THE LESSON OF JENIN.
Bad Information
by Jacob Dallal
Only at TNR Online
Post date: 08.05.05
Later this month, journalists from around the world will arrive in Israel to cover the evacuation of the Gaza settlements. It is widely expected that violence will increase prior to the withdrawal, as Palestinian terror groups, like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, try to create the impression that Israel is leaving Gaza under fire. (This, they hope, will add heft to their argument that territory can be "liberated" from Israeli control through violence, indeed that the whole of Israel can be chased from existence in this manner.) Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has pledged to respond forcefully to an uptick in attacks. The result could be some of the largest operations by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in recent years. And there to cover it all will be the legions of international journalists assigned to write about the Gaza disengagement.
The last time a media event of this scale took place in Israel was in April 2002, when the IDF entered West Bank cites, including the city of Jenin, following a year and a half of Palestinian terror attacks. From a military standpoint, the operation in Jenin was a success, but from a public relations standpoint, it was a disaster. In the days after Israeli forces entered Jenin, a rumor took hold around the world: that the IDF had leveled the refugee camp and massacred its inhabitants. The rumor was utterly false; but by the time it was proven false and Israel was vindicated, it was too late: The myth of a massacre in Jenin had entered the popular consciousness, where it was to remain. So large looms the story today that if you do a Google search for the word Jenin, you come up with around 950,000 entries, many of which have to do with the fighting there in April 2002. Compare that with a search for Nablus, the largest West Bank city, which yields around 630,000 hits, or Ramallah, the center of Palestinian government, economy, and culture in the West Bank, which yields around 810,000.
I recently finished a four-year stint as a captain in the IDF. During that time, I served as a spokesman to the foreign press, and in 2002 I escorted the first group of journalists to enter Jenin following the conclusion of fighting. In that role, I saw how Israel mishandled the p.r. side of the operation, creating the conditions under which an enormous lie could enter international discourse as truth. The commander of the operation in Jenin--interested in saving lives and totally unaware of the consequences of an information vacuum--insisted on keeping journalists out because, simply put, he was afraid one of them would get killed. His decision was backed by the chain of command through the defense minister.
Israel learned a valuable p.r. lesson from Jenin: During a low-intensity conflict, give the press maximal access. In the wake of the events in Jenin, the army made media-pool access during every major operation a standard practice. Indeed in the months after the fighting in Jenin, the IDF started embedding reporters with troops in earnest, a practice that continues to this day. The army also began giving priority in these pools to foreign reporters; previously, Israeli journalists had been overwhelmingly favored.
At a time when Israel faces the prospect of violence in Gaza, the lessons of Jenin are once again relevant. This is the firsthand story of how Israel tracked down its enemies in Jenin but allowed the truth to slip away.
qWhere are the rest of the bodies?" I asked. "There are no more bodies," the officer replied. I asked again, but he was adamant: There were no more bodies. It was Sunday morning, April 14, 2002, and I was escorting a group of about 20 journalists into Jenin in the aftermath of the intense fighting there. Debris was scattered everywhere. We hobbled over mounds of earth, repeatedly warned by soldiers not to stray from the path or touch anything in the piles of rubble as they were laden with live ordinances. The journalists, who had been pleading for access to the area for the last week, had come with one main aim: to check out Palestinian claims that there had been a massacre in the refugee camp, adjacent to the city of Jenin.
One of our guides on the tour was the liaison officer for the IDF brigade assigned to the Jenin area--Lieutenant Colonel Fuad Halhal, an Israeli Druze, who served as the army's point of contact with the Palestinian civil officials in Jenin and coordinator for all humanitarian issues. He was also the man responsible for reporting the IDF assessment of the number of Palestinian dead in the fighting. Asked by journalists how many Palestinians were killed, Halhal said that 25 Palestinian bodies had been recovered and were in local hospitals, and he estimated that another 25 were in the rubble.
