The reporter entered the briefing mode. Screenshot from the article in News 12. The questioner is the young Palestinian, the answerer is the reporter Uri Isaac
After three out of five attacks that happened recently in Jerusalem were carried out by Palestinian boys aged 13-14, the Israeli media remembered to deal with the young people living in East Jerusalem. On normal days, the channels are not really interested in the safety of the Palestinian children – hundreds of whom are arrested every year in night raids, despite a new state procedure that should prevent this. Even in the violence they are exposed to every day from the window of their house or on their way to school, in the destruction of the houses and the suppression of protests, no one is interested.
But now the brave reporters have gone out into the field, that is, to the Nablus gate, to trace the reasons why Palestinian youths go out to carry out attacks, in two reports – here on the 11th and on News 12. Although it is three boys, out of tens of thousands who live in the east of the city, who have carried out knife or gun attacks in recent weeks, But in the eyes of the determined reporters, every Palestinian owes explanations for their actions – similar to the logic according to which Palestinians should be punished collectively if a relative committed an attack. “They are heroes, the attacks caused the Jews to be under pressure,” said a young man at the Nablus gate to a reporter here 11. Now everything is clear.
The reporter for the Arab section of Kan 11, Omri Haim, produced an article about “this terrorism of children, which has recently raised a head”, as the presenter Michal Rabinovitch defined it in the edition. “Three elements combined with each other are the ones that create the venom for which and in whose name those young terrorists go out to carry out these murderous attacks,” states Haim, and elaborates: “One is education, or more precisely the contents of the Palestinian textbooks, which are partly taught in East Jerusalem… The second element is support that the terrorists receive, regardless of their age, from the home and environment they came from.” And the third element, according to Haim, is perhaps the strongest, it is, of course, “social networks”.
Not a word about the occupation. Not a word about the wider context of the events. Not a word about the number of Palestinian deaths, which reached a 17-year high in 2022; and the month of January 2023, which was the deadliest in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 2015.
Into this batter, the reporter inserted a quote from Musa Alkam, the father of the shooter from Neve Ya’akov who killed seven people, in which he is proud of his son. One problem: Hayeri Alkam, the shooter, is not one of the three boys in question, and was not a minor at all. Immediately after that, the article shows a video showing the mother of a gunman in Jenin who was killed, who talks about her joy over the rifle he got, without specifying her name, her son’s name or the context in which he was shot. In any case, it is clear that this is not a minor or East Jerusalem. Here the problem is not even the lack of context, but a logical fallacy, perhaps based on the assumption that in the eyes of the viewers all Palestinians are the same, and therefore it is possible to mix in quotes that are not at all related to the topic of the article.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yh30E0Q8JA
The News 12 reporter, Uri Isaac, also went to the Nablus gate for a similar article, but in his case it seems that he is more interested in presenting his opinion than listening to the answers. “It is still hard to digest that these are not adult terrorists, driven by ideology, but children who have also become ticking bombs,” declares Isaac at the beginning of the article, because it is clear that an item about Palestinians in the main edition is only interesting when they are about to explode. Isaac also blames the social networks, which cause the youth to be “influenced and ready to go to battle”.
Isaac is standing at the gate of Nablus, and notes that “in the Old City today, it is difficult to get an answer from the gangs of boys to one question: How can a 13-year-old boy take a knife and carry out an attack?”. A bit strange, given the fact that already in the first year of journalism studies, you learn that if you didn’t get an answer, you probably didn’t ask the right question.
“Go ask their family why they did that,” one young man answers him with demonstrable impatience. But the reporter insists, and asks him if he walks with a knife, as if he was guarding the entrance to the mall or at the checkpoint. The other young man angrily replies: “No! He doesn’t go with a knife or anything!”. The reporter leaves the group of young people, who seem not to have understood where this security questioning came from. But the media does not give up. “When you try a little more and scratch the barrier of fear,” clarifies Izak, as if he were a Shin Bet investigator, “you still manage to reach them and learn something about the mechanism of what has been happening in recent weeks, especially in East Jerusalem.”
