"Would you like to take a tea break?" Zelter, a 50-year-old potter from Cromer in eastern England, asked the helmeted Israeli soldier staring her in the face. "If you did, we could walk through to Jerusalem."

Amid all the violence and bloodshed between Israelis and Palestinians, it was a somewhat surreal scene at the Israeli military checkpoint on the main road from Bethlehem in the West Bank.

On one side were the 50 or so pro-Palestinian demonstrators from Britain, France, Italy and the United States clutching placards that read "End the Occupation." They sang "We Shall Have a State" to the tune of "We Shall Overcome" and waved little plastic Palestinian flags.

One, a Palestinian-American called Heidi, WAS a Palestinian flag. Why else would someone wear red slacks, a green jacket and a black T-shirt with the words "Free Palestine" emblazoned in white across her chest?

Facing the group were Israeli soldiers, police and border police clutching their weapons and barring the way.

An Israeli policeman filmed the protesters with his home video camera. Some of the demonstrators filmed him back with their home video cameras. Everyone smiled. Even the policeman.

way from it all, elderly Palestinian women in traditional embroidered dresses shuffled past, dragging plastic crates of figs and other produce towards Bethlehem.

The group has been protesting in and around Jerusalem in support of Palestinians engaged in the uprising against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Saturday's action, they said, was intended to draw international attention to the harsh restrictions Israel has placed on the movement of almost all Palestinians since the violence erupted last September after peace talks stalled.

Israel calls the blockade a security measure against attacks on its citizens. Palestinians call it collective punishment.

"The West Bank and Gaza are a total prison," said Luisa Morgantini, a leftist Italian member of the European Parliament. "There are not two sides that are equal. There is one side which occupies and another side which is occupied."

The khaki-clad soldiers and blue-uniformed police were not impressed. Having summoned reinforcements, they linked arms and moved heavy plastic barriers across the road.

Within an hour it was all over. Short of a bit of pushing and shoving, there was no violence. No one was hurt. No one was arrested. And having made their point, the protesters turned their backs on the Israelis and headed off the way they came. "It was expected," said Zelter. " And I think it's a total disgrace."

[The Independent - 19 August 2001]: When Angela Zelter tried to talk to an Orthodox Jew last week, she got an earful. "I greeted him with 'Shalom' and he and his friends told us we were 'friends of terrorists'," she says. "One of them told me: 'Fuck you, your friends killed our babies.' We were spat at." But being a member of the International Solidarity Movement to End the Occupation has its rewards. Ms Zelter – a potter from Norfolk -- and her friends from Britain, France, Italy and America have their little victories in Jerusalem and on the West Bank, preaching non-violence to a population that admires suicide bombers, pleading with Palestinians not to throw stones, ostentatiously monitoring the Israeli army's debilitating, endless checkpoints.

I watched several of the "internationals" – men and women – telling Palestinians not to throw stones at the police outside Orient House last week. A day later, they were standing beside Israeli troops at a roadblock in Qalandiya in the West Bank, holding placards proclaiming themselves "international observers". Palestinians told them there was less harassment while they stood there. As many as 80 men and women from Europe and the United States – along with at least five Israeli women and a Colombian – have been trying to persuade the Palestinians that the world has not forgotten them, that it is possible to resist an occupation without violence.

At one checkpoint, the monitor was a retired Israeli policewoman – formerly a police major – while Ms Zelter spent some minutes trying to encourage a young Israeli tank driver to meet her at the group's hotel and travel with them in plain clothes to meet Palestinians. The Israeli might not be the only man frightened of these formidable ladies from "Women in Black", who regularly meet at the foot of Nurse Edith Cavell's statue near the National Gallery in London.

Tough is not the word for them. Up to 20 Western men and women sleep every night in the Palestinian town of Beit Jalla -- the shooting gallery which regularly appears on every television news programme -- risking their lives under the Israeli tank shells which invariably follow the appearance of Palestinian gunmen in the town's streets.

Jerry Levin, the CNN reporter once kidnapped in Beirut, and his wife have stayed there, along with a clutch of French and Britons, at least five Jews among them. Ms Zelter says Arafat's men have turned up most recently and appear to be keeping the gunmen off the streets – perhaps because of the presence of the "internationals".

Edward Mast and his wife Linda Bevis from Seattle are spending their honeymoon to show "solidarity" – how painfully old-fashioned that word seems amid the Palestinian-Israeli war – with those under occupation. "I want to be part of the non-violent resistance to occupation," Mast says. "And to register my protest as an American at what is happening here." Last week, in perhaps the most dramatic incident of its kind, the group turned up at the West Bank village of Al-Khader to remove an Israeli roadblock made up of rocks and two carbonised buses that was preventing villagers from driving to their fields.

