SEMINARS Passia Seminar 1999 Media and Communication Skills

 

 

 

Dr. Nabil Khatib

 

 

 

hen I was asked to speak about the Palestinian media-communica­tion strategy, I said that according to my understanding it does not exist and that it would therefore be extremely hard for me to talk about it! Neverthe­less, I am going to present a couple of case studies, which should give you some idea about the Palestinian experience in this field.

 

I will start with two stories that involve me personally. In 1986, I was a new journalism graduate and had just returned home. I was working as a corre­spondent for the northern areas - Nablus, Jenin, etc. - with Al-Fajr newspa­per, one of Palestine’s famous newspapers, which expressed the view of the PLO; that is, before it was closed in 1996. One day, we received infor­mation concerning a female patient in a hospital in Jenin who had been mistakenly declared dead and put in the refrigerator, even though she was actually still alive, as was discovered the next day. Unfortunately, the poor woman died shortly afterwards because of her ordeal. This was an impor­tant story, which the public had the right to hear, but it was also a story that had the potential to harm certain people because anyone hearing it would demand that those in­volved be fired. In other words, they would try to bring about a positive change. Certainly, both the hospital and the doctor most immediately con­cerned were keen to keep their names out of the papers and to escape any repercussions.

 

Being fully aware of the sensitivity of the issue, my colleagues and I went to great lengths to ensure that the information we had received was correct and that we were not simply dealing with a case of a relative of someone who had died under normal circumstances trying to make someone ‘pay’ for his or her loss. Once we were convinced of the authenticity of our in­formation we sent the story to be published, only to be told that it had to be scrapped. When we asked why, we were told that according to a certain Palestinian strategy, it is illogical to declare to the whole world that we have defects like these, thereby allowing the Israelis to turn around and say, “If they can’t even manage their medical affairs, how could they possibly manage a state?” The direction followed by the Palestinian political elite that was responsible for Palestinian journalism at that time was that such issues should not be tackled.

 

The second example concerns the events of only a few days ago. An Is­raeli settler slaughtered a Palestinian called Osama An-Natsheh in At-Thori neighborhood. According to the initial information we received, An-Natsheh had been ‘stabbed’ - as anyone would admit, from the linguistic point of view, there is a world of difference between being ‘stabbed’ and being ‘slaughtered’. Many people, if provoked enough, are capable of stab­bing someone, but to slaughter someone requires a great deal of callous­ness and a far greater readiness to kill. In this particular instance, it was very clear that the assailant was motivated not only by nationalistic ideas but also by a heightened criminal readiness to commit murder.

 

Several hours after the killing, some students from Birzeit who were pro­testing against the plight of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails started stoning cars with Israeli identification plates near Bet El. I was there at the time, and I remember counting five TV cameras, three of which belonged to international stations. When a young Israeli soldier, a passenger in a settler car, was dragged from the vehicle and beaten, footage of the incident was distributed very quickly – in about half an hour – and was sent directly through satellite from Ramallah to London, contrary to usual procedure; usually it is sent to Jerusalem and edited first.

 

The next day, when I opened the newspapers I was annoyed but not sur­prised to discover that the dominant story was the so-called ‘attack’ on the soldier, even though the Israelis admitted he had sustained only minor injuries. Of course the shots of him being beaten were somewhat dramatic, but that did not change the fact that his injuries were only very minor, whereas four hours earlier in Jerusalem an Arab had been slaughtered – not simply murdered – and yet hardly any mention of his death was made. According to the generally accepted idea that someone being murdered is more newsworthy than someone being mildly injured – unless the person who is injured happens to be very important – the media, in this instance, had clearly let the public down, especially as the murder was characterized by both criminal and nationalistic tendencies on the part of the assailant. The overall result was that on this particular day of strug­gle, Israel was the winner from the media point of view, because the minor injuries sustained by the soldier, who was armed, had taken precedence over the slaughter by an Israeli settler of an unarmed Palestinian from Je­rusalem.

 

Another thing that attracted my attention was that although the soldier had been armed, he had not attempted, as is normal practice in such situations, to fire at the students. Nor, having dragged him from the car, did the stu­dents attempt to injure him seriously, let alone kill him. Unfortunately, the public did not see some of the students trying to help the soldier escape, nor was any mention made of the fact that they had taken his rifle, not in order to kill him but in order to stop him from firing at them. There was clearly, amongst all the confusion, a subconscious decision on the part of the students to refrain from seriously harming the soldier.

 

The day after the incident, I personally heard declarations by 12 Israeli ministers about what had happened and I know that the ministerial council watched the tape four times and then took a decision to stop the negotia­tions and that nobody contested the decision as most people, by that time, had seen the footage. On the other hand, nobody said a single word about what had happened in At-Thori.

 

The reason why I gave these two examples is as follows: the first example is relative to the internal Palestinian media policy while the second one is relative to the media policy with regard to the whole world.

