Honest Reporting: How Reporting From Israel Changed My Worldview Forever
I was content to tell this story for my first few months in Israel, because I, too, believed it. As I wrote recently in The Jerusalem Report magazine, I had a deeply negative view of the Jewish state until I moved there. I grew up in a WASPy New England town where everyone is a liberal Democrat. For some reason, hostility towards Israel is a knee-jerk liberal opinion in the U.S. (and in much of Europe). As a product of my environment, I believed that Israel was a bully and the primary obstacle to peace in the Middle East.BBC Discovers WWII Headlines In Archives (satire)
But foreign affairs always look different when they become local, and nowhere is that more true than in Israel. I began to see that one sunny afternoon not long after I moved to Jerusalem. On that day, I went to cover a Palestinian protest at an Israeli-run prison near Ramallah. A reporter for The Independent and I drove out there and fell in with a group of about 100 Palestinian demonstrators as they marched towards the prison.
When they arrived, about a half dozen Israeli soldiers came out to meet them. The Palestinians quickly set up a roadblock of burning tires to prevent the Israelis from escaping. More and more protesters arrived – I don’t know from where – but I soon saw them swarming over the hills above the prison, clad in face masks and keffiyehs. It was like a scene from Game of Thrones. Some had knives in their belts. Others had brought ingredients for Molotov cocktails. They took up positions on the hills above the prison and began using powerful slingshots to hurl rocks and chunks of concrete at the six or so Israeli soldiers down below. The Israelis were so outnumbered that I couldn’t help but question the narrative that Israel was Goliath and the Palestinians were David, because here in front of me it looked like the exact opposite.
When I visited the Gaza Strip a few months later, I again saw the difference between how journalists portray a place and reality. Reading about Gaza in the news, you’d think the whole place was rubble, that it looks more or less like Homs or Aleppo. In fact Gaza is no different in appearance from anywhere else in the Arab World. During eight days in the Strip, I didn’t see a single war-damaged building until I specifically asked my fixer to show me one. In response, she drove me to Shujaya, a neighborhood of Gaza City that’s a known Hamas stronghold and is still visibly damaged from the 2014 war.
Was the destruction in Shujaya shocking? Yes. But it was very localized, and not at all indicative of the rest of Gaza. The rest of Gaza is not so different from many developing countries: people are poor but they manage to provide for themselves, and even to dress well and be happy most of the time. Actually, there are parts of the Strip that are quite nice. I went out to eat at restaurants where the tables are made from marble and the waiters wear vests and ties. I saw huge villas on the beach that wouldn’t be out of place in Malibu, and – right across the street from those villas – I visited a new, $4 million mosque.
Richard Westin, a BBC reporter and historical archivist from West Hampstead recently discovered a slew of old headlines from WWII and onwards. What was thought to have been lost when the company began switching many of its historical news pieces to a digital format, Westin felt lucky to have stumbled onto the prized pieces of history.HR's Daniel Pomerantz, BBC Headlines on i24
“I was doing some research on how Israel withholds air from Palestinian areas and was lucky enough to stumble onto a great historical find.” Many of the headlines included classics like, “German Officer Catches Cold at Auschwitz” and “Twenty Year Old German Boy Killed By Jews In Warsaw Uprising.”
Speaking from West Hampstead, Mr. Westin also said he was fascinated how the BBC has historically been credible with its news and always concentrated just on the facts. “Upon further investigation, it was concluded that not only one, but many German officers caught colds at Auschwitz, as did many Ukrainian Guard. The BBC definitely had it right. Also, we contacted the family of the twenty-year-old boy who was killed in Warsaw, Hanz Baur, and the now elderly family speaking from Germany said Hanz’s death has left a huge hole difficult to fill for them. From photos, we can clearly see how Hanz was a strapping good looking blonde bo,y and who knows what he would have become had he not been killed?”
Other headlines dating back some years were also discovered. From 1973 a headline of “Secular Jews In Israel forego Services On Yom Kippur To Fire Guns” as well as a 1948 Headline, “Jews Abandon Western Wall”. While most of the authors who penned the headlines are no longer living, Mr. Westin feels that through this rare archival document find, he can remain connected to those BBC reporters who came before him.