By DANIELLA CHESLOWExtract from an article in Issue 14, October 27, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Reportclick here.
B'Tselem's cameras raise provocative questions about journalistic truth and partisan reporting
Nasser Nawaja, 25, lives with his wife, Hiam, 17, and one-year-old son, Ahmed, in a one-room house with walls made of cement blocks and a black tarp stretched over thin metal poles for a roof. They live alongside 29 other Palestinian families in a an impoverished area, with no electricity or running water on a dusty hilltop in the southern West Bank, just off a road that leads in one direction to the ruins of an ancient Jewish community and in the other to a modern-day Israeli settlement, population about 750. All three places are named Susiya.
In late August, Nawaja sits on a thin mattress close to the window - really, just a gap between the tarp and the cement - and opens a cardboard box near a non-functioning refrigerator. In nearly fluent Hebrew, which he taught himself, he tells The Jerusalem Report that the settlers from the nearby region have been very violent towards Palestinians in this region, and that he uses two Sony Handycam video cameras to film them. Then Nawaja takes out a blue and silver solar panel the size of a floor tile that he uses to charge the cameras. Another solar panel on top of his tent-house charges a laptop, which lays closed next to Ahmed, who is asleep on the mattress in the corner.
Nawaja is a field worker for B'Tselem, an Israeli group dedicated to reporting human rights abuses in the Israeli-occupied territories. (The name means "in the image of," a reference to the biblical injunction that all people were created in the image of God.) In January 2007, B'Tselem launched a project called "Shooting Back," distributing 100 hand-held digital video cameras to Palestinians like the Nawaja family in the West Bank and Gaza. B'Tselem spokespeople tell The Report that the project aims to promote law enforcement and accountability and to bring the reality of Palestinians' lives under occupation to the attention of the Israeli and international public. Yet at the same time, the cameras raise provocative questions regarding citizen journalism, journalistic truth and partisan reporting.
Reports of complaints of attacks by settlers on Palestinians have been increasingly steadily over the past decade, and especially in the past two years. This August, B'Tselem released a report citing rising violence around Yitzhar, a settlement in the northern West Bank. Judaea and Samaria Police Spokesman Danny Poleg confirms that of late, complaints around Yitzhar have risen even as those inside Hebron have fallen. Another police source confirms, on condition of anonymity, that while the police and the Israel Defense Forces also have cameras operating within the territories, they are "mostly focused on violent activities on the part of the Palestinians, and less on the settlers or our own troops."
Oren Yakobovich, 37, a former documentary filmmaker from Tel Aviv, with a piercing gaze and graying hair, runs Shooting Back from B'Tselem's headquarters in an industrial area of southern Jerusalem and has run the organization's video department for the last three years. As part of the Shooting Back project, he and his staff comb and catalogue the footage coming in from the Palestinians' cameras, searching for noteworthy instances of violence or of illegal army procedures. Those clips are then handed to the police or military, he says, and afterwards to the local and international media.
Before handing out the cameras, B'Tselem provides all of its volunteers with several hours of training regarding clear definitions of human rights abuses and ethical photojournalism, as well as technical training in the use of the camera. Additional training seminars are held every few weeks to update the volunteers, discuss problems that arise, and assess the project's impact, Yakobovich tells The Report.
B'Tselem, registered as a non-profit organization in Israel, was founded in 1989 to provide information on human rights violations and Palestinian deaths during the first intifada and operates on a yearly budget of approximately $2m; funding is provided from Jewish and non-Jewish sources in the United States, Europe and Israel. The Shooting Back project costs about $250,000 to run annually, Yakobovich tells The Report, with funding provided, among others, by the Annenberg Foundation, the European Union and the Ford Foundation.
B'Tselem spokeswoman Sarit Michaeli says Shooting Back is a change in tactics for the organization, which, until initiating this project, concentrated on collecting documentation from victims and witnesses only after incidents of human rights abuses and violence came to their attention.