 

Today, the reality is that we have three Palestinian daily newspapers, whereas in the 1920s and 1930s there were 125 daily, weekly and monthly periodicals. Like in all the countries of Bilad Ash-Sham, there was a strong cultural movement in this country, and had we not been occupied, the ad­vanced situation of the media might have continued. In 1948, when the country was divided, the cultural centers were Haifa and Jaffa, and there was also considerable activity in Jerusalem and Nablus. Those who were forced to flee to Lebanon and Syria published a few small clandestine pub­lications on the necessity of preparing for the battle as Palestinians, but in Egypt or Gaza, the feeling was that Palestine was the issue of all Arabs. Accordingly, the consensus was that Palestinians should not publish news­papers and raise Pales­tinian interests and problems as Palestinians. When the West Bank was united with Jordan, there was a debate concerning whether someone living there should publish a newspaper according to his status as a citizen in this united country or as a Palestinian who still has a problem to be solved. The result was that there was no Palestinian news­paper illustrating Palestinian concerns and afflictions, with the exception of Al-Ittihad, which was trans­formed from a Palestinian newspaper into an Israeli newspaper but which dealt with ‘inside’ Palestinians’ concerns.

 

In 1967 when the contemporary Palestinian revolution was prominent, there was a heated debate going on about whether or not we should pub­lish our newspapers and accept being subject to the Israeli military censor­ship. Another debate concerned the fact that the Palestinian resistance had decided that if newspapers were to be published, then it wanted to finance them. Many people at that time believed that politics start from firearms and that community work is secondary. So, after 1967, the only newspaper that resumed publication - after being renamed - was Al-Quds, now as a news­paper that dealt with the Palestinian issue in the framework of the Pales­tinian problem with a new vision – the right of self-determination, etc. The Al-Fajr and Ash-Sha’ab newspapers were only published in 1972, i.e., it took us five years to agree on this issue.

 

The problem faced then was that there were not any real journalists, only political activists. Al-Fajr, for example, was financed by a given faction, so those responsible for funding it would find people who shared the faction’s point of view and whose written Arabic language was acceptable. So the ‘journalists’ actually started writing propaganda and not news, but even then, the attempts to mobilize people through the media were not always successful because all the material had to go to the Israeli military censor. It was due to this censorship that issues with which the censor was not particularly concerned, such as the Palestinian disputes with Jordan, Egypt and Syria, usually took precedence over the problems between the Pales­tinians and Israel. This problem was complicated by our leader­ship’s lack of belief in the role of the media and the tendency to avoid pub­lishing de­tails of shortcomings in order to prove that the Palestinian nation deserved to survive.

 

In the 1980s, awareness of the importance of community work increased further, but the newspapers remained in the framework of the political par­ties that financed them. Thus, the supply of information to the public was very selective, and articles about the activities of the local organizations that supplied an alternative flow of information to that coming from Israel, which was often inaccurate, were only few and far between.

 

During the Intifada things changed and finally a local leadership emerged that was able to speak its mind without fear of being punished and that was in direct contact with the ‘outside’. We could go and ask Faisal Husseini, or Dr. Abdul Hadi, or Sari Nusseibeh, “What do you think about this or that aspect of the Question of Jerusalem” and be provided with a local Pales­tinian perspective, which was something entirely new. Since telephone interviews with Abu Ammar or others in the leadership were forbidden, these local sources of in­formation became all the more important. At the end of the Intifada, that same local personalities started to speak openly, and many of them became negotiators. This resulted in news about the negotiations coming not from Tunis, but from Jerusalem, and foreign jour­nalists taking their information from their Palestinian counterparts. This situation continued until the arrival of the PNA.

 

Today, we have other types of problems. First, there is still Israeli military censorship in Jerusalem and other areas still under occupation. Second, there is a very unclear situation in the territories under the PNA: many newspapers were closed (e.g., Ash-Sha’ab, Al-Fajr), while new ones (e.g., Al-Hayyat Al-Jadeedah and Al-Ayyam) and a Palestinian TV and radio sta­tion were established. In short, a whole new structure emerged while the original one, excluding Al-Quds newspaper, was destroyed.

 

Under the PNA, the media is no longer subject to two authorities, but it is not that one no longer exists or was replaced, rather that there has been a ‘juxtaposition’ of the two. Accordingly, Al-Quds newspaper, for ex­ample, will take into consideration both the view of the Israeli military cen­sorship as well as that of the PNA. This even applies to Al-Hayyat Al-Jadeedah, which is printed in the PNA territory, because it is distributed in Israel and it will pass through Israel on its way to Gaza.

 

After the arrival of the PNA in 1994, Palestinian journalists were third in the list of groups of people being imprisoned by the PNA, the first and second being collaborators and members of the Islamic opposition respectively. Between July 1994 and July 1995 alone 13 journalists were imprisoned. One of the main problems is the number of laws being applied: Ottoman laws, the British martial laws of 1933 and 1935, the Jordanian laws that even Jordan has stopped using, the Egyptian laws in Gaza, and the Israeli military laws. Until today we have judges that refer back to Ottoman laws.

