Conflict--TV’s Magnet on West Bank

Easter Sunday: Another day at the office.

To the front and rear windshields of the leased Volvo, Yisrael David carefully tapes signs in English and Arabic that say: “Foreign TV Camera Crew.”

Then he sits back in the passenger seat as Eytan Harris presses the accelerator, and they leave Jerusalem, speeding toward the West Bank city of Nablus.

These two could be Israeli car-poolers en route to work at 10 a.m. And, in a sense, they are.

Eytan, 35, is the cameraman, good-looking and well-built, fluent in English after spending several years living in New York. Yisrael is 25 and stooped, an introverted soundman who hears better than he sees, judging by his thick glasses. He is also a keyboard musician.

They are one of two camera crews working for Cable News Network’s small Jerusalem bureau, hustling to cover the Arab territories that Israel captured in the 1967 Six-Day War.

Eytan’s former soundman took a hit from a Palestinian-thrown stone and was out five days. The stones break car windows, too, requiring Eytan to change vehicles more often than partners.

Once out of Jerusalem, where Israeli law mandates using seat belts, Eytan and Yisrael remove theirs, making for a faster exit should a fire bomb come their way. And they raise their windows.

But there will be no fire bombs for them today, happily, not even a stone. All will be quiet on their Middle Eastern front.

Relatively quiet.

“I’ve only been a news cameraman since December,” Eytan says. “I make films and documentaries.” He was cinematographer for “Midsummer Blues,” a film that is due to be released in the United States, he says.

What kind of films does he want to make? “About feelings and emotions,” replies Eytan, who revels in the awesome beauty of the mountainous West Bank. “In the beginning, they were kidding me at the office because I am taking shots of animals and flowers. They never use it.”

American TV news “doesn’t really tell you about these towns,” he says. “They don’t show you the feelings and emotions. All they want is shooting and stoning.”

In the main, he is right.

There are exceptions, TV’s occasional human interest story that surfaces in this frustrating conflict between Arabs and Jews. One was NBC correspondent Martin Fletcher’s Easter Sunday piece seeking to melt antagonism between adversaries.

In this case, the young foes--an Israeli reservist and Palestinian protester--had clashed before. Fletcher arranged for them to meet again in a calmer environment, but the Palestinian backed off at the last minute.

“The gulf of history is too wide,” the NBC newsman says. “It isn’t easy to make peace.”

Nor peaceful TV, when the subject is Palestinians in the occupied territories. TV’s own gulf of history includes a hunger for action that tailors life to the tick of a time clock.

Conflict is TV’s magnet. The 40 or so Israeli camera crews roving the occupied territories are equipped with police radios, but instinctively move to where something’s happening.

They know the signs. A column of dark smoke, signifying a tire being burned in anti-Israel protests. Gunfire. Gathering crowds and soldiers. Bunching of media.

At least the media are not the provocateurs , Eytan insists. At least not in his case.

“I’m very careful not to start anything,” he says. “I never take a camera out of the car unless there is a clash between Arabs and the army. It is provoking. I believe most of them (the other TV crews) are just as careful. It’s mostly the still photographers from abroad that go into the (Palestinian) refugee camps and start something.”

There are no refugee camps heading today’s agenda for Eytan and Yisrael, only Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s whirlwind tour of West Bank army installations.

It’s a media event, a 50-mile photo opportunity for the hard-line Israeli leader hours before the arrival in Jerusalem of U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz on a mission to push the U.S. Middle East peace initiative. The plan, centering on an exchange of Israeli-occupied territory for assurances of peace, is opposed by Shamir.

Shamir is using this West Bank tour to depict himself as a moderate, and yet reaffirm his position that Palestinians cannot win concessions from Israel through violence.

As CNN’s able Jerusalem correspondent Mike Greenspan will note privately later: “Shamir said nothing today that he couldn’t have said back in his office.”

But saying it in front of Israeli troops in the field is so much more dramatic--and photogenic.

The media wait for him and follow him at several stops en route to his reported destination of Nablus.

We race ahead. Twenty minutes later we stand among the media army awaiting Shamir in a small town, lining a narrow street as his motorcade speeds by without stopping. Some quick camera shots, and then back to the cars we go.

This is an Israeli-style media event, chaotic, with no printed schedule. Where’s Shamir going? “We don’t know,” says Eytan, gunning the engine.

Next stop is down the road, an army barracks where Shamir sits outside facing a large group of soldiers, answering their questions and then delivering a pep talk.

Then it’s to Nablus--and through, without stopping, to the town of Jenin, winding through magnificent rolling green hills along the way. From their fields and outside their homes built into the hillsides, Palestinians stare at the serpentine column: Shamir’s 20-car military caravan trailed by foreign media cars and the orange van of Israeli Television.

“They hate him (Shamir),” says Eytan of the onlooking Arabs.

We pass near the town where Palestinians lynched a suspected Israeli collaborator not long ago. Then finally we passed through Jenin toward a hilltop army camp. Shamir talks about 200 paratroopers and holds a 10-minute press conference.

Back go the camera crews, back through Jenin, back to other business, back to Nablus where Eytan pulls up behind two other rented cars, speaks to the camera crews, then returns.

“Something terrible has happened, and we have missed it,” he reports. “I’m glad. I don’t want to see such things.”

The other crews say that a Palestinian has been electrocuted. They say the man had hung a Palestinian flag from a live electrical wire--hanging such a flag is forbidden by the Israelis--and booby-trapped it with a grenade. He planed to trigger it from afar if an Israeli soldier tried to remove the flag, they say.

Instead, the army made the Palestinian remove the flag, and that’s when he was electrocuted.

(Stories on Israeli radio and in the Jerusalem Post mentioned no booby-trap, only that a man--perhaps not even the man who put up the flag--was electrocuted.)

Quickly, on to something else. Nearby, 14 cars flying white-and-blue Israel banners are lined up and ready to drive through the city as a taunt to Arab residents. The cars carry supporters of one of Israel’s right-wing political parties.

Why do this? “We are Jewish people!” a woman snaps. “This is our land, so why not?” Glaring at a newspaper reporter, she adds, “You came here for provocation; we didn’t! Bye!”

Eytan gets a shot of the cars, and then we follow them until he decides to turn back. “I’m not going to chase these jerks,” he says.

Now things are moving swiftly. On his police radio, Eytan hears that the army “is going to shoot somebody here.” Trailing an ABC car, we zigzag through the city in search of the incident, finally parking across from an open field in front of a small wooded area on the outskirts of the city.

An army Jeep and soldiers are visible in the distance, searching the woods for “the suspect,” and Eytan watches them through a telescope.

“They are with equipment and everything, and he is running barefoot,” a member of an NBC crew says. “He is probably back in the village already. You wait and wait and wait, and then you have to leave before you ever know what happens.”

Under a hazy blue sky, life passes serenely for the next minutes as the soldiers continue their search in the distance. An old-timer on a burro heads down the road, meeting several men pushing carts filled with produce toward a nearby open market. Such pastoral scenes rarely get equal time on TV with the violence.

“We have to leave,” says Eytan, who must return to Jerusalem in time to cover Shultz’s arrival. The CNN car speeds away, its police radio still barking.

Animals and flowers.