200-250 words for each article answers

Local hands, international news Palestinian journalists and the international media

■ Amahl Bishara New York University, USA

A B S T R A C T ■ Study of the production process of news about Palestinians rather than simply its final forms reveals the extent to which mainstream news is a cultural product not only of US society and western journalism’s professional norms, but of Palestinian society as well. Palestinian journalists working for international news contribute essential labor to the final product of international news. They serve as cultural and geographical guides for foreign correspondents. They are photojournalists and reporters on the scene covering both everyday political news and dangerous crises. Much of their work demands embodied skills acquired within Palestinian society under occupation. Yet, perhaps because journalism is generally thought of as intellectual work, and also because of the intensely local nature of these journalistic skills, Palestinian journalists’ contributions – which generally relate to the facilitation of knowledge production, rather than to the formulation of editorial positions – are rarely recognized in publication or in discussions of journalism.

K E Y W O R D S ■ journalism, media production, Middle East, Palestinian society, embodiment, military occupation, nationalism

graphy Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com Vol 7(1): 19–46[DOI: 10.1177/1466138106064590]

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Introduction

They negotiated their way past armed guards and over uneven pavements at dusk in a Palestinian neighborhood in the West Bank. The three journal- ists, two Americans and a Palestinian, were there to witness the erection of an eight-meter concrete wall, part of Israel’s separation barrier. The Pales- tinian news fixer had heard that construction workers were going to begin work that evening and brought the foreign correspondent and photogra- pher to the scene. All of their senses were sharpened as they stood in the thickening dark talking to local residents outside rundown stores. The jour- nalists had found a scoop. The building of Israel’s separation barrier – a concrete wall near cities and towns, a reinforced fence when running through agricultural lands – was one of the biggest news stories of 2002–4, and now it had arrived to critical new territory in its most dramatic form. The reporters spoke to fathers and children about how they expected their lives to change now that they would be cut off from nearby Palestinian areas. The reporters even elicited the conflicted explanations of the Palestinian-Israeli construction workers,1 who expressed understanding of how the barrier would harm local Palestinian communities even as they eased planks of the wall in place. The Palestinian journalist translated quickly and inconspicuously as the US journalist took notes.2

The reporters interviewed an old woman and her daughter who happened by. The younger woman had brought her mother in order to prove to her that her house was really to become inaccessible because of the wall. She would have to continue staying with her extended family or risk being isolated from them. The old woman wanted to stay in her home. Between mouthfuls of translation, the Palestinian journalist was full of sympathetic expressions, spoken in his deft Jerusalem Arabic. Perhaps he was all the more heartfelt because he knew the path of the separation wall was to go by his own house as well, but he did not mention this. The old woman lamented that she had also lost a home in 1948, when the state of Israel was created and Palestinians were pushed out of the area. The young woman pleaded with the journalist to convince her mother that she had to come back with her.

As the Palestinian journalist bent over the small woman urging her to be practical, the US reporter stood back. The photographer was already off on her own, wrestling with the spotlights and the cranes and the wall planks through the lens of her camera. For a moment, this scene of journalists at work, soon to become a tiny part of US public culture, was an intimate exchange between three Palestinians: less a journalist and his interview subjects than a man exhorting an old woman to listen to reason, two young people sheltering an older one, distant neighbors working out the lived details of a draining occupation. As happens so often in everyday local

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politics, they were concerned not with the injustice of their situation, or with its larger political implications, but with the practical problem that it presented to them on that particular evening.

On the way out of the area, the journalists again passed by the Israeli guard and roadblock, which stopped both pedestrian and motor traffic. They slid past with a nod because they were all accredited journalists, and two were foreigners. But as they were leaving, the guard turned away a neighborhood resident, telling him that he would have to take a much longer path home. The journalists, following the lead of the American cor- respondent, lingered, eyeing the situation until the guard allowed the man to pass. When the journalists turned away, they seemed satisfied that they had done one small good deed.

It turned out to be a strong story, full of political import, moral complex- ity, and even historical context. The foreign correspondent was an excel- lent writer with an apt eye for detail. The photographer skillfully incorporated the architectural shock of the wall, the implacability of the nighttime work, and the agony of local Palestinians. The Palestinian reporter had brought them both to this important location and not only had done the necessary translation but also managed to create moments of connection during which the richness of the old woman’s story emerged. Yet, in a way, he had less input into the content of the story not only than the US journalists, but even than the old woman. Moreover, he was the only one of the salaried trio that did not receive printed recognition for his role in the story. This lack of acknowledgement is customary, and it is indicative of a larger obscurity concerning the process of production of international news about Palestinians, and the production of international news more generally.

International media’s structural failure to recognize Palestinian labor mirrors other instances of western neglect of indigenous or Third World peoples’ contributions to international processes of media production (Feld, 1994, 1996a; Ginsburg, 1991, 2002; Johnson, 1996; Lippard, 1992). This tendency also recurs in other situations of cross-cultural knowledge produc- tion, including in anthropological (Sanjek, 1993), archeological (Smith, 2005), and scientific (King et al., 1996; Ziff and Rao, 1997) research. In all of these cases, professionally trained westerners seem to underestimate the creativity or skill of their native collaborators. Non-westerners are assumed to be tied to their culture or their position in a way that makes them unable to represent themselves or something of their society, to break out of what are perceived to be static and homogeneous cultures, and still remain connected to them. Similarly, Palestinians are assumed to have insur- mountable political biases bound to their nationality.

This article is about the role Palestinian journalists play in the produc- tion of international, and especially US, news about Palestinians in the

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Israeli-occupied West Bank.3 Some of these skills are embodied and many are learned as a necessary part of living in Palestinian society under Israeli occupation. Their embodied and local nature are two reasons which may lead to the lack of reflection on them. Embodied practices in intellectual work are too often overlooked and international journalism is usually presumed to consist of international, rather than local, standards and practices. Through an ethnography of media production, it is possible to complicate oversimplified notions of people’s relationships to both local and professional cultures.

Palestinian journalists in a complex field of production

Any kind of international news is a cross-cultural product involving the labor of people with diverse professional and ethnic or national back- grounds. In the Israeli–Palestinian context, the field of international news production includes those based in the United States or Europe in charge of generating advertising money, editors in Israel and abroad; foreign correspondents based in Israel; Palestinian and Israeli journalists who work with international corporations; and those in Israeli and Palestinian media organizations who often inform international coverage. It also includes actors and institutions outside media corporations such as govern- ment officials, corporations who advertise through the media, and activist media organizations. Finally, there are the various non-professional Pales- tinian and Israeli spokespeople who sometimes get a word in edgewise: the Israeli soldiers and settlers, Palestinian militant leaders and farmers, insistent Palestinian children, and NGO leaders and weeping mothers of both nationalities.4 When Palestinian society is in the news, Palestinian journalists are front-line mediators closest – in both space and sentiment – to the action of a news story in this complex field of production.

