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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (26760)	4/23/2002 11:59:32 PM
From: Paul Kern	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 281500

Paul, I have a question for you. Many reporters who go to the Mideast become quite pro-Palestinian. It didn't happen that way with you, obviously. Do you have any insights to share, either on why so many others became pro-Palestinian or on why you didn't? It's late so I'll make this brief. I went over there as normal, lefty journalist as did most of the other I met. After only a few months, I suffered a depressing sense of congnative dissonance -- what I thought that I thought didn't jibe with what I saw and heard. I was there a few weeks and the intifada was quiet so I went off with a Pal fixer to do a daily life story on a Palestinian village -- an old stand-by tearjerker for when there is nothing happening. On the way, we stopped at a tent where the fixer said a family had been living since their home had been bulldozed by the IDF. First there were about six or seven people in a tent that could sleep, at most four, and second there were several clean-cut, college age Pals who spoke nearly perfect English. They told me their sad story as granny wailed and ululated and I took a few snaps not really interested in what looked like a set-up. A few weeks later, travelling with the reporter from a major American paper and a different fixer we stopped by the same tent. Only, none of the people were the same. They told her their sad story of how their home and been destroyed and they were all living in the tent and so on. I took a few more snaps as a different granny wailed and ululated. When we were back in J-town, away from the fixer, I told her that she had been had and that I had the pix to prove it. She wrote the long sob story anyway and it was published. It just went on from there. In a small, ex-pat community where we all drink at the same places, eat at the same places, go to the same parties, join together in cars to travel out in the West Bank, share fixers to keep the cost down, and go to the beach or Jericho together for lunch on quiet Saturdays, there is tremendous social pressure to hold to the party line. Most bosses and editors also question any journo who comes with a story that's much different from the others.