Caught in the Middle

Among the most controversial people in this troubled land are the camera crews helping American TV to relay news of bloodshed and Palestinian unrest from the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip and West Bank.

These TV technicians are Israeli--and they are being scorned and called traitors by many of their fellow countrymen.

There are indications that angry Palestinians, too, dislike the Israeli cameramen and soundmen, whom they have been using to deliver their message to the rest of the world. “Neither side don’t like us,” said Israeli Edward Bianco, an ABC cameraman for 18 years.

But the true irony for these employees of foreign TV lies in their relationship with their own people.

They are citizens of the very nation whose government has charged foreign news media--particularly American TV--with inciting violence and slanting news from the occupied territories against Israel.

Anti-press fervor is so high in the government that it recently closed the territories to the media and other outsiders for three days.

Some American reporters are feeling almost as much heat as their cameramen.

“The average Israeli won’t talk to me anymore, and when I go to a party, all people want to do is rant and rave at me,” said ABC correspondent Dean Reynolds, stationed in Israel for 18 months. “But it’s the Israeli cameramen who have been threatened, beaten up and spat upon. A right-wing rabbi even said that they deserve to be killed.”

Nearly all the camera crews working for foreign TV here are Israeli.

“I can’t say enough about them,” Reynolds said. “I blow into town, spend a couple of years trashing the state, then leave with my career in hand. But it’s their country. They have to live here.”

And living here is not as pleasant for them as it was before the uprisings began and TV footage showed Israeli soldiers shooting and beating Palestinian stone throwers.

Bianco, whose May 16, 1948, birth date corresponds with the birth date of Israel, used to go to the same cafe after each day of working as a cameraman for ABC News. But no more.

“I go there and I hear, ‘You’re selling yourself for money,’ ” said the French-born Israeli. “So I go much less.”

Bianco is called Dou Dou, the nickname he acquired as a child. “It’s French, meaning two times sweet ,” he said.

In only a few months, from sweet to sour.

The paradox is that many Israeli TV technicians are prospering even as their popularity falls. While the uprisings have shaken Israel and blackened its image, they have also created an employment boom among free-lance Israeli TV workers. Even the former occasional part-timer now has a steady paycheck as a result of beefed-up coverage.

“Everybody’s been working the last four months,” said cameraman Eli Fastman, who heads Israel’s National Union of TV Crews.

But at what cost?

“It’s gotten very dangerous,” said Robert Wiener, Cable News Network’s bureau chief here. “Israeli settlers have started marking their cars with a ‘TV’ in masking tape just like we do so they won’t get stoned by the Palestinians (in the occupied territories).” The result is that Palestinians now suspect legitimate media-marked cars of containing settlers, making these cars targets for stoning, too.

The standard charge against the news media here is that they’ve been manipulated by Gaza and West Bank Palestinians who have made action-lusting TV their stage for anti-Israel protests. And it’s true that TV, in particular, loves a good visual show.

But some also believe that Israelis themselves, along with Jewish critics of the press in the United States, have been manipulated as well--by Israeli leaders whose blistering tirades against foreign media coverage have been inflammatory.

NBC bureau chief Mauri Moore said Sunday that one of her camera crews was punched and roughed up on Easter morning by American tourists at the West or Wailing Wall of Jerusalem’s Old City. “They shouted things like, ‘We don’t want your kind here,’ ” said Moore, who witnessed the incident.

“The government was looking for someone to blame and they found us,” charged Fastman, referring to statements by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and others.

“There is pressure on us every day. The Israelis are very patriotic. Whoever they figure causes damage to their country is, to them, a traitor. Look. You are only to drive the streets in Jerusalem with press, and then you know it is hard to go in a car without being cursed or spat upon at least once.”

The Israeli government has “created a lynch atmosphere,” insists ABC bureau chief Bill Seamans, who has been covering Israel since 1973.

No one knows that better than CBS cameraman Moshe Alpert, whose footage of four soldiers beating two alleged Palestinian stone throwers in Nablus near the West Bank last month made him a target of Israeli outrage.

So much so that his life was threatened and CBS had to hire a bodyguard to protect him.

Alpert lives on a kibbutz where the surroundings are intimate and he is easily identifiable.

“Moshe had to go into isolation for a few weeks and he couldn’t work or even answer his phone,” Fastman said. “They (his critics) named him kapo (after the Jews who collaborated with Nazis in concentration camps).’ ”

Alpert is the extreme case. But Dou Dou has also been criticized for doing his job--even when the victim he photographed was Israeli and not Palestinian.

His exclusive footage of a fatally shot Israeli soldier--as the reservist lay dying on the ground in Bethlehem--so angered Geula Cohen, a conservative member of the Knesset, that she suggested that Dou Dou arrived on the scene so swiftly because he had prior knowledge that the soldier would be shot.

“Can you imagine I would do it?” Dou Dou exclaimed emotionally. “That hurted me.”

The shooting of the reservist--the only known Israeli fatality during the uprisings, compared with scores of Palestinian deaths--occurred March 20. Dou Dou said he and soundman Rony Roemer were en route somewhere else when they heard shooting and investigated. He said the mortally wounded soldier was being attended to by an Israeli civilian while another soldier repeatedly shot into the air to attract other soldiers to the area. Dou Dou said that after sending Roemer back to the car to phone for help, he continued taping with a zoom lens.

Some criticized him for not helping the soldier.

“I’m not a medical,” he said. “What could I do? I did not want to feel a traitor. I’m Israeli citizen. I was filming and crying. I saw someone who was finishing his life in front of me. I know the next day it could be me.”

That’s because the cameramen themselves are reservists here, where females and males must serve two and three years active duty, respectively, and males an additional 30 days a year until age 55.

So today’s cameraman is tomorrow’s soldier being shown on TV.

“One of our sound technicians,” said CNN’s Wiener, “was wondering, ‘When I go down to the Gaza Strip (as a reservist), will I have to beat people?’ ”

Dou Dou says he has been exempted from military duty for the time being. “I told them if I go back there (to the occupied territories) wearing an army uniform, I am burned.”

None of the combatants in this increasingly bloody conflict likes the cameramen, he said.

“The settlers see us as a PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) representative. And the army don’t like us because the politicians always say we are inflaming. The soldiers are getting cursed every day, so we are a pain . . . to them.

“Now the Arabs are using us as a tool. They know how to manipulate us. But there is a suspicion by them that we are a so-called secret agent for the army.”

Of all these antagonists, Dou Dou fears the rioting Palestinians most.

“They are the most dangerous because we are Israeli,” he said. “They ask where I’m from, and I say ABC News. I pretend I’m American or I try to speak my French and pretend I’m a foreigner. The army will tell me to go. The settlers will curse me. But the Arabs--if something is wrong--they will kill me.”