Although it is rare to read a Palestinian byline or to see a Palestinian correspondent on television in the United States, Palestinians do play an essential role in the production of international news about their own society and Israeli occupation. Foreign correspondents usually arrive in Jerusalem speaking little or no Hebrew or Arabic (Hannerz, 1998, 2004), and they have neither the rich historical background nor the vast social network essential to doing work in Palestinian society. Palestinians are translators, and they are the producers and fixers of stories, selecting people with whom to speak, setting up interviews, and leading the way through territory unfamiliar to the foreign correspondent. Most photo- journalists working on a daily basis in the West Bank are also Palestin- ian, and they are often the only ones who attend the funerals, planned commemorative protests, or more spontaneous demonstrations that make

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up the bulk of everyday, visible, Palestinian politics.5 Palestinian reporters and photojournalists working for wire services are the only journalists who attend all of the press appearances of Palestinian officials, thereby gather- ing the basic information for everyday news stories. Due to institutional norms, photographers are most likely to receive credit for their work, followed by wire service reporters who may receive a byline, and then by camerapeople, fixers, and stringers who very rarely receive published acknowledgement.

Interestingly, the same kinds of labor that are overlooked for authorial credit also do not necessarily contribute to the editorial content of reports. To study the local Palestinian context of production is certainly to study a complex process of communication between media-makers and their audiences, but not necessarily to study the creation of the message, since Palestinian journalists do not regularly have a strong role in writing and editing. Rather, it is studying the process of making contact, the construc- tion of a ‘physical and psychological connection between the addresser and the addressee’ (Jakobson, 1985 [1960]: 150), or an aspect of the material dimensions of media production. Making contact is an important part of journalistic labor in any situation, since journalism valorizes being on the scene and having relationships with sources. Any act of research, of gather- ing information, is also an act of creating contact between the reporter and the world. Other studies have considered the materiality of media itself by way of cut radio lines and radios broadcast on the shoulders of pedestri- ans (Armbrust, 1998; Larkin, 2002; Mrazek, 1997; Spitulnik, 2002). Here, though the media product itself remains evanescent and inconspicuous – television reports that come and go with the wave of a second hand, news- papers that appear quietly on pre-dawn doorsteps – I will focus on the materiality of the media by looking at the work involved in producing those reports. Palestinian journalistic work requires physical strength, courage, and an intellect attuned to the immediate physical environment as well as to historical processes and minute-to-minute political developments. It requires a good local social network as well as an understanding of audiences abroad.

My research was conducted during the second half of the second Intifada,6 in the shadow of Israel’s large-scale invasions of West Bank cities in 2002.7 This period encompassed the death of Palestinian Authority (PA) President Yasser Arafat, subsequent PA presidential elections, the beginning of a new dialogue between the PA and the Israeli government, and Israel’s building of a separation barrier around Palestinian populations in the West Bank. Journalists had more time to sit and chat than they would have had in the preceding years, especially as the war in Iraq took up media space. It was a good time for reflection about the PA, the Intifada, and how international news covered both. Journalists without full-time jobs also

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contemplated what they would do when the flow of headlines slowed even further, as they believed it eventually would. In this article, I will first discuss the debate about the professionalism and national commitment that is a constant companion to discussions of Palestinian journalists’ role in the international media. Then I will discuss the various social and embodied skills it takes to produce international news about Palestinian society, notably journalists’ quiet skill of emplacement, their ability to negotiate complicated social relations within Palestinian society, and their gumption and resourcefulness in the face of life-threatening situations.

Professionalism and national commitment

For those who follow the mainstream political debate on the Israeli– Palestinian conflict, the question of media bias looms large. In this sphere, some critics not only acknowledge Palestinian journalists’ role but turn it into a source of controversy. A Jerusalem Post news article summarizes the case of Palestinian journalists’ critics, asserting that many members of ‘the international news media . . . employ “journalists” who see themselves as “foot soldiers” serving the Palestinian cause’, and as a result, ‘parts of the foreign media frequently allow their stories to be filtered through such fixers-consultants’ (Staff, 2005: 13). This issue reflects the larger challenges Palestinian journalists face because of public focus on reductive cultural politics rather than on the kinds of historicized, on-the-ground processes that ethnography can illuminate (Mamdani, 2004). This section discusses Israeli official action apparently meant to limit Palestinian journalists’ influence; addresses various players’ positions on Palestinian journalists’ professionalism and national commitment; and briefly considers Palestinian journalists’ diverse backgrounds and basic political orientations.

The debate about Palestinian journalists acquired high stakes when, at the beginning of 2002, Israeli authorities refused to renew government- issued press passes of Palestinian journalists from the Occupied Territories, including those working for international organizations. Daniel Seaman, Director of the Israeli Government Press Office (GPO), justified this decision stating:

There is a war today between the Jewish people, the Israeli people, and the Palestinians . . . They will use every method to hurt us, including exploiting the media and Israeli democracy. We have to put a stop to this matter. (Schmemann, 2002: A8)

In the same article, he alleged that Palestinian journalists working for inter- national media were ‘no doubt employed by the Palestinian Authority’ (2002: A8). These remarks insinuate that Palestinian journalists contribute

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to negative press coverage of Israel. Seaman went on to allege that Palestinian journalists might be involved with militant activity, noting, ‘in the estimation of the security services, for the time being the mere entry into Israel of [Occupied] territories residents may endanger the well-being and security of the citizens and residents of the state in a most substantive manner’ (Izenberg, 2003: 6A).

In response to the ban, the Reuters news agency filed a court case on behalf of one of its employees, Ahmed Seif, who had held a press pass for 12 years before it was revoked. In the spring of 2004, Reuters won its case in Israel’s Supreme Court, which declared that if Palestinian journalists had security clearance, they could not be denied press passes. This should have set an important precedent for other journalists, but in the following year, only a few individual Palestinian journalists succeeded in reacquiring press cards. As of the spring of 2005, Palestinian journalists first needed to obtain a work permit to enter Israel, a time-consuming process involving extensive security checks, before they could be issued a three-month GPO card. By contrast, many international and Israeli journalists get a GPO card valid for at least a year in a very short time. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a New York-based free press and human rights organization, reported in 2004 that it was clear from an interview with Seaman that the process would remain difficult for Palestinian journalists (Campagna, 2004).

During the case and in its wake, foreign editors and representatives of the Foreign Press Agency have asserted that Palestinian journalists play an integral and uncontroversial role in news production. Tami Allen-Frost, the deputy chairperson of the Foreign Press Association and an ITN reporter, commented that, ‘there are many jobs Israelis simply could not do. For instance, no ITN producer would take the risk of sending an Israeli camera- man into an area controlled by the Palestinian Authority’ (Leith, 2001: 20). While Allen-Frost hinted that Palestinians have safe access to areas because of their nationality, a western editor emphasized the cultural skills that locals have. He told me that he considered it natural that Israelis and Palestinians would each cover their own societies, because locals provide ‘contacts and penetration in the community . . . It is like this in all news organizations, all the world over, for any serious news organization that doesn’t just want to rip information off the wires’. The editor also empha- sized that there are extensive checks on all employees and their writings to verify that news stories are true and complete. Still, an Israeli editor for a western news corporation told me, while acknowledging the important role of Palestinian journalists, that Palestinian journalists were more likely than Israeli journalists to be biased because of Palestinians’ ongoing national struggle.