I recall Serge Schmemann of The New York Times taking me aside and saying something to the effect of: This doesn't make any sense. You guys have been saying there are 150 dead, and this officer is saying there are only 25, possibly 50?
Indeed, the Palestinians were saying that 500 people had been killed; the Israeli army had estimated the Palestinian casualties at between 150 and 200; and both sides agreed that there had been a week of ferocious fighting. As a result, the numbers Halhal was giving didn't make any sense to me either. So I took him aside and explained that not only had our office, the army spokesperson's office, been saying that some 150 Palestinians had been killed in the fighting in Jenin, but that I had personally heard IDF generals telling journalists that as many as 200 Palestinians were killed. Now, when we finally got to the field, he could account for no more than 50 Palestinian dead.
But Halhal insisted. So I gathered the press together and went over the Palestinian body count. Halhal's estimate would later prove to be almost exactly right. According to the final U.N. report on Jenin, 52 Palestinians were killed in the fighting, a figure Israel accepts as definitive. But at the time, the truth was just about impossible to believe--for a New York Times reporter, for many Israelis, for observers the world over. How had it come to this?
The Israeli offensive in Jenin, and other cities in the West Bank, began on April 3, 2002. Jenin, or more specifically the refugee camp adjacent to the city, was the stronghold of Islamic Jihad in the West Bank and the place that had generated the most suicide bombers in the years leading up to the offensive.
The IDF had actually anticipated encountering the heaviest resistance not in Jenin but in Nablus--and so decided to send its two best regular infantry brigades (the Paratroopers and Golani) to fight there. Jenin, meanwhile, was assigned primarily to a reservist brigade that had been part of the 20,000-strong reserve call-up for the operation. The reservists had very little time to train and prepare for the intricacies of urban warfare in advance of the operation.
Once the operation was under way, the extent of the resistance and the ferocity of the fight in Jenin surprised everyone. The intelligence indicated that the camp had been extensively booby-trapped in advance of the Israeli offensive. But soldiers were stunned to encounter not only whole streets and sewers rigged but booby traps in garbage bins, refrigerators, handbags, everywhere--not to mention shooting from almost every home, out of every window, from behind women and children.
Still, though fierce, the fighting in Jenin did not attract particular media notice during the first few days, as there was fighting in all the West Bank cities, and we within the IDF spokesperson's office did not believe the situation in Jenin warranted particular attention. In fact, we were far more preoccupied with Bethlehem and the standoff that was taking place with Palestinian gunmen holed up in the Church of Nativity. It was clear that if anything were to happen at the holy site, it would immediately attract world attention.
The real problem with Jenin lay in the unfortunate fact that it was the only area of the West Bank to be hermetically sealed from the press. At the start of Operation Defensive Shield, the IDF declared all Palestinian cities closed military zones, barring all civilians, including journalists, from entering out of concern for their safety. But that was de jure; de facto journalists could get essentially everywhere in the West Bank--everywhere, that is, except for the refugee camp of Jenin. In part due to topography, in part due to the relatively small area of the camp, the closed military zone in Jenin was uniquely easy to enforce, which meant journalists stayed out.
It is instructive to compare Jenin to the situation in Nablus, where the fighting was also fierce and the Palestinian casualties were, in fact, much higher, around 75 dead. But because the press was able to make its way through Nablus and witness the fighting, the situation there never really made news. It was clear to the media that there was fierce fighting between the IDF and Palestinian gunmen, and that was the extent of the story.
In Jenin, however, there was no media, and thus an information vacuum prevailed when, on the fourth day of fighting, Saturday, April 6, Palestinians began using the word "massacre." At the time, however, we were not concerned: This was not the first time the Palestinians had used that term during the conflict; moreover, by the next day, indications from the field were that the IDF was wrapping the battle up. Chief IDF spokesman Brigadier General Ron Kitrey declared, "We are on the verge of ending the fighting."
