JOURNALISTS AT WAR
The deaths of American journalist Kurt Schork, Greek photographer Yannis Behrakis, South African cameraman Mark Chisholm and Spanish photographer Miguel Gil Moreno de Mora in an ambush in Sierra Leone on 24 May are a tragedy. In 1984 23 journalists were killed in wars. In 1999 87 were killed. Already this year 31 have been killed.
War reporting is more dangerous today because journalists are closer to the fighting than they have ever been, and because wars are more intimate and intense than they used to be. However, the other reason that journalists are in the crossfire is that increasingly they are expected to act not just as reporters, but agents of change.
The Guardian's award-winning Bosnia correspondent Maggie O'Kane remembered Kurt Schork as 'a "believer". A believer that journalists can make a difference'. John Sweeney wrote that 'the reporting of journalists such as Kurt Schork, Maggie O'Kane, Ed Vulliamy, Martin Bell and Anthony Lloyd of the siege in Sarajevo and the war in Bosnia helped to dramatise a war of aggression and the suffering of a civilian population, stiffening the mettle of an indifferent international community'.
For Sweeney and O'Kane, journalists are participants in the war, not just reporters. Their proscriptions make journalists into targets. As in the Bosnian and Kosovan wars, reporting of the Sierra Leone conflict has 'dramatised' events. The rebels are portrayed as evil slavers and even cannibals, the British troops as derring-do chaps.
Last week the British government de-classified sensitive military information such as code-names for weapons and operations - presumably confident that journalists were on-side, after the experiences of recent wars.
Robert Fisk reported another side to journalism at war. On 21 April 1999 American television team CNN were told that Nato were about to bomb the Serb television headquarters in Belgrade, and that they should vacate their offices there. On 23 April CNN arranged an interview with Serb information minister Alexander Vucic at 2.00 in the morning, to be broadcast from the building. Fortunately for Vucic, he was late, because the time scheduled was precisely the moment that Nato's bombardment of the television headquarters started.
The deaths of scores of Belgrade television staff were not mourned in London or Washington, but celebrated as a 'legitimate target'.
ISRAEL UNRAVELS
At 6.42 am on 24 May the last Israeli troops leaving the Lebanon padlocked the gate at the Good Fence border crossing. The disintegration of Israel's proxy South Lebanese Army (SLA) ahead of the scheduled withdrawal later this year forced the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) into a hurried retreat. The Israelis overestimated the strength of Antoine Lahad's SLA, and the moral collapse that ensued from Israel's announced intention to leave. The claims that the SLA was anything but an Israeli puppet were disproved when soldiers and their families fled to the border demanding sanctuary.
To the dismay of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, the retreat hands a victory to the Hizbullah forces who have inflicted a debilitating series of fatalities on the IDF. While IDF commanders were still insisting that they would not free prisoners held in their jail in the occupied zone, Lebanese civilians and Hizbullah fighters took matter into their own hands and tore down the prison gates.
Israeli threats of retaliation if Hizbullah strike across the border are hypocritical. Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, a mission to drive Palestinian refugees from Israel out of Lebanon is one of the bloodiest chapters in recent history. The IDF used the Christian militiamen of Bashir Gemayel's Phalangists to massacre thousands of refugees in the camps at Sabra and Chatila. The invasion destabilised Lebanon for a decade. The continuing occupation of South Lebanon was marked by indiscriminate slaughter, such as the shelling of the UN refugee compound at Qana. The celebration of Hizbullah's victory in Lebanon - the day was made a national holiday - should not surprise the Israelis.
The purpose of Israeli sabre-rattling was more deliberate, though. Recognising that the rout leaves no authority in Southern Lebanon but sworn enemies Hizbullah, Israel is keen to provoke a bigger player, like Syria into restraining the guerrillas. In the event, Israel exaggerates the threat from Hizbullah. Their resistance to the IDF was heroic, but the truth is that the victory was handed to them by the Israel's announcement of withdrawal. At the border the mood was one of relaxed celebration, rather than determination to press onwards.
The rapid disintegration of Israel's South Lebanese buffer zone brought mixed feelings in Israel - of relief on the part of soldiers and their families, and of humiliation. Some called in 'Israel's Vietnam'. The withdrawal comes at a time of anxiety about Israel's role and identity.
Avi Schlaim's new book The Iron Wall is characteristic of the growing school of revisionist history in Israel. Schlaim records the intolerance and belligerence of successive Israeli governments towards their Arab neighbours, reversing the judgement that they always sought peace. In many ways, Schlaim, though supported by new archive material is only telling a story everyone outside of Israel always knew. But Israel's ideology of courage in the face of adversity is difficult to challenge. Historian Ted Katz's article on a massacre in 1948 is being challenged in the courts.
Schlaim's thesis is that the Israeli hawks have forgotten the original goal of Zionism first to fight for a place in the Middle East, and then to negotiate with her Arab neighbours from a position of strength. It is a thesis that seeks to accommodate Israel's militarist past with peace negotiations today.
The question, though, is whether Israel has any identity without a belligerent war with the Arabs. The state has had no existence for its first fifty years other than as a frontline Western force in the suppression of Arab self-determination. Now that the United States is dealing direct with Arab states, they have little need of their proxy. As the SLA is to Israel, so Israel is to the United States. Will it unravel?
-- Jim heartfield