A Palestinian journalist poetically summed up the importance of Palestinians for international news organizations, commenting, ‘We catch

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stories like fish because we are swimming in the same sea.’ Palestinian journalists, for their part, do want to contribute to media messages. As in other cases of nationally disempowered groups who produce media or information for outside audiences, such as indigenous media-makers, Palestinians are concerned with the communication of Palestinian ideas and experience to outsiders, or ‘foreigners’ as they are called locally.8 Palestinian journalists reconciled professional values of objectivity with Palestinian societal goals of representing the ‘truth’ of Palestinian society – that is, the oppression of occupation – to outsiders. Some said that they were trying to improve media coverage by encouraging more critical coverage of the occupation, and more nuance in coverage of Palestinian society. Voicing a sentiment I heard more than once, one reporter said, ‘When I press editors to change something, I am not cheating. I am talking about the reality.’ Yet, in individual interviews and in a number of public Palestinian media confer- ences addressing how Palestinians can best get their message across to an international audience, Palestinian journalists and intellectuals seemed to take for granted the lack of influence Palestinian reporters have over how the international media cover their issue, for the simple reason that they must keep their jobs. Some journalists remain in dialogue with editors about contested terminology and contextual information. However, one Palestinian journalist said that in general her colleagues do not do enough, lamenting, ‘unfortunately many Palestinian journalists working in this field think it is good enough that they have these jobs, so they do not challenge editors’. A professionally successful stringer who decided to leave the field because he found it unfulfilling articulated another shared complaint: ‘Most Americans have an agenda. They would not take a story from me. They rely on me for collection of data, for the raw material. But they consider it to be their work to mould this information.’ Corroborating an observation made by US media scholars (McChesney, 2004: 100), he said that American journalists do not necessarily even get their story ideas from their observa- tions here, but rather from editors abroad.

Different kinds of journalists have different attitudes about the activist value of their work, corresponding to a certain extent with various prac- tices of journalism. Photojournalists, who risk their safety on a daily basis and who have more control over the images they produce than reporters and fixers do over stories, tend to believe their work helps Palestinian society by bringing ‘the truth’ about the occupation to the world. On the other hand, reporters can be much more cynical. One talented high-level fixer insisted on a number of occasions that journalists should not be activists but rather professionals who aim for objectivity. Nonetheless, he claims to have stopped reading his publication out of dismay. Others hold or have come to hold political views that accommodate a mainstream, inter- national perspective on the conflict, a trend also common among US

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journalists (McChesney, 2004). Yet there is great variety in Palestinian jour- nalists’ political perspectives. One cameraperson insisted that he did not believe in the effectiveness of the media because he believed that this struggle would ultimately be won or lost through armed conflict.

Journalists have diverse reasons for entering the field, and bring with them different backgrounds. Many journalists, especially older ones who became journalists before journalism programs were founded at major Palestinian universities, do have backgrounds in political activism. With their decision to enter journalism, they both distanced themselves from the gravest dangers of political activism under occupation, and maintained their engagement with political issues. As Palestinians started to enter the field of international journalism during the first Intifada, Palestinians with politi- cal backgrounds made excellent fixers because they were connected and informed. However, as they advanced in the field, their political involvement had to change, since many major media organizations specifically prohibit involvement in partisan politics and even participation in demonstrations, for all reporters around the world. Other Palestinians entered the field of international journalism because of their experience with photography, through studio, wedding, and tourist photography, or because they spoke good English. Along with these skills, all of these journalists brought their basic knowledge about the political situation in which they live. As one fixer said regarding why he was offered his first job in journalism after impress- ing foreign journalists who happened to be using his in-laws’ roof for a shoot, ‘One asset all Palestinians have is that they are politically educated.’

In public debate, the distinctions between professional and personal identity are often elided. The Jerusalem Post article cited above expressed suspicions that Palestinian journalists were Palestinian Authority agents or Palestinian nationalists, asking why some such journalists worked both for foreign agencies and for Palestinian papers. But journalists who worked with both international and local media generally did so because, while they enjoyed the higher salary, production standards, and prestige of working with international organizations, they treasured the opportunity to do their own writing in the local press and to address their own community about its internal dynamics and problems. The Jerusalem Post article also raised questions about Palestinian journalists’ so-called ‘criminal records’. It cited an unnamed ‘veteran foreign journalist’ who said:

I . . . know of cases where former security prisoners have been hired as journalists and fixers for major news organizations, including American networks. Can you imagine what the reactions would be if they hired an Israeli who had been in jail for one reason or another? (Staff, 2005: 13)

Yet, as a middle-aged Palestinian journalist pointed out in an interview after noting that he himself had been in prison when he was 17, ‘I have never

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met an Israeli journalist who hasn’t been in the army. Likewise, many Palestinian journalists have been in jail. The PLO is like the Israeli army.’9

For years, the PLO was illegal under Israeli occupation, and membership led to jail for many. The foreign journalist quoted in the Jerusalem Post implicitly contributes to the criminalization of Palestinians and Palestinian politics, while the Palestinian journalist critiques the position of the foreign journalist by pointing out that Palestinian ‘security prisoners’ are in fact politi- cal prisoners. Thus, they are not comparable with ‘an Israeli who had been in jail for one reason or another’.

The Palestinian journalist’s statement also hints at an underlying truth about Palestinian life and politics and its relationship to Israeli official positions. Even more common than experience in prison – over 600,000 Palestinians have been in Israeli prisons in the last 38 years (Cook et al., 2004: 7) – is Palestinian opposition to Israeli occupation. Palestinians living under occupation unanimously oppose Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and would like to have some say in how they are governed. The Israeli government, on the other hand, has bulwarked occu- pation for 38 years, and even at the height of the peace negotiations in the 1990s preferred to conceptualize the peace process not as ending an unjustified occupation but as ‘giving up’ rightfully Israeli land in exchange for peace. Just as Palestinian views of the PLO as a vehicle for national liberation radically diverge from past Israeli positions that the PLO is a terrorist organization ineligible for political dialogue, so is there a wide gap in perspective between the Israeli government and the Palestinian people on a wide variety of historical and political issues. In this sense, it does not much matter if the Palestinian working for international media has spent time in jail or has not, or believes in a two-state solution or does not – no matter what, they have wildly different perspectives than the Israeli government. Therefore, it is understandable why Israeli officials – who do after all have so much power over the lives of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories – would try to limit Palestinian journalists’ roles. Even if these Palestinians do not have a great deal of editorial input, their presence on the ground in the West Bank and Gaza – where Israel’s closure policy keeps them – moves information from Nablus, Jenin, Rafah Refugee Camp, and Ramallah to international newsrooms. If Palestinians were not employed in the West Bank, news organizations would have fewer voices and less footage of news events. Without Palestinian journalists, foreign correspondents would likely rely to a great extent on Israeli military sources and government spokespeople.