But the fighting did not end Sunday; and as hostilities continued into Monday, they began to look more serious. Not only were press barred from entering Jenin but so were aid agencies and U.N. personnel. And the military operation had stepped up to include helicopter missile fire and armored bulldozers to deal with those pockets too dangerous for the soldiers on the ground to enter. The headline of The New York Times article on Jenin on April 8 warned of a "looming crisis."
Then came the event that would divert the army's attention and essentially doom any attempt to get the truth about what was happening in Jenin out to the world. Before dawn on Tuesday morning, 13 Israeli soldiers were killed in an elaborate Palestinian ambush in a small pocket of the refugee camp that had yet to come under Israeli control. This was the highest IDF casualty figure in a single attack in the whole of the conflict, until then and until today. The deaths had the effect of hardening the army's determination that the situation was still extremely dangerous and that no one would enter the camp until it was safe. If we in the spokesperson's office were realizing by Monday the urgency of bringing journalists into the field, by Tuesday such a request had become unrealistic. What's more, the death of the 13 soldiers, at close range and in very intense fighting, made it incomprehensible to IDF leaders that anyone--let alone journalists--could believe Palestinian claims of a massacre. (Indeed, some in the IDF began to question whether the soldiers had been put at too great a risk in order to minimize Palestinian casualties.) The upshot of all this was to squelch any chance of allowing journalists into the camp. But in retrospect, it was during the fateful four days that followed--from the morning of Wednesday, April 10 to the morning of Sunday, April 14, when reporters finally entered the camp--that the myth of the massacre in Jenin came to life.
The fighting continued all day Wednesday and until late Thursday, when the IDF declared it had taken control of the Jenin refugee camp. Still, entry remained extremely dangerous because of sporadic gunfire and the unexploded ordinances laid by gunmen in the rubble. (In the weeks following the fighting at least two Palestinians would be killed by these devices.) It wasn't until Saturday afternoon that we would receive a call instructing us to arrange a media pool for the next morning.
The story of the ambush on the 13 soldiers dominated the news on Tuesday, but by Wednesday the media began to refocus on the question of casualties in Jenin. This was partly due to the fact that much of the bulldozing occurred immediately following the ambush in a particular pocket of the camp, accounting for 10 percent of its total area, that was too heavily booby-trapped for soldiers to enter the houses on foot, as they had been doing until then. And the Palestinians, fearing IDF revenge for the attack, simply said the army was bulldozing the whole camp.
Worse still, the IDF was releasing what turned out to be erroneous, highly inflated estimates of Palestinian casualties. With Palestinian leaders clamoring "massacre" on all the news networks, pressure mounted on the IDF to give its own assessment of Palestinian casualties, something the army does not do as common practice. What we ended up with was an inflated estimate guessed at by field commanders based on the intensity of the fighting. While our office was saying around 150 Palestinians were killed, I heard very senior generals say up to 200, and the press quoted defense officials with numbers ranging as high as 250. These estimates made the Palestinian claims of 500 dead seem reasonable.
But here, again, you had the problem of independent verification: "How many people were killed? We just don't know. [The Israelis] say around 200. Palestinians say 500. The Red Cross is somewhere in between. And these are just numbers being thrown out that no one really can verify," said Ben Wedeman of CNN in a report on Friday, April 12. "I've been watching the Arabic television stations, the satellite stations, basically it is now taken as a fact, as the truth by millions of Arabs that a massacre did take place within that camp. But we, ourselves have no way of confirming that. And until we get inside, the stories will mount." And so they did. "When it turned out the rumors of executions were baseless ... Palestinian Minister Saeb Erekat continued lying, though he lowered the number of dead from three thousand to five hundred," wrote Ze'ev Schiff, the senior military analyst for the Israeli daily Ha'aretz. Without independent media access, these numbers continued to enjoy credibility.
If the exaggerated figures weren't enough, talk at the IDF general staff meeting on Friday of removing the bodies of Palestinian gunmen and burying them elsewhere proved to be the nail in the coffin of Israel's p.r. effort. The idea came up after the generals were presented with intelligence indicating that Palestinians intended to stage a mass funeral when the IDF withdrew from the Jenin camp to support their claim of a massacre, bringing bodies from other areas to the site to ensure a high body count. The generals were adamant about preventing this ploy, and the suggestion was made to bury the bodies recovered in an army burial site for enemy dead in the Jordan Valley.