 

Accordingly, our main request, following the lobbying of some Palestinian decision-makers by the Palestinian Journalists Forum, was that a single Press Law be issued so that we would know our rights and responsibilities. The Press and Publications Law was the fifth law to be formulated by the PNA. It raised a lot of debate because on one hand it annulled all the previ­ous laws and eliminated the direct censorship, whilst, on the other hand, there were certain ‘foggy’ articles that imposed some sort of ‘self censor­ship’ on the journalists and their editors-in-chief. During the press confer­ence that dealt with the new law, held by the Minister of Information, Yasser Abed Rabbo, the editor of Al-Quds, Maher Ash-Sheikh, said “It is better for me to have a censor, instead of making a ‘mistake’ and then be­ing thrown in prison because of it.”

 

For example, the Palestinian Press Law exposes to punishment everyone who publishes anything that harms the national Palestinian unity. But what exactly is ‘the national Palestinian unity’? The law forbids harming some­thing without even determining what it is. It also ignores the fact that the national good of 1936, or 1948, or 1967, or 1974, or the Madrid period, the Oslo period, etc. is different to the na­tional good of today.

 

One of the most dangerous aspects of the Press Law is the article that gives any judge the right to oblige a journalist to uncover his/her sources, which often, and quite understandably, results in a lack of willingness on the part of potential sources to divulge information.

 

I think the Press Law is a positive step forward; not all journalists approve of it, but it was the best compromise that could be reached. One should not forget that there was a dispute over it in the Cabinet, which re­garded it as very accommodating to the journalists. The outcome is that the newspa­pers do not apply many of the articles, while there are a lot of arti­cles that correspond to the rights of journalists that are also not applied, which is why the process of putting journalists into prison continues, albeit to a lesser degree than before.

 

The PNA committed itself not to arrest any jour­nalist unless the order comes from the highest level, not just from se­curity personnel. We all know, however, the story of Al-Quds journalist Ala’ Mashharawi from Gaza, who was arrested six times by six differ­ent security apparatuses for the same reason, simply because of the pres­sure being exerted on the PNA at the time as a result of Hamas’ opera­tions. What happened was that the President asked who was responsible for the press re­lease concerning Hamas taking responsibility for the operations from Gaza. When he was told it was Mashharawi, he demanded that he be brought in for questioning, so poor Mashharawi would be released by one security apparatus, only to be arrested by another.

 

From the media point of view, the current situation is very complex, and the political dimension is only one problem; there is also an economic dimen­sion, which is related to the way in which the Palestinian economy affects the local press. When an economy is strong, the number of advertisements increases, which means that the newspapers are able to depend on them­selves, develop, and pay higher salaries. What has happened in Palestine is that the bad economic situation has obliged the newspapers to rely heavily on news agencies as an inexpensive source of information, even though the agencies are not concerned with local issues.

 

The third problem is a professional one that cannot be changed by a law, nor by a presidential decree, nor by a decision from the Journalists’ Asso­ciation. It is a problem related to the accumulation of ethical and profes­sional morals of journalists that require tens of years to change.

Is the Palestinian media capable of playing its role in controlling the public institutions, whether governmental or non-governmental, and at the same time guarantee the flow of objective information and pass it on to people? To answer this, one only has to consider the following figures: the level of distribution of newspapers in developing countries is 80 per 1,000 of po­tential readers on average, in Africa, 50 per 1,000, but here in Palestine, the figure is only 20-30 per 1,000. Even though our country is characterized by a high political interest, there is a very low interest in the newspapers, which probably results from the public’s view that the newspapers fail to provide them with enough reliable information or act as ‘supervisors’ with regard to the performance of the public institutions.

 

During the period leading up to the election some colleagues and I pre­pared a weekly publication called The People and the Elections because we felt that the elections were not being covered properly. The organiza­tions that were most interested in following up what was being published on women candidates or women’s issues in general were the Women’s Study Center and the WATC (Women’s Affairs Technical Committee). Both tried to influence what we published, saying “You have said such and such, now we want you to print our point of view,” which, in many cases, we did. The way they followed the media and tried to control the flow of information, sending letters asking us to do something or else condemning something we published earned them our respect. It also showed that change requires social interactions, not only the making of decisions.

 

The Voice of Women, which is published by the WATC, is considered a tool that can be used to influence and mobilize the public, but a look at the first 15 volumes reveals rather unsuccessful public relations work. The mis­take the NGOs are committing in their publications is that they write only about their activities - e.g., Zahira Kamal met so and so, this female activ­ist did such and such, a training program took place here and there, etc. - which do not really interest the general public or the media. If the NGOs want to make use of the media, they should employ public relations people who understand how the media works.

 

It is time that we make an effort to ensure that an entirely new generation of journalists emerges; now, most journalists are former political activists, and third-year journalism students at Birzeit, for example, are actually far more active than the ‘real’ journalists. One of my students visited Jericho three times to cover the casino story, at her own expense, whereas not one of the ‘real’ journalists did the same thing.

 

The Ministry of Information has issued 22 permits to different organizations for newspapers and journals. The PNA itself is spending money on three newspapers and is sponsoring another three dailies. If the opposition or the civil society organizations do not publish a newspaper or any other form of publication in order to control what the PNA is doing, then the PNA will continue to do exactly whatever it likes. The new generation will, it is hoped, bring new changes.