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The habitus of journalism: two cell phones and beyond

What exactly do Palestinian journalists do for international media corpor- ations? How does this work necessitate skills that local Palestinians are more likely to have than foreign correspondents? In some situations, the work of journalism is a matter of attending press conferences, conducting interviews, and analytic writing. While Palestinian journalists do some of these things, they also move within diverse sectors of Palestinian society. They bring to their work the habitus of a person living under occupation, which includes knowing how to deal with checkpoints and other physical obstacles, to identify the sounds and dangers of weapons, and to negotiate with Israeli soldiers and officials. As in other contexts, in which ‘one does not just learn to fish . . . but one learns to fish using a particular technique in a definite place amongst specific kinds of people’ (Harris, 2005: 202), journalistic skills are locally developed and historically situated.

One reason Palestinians’ contributions to the news might be overlooked is that journalism fits into a broader pattern in which ‘perhaps a majority of professional communities regard the corporeality of practice as entirely mundane and thus requiring no special discursive attention or conscious regulation’ (Boyer, 2005: 246). Journalism is generally seen as intellectual, not physical, labor, a distinction that Marx described in The German Ideology (Boyer, 2005: 246–7). Yet, under occupation, producing infor- mation often requires physical labor that demands great skill as well as tremendous gumption. In this context, the division between Palestinian journalists who are experts in the local embodied work of journalism and foreign correspondents who carry the responsibilities and privileges of authorship has been naturalized.

I observed that the daily rhythms of journalism varied for different kinds of journalists in different cities. The line between work and the rest of life was blurred, since news events determined journalists’ hours, and journal- ists were often, in one way or another, living in the field. Reporters or producers in Ramallah and Jerusalem with staff positions at major news organizations usually woke up early to read or listen to news in Arabic, which their foreign correspondents might ask about later. A few reporters had part-time or volunteer work to do, maintaining websites or doing trans- lation work. Others worked on their English on a daily basis, or held meetings with PA officials to make sure they stayed up on the latest news. Those working for agencies in Ramallah had offices to report to daily, though their bosses were in Jerusalem. Journalists spent a lot of time in these offices, exchanging information, contacts, and occasional English language tips. Journalists in Ramallah covered political news about the Palestinian Authority, and were always going to and from the Muqaata’a, where Arafat was besieged for years before his death. They also covered

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demonstrations in Ramallah and occasionally reported other feature stories in the West Bank, as they were often respected staff journalists. Journalists from Jerusalem had basically the same beat as Ramallah journalists, but they made the trek to the Muqaata’a less often, covering only the larger events, and they went to their main bureaus in Jerusalem on a regular basis.

Journalists in the rest of the West Bank also occasionally worked on feature stories, but spent most of their time covering the occupation and the Intifada as events on the ground: organized protests, spontaneous rock- throwing demonstrations, assassinations, funerals, building demolitions, the construction of the separation barrier, and local political developments. Only a few of these journalists went to their bureaus on a regular basis. This was partly because most of their work was in the field, and partly because most Palestinian journalists were prohibited from going to Jerusalem because they hold West Bank identity cards. Stringers through- out the West Bank sometimes worked only a few days a month. Photojour- nalists were busy only when a newsworthy event was occurring in their geographic beat and afterwards, when they sent their pictures to their editors. Sometimes, they knew about a funeral or demonstration ahead of time and met colleagues nearby to make their way to an event. Otherwise, they were often at home when either another journalist, a contact or friend in a hotspot or a hospital, or their editor called with news of an event, and they grabbed their cameras and jumped into cars labeled ‘TV’ or ‘Press’ and headed to the scene. All journalists were always just a cell phone ring away from work; and Palestinian journalists generally carried at least two cell phones, one Israeli and one Palestinian, so they could stay in touch with sources and editors.

Being on the scene

Journalism is intrinsically physical work because at least ideally it requires journalists to be in the place from which they are reporting. Emplacement holds the promise of insight, perspective, and authenticity. The imperative to make it to the scene is a clear example of how establishing contact is a distinct part of the process of communication, as discussed by Jakobson (1985 [1960]). For some foreign correspondents, mobility is a presumed benefit of their job (Hannerz, 2004), while in other dangerous places, safety concerns can curtail foreign journalists’ ability to travel to the scene (Pedelty, 1995). Palestinian journalists, like many other Palestinians in the West Bank, have become experts in emplacement, as Israeli closures have intensified in recent years. In this section, I will look at the labors of emplacement through a close-up example of camerawork, and examine obstacles to movement for Palestinian journalists in the West Bank.

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Photography generally entails physical acts of emplacement, in that photojournalists must be in exactly the right place at the right time in order to take precisely the shot they want. In Ramallah, journalists strained against routine to find an interesting angle from which to photograph the latest delegation coming to visit Arafat in the Muqaata’a, for example, pressing themselves to the ground for an angle which highlighted guards’ guns. In Nablus, a journalist took a particularly memorable picture of the funeral of a young man who had been killed by the Israeli army. The body, wrapped in a traditional black and white kaffiyah scarf and a Palestinian flag, was framed first by kaffiyah-wearing pallbearers and second by a grapevine growing on a trellis above the procession. The repeated pattern of the kaffiyahs and the lacy grapevine provided a poignant visual and cultural frame for what, for the international news, was just another dead Palestinian man. To get that photograph, the journalist had to stand on a rooftop just over the funeral procession. The photographer told me that after so many funerals, he was looking for a new angle, and the grapevine had inspired him. In order to take quality photos at funerals, photojour- nalists must make their way through emotional crowds, sidling up close to mourning families, and then run ahead to stand on a car, ledge, or hill to get wider shots, only to later wrestle their way back into the throng to take a close up as the person is buried. Their movement through the crowds is facilitated because they are carrying cameras, and because people often know them, but the work is nonetheless strenuous. This routine of moving up close to the center of events and then backing up to take wider shots is used to cover many kinds of events.

On a broader level, being in the right place involves travel. In most situations outside of the Occupied Territories, a bit of money, some time, and inclination is enough for one to get to work. In the West Bank, however, reaching one’s workplace – for journalists and others – often requires significant physical effort and local knowledge. In the middle of the Intifada, in December 2003, there were 735 physical barriers to movement in the West Bank; as of March 2005 there were 605, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.10 Collectively, these are all part of a closure policy that Israel justi- fies by citing security concerns. These limitations restrict movement in different ways; a number of them make a road completely impassable, while others make it possible for soldiers to control who can pass through a certain point and when.