Although no steps were taken to implement the plan, the idea of carrying out a mass burial quickly leaked out of the meeting, prompting an outcry. Human rights groups immediately petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court, which issued an injunction barring moving the bodies. Most critically, though, news of this plan convinced the Palestinians, and others, that there indeed was a massacre and here was proof that the IDF was trying to cover it up. The weekend papers and newscasts all over the world led with the claims and counterclaims of a massacre, coupled with the Supreme Court injunction.
The confusion within the Israeli establishment finally came to an end on Sunday morning when then-Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer reported to the cabinet that "dozens not hundreds" were killed. Sunday also was the day I led the first tour of the camp.
After Sunday, the whole of the following week was spent by Israeli spokespersons doing damage control. We had two other tours of Jenin that week for reporters. We even arranged for photographers to shoot pictures from the air, in order to prove that the razing of homes was limited to a small area of the refugee camp, and that the whole of the camp had not been destroyed, as many media reports had implied.
While it soon became clear that there was no massacre, and while the U.N. and major human rights organizations put the number of Palestinians killed in Jenin at around 52, the impression of a massacre persists, and the association of "Jenin" and "massacre" cannot be fully erased from international consciousness. This teaches us something fundamental about shaping world opinion in a low-intensity conflict: It is, unfortunately, not always the reality--the actual facts--that matter, but rather the perception of the reality; and that perception is formed by the media, and the perception in the media is formed by the initial rendition of the event. An untruth cannot be allowed to linger--it has to be disproved, to a reasonable journalistic standard, immediately. Otherwise you can do all the damage control you want, but the initial impression will never be fully erased.
The IDF has learned this lesson the hard way. Had we sent a single representative of the foreign press into Jenin for half an hour every day of the week during the fighting, I can say with almost full certainty that the claims of a massacre would not have taken root. Specifically, the journalists on the ground would have been able to sort out the issue of estimated Palestinian casualties; and they would almost certainly have arrived at more accurate numbers than those relayed through the chain of command to the general staff.
In the months that followed the fighting in Jenin, the IDF insisted on bringing journalists, serving as pool reporters, on almost every large operation, even to the point where it wasn't useful for the journalists themselves. I remember a military operation that summer in Bethlehem in which we took a senior print journalist who ended up spending ten hours in an armored personnel carrier (APC); and although he was exposed to everything that went on within and in the proximity of the APC, he had little sense of the whole operation, nearly missing his deadline as he tried to call in fragments of the story by cell phone. Eventually we found a way to strike the right balance with the pools, taking into consideration the needs of journalists.
But even the pools in which journalists sometimes get stuck and don't have much to report on are nevertheless useful. During an operation in Gaza last year we sent a number of journalists to the edge of the Palestinian town of Rafah to see the fighting from the IDF perspective. The APC brought them in, then parked, and the soldiers were promised that another APC would be there momentarily to pick them up. Momentarily, as sometimes happens due to lack of communication within the army, took about three hours. In the meantime, there were continuous exchanges of gunfire between IDF and Palestinian gunmen, and the journalists were ducking for cover in the parked APC. They, understandably, began to make panicked calls to their bureaus, and even contacted the U.S. Embassy for help.
The downside of this press pool was that we ended up with a group of justifiably angry journalists. But there was an upside: The reporters witnessed the heavy fighting, got a good sense of the intensity of combat, and perhaps came to better understand the situation of the Israeli soldier. In other words, unlike in the spring of 2002, reporters saw just about everything there was to see. IDF commanders will almost certainly provide the same access during the tense weeks to come. By doing so, they will ensure that Gaza is not the next Jenin.
Jacob Dallal is a former captain in the Israel Defense Forces.
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