This essay describes my first full day in Palestine, back in 2000, during the first month of the second intifada. It was a very eventful day.
I wake up and turn on the TV. CNN reports Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat met last night and agreed on a disengagement plan. The Israelis will pull back from clash points, thus the Palestinian children won't have anybody to throw rocks at, thus a few days will go by without funerals, thus maybe the peace plan can recover.
Maybe I'll be going home soon, I think to myself. At breakfast, the rest of the crew had also heard the news. We decide to check out the closest clash point and see if the agreement between the leaders has filtered down to the ground.
At City Inn, on the outskirts of Ramallah, for the first time in a month, the road is open. The Israeli jeeps are gone. Rocks and burnt tires litter the road; the store at the bottom of the hill is selling cigarettes and soda pop again. Kids wander around aimlessly, the absence of their enemy seems to disorient them.
Wow. Maybe Peres and Arafat are on to something. We film the cars driving down the road, we film the kids not throwing stones, we film the absence of jeeps. When we get back in our car, we are all excited. We might have a story here, a happy story about an unexpected outbreak of peace.
The producer's cel phone rings. A 17-year-old Palestinian boy has just been killed by an Israeli settler. So much for peace. The concept of the story changes. Now it is how hard it is to make peace stick; how an extremist on either side can fuck it up with hardly any effort.
Hesma is a little Arab town maybe 10 miles from Jerusalem, surrounded by hostile Israeli settlements. When we arrive at the edge of town, a large angry crowd greets us. We don't feel welcome right away but cooler heads prevail and they walk us up the hill to the spot overlooking the road where Hussein was shot.
His blood is still fresh on the ground. According to our new found friends, he had been waving a Palestinian flag when a settler stopped his car, got out, rifle in hand, took aim, and shot him dead. Perhaps that is the exact truth. Or perhaps he had been throwing rocks. Perhaps the settler was actually Israeli undercover police. Perhaps it was a random shot, perhaps the Israeli hadn't been aiming for his heart. We heard all those stories the next few days but one thing was certain. A boy had been standing on a hill in his hometown and another man, who didn't know him, shot him dead.
I film the blood. I film the settlements. I film the road. I film his Palestinian flag stained with his blood. I film other children, standing where he stood, making the victory sign. My favorite shot frames the blood stained dirt and the new white buildings of the Israeli settlement perched on the hill above.
Two Israeli jeeps arrive at the edge of town. Soldiers step out, wearing flak jackets, carrying automatic weapons. We stroll over to them, wanting to ask their version of events. They tell us they know nothing. We don't stay long. We don't want to be seen talking to them too much or we'll lose our credibility with the Palestinians.
Time to visit the mother. The rest of the town is already paying their condolences. She lives in a small charmless one story concrete house. The roof is a construction site; Hussein had been building a second story, in the hopes of attracting a wife. One of his cousins shows me his room; he had cassettes on a little table, pictures of pop stars on his wall. I don't film the room. It is too stark, almost empty, his bed rolled up and put away, but its plainness affects me. I realize he was just a kid and a few hours before he had been alive, thinking of girls and music.
I do film his sisters. Their tears are extravagant, unselfconscious, dramatic. Others in the room may see Hussein as a martyr to the cause of Palestine, a worthy death in the struggle. These girls just know their brother is dead. The light is perfect, the shots are great, I'm very happy with the pictures I make from their tragedy. Perhaps, I think, we can open the story with their tears.
Hussein's body was taken to the hospital in Ramallah. When it is brought back to Hesma, the funeral can begin. We return to the crossroads to await his coffin's arrival. At the edge of town, kids are throwing stones at Israeli jeeps, Israelis are shooting back.
When the body arrives, the fighting stops. It seems the whole town is marching in the procession. I film the plain box carried on the shoulders of the men, I film the women, all together, black headscarves covering their hair. I film the chants, the flags, the little streets packed with mourners.
We walk with the crowd for a couple of kilometers. Our reporter is mulling over in his head the story he will try to sell to New York. The essence of the problem is that, whatever the leaders decide, on the ground Palestinians and Israeli settlers live cheek by jowl. They hate each other and all it takes is one extremist on either side to dash the hopes of peace.