At checkpoints, Palestinian journalists from the Occupied Territories are often treated no differently than other Palestinians from the Occupied Terri- tories, because the Israeli GPO has denied them press cards since January 2002. A Palestinian journalist recalled an Israeli military spokesperson telling her, ‘As a Palestinian from Gaza, you are considered a security threat

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first, a journalist second’ (El-Haddad, 2005: A25). Some journalists have adapted by developing skills and even rapport with soldiers that help them to move through at least the main checkpoint in their area. Palestinian jour- nalists know that when they can, they must try to pass as a privileged inter- national journalist, a kind of V.I.P. For example, when driving a fortified car with Israeli license plates,11 two Palestinian journalists from the West Bank knew their chances of easily passing through a checkpoint would improve if they did not wait in the accumulating Palestinian line. Swinging around the queue as though confident they did not have to stop, they slid through the checkpoint with unusual ease. But in some cases, soldiers may stop Palestinian journalists precisely because they are journalists. In practice there is no rule about journalists’ passage through checkpoints which are by their nature somewhat arbitrary. A cameraperson working in Ramallah explained that Israeli soldiers ‘could both allow you to pass or prevent you from passing just because you are a journalist’, or they could not recognize that you are a journalist at all. Journalists, like other Palestinians, use many ways to navigate around or through checkpoints, including walking circuitous and sometimes dangerous paths around checkpoints, and trying to use their professional or personal identity to convince soldiers to let them through.

Moving in the West Bank is therefore not only a way to arrive at a place from which to gain perspective; moving – and especially moving as Pales- tinians move – itself grants perspective. For Palestinian journalists and non- journalists alike, traveling is virtually always movement through highly political territory. The landscape provides Palestinians with a kind of diagram from which to speak to any internationals that happen to be along for the ride.12 Driving north from Ramallah, journalists told me about the proliferation of settlements in the area, remarking, ‘it seems like every time I come this way there is a new settlement.’ They also told about occupation stories specific to certain villages, and then, as we turned off onto a dirt road, talked about how those old agricultural roads had been in total disuse until Israel closed off main roads during the second Intifada. As if to illus- trate the point about the problems closure creates, a truck lumbered by on the one-lane road, stirring up a cloud of dirt and compelling us to pull over so it could pass.

Movement concerns can be either pushed to the foreground or simply assumed as part of the unspoken rhythms of journalistic work. Sometimes, the checkpoints become a part of the story, as when a ‘flying’ – or tempor- ary – checkpoint appeared on the main turnoff from the Jerusalem area to a West Bank village where a demonstration against the separation barrier was planned. In this case, an experienced Palestinian stringer with Israeli citizenship and a press card was leading a group of about 15 foreign jour- nalists to cover the demonstration. Because the Palestinian journalist speaks

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excellent Hebrew as well as English, and because she was bold with the Israeli soldiers manning the flying checkpoint, she was able to convince a soldier to produce the military order that had made that village into a ‘closed military area’ on that particular day. She created a photo oppor- tunity for the foreign journalists with the order, and used it as a lesson for the journalists about Israeli military control of the press. When one of the protest speakers, an Eastern Orthodox priest in ornate ceremonial robes, was stopped at the same checkpoint, she made sure journalists took his picture and spoke to him both about the barrier and about the closure. Other times, journalists cover events at checkpoints while they are going about other business. On several occasions, I ran into photographers who were not able to enter Jerusalem at the main checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem. As they picked up papers from couriers, they would stop for a few pictures of Qalandia checkpoints’ latest developments: newly installed turnstiles closing down a formerly open path, bulldozers working on the separation barrier, a new coil of barbed wire, or of the ebb and flow of people waiting to pass.

Finally, the closures confine Palestinian journalists’ careers. Mazen Dana, a journalist known for his intrepidness before he was killed on the job,13

described in a filmed interview in English the layers of movement restric- tions he faced as a journalist in Hebron:

I have been wanting to go to Gaza for seven years. I ask permission to go to Gaza, to see what is going on in Gaza, it is forbidden. For nine years, I am asking permission to go to my office in Jerusalem. I am not allowed. Really, I am going in an illegal way, smuggling and going. Two times, they [Israeli authorities] caught me in Jerusalem and they arrested me. And 18 days I spent in jail just because I entered Jerusalem illegally, without permission. And many, many times soldiers stop me when I am trying to go back to my home [from work in downtown Hebron] because it is in area C, which means it is under Israeli authority. It [the detention] takes half an hour, one hour, and sometimes they ask me to go back. They do not let me, one way or another, to go home, to my home. (Bishara, 2002, video recording)

Dana described jumping from roof to roof in order to get around when the city was under curfew, a practice not exclusive to journalists in Hebron’s densely packed Old City. Movement restrictions also limit the potential career paths of journalists by narrowing their beats, often to one city. Before the Intifada, a number of Palestinian journalists covered events inside Israel as well as in the West Bank, but now that is virtually an impossibility for Palestinians with West Bank identity cards. One journalist in his late 20s complained that because he could not obtain a permit to enter Jerusalem, a major US television network rescinded a job offer. He remains their stringer in a West Bank city, and works only irregularly.

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The local history and social skills of journalism

Palestinian journalists working for international news companies occupy an ambiguous position between Palestinian society and the outside world. Maintaining relationships with the involved parties can take significant social finesse. Salaried producers as well as fixers working on a day-by-day basis make their personal and professional connections available to the international journalists for whom they work. This is part of the often hidden labor of establishing contact necessary for larger processes of communication. West Bank society is relatively small – there are 1.8 million Palestinians living in the West Bank – and a great deal of work, journalis- tic and otherwise, is carried out through networks of people who know each other by way of family, past work experiences, or political circles.

Providing foreign correspondents with updates and context about politi- cal developments, especially those within the Palestinian Authority, is one of top reporters’ most important responsibilities. US foreign correspondents usually stay in a particular region for only a few years, while Palestinian journalists have been following Palestinian politics for their entire careers, and often for their entire lives. They also generally have a more thorough knowledge of Palestinian history. Palestinian journalists know party and local leaders, and they follow them as their careers develop. Of course, foreign correspondents are also in consultation with Israeli journalists who in this regard play a similar, mirror role to Palestinian journalists. While some foreign correspondents can make appointments with top officials because of the prestige of their organization, they also rely on Palestinian journalists’ reputation and rapport to make connections. News organiz- ations with pro-Israeli reputations especially rely on Palestinian journalists to convince Palestinian experts and officials to lend them their voices. Finally, Palestinian journalists often have the cultural insight to investigate questions that foreign reporters might overlook. Palestinian journalists have reported on how Palestinians manage to survive in the face of economic crisis, how Palestinian families feel about militant groups’ apparent recruit- ment of teenagers, and how secular/religious tensions play out in the context of a weak Palestinian Authority is weak and strong nationalism.

Palestinian journalists mobilize the social capital of their own non- professional lives in their work, and sometimes their work connections hold great personal meaning for them as well. One day, a journalist exclaimed to me happily, ‘You know it really pays off to be in touch with people!’ He described how he had contacted a cousin living in another city, and while asking her about her own life and activities, she led him to an interesting story, which he researched and wrote. Also, when militant groups or insti- tutions, such as universities, want to restrict or influence journalists’ coverage, journalists rely on being ‘abnaa’ al-balad’ (sons of the city, i.e.

