Caught in the middle

Linda Gradstein of National Public Radio entered a house in the West Bank town of Tulkarem last summer. She and a print reporter were there to interview members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade who had assassinated two Palestinians accused of collaborating with Israel. “There was a gun on the table, and the person who had pulled the trigger was a young man in his 20s with a baby,” Gradstein recalled. After a while, she asked if the weapon was the one he had used. He said it was.

“It was very strange, and a bit scary,” she said. “I wondered if they were gonna take that gun and say, ‘Let’s kidnap a Western journalist.’ ” Instead, they showed the reporters video of the executions. “At the beginning they didn’t want to speak on mike,” Gradstein said. Picture, if you can, Gradstein negotiating with six unmasked men from a Palestinian militia responsible for some of the bloodiest attacks against Israelis. Gradstein ... the observant Jew. Gradstein ... the mother of small children. Gradstein ... the antithesis of the romantic and glamorous stereotype of a foreign correspondent.

Gradstein ... six months pregnant and showing it.

The flak jacket she sometimes wears for protection fits over the top, leaving her belly exposed. “They were a little taken aback” by her swollen belly, she said, “because in Palestinian society pregnant women don’t walk around like that.” Seven months later, most of the men she met in Tulkarem are in Israeli jails or dead.

Being on the job with child was routine for Gradstein, a 40-year-old mother of three whose 13-year career as a Jerusalem-based reporter for NPR is a book or movie demanding to be written, given her straddling of mommy and media tracks in one of the globe’s tinderboxes. “I was pregnant during a lot of that stuff,” she said, one example being the 1994 Hebron massacre when a Jewish fanatic mowed down 29 Muslims worshiping at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, touching off bloody clashes between Palestinians and Israelis.

“About a week later, I went back and slept on the floor of a Palestinian home because I wanted to do a story about life under curfew,” Gradstein said. “I had terrible heartburn. The story ran on the night I gave birth to my first child.” From her lips, to your ears -- some of them burning.

There’s more to Gradstein than motherhood, military checkpoints and brushes with potential danger. Speaking of flak, a withering cross-fire of criticism from Arabs and Jews has both her and NPR ducking. NPR joins CNN, the New York Times, this paper and others in being blasted by both sides for its coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The problem is so acute at NPR that its president, Kevin Klose, has been making the rounds of Jewish communities in an attempt to answer the criticism. Much of it mentions Gradstein, a contract employee. (NPR staff reporter Peter Kenyon is also based in Jerusalem).

“I don’t want to use the term ‘self-hating,’ ” said Daniel Seaman, director of Israel’s government Press Office, waving off Gradstein’s status as a devout Jew. “But my experience is when [media members covering the intifada] are Jewish, they tend to overcompensate for the sake of their credibility.” In highly partisan circles, that credibility is already in tatters. “Yesterday at a press conference,” Gradstein said, “someone from a very right-wing Jewish organization cornered me about the criticism and said, ‘How can you defend yourself?’ When I told her we also get criticized from the Palestinian side, she said, ‘That’s impossible, because you’re completely pro-Palestinian.’ ” Gradstein says she’s pro-journalism, noting that it’s appropriate for some stories to have one point of view as long as overall balance is achieved in the long run.

Even so, she said the criticism stings. “Especially when it gets personal, when they think I should be fired and say I’m a self-hating Jew or a right-wing Zionist.” Actually, Gradstein is one of NPR’s most valuable assets. On this January day, she was just back from the volatile West Bank city of Nablus after interviewing another member of Al Aqsa, which is associated with Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement. He told her the group rejects the Palestinian leader’s call to end attacks targeting Israeli civilians.

“I was always attracted to this part of the world and wanted to make some contribution in trying to bring Israelis and Palestinians closer together,” said Gradstein, a U.S. citizen and transplanted New Yorker who speaks Hebrew and Arabic, has a master’s degree in Arab studies from Georgetown University and spent a year in Cairo on a Rotary fellowship. “That’s why I spent five years studying Arabic.”

She believes knowing the language matters. “Many Palestinians speak Hebrew, which they learned either from working in Israel or in Israeli jails, but very few Jews speak Arabic. It’s symptomatic of a wider problem, which is that Palestinians and Israelis really know very little about each other. Israelis see Palestinians only as potential terrorists, and Palestinians see Israelis only as soldiers.”

Gradstein came to Israel in 1985 “and basically never left.” She began as a translator and newspaper stringer before joining NPR in 1990 and fine-tuning her ear. “A good radio piece is like a movie,” she said. “It has a beginning, a middle and an end with scenes along the way, and you’ll often transition from one to another with sound.” That’s how she captured the ambience of the casbah she passed through en route to meeting the Al Aqsa man in Nablus. “I used a rooster going cock-a-doodle-doo. It put the listener there, although I felt foolish standing in the middle of this marketplace waiting for the rooster to make noise.”

Is there conflict between Gradstein the reporter and Gradstein the Jew who observes the Sabbath? “I feel that having a day when you can’t cover the news makes me a better reporter because I can put things in a better perspective,” she said. “And NPR has been very tolerant of me because I decided from the beginning it wasn’t negotiable.”

After logging this intifada and the earlier one that exploded in the late 1980s, she battles burnout by adding human interest stories. “In other words, instead of talking about 15 victims, I take one victim and tell that life story.” Gradstein’s own includes the South Jerusalem apartment where she sends her stories to NPR from a cozy studio. She shares the spacious home with her husband, Cliff Churgin, bureau manager for Knight Ridder newspapers here, and their children, seeing in their young faces those of the Israeli and Palestinian children whose tragedies she regularly witnesses for NPR.

“And it makes me so sad,” she said. “Children on both sides have a right to grow up in a safe place. Maybe because I’m a mother I’m more sensitive to that.” Perhaps, also, because her 8-year-old daughter, Rafaella, fears dying in a terrorist attack. All of which appeared distant on a day when Gradstein proudly showed off her freshly remodeled apartment and its colorful new kitchen to a visitor, saying: “The architect was an Israeli Arab, the carpenter was Palestinian, and the contractor was Jewish.” Peace at last.