Immediately after, our reporter moves on to the next suspect, a young man in the old city. This time he succeeds. He asks the young man how it is possible that 13-14 year old children take a knife and stab people in the street. The young man answers him with the question: “Whose land is this?”. The reporter doesn’t get confused and immediately goes into explanatory mode, and answers: “The land of the Jews.” Not for the citizens, not for the residents, not for those who live there, God forbid. The young man did not remain indebted, and answered him: “No, brother, it is not your land, it is the land of the Arabs.”
The reporter continues asking: “And is it okay that because of this someone would kill seven people in an attack?”. Here too, as in the Kaan 11 article, we suddenly switched – with deliberate confusion – from an article about “child terror” to an attack in Neve Ya’akov, the perpetrator of which was not a child. “Yes, no problem,” answers the young man. And the reporter continues to make it difficult: “What if he murdered me? Is that okay?”. “That’s fine too,” the young man replies.
Palestinian minors have no protections in the media either
The only occasion, in these two articles, where the word “occupation” is mentioned is when Isaac interviews a young man at the Nablus gate, who calmly explains to him: “This is the result of the policy of occupation, the pressures that… for example, this little boy at the age of 13, sees that his brother is in prison and that the Jews are beating him at the checkpoint “. The reporter neither confirms nor denies. “Everything here is connected to everything,” he says. “From the point of view of the young East Jerusalemite, what happens in Al Aqsa, Nablus, Jenin, Hebron and even the Gaza Strip, can at any moment be the match that ignites the region.” And yet, Isaac continues without referring to the relationship he himself declared.
Another young man in the article actually asks the reporter a question: “The people who died in Jenin, the people who died in Gaza and are still dying, what, aren’t they human?”. Isaac had no problem answering the question of whose country this is, but when faced with this question, he asks, “What is the connection between Jenin and Jerusalem?”, and the young man simply answers: “All are Arabs, all Islam, all Palestine in the end.” I wonder if the reporter would have asked in Jerusalem why people are interested in what is happening in Sderot, or even Jews in New York.
The two articles do not mention the fact that the interviewees are probably mostly residents, whom Israel occupied, who are not citizens who can, for example, vote in the elections. The general situation in East Jerusalem, which is occupied territory according to any international standard, is not even mentioned.
In the article in Han 11, the reporter states that two of the boys are from the Shoafat refugee camp, but does not refer to the situation in the camp at all, and does not talk about the people who are imprisoned on the wrong side of the separation wall, about the dire state of the infrastructure, about the fact that they pay property taxes to the Jerusalem municipality but receive nothing in return. Or about the collective punishment imposed on them after every terrorist attack.
There is a lot to be said about young people who go out with a knife or a gun in front of soldiers, policemen and settlers, when the chances of them dying are very high. But this is not the way to delve into the subject. In none of these articles, for example, no Palestinian expert, educator or activist was interviewed.
An equally important point, which stood out in both articles, is that just as the young Palestinians have no protection against the violence of the Israeli authorities, the media also do not apply to them the basic protections, some of which are fixed by law – for example mentioning the name of the attackers, as opposed to, for example, the name of the young Jewish man who was involved in the murder in Douma, whose name Not published; Or publishing the names and faces of minors without blurring, which is doubtful if the reporters legally requested the approval of their parents as required. Perhaps this stems from a lack of thought that the laws for the protection of children also apply to them, or from the assumption that no one will sue.
Does it seem to anyone that brave journalism of this kind has no effect on reality? After the article was published in Khan 11 and following the guidance of the Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben Gabir, the police arrested the minor Yusef Abu Al-Hawa from the town of Al Tor, who was interviewed in the article. He was released to a two-day house arrest and banned from media interviews or using social media for a month.