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respected community members with connections in civil society and govern- ment) and on their own resourcefulness to resolve problems, rather than turning either to authorities or to their employers. Particularly in the case of official leaders and militants, maintaining working relationships takes perseverance and cleverness, and journalists expressed pride in their ability to forge these important professional connections. Meeting and talking to people from around the West Bank can also be one of the pleasures of jour- nalistic work. One Jerusalem producer exclaimed that when she gets married, she wants to invite people from ‘all over Palestine’ – in other words, in this romantic context, from the Occupied Territories and Israel – to come to her wedding, because she has made so many friends through her work: farmers who lost their land, families whose houses were threat- ened by demolition, parents who had lost sons and daughters.

The work of media-making sometimes generates on-the-ground byprod- ucts. In the example given in the introduction, a woman took advantage of the presence of a journalist to convince her mother to come home with her to Jerusalem. In another case, a journalist photographed a bride crossing a checkpoint. The photograph was stunning, with the bride in her big white dress amidst the dirt, barbed wire, and metal gates of the checkpoint. For the wedding party, more important than the publication of this unusual bit of wedding photography was the journalist’s effect on the situation: were he not there, the bride might not have been allowed to cross the checkpoint, and the wedding would have been ruined.

Sometimes, journalists are asked to do things that compromise their work, for example, to transport weapons across a checkpoint, or to not photograph a stone-throwing youth because it could lead to his arrest. Concerning the stone-throwers, journalists often continued with their work, reasoning that Israeli intelligence has many sources of information other than their pictures. As for arms smuggling, journalists were insistent that they never became involved in such forms of resistance. They expressed their opposition to doing such work not by taking a political stance, but with professional and practical objections. They knew this would endanger not only their jobs but also their status as free people. As one photographer said, ‘in order to be effective in our society’s struggle, each person must carry out one’s own specialized duty. A journalist cannot do the work of a militant.’ Sometimes being a journalist prevents people from doing human- itarian work as well. During the height of Israeli invasions in 2002, health workers contacted a journalist working in Nablus to let him know that they were going to evacuate dead and wounded from a mosque turned field hospital after days of curfew. The journalist knew that they had called because the press coverage would force the army to give them some breath- ing room to work, but he also knew it would be a good story. He and his foreign correspondent went to cover the story. It was not long before one

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of the health workers asked him to help carry the wounded, in plain sight of the army and foreign media. Turning the health workers down was very painful for him, as he told me more than once.

Occasionally, Palestinian journalists pay a heavy price for going against purportedly nationalist interests. Late in the evening of 23 April 2004, masked men beat Agence France-Presse photographer Jamal Aruri, 38, with sticks and clubs and smashed his cameras as he left his house. Streams of journalists, friends, and family visited him in the hospital, where he lay bandaged on both arms and his head. One journalist, urging others to be gentle as they bent down to kiss him in greeting, noted that he had clearly been beaten around his eyes and his hands, body parts he uses most when he works. The attack happened after a photograph Aruri had taken several months previously of wanted men taking cover in the Muqaata’a was re- published. When the photograph was first published, PA officials had banned him from entering the Muqaata’a for several days. While it is unclear exactly who did the beating, attackers are believed to be closely linked to the PA. After journalists’ protests, the PA even apologized to Aruri, who was unable to work for more than a month following the incident.

Finally, journalism in Palestinian society demands patience and some- times humility. The first thing that Palestinian journalists based in Ramallah government headquarters must contend with is the slow pace of much of the work. This was particularly true during Arafat’s presidency. An International News Safety Institute press advisory written by a Palestinian journalist advised journalists going to the Muqaata’a:

Take some food and water when you go to work there as there is none avail- able and sometimes you must stay for hours for the story. It is very cold in winter and hot in summer outside, and journalists can have to stand around for hours with no shelter from sun or cold or even rain. Take appropriate clothing, food, water and a cover for your camera.

Lower-ranking Palestinian journalists sometimes face the extra indignity of not being allowed into certain meetings made open to international journalists, thus extending the time they wait outside in the courtyard of the Muqaata’a. But journalists find a number of ways to entertain them- selves, making calls on ubiquitous cell phones, and enjoying the expansive sociality of chatting with friends, telling jokes, exchanging business cards, or singing a line from a favorite song.

Physical danger, emotional scars

The physical expertise involved in journalism is most demanding when journalists are covering violence. For Palestinian journalists, authorities’

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frequent lack of recognition of their professional status only increases the dangers they face. Journalism, of course, has very distinct goals from popular resistance, but the skills of the two enterprises overlap. For both kinds of activities, participants must be able to identify the sounds and dangers of Israeli counter-insurgency weapons: the various explosions of Israeli tear gas, sound bombs, light flares, and home demolitions, or Palestinian pipe bombs; the contrasting raps of Israeli rubber bullets, live ammunition, and tank fire in contrast to any Palestinian gunfire; and the different ranges and threats of Apache helicopters, F-16s, and the various kinds of Israeli tanks and bulldozers. Identifying at least some of these sounds, particularly during the Intifada, has become a useful skill for the general population as well, as certain Israeli attacks play out for a whole city’s population to see (Bishara, 2005). Like participants in demonstrations that turn violent, photojournalists especially must know how to manage tear gas and to be able to run when necessary. They must also be able to find places from which to work where they are safe from both Palestinian stones or Israeli bullets. Journalists must also be able to talk to Israeli soldiers convincingly if they or their colleagues are detained, something which older community leaders might do on behalf of a detained youth. All the while, journalists have to take dramatic, high-quality pictures. Like African-American boxers living in an impoverished and dangerous ghetto (Wacquant, 2004), Palestinian journalists face dangers in their daily lives, and their career choice allows them to mobilize some of the local skills with which they deal with these dangers.

Nothing better indexes the intense corporeality of journalists’ work in occupied territory than torn flesh or a dead body. No matter what skills the journalists have, they are at risk of being shot even in relatively minor encounters between Palestinians and Israeli forces. Israeli soldiers shot and killed Nazeh Darwazeh, a cameraperson for Associated Press Television News in Nablus, as he was filming Palestinians resisting an Israeli arrest raid (Campagna, 2003). The bullet that killed him went through his head and his camera. Despite video footage of the event corroborating other jour- nalists’ witness account of the shooting, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) maintained that it was unclear whether he was shot by Palestinian or Israeli gunfire. The contrast between the footage and IDF statements reflects an alarming relationship between mass mediation – even as carried out by a major US company, the Associated Press – and both the physical and ideo- logical power of the state. During a demonstration at Bir Zeit University in the mid-1990s, a cameraperson working with a major international company was shot in the head by Israeli troops – and then arrested, accused of throwing stones, despite the fact that he was carrying not only an Israeli- issued press pass but also his video camera. He had recorded the whole incident. He describes that after his arrest:

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the prison authority in Ramallah refused to receive me because I was in critical condition. They took me to a military camp close to Ramallah where a military doctor treated the wound cursorily and then they returned me to the prison in Ramallah. Meanwhile, my office had reached a lawyer who contacted the spokesperson of the Israeli army. They released me but kept my Israeli [press] card with them. (Interview from fieldwork)

A court case about the incident is still pending, but he does not expect any results. This is a critical example of the dangers created by Israeli refusal to recognize Palestinian journalists.