"We eventually got the Palestinians to understand what we wanted to do and an 11-year-old boy turned up with a JCB digger," Zelter says. "He was very brave and very professional, and I think the other Palestinians were afraid. But we formed a human shield and he moved the stones and pushed one of the buses to one side and the people could then take their vehicles to their fields. Some Israeli soldiers were watching from a hill. An army truck moved towards us, but stopped."

At 2am the next day, the Israelis returned and re-erected the roadblock. Then the group returned to play football on a field the Israelis had deemed "forbidden" because it overlooked a road for Jewish settlers -- though not close enough for a Palestinian to throw a stone even with a slingshot, as one of the women explained. Again, the Israelis watched. An army jeep drew up, then retreated when the driver saw that Westerners were playing in the football game. Al- Khader are football champions in this part of the West Bank.

It's easy to dismiss the "internationals" as a bunch of do-gooders out of their depth – "ageing hippies", as one Western journalist called them. But the message is all too real for the Israelis. Israel refuses to allow international monitors to police the Israeli- Palestinian war. But the men and women of this solidarity campaign are proving that they can throw a blanket over the sparks, persuade Palestinians to play football rather than throw stones.

Perhaps a real monitoring force – disciplined and without political leanings – could do even better. It might at least take its cue from the last words of Nurse Cavell, which Ms Zelter remembers: "Patriotism," the English heroine said as she faced a German firing squad in the First World War, "is not enough."

[Sunday Times, UK, 19 August]: ISRAEL'S prime minister, Ariel Sharon, wanted to send troops and tanks into the suburbs of Bethlehem last week, but was stopped from turning one of Christianity's most sacred spots into a battle zone only after a row with his top commanders, military sources claimed this weekend.

Sharon was enraged when Palestinians fired light arms on Tuesday at Gillo, a Jewish settlement built on land expropriated in 1967 from the Arabs of Beit Jalla, a suburb that lies just a mile from the centre of Bethlehem and the Church of the Nativity.

The Fatah gunmen claimed they had opened fire in response to the Israeli army's demolition of a Palestinian police station the previous night.

Sharon pushed for a lightning takeover of Beit Jalla, using tanks and paratroopers, under the codename "an eye to Zion".

It was initially claimed the operation was cancelled only because of intense lobbying by America.

News of the disagreement emerged as Israeli tanks moved early yesterday into a Palestinian-controlled area in the southern Gaza Strip. One Palestinian was reported killed and 10 injured in the clashes that followed.

Aides said Sharon wanted "an eye to Zion" to be completed by Wednesday lunchtime, before his meeting with David Sutterfield, the American envoy.

Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, the defence minister, wanted something that would look good on the main evening news.

But Shaul Mofaz, the army chief of staff, preferred the operation to be carried out under cover of darkness.

While the three men haggled, Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, telephoned his men and told them to stop firing - knowing full well that the Israelis monitor his calls. When the message reached Ben-Eliezer and Mofaz, they agreed to abort the operation.

[The Independent, UK, 18 August]: 'It's not the words Israelis and Palestinians use about each other that concern me. It's our submission to them'

What on earth has happened to our reporting of the Middle East? George Orwell would have loved a Reuter's dispatch from the West Bank city of Hebron last Wednesday. "Undercover Israeli soldiers," the world's most famous news agency reported, "shot dead a member of Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction yesterday in what Palestinians called an assassination." The key phrase, of course, was "what Palestinians called an assassination". Any sane reader would conclude immediately that Imad Abu Sneiheh, who was shot in the head, chest, stomach and legs by 10 bullets fired by Israeli "agents" had been murdered, let alone assassinated. But no. Reuters, like all the big agencies and television companies reporting the tragedy of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, no longer calls murder by its real name.

Back in the days of apartheid, no one minced their words when South African death squads gunned down militant opponents. They talked about murder and assassination. They still do when Latin American killers murder their political opponents. I've yet to find a newspaper which shrinks from reporting the "murder" -- or at the least "assassination" -- of IRA or UDA gangsters in Belfast. But not when the Israelis do the murdering. For when Israelis kill, they do not murder or assassinate, according to Reuters or CNN or the most recent convert to this flabby journalism, the BBC. Israelis perpetrate something which is only "called" an "assassination" by Palestinians. When Israelis are involved, our moral compass our ability to report the truth dries up.

Over the years, even CNN began to realise that "terrorist" used about only one set of antagonists was racist as well as biased. When a television reporter used this word about the Palestinian who so wickedly bombed the Jerusalem pizzeria last week, he was roundly attacked by one of his colleagues for falling below journalistic standards. Rightly so. But in reality our reporting is getting worse, not better.