The cameras have already led to several investigations as well as punishment of several soldiers and settlers guilty of abuse of Palestinian human rights. In Nawaja's home of Susiya, in June, a Palestinian woman armed with a B'Tselem camera filmed four settlers walking over a hilltop, their faces swathed in cloth, and beating three Palestinian shepherds with clubs. The tape led to the investigation of three minors from Jewish Susiya; they were released to their parents and the investigation continues, police spokesman Poleg tells The Report.
In January 2007, Yifat Alkobi, a resident of the Jewish settlement in Hebron, was filmed chanting "whore" in Arabic through the window of an Arab family in the city. In the film clip, which was widely aired on Israeli television, Alkobi, a woman in a traditional, religious, white head covering and glasses, is seen screaming at a Palestinian woman to go inside and then taunts her as an Israeli soldier tells the Palestinian to go home, rather than apprehend Alkobi. The film led to a police investigation against Alkobi, which is still ongoing.
In early July, B'Tselem released a video shot by a Palestinian girl in the West Bank town of Ni'lin to the media. The footage shows a Palestinian man, later identified as Ashraf Abu Rahma, 27, handcuffed and blindfolded, standing outside an Israeli army jeep. Two soldiers hold Abu Rahma by the arms and another shoots a rubber bullet at his foot. Abu Rahma suffered a minor injury to his toe. The film grabbed international attention and shocked many Israelis, but B'Tselem workers are convinced that the incident might never have come to light had B'Tselem not released the footage to the media. The commander who ordered the soldier to shoot, Lt. Col. Omri Borberg, was indicted, transferred to another post, and charged with "unbecoming conduct." B'Tselem and several other groups have petitioned the High Court of Justice to have Borberg charged for more severe crimes that carry heavier punishments; the case is pending.
For every camera in the field, there are hours of footage with no evident crimes or rights violations that the B'Tselem staff must review, says Yakobovich. And he adds that at first, Palestinians with cameras would often call him reporting incidents that have no relevance to the project. And even Nawaja says that he has "caught only one" incident on tape, in which settlers beat an elderly Palestinian woman as she rode a donkey.
Furthermore, the footage is often jumpy and incomplete, and sometimes it is difficult to interpret definitively. The clip from Ni'lin shows Abu Rahma standing with his hands behind his back one moment and on the ground the next. "Did you film?" asks an unseen man behind the camera after the shot is heard. "No, I was afraid," answers a girl's voice. Similarly, the footage of settlers wielding clubs in Susiya is blurry and the attackers' faces are covered.
Yet, despite these difficulties, human rights organizations operating in the West Bank say they are crucial for the enforcement of justice. "Even if we're convinced that a Palestinian witness is telling the truth, there really is no substitute for documentation of an event as it unfolds," B'Tselem spokeswoman Michaeli explains.
Police Spokesman Poleg agrees, telling The Report that "the minute there is something filmed, the evidence is stronger." Poleg adds that the images provided by B'Tselem are often used in investigations. On September 13, a Palestinian man stabbed a 9-year-old Israeli boy and set fire to a house in Shalhevet Yam, an outpost of the Yitzhar settlement. A B'Tselem cameraman subsequently filmed Yitzhar residents rampaging through the Palestinian's village, Asira al-Kabaliya, where the settlers lobbed stones, spraypainted Jewish stars, and destroyed cars as Israeli soldiers looked on.
"We turned to B'Tselem as police officers and we asked for the video as evidence," Poleg says.
Yet despite these investigations, organizations such as B'Tselem contend that law enforcement in the West Bank is biased. A report released in July by Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group that deals with law enforcement in the West Bank, charges that only 10 percent of Palestinian complaints against Israeli citizens result in an indictment.
"The police and the army are… trying to protect one population at the cost of the other," says Yaron Ezrahi, professor of political science and political communications at Hebrew University. "Their actions in response to settlers' violence and murders to the other side are incomparably weaker, incomprehensive and delayed in comparison to the swift, massive and aggressive treatment of Palestinians who violate the public order."
Extract from an article in Issue 14, October 27, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Reportclick here.
if(catID != 151){
var cont = `Take Israel home with the new Jerusalem Post Store