In Hebron, where 4000 Israeli settlers live in the middle of a Palestinian city of 160,000, Israeli settlers have beaten journalists, or encourage soldiers to deal with journalists aggressively. This further illustrates how Palestinian journalists’ work must be understood in the context of how Palestinians in general live under occupation. Settlers’ attacks on journalists are part of a larger campaign of harassment against Palestinians. From footage of settler attacks and soldiers’ confrontations with journalists, it is clear that being a camera operator or photographer demands extraordinary stamina and considerable strength, just to hold onto a heavy camera while being kicked or beaten.

Following the military invasions of 2002, the Committee to Protect Journalists named the West Bank as one of the worst places to be a journalist for three years running, writing, ‘Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon’s government has used extraordinary force to keep journalists from covering its recent military incursion’ (Journalists, 2002). During this period of intense news coverage, foreign correspondents relied tremendously on Palestinian journalists for their ability to evaluate danger, navigate through closures and checkpoints, and set up contact with Palestinian militants. Yet again, soldiers and Israeli authorities consistently did not recognize the professional status of Palestinian journalists. After an Associated Press journalist, Mohammad Daraghmeh, was arrested, detained, and upon his release made to take a dangerous trek on foot to the city of Nablus at night despite a harsh curfew, GPO director Daniel Seamen dismissed his journal- istic credentials commenting, ‘He was not arrested because he is a journalist, he was arrested just like dozens of other Palestinians were arrested’ (Lynfield, 2002b: 6). Since Palestinian journalists working for international organizations carry their company identification cards even if they do not have GPO cards, one must also question whether official lack of recognition might also be used to restrict journalists because their work is seen as a threat, particularly during times of siege.

Still more troubling were the killings of both Palestinian and inter- national journalists by the Israeli army during army invasions. Israeli forces denied ambulance access to a profusely bleeding journalist, Imad Abu

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Zahra, after those forces shot him with tank fire. He later died from a thigh wound (Campagna, 2003). After an Italian journalist was killed by Israeli tank fire in Ramallah, Seaman commented, ‘I am more afraid that an Israeli soldier will not shoot in such a situation and get killed than I am that the journalist will get killed’ (Lynfield, 2002a: 7). According to CPJ, The Israeli Defense Forces killed seven journalists between 2001 and 2004, one British, one Italian, and five Palestinians.14

Palestinian journalists hold memorials and protests for friends and colleagues who have been killed, similar to memorials for other Palestini- ans killed in the Intifada. In a few cases, new grief and past protests overlap and overflow into each other. An oft-published picture of Mazen Dana, a Reuters cameraman whom US troops killed in Iraq, shows him at a protest holding a poster that declares, ‘Stop killing journalists.’ A picture of Nazeh Darwazeh, the AP journalist killed in Nablus, shows him holding a picture of Palestinian Al-Jazeera journalist Tareq Ayyoub after Ayyoub was killed when the United States bombed the Baghdad bureau of Al-Jazeera just 11 days before Darwazeh himself was killed. Journalists often remember their colleagues and credit them for their bravery with the idea that fallen journalists worked for the truth, and were ready to sacrifice themselves for the truth, as in a video made about Mazen Dana’s life and death. Of course, journalists take part in these commemorations knowing that they face the same risks as their fallen colleagues.

Journalists also must cope with seeing the violence and suffering of the occupation up close, more than most Palestinians, but in a way that is comparable to health workers, militants, and activists and community leaders living in targeted areas such as refugee camps, Nablus, or the Gaza Strip. The emotional toll of this work is intangible, but it reveals itself physically from time to time. One journalist, reporting a story on families in which more than one person has been killed as a result of the occupation, was going from one family to the next in his hometown conducting inter- views. In more than one house, he began to weep along with the inter- viewees telling stories of their losses. Because the impact of the occupation on Palestinians has been so widespread, many journalists find themselves reporting on stories that indirectly or directly affect them. For example, in one horrific story, an Al-Jazeera journalist was filming in Gaza after Israeli helicopters fired upon a peaceful demonstration. The journalist was focusing in on two particularly bloody bodies, and as he did so, he realized the bodies belonged to his own mother and sister (Löwstedt, 2005). One journalist whose father was killed by torture in Israeli prisons when he was a young child now reports, occasionally, on prisoners’ issues. However, on the job covering a prisoner release, he expressed no special grief or emotion. This is perhaps a more typical Palestinian reaction than rage or tears, since occasions for anger or grief are so quotidian – at checkpoints, for example

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– that Palestinians are more likely to display quiet or ironic affect. These are certainly not the only stories of journalists’ work overlapping with their personal life.

Conclusions

During a period in which US mainstream news is compromised by the limi- tations of embedded journalism in Iraq, US government press releases that masquerade as independent journalism, and reporters who may not go to the scene in order to report on events, anthropologists can contribute an invaluable understanding of how news is produced in frontline situations. Readers must understand where their information comes from not only because media corporations constitute an industry like any other, and consumers should be concerned about conditions of labor for products they buy, but also because media corporations ‘are unique in one vital respect. They do not manufacture nuts and bolts: they manufacture a social and political world’ (Bagdikian, 2004: 9). Arabs are so often represented by the mass media in one-dimensional terms, and Arabs, like so many other non- western people, have been presumed to be unable to objectify their own cultures, to represent themselves. Thus it is particularly important for readers to understand the gap between what is in the news and how the news is made. It is with these goals in mind – in addition to anthropological discussions of media production – that this article lays out the basic aspects of how Palestinian journalists contribute to international news.

Good media jobs do provide Palestinians with good incomes and some- times with rewarding work, as Palestinians become part of the same mass media corporations that employ top US journalists. Yet, these journalists are marked by controversy about their political identity and beliefs, and often they are marked also by physical scars from their work. Many Palestinian journalists do not see a conflict between being objective reporters of the occupation and trying to serve their communities by showing the world the ills of the occupation, but at the same time they do not generally believe that they have much sway over media content. Since foreign correspondents, editors, and professional norms wield much more power than stringers, translators, photojournalists, and reporters in creating the messages of international news, the Palestinian role in the process of representing their society does not regularly shape the overall viewpoints expressed in news.

Nonetheless, Palestinian journalists play a critical role in the production of international news, and they bring to their work some skills that non- Palestinians rarely have. Palestinian journalists learn about journalism’s international professional norms through college courses, their company’s

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trainings, or on the job. However, they also utilize intensely local skills. From their own families and community, they learn the polite, charming Arabic and respectful postures that will give them access to officials, mourning mothers, and militants alike. They learn to navigate through closures and negotiate other forms of occupation violence from their everyday life, skills certainly specific to their historical circumstances. They may learn about photography in their parents’ studio or at local weddings. Through legwork and photojournalism, Palestinian journalists create contact between local sources of information and international media institutions. A look at the production of news about Palestinians, rather than study only of its final forms, reveals the extent to which mainstream news is a cultural product not only of US society but of Palestinian society as well.