We bang out a stand-up, the funeral procession framed over the reporter's shoulder, and we head back to Ramallah. We decide to check out City Inn, the clash point that had been peaceful in the morning. The Israeli Jeeps are back, the kids are throwing rocks, the familiar dance goes on. So much for Peres and Arafat. One settler with a gun, so much for peace.
We are happy. It has been a good days work. We have a neatly contained story, about one death, about one town, that like a fractal tells the whole story of the obstacles for peace.
Now the reporter and producer have to try and sell the piece to the show in New York. If they succeed, they'll have to write the spot, track it, and feed the tape so it can be cut either in London or Tel Aviv. If not, cocktail hour for every one.
The producer's cel phone rings again. Car bomb in Jerusalem. Two Israelis killed. Several injured So much for our little story of Hesma, no sense even trying. Israeli deaths trump Palestinian deaths every time.
Off to Jerusalem. The blast was in the heart of West Jerusalem, in a lower middle Jewish shopping area. Whenever we get close, cops chase us away. The heart of Jerusalem is closed. We park the car and walk several miles to the bombsite.
New York wants a live shot. We need to set up at the blast site, park a satellite truck near by, hook up phone lines and feed a signal 22,000 miles into space and then into your TV set in America. New York doesn't care that the police have closed the area or that other networks have hired all the satellite trucks.
It takes us a few hours. We hire a satellite dish on the back of a Uhaul, we wend our way through the back streets to the bombsite, we string cables across the street, we set up our lights and camera.
Like television people anywhere, we take a little plot of land and we turn it into our little studio.
Our driver, Abdul, is scared. He is the only Palestinian for miles, surrounded by Israelis infuriated that their brethren have been killed. He fears he could be a locus for their anger. We tell him, don't be silly you are with us.
We draw a crowd. People always want to talk to the TV people. We chat with Hasidim about the Yankees, real estate prices in Brooklyn, the peace process as we wait for our hit time.
A group of kids are chanting and holding signs in front of our camera. They don't realize we aren't transmitting yet and we don't tell them. Some of them see Abdul sitting with us and he infuriates them.
They march over and scream in his face, telling him "Arab get out or we will kill you". Our soundman and I jump in front of him and interpose ourselves between the crowd and Abdul. He is with us. To attack him is to attack us. One of the great pleasures of television production is its collaborative nature and the way you become a team, bounded by deep loyalty, at least until the job is over.
The older Hasidim with whom we had been pleasantly chatting do nothing as the teenagers scream at us. One kid starts to kick. He kicks our soundman in the balls, me in the shins. We push and shove. Our producer worries how we will do the live shot if we get thrown in jail for beating up these young hooligans. After a few minutes, a cop comes over and breaks it up.
One kid, not the kid who was kicking, but one of his friends comes over to explain. He doesn't want us to think ill of him, he wants the TV people to understand. He explains his friend's actions "He wasn't trying to kick you, he was trying to kick the Arab." I guess that was supposed to make it all better.
After all that excitement, we miss our live shot. Our picture, sound, IFB, camera PL, all were up; our signal was hitting the satellite, but New York couldn't find it. Oh well move on. At least we held up our end.
One more request from New York. The young woman who was killed in the bomb blast was the daughter of a Member of the Knesset. The evening news cast needs footage of her funeral.
Abdul doesn't want to drive us. We don't blame him. We catch a cab to the second funeral of the day. It is different. It is indoors, the room packed with Hasidim. No one cries. Rabbis make speeches.
It is the same. Everybody is friendly to us, helping us get our shots. The coffin is brought in on the shoulders of relatives. She was 28 years old, a mother. She was out shopping. She did not expect to die. Her father stares at his daughter's coffin, his life shattered.
After the funeral, we walk for a mile before we find a cab to take us to the feed point. We feed the tape to Tel Aviv, wolf down sandwiches, drive back to Ramallah. It has been a long day.
The next morning I call the producer in Tel Aviv to find out if my shots of Hussein's crying sisters made the cut. "No," she tells me, "but thanks for the funeral footage, we really needed it." She meant the funeral of the Israeli woman. Palestinian deaths don't make air.