Editors around the world are requesting their journalists to be ever softer, ever more mealy mouthed in their reporting of any incident which might upset Israel. Which is why, of course, Israelis are so often reported as being killed by Palestinians while Palestinians, some as young as 10, are killed in "clashes" -- "clashes" coming across as a form of natural disaster like an earthquake or a flood, a tragedy without a culprit.

One sure way of spotting Israel's responsibility for a killing is the word "crossfire". Mohamed el-Dura, the little Palestinian boy shot dead by Israeli troops in Gaza last year, became an iconic symbol of the Palestinian "intifada". Journalists investigating the boy's death, including The Independent's Jerusalem, correspondent were in no doubt that the bullets which hit him were Israeli (albeit that the soldiers involved may not have seen him). Yet after a bogus Israeli military inquiry denounced in the Knesset by an Israeli member of parliament, all the major Western picture agencies placed captions on the photo for future subscribers. Yes, you've guessed it, the captions said he was killed in "crossfire".

Wars have always produced their verbal trickeries, their antiseptic phrases and hygienic metaphors, from "collateral damage" to "degrading the enemy". The Palestinian-Israeli conflict has produced a unique crop. The Israeli siege of a city has become a "closure", the legal border between Israel and the occupied territories has become the "seam line", collaborators for the Israelis are "co-operators", Israeli-occupied land has become "disputed", Jewish settlements built illegally on Arab land have become "neighourhoods" -- “ nice, folksy places which are invariably attacked by Palestinian "militants".

And when suicide bombers strike "terrorists" to the Israelis, of course the Palestinians call them "martyrs". Oddest of all is Israel's creepy expression for its own extrajudicial murders: "targeted killings". If a dark humour exists in any of this dangerous nonsense, I must admit that Israel has found a real cracker in its expression for Palestinians who blow themselves to bits while making bombs: they die, so the Israelis say, from "work accidents".

But it's not the words Israelis and Palestinians use about each other that concern me. It's our journalistic submission to these words.

Just over a week ago, I wrote in The Independent that the BBC had bowed to Israeli diplomatic pressure to drop the word "assassination" for the murder of Palestinians in favour of Israel's own weird expression, "targeted killings". I was subsequently taken to task by Malcolm Downing, the BBC assignments editor who decreed this new usage. I was one-sided, biased and misleading, he said; the BBC merely regarded "assassination" as a word that should apply to "high-ranking political or religious figures".

But the most important aspect of Mr Downing's reply was his total failure to make any reference to the point of my article the BBC's specific recommended

choice of words for Israel's murders: "targeted attacks". The BBC didn't invent that phrase. The Israelis did.

I don't for a moment believe Mr Downing realises what he did. His colleagues regard him as a professional friend. But he has to realise that by telling his reporters to use "targeted killings", he is perpetrating not only a journalistic error but a factual inaccuracy. So far, 17 totally innocent civilians including two small children have been killed in Israel's state-sponsored assassinations. So the killings are at the least very badly targeted indeed. And I can't help recalling that when the BBC's own Jill Dando was so cruelly shot dead on her doorstep, there was no doubt that she was killed by a man who had deliberately "targeted" her. But that's not what the BBC said. They called it murder. And it was.

Within the past week, CNN, the news agencies and the BBC have all been chipping away at the truth once more. When the Jewish settlement at Gilo was attacked by Palestinian gunmen at Beit Jalla, it once more became a "Jewish neighbourhood" on "disputed" land even though the land, far from being in "dispute", legally belongs to the Palestinian people of Beit Jalla ("Gilo" being the Hebrew for "Jalla"). But viewers and readers were not told of this.

When the next state-sponsored assassination of a Palestinian Hamas member took place, a television journalist -- BBC this time -- was reduced to telling us that his killing was "regarded by the Israelis as a targeted killing but which the Palestinians regard as an assassination". You could see the problem. Deeply troubled by the Israeli version, the BBC man had to "balance" it with the Palestinian version, like a sports reporter unwilling to blame either side for a foul.

So just watch out for the following key words about the Middle East in television reporting over the next few days: "targeted killings", "neighbourhood", "disputed", "terrorist", "clash" and "crossfire". Then ask yourself why they are being used. I'm all for truth about both sides. I'm all for using the word "terrorism" providing it's used about both sides' terrorists. I'm sick of hearing Palestinians talking about men who blow kids to bits as "martyrs". Murder is murder is murder. But where the lives of men and women are concerned, must we be treated by television and agency reporters to a commentary on the level of a football match?

Mid-East Realities

www.middleeast.org

Source: http://www.middleeast.org/articles/2001/8/351.htm