Acknowledgements

This research was conducted with the support of grants from the Fulbright- Hays and the National Science Foundation, to whom I am very thankful. I want to thank all of the journalists and friends in the West Bank who were so generous in sharing their experiences and insights with me. I am also very grateful to Lila Abu-Lughod, Lori Allen, Steven Feld, Faye Ginsburg, Sherine Hamdy, Graham Jones, Peter Lagerquist, and Fred Myers for their thoughtful comments on this article. Finally, I greatly appreciate the close reading and new ideas from the editors of this issue, Ulf Hannerz and Dominic Boyer.

Notes

1 Palestinian Israelis, or Arab Israelis, are Palestinian citizens of Israel who were able to remain inside the area that became Israel in 1948. They have Israeli citizenship and constitute a minority of about 20 percent of Israel’s population.

2 To protect the journalists with whom I have worked, I have disguised the identities of journalists except when discussing published articles about a journalist’s experience, and even then have used journalists’ names only when doing so would not compromise any other promises of confidentiality. Maintaining confidentiality has sometimes entailed changing or obscuring minor details of news stories.

3 I limited my research on journalism to international news that would reach US audiences. While this mainly consisted of US news corporations, it also included European news agencies that are regularly picked up in the US media.

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4 The division between the two parts of the Israeli–Palestinian field of production of international news is both extremely blurry and surprisingly stark. Each major news organization has one bureau for covering Israel and the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza; thus editors and foreign correspondents are used to working on both sides of the story. These bureaus are all based in West Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, both areas inside Israel. Yet, Palestinian journalists working with these bureaus almost exclusively cover Palestinian society in the Occupied Territories, and not Palestinian communities in Israel. They do not cover Jewish Israeli society or Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza. My decision to focus on the Palestinian side of this field was driven by both theoretical interests and fieldwork practicality. Likewise, I limited my research to the West Bank because access to the Gaza Strip was extremely hard to obtain (without a press pass) while I was there.

5 The title of producer is usually used in broadcast journalism, while the title of fixer is used for similar work in print journalism. Photojournalists include both photographers and camerapeople. Stringers are freelance journalists that may do any kind of journalistic work.

6 In comparison to the first Intifada, which began in 1987, the second Intifada, which began in September 2000, included more armed resistance and attacks inside Israel. This left less room for the popular participation for which the first Intifada was known. Israeli response to the Intifada was, even from the first days of popular demonstrations, much more violent, including assassinations of militants and leaders, invasions of cities with tanks, and air strikes. Another critical feature of this period was the great intensification of movement restrictions on the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza, discussed in detail below.

7 I conducted fieldwork for this project in the West Bank between September 2003 and May 2005. Much of my research revolved directly around Palestinian journalists working for the international media. I accompanied journalists as they worked and attended other news events, large and small, and did some work as a journalist. I also did interviews with Palestinian journalists working in international news and taught an advanced English class for journalists during which we read and discussed news articles. In preparation for fieldwork, I interned with the New York-based human rights organization, the Committee to Protect Journalists, in the summer of 2001 and made a documentary about CPJ and their work in the Middle East in 2002. To further round out my perspective on Palestinian work at self-representation through the international media, I spoke to inter- national and especially US journalists about their understanding of the role of Palestinian news workers, and I did interviews with Palestinian official and unofficial spokespeople about their attempts to communicate through the media. I also did other kinds of fieldwork to understand the place of

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international journalism in the context of Palestinian society. It was this auxiliary fieldwork – socializing, volunteering in a youth center, and living in the West Bank – that, along with my Arabic language skills, distinguished me from international journalists.

8 The category of ‘foreigners’, ajaanib in Arabic, is an important one in Palestinian life in the West Bank. It generally refers to all of the inter- nationals, mostly from the United States and Europe, who come to the Occupied Territories. They include journalists, tourists, international soli- darity volunteers, religious visitors (mostly Christian), and workers in the non-profit sector. Palestinians recognize that internationals are there for many purposes: to help, to learn, to do their jobs, and to get their adrena- line going. However, Palestinians in general feel that they host these visitors generously, and they can be critical of internationals that come and do not seem to contribute something to Palestinian society, and especially to the effort to represent Palestinians abroad in return. Palestinians in general regard foreign correspondents to be a specialized and more powerful sub- category of foreigners. Journalists stand apart from the ajaanib closest to Palestinian society in that they rarely live in the Occupied Territories and are recognized to be acting within large institutions that may render their personal opinions or desires less effective than those of other internationals.

9 Israel drafts its Jewish citizens, so the vast majority of Israeli Jews have indeed served in the army. The Palestine Liberation Organization is an umbrella organization of Palestinian political parties, including the centrist Fateh party that now leads the PA, and leftist groups. Israel considered the PLO an illegal, terrorist organization until the early 1990s when Israel began to negotiate with it. Before that period, just being a member of the PLO or its subsidiary groups was a common route to prison.

10 In March 2005, this included 57 checkpoints, seven partial checkpoints, 118 roadblocks, 51 road gates, 282 earth mounds, 35 earth walls, and 55 trenches.

11 License plates of Israeli citizens or those renting cars from inside Israel are yellow, while license plates for Palestinians from the Occupied Territories are green. Movement restrictions target Palestinians from the Occupied Territories, and present fewer barriers to Palestinians with Jerusalem ID cards or those with Israeli citizenship, and even fewer to internationals. Palestinian journalists experience Israeli closure differently than inter- national journalists for several reasons, including their appearance, their legal identification, and the fact that a separate system of bypass roads exists in the West Bank for use by non-Palestinians.

12 Other anthropologists have similarly described how travel or stories about travel have provided ways for other people with strong local relationships to land to discuss social histories and values (Basso, 1996; Feld, 1996b; Myers, 1991).

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13 Mazen Dana, an award-winning veteran Reuters cameraperson, was killed on 17 August 2003 by US troops outside the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. US army spokespeople reported that soldiers thought his camera was a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, despite the fact that his team had alerted soldiers at the prison of their presence. He was 42 when he was killed, and he left behind his wife and four children.

14 Of course, journalists around the world face grave dangers in places of conflict. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, in Iraq, more than 50 journalists have been killed since 2003; in Algeria, 58 journalists were killed between 1993 and 1996; in Columbia, more than 50 journal- ists have been killed since 1986. In many places, such as Russia, journal- ists are targeted and even killed for critical reporting.

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■ AMAHL BISHARA is a PhD candidate at New York University in the department of Anthropology. Through the NYU Culture and Media program, she completed a documentary, ‘Across Oceans, Among Colleagues’, about the Committee to Protect Journalists’ advocacy for Middle East journalists in 2001–2. Address: New York University, Anthropology Department, 25 Waverly Place, New York, NY 10003, USA. [email: [email protected]] ■

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