps were waiting for us, soldiers gathered around our rental car.

A young officer, early twenties, obviously of European origin, comes up. “This is a closed military area. You can’t film here. You have to leave the town.” I countered that there had been no barricades when we entered town, so when did the closure go into effect? “Today. The people have not been so quiet. We are taking measures.” He was making it up as he went. There was no curfew. The town was wide open. He was just doing his bit to stop our filming.

I explained that we weren’t trying to film the town, that we were there to shoot an interview. “It’s a closed area you can’t film anything. You have to leave.”

“If this town is closed where’s the closure order. I want to see the order.” The soldiers went through their pockets. The Army had been issuing blank Closure Orders to troops so that they could fill in location and date when and where they found journalists. But none of the soldiers had a blank handy so they held us there on the street at gunpoint while one of them drove off to fetch one. One of the people at AlHaq snapped a picture of us surrounded by soldiers on the sidewalk beneath their windows.

I hate it when an Israeli soldier points an M-16 at me. Ouzis and Galili rifles I can take, but not the insult of an M-16. I pay taxes that are sent to Israel to insure its “security.” Then that aid is shoved in my face in the form of an automatic weapon to keep me from communicating how the aid is being used to the people putting up the cash.

Twenty minutes later an Army jeep careens to a stop and a Closure Order is presented to us. Then we had to go through a negotiation about the load of equipment we had already carried up to the fourth floor. “Can we go back up and get our camera now?” “You must leave now.” “I can’t leave without the camera.” “No.” “I’m not leaving without it.” “One of you get the camera. The rest stay here.” Their jeeps escort us out of town.

Ramallah is close to Jerusalem, press headquarters for the world. The further you went into the Territories the tougher the Army was on journalists.

We were doing some follow-up filming in Jenin when two Army jeeps screeched in front and behind us at an intersection. Riad, Dorothy and I pass out our press cards. Their radios spit and hoot for a while then an older soldier approaches the car. He doesn’t speak English, but he is speaking Arabic to Riad. “He says we can’t film here.” “What does he mean ?here’”?

It had become standard MO to push back when the Army pushed us, pretending we weren’t intimidated. But survival is tied to knowing when to stop pushing back.

The three-way conversation through Riad had reached the “I want to see the closure order” stage. “He says he doesn’t need an order. He says it’s a soldiers’ order.” “Tell him I want to see the order. Tell him we have credentials from his government.” “Tooom,” Riad says between his teeth. I glance back over my shoulder.

The soldier has stepped back from the car and raised his gun to waist level. A real gun, not a word on a page. The other seven soldiers have moved to flank him.

He barks something in Arabic. “He says it’s a soldiers’ order.” I’m scared, yes, and frustrated out of my skin. We’ve been on the road four hours crawling through checkpoints getting here. The day is going to be a bust if we’re summarily thrown out. Or beat up, or shot. “Ask him if he expects me to believe that he can close this whole town without a written order.”

Riad reluctantly translates my question. It does the trick. He says that we can film the town but we are not allowed to film any soldiers. We must cover the camera lens when we are around soldiers. We say “fine” and they let us drive away.

What the man with the gun was ordering us to do was give reality a holiday. Creating images in the Occupied Territories that exclude the occupier is like filming an abattoir without filming the butcher.

In the fall of 1989, Beit Sahour had a tax strike under the oddly familiar slogan “No Taxation Without Representation.” The Israeli Army threw an extended siege and curfew on the town during which they plundered, looted, and trashed much of Beit Sahour in the name of “tax seizures.” It was one of the beautiful and terrible stories of the Uprising; the granite solidarity of the community, the base expression of rage from the occupier.

Peace Now had scheduled a trip to express solidarity with the people of Beit Sahour shortly after the siege ended. We were intent on filming this meeting. It’s important for Americans to understand that Israel is not a political monolith.

We packed up and took off early. The Peace Now buses were supposed to be there at 3:00 but we wanted to be in place well ahead of time.

Just outside of Bethlehem the road drops sharply into Beit Sahour. No sooner do we make the turn but we’re at an Army barricade. A soldier whose flat Midwestern accent smacks of Chicago leans in the window. “You can’t enter Beit Sahour. It’s a closed military area. Here’s the order.” No luck there.

We drive up into Bethlehem and worm our way down steep alleys and goat paths, a secret access into Beit Sahour. It is not looking good for the Peace Nowers. We decide to try filming the Army turning back the Peace Now buses. A family whose house clung to a ridge directly opposite the blockade lets us film from their veranda.

We film the Army turning back several United Nations vehicles, but no Israeli busses show up. Through our telephoto we could make out two people sitting beside the checkpoint, obviously bound. Soldiers walked over periodically and whacked or kicked them.

Someone tells us that Peace Now was trying to get into town the back way. We load up and try to drive across town. Despite some Three Stooges driving—going between houses and through yards—the Army had us in 10 minutes. “You are in a closed military area. We will escort you out. If you are seen here again you will be arrested.”

Fine. Two jeeps escort us back to the entrance of the town. One of our helpers suggests that we could at least catch a shot of the busses entering town from the balcony of a house overlooking Beit Sahour city limits. This way we’d be outside of the closed area, but have a good view, through a long lens, of the town.

We drive over to the house. An Army unit has taken over the roof of a house on the high point above Beit Sahour. We park our car where they can’t see it, well away from the house we want to film from. People in the neighborhood help us move our equipment piece by piece to the house and we begin setting up. We thought we’d been pretty cool, pretty invisible. Not.

There is a rumble of trucks outside and the screech of air brakes. A little girl looking out the door screams “Jaish!” “Soldiers!” A 13-year-old boy runs into the bathroom and hides in the shower. Outside troops in full combat gear are pouring from two tru

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