Cameraman
Under the Streetlamp
By Amira
Hass
Haaretzdaily
23 April, 2003
One of the answers
often used by the army when its soldiers kill someone who clearly had
nothing to do with the fighting or even stone-throwing (which nobody
questions is a crime punishable by death), is that the situation is
dangerous, there's combat going on, and the risks about being in the
area are known. That's what was said Sunday when Palestinian cameraman
Nazeh Darwazeh, 45, a father of five - the youngest, four months old
- was killed.
Anyone who lives,
works or learns in the territories knows very well it is dangerous.
Every foreign correspondent or solidarity activist who has chosen to
be there is well aware of the dangers; so are quite a few Israelis who,
despite the ban, choose to meet with Palestinians in their besieged
communities - for example, the Ta'ayush activists who were attacked.
Most Palestinians
choose to stay away from dangerous places, because in any case, they
live in constant danger. But it was Darwazeh's choice, like other cameramen
and reporters, Palestinian and foreign, to run around documenting slices
of life in hours of danger. Thus, Darwazeh, as a Palestinian and a journalist,
lived with a double jeopardy.
For civilians,
and not only reporters, there is always the danger of becoming a dead
or wounded casualty from a piece of shrapnel fired from a rocket aimed
at a Fatah or Hamas activist or a Palestinian Authority building or
from a stray bullet fired by a careless Palestinian gunman or a bullet
fired by frightened, angry or careless soldiers at a checkpoint. That's
why the shepherds are afraid to move between the hills and stay in the
fields closest to their homes. It is dangerous to be alone in a field,
because a soldier can always claim he suspected you were a terrorist.
There's constant danger lurking for Palestinian civilians and their
visitors in Gaza's refugee camps, since every IDF raid there is accompanied
by deadly fire.
Nonetheless,
the civilians who do take the risk figure that being close to the focal
point of the danger provides a measure of protection: it enables certain
identification of the reporter, medic, doctor, International Solidarity
activist, and schoolgirl in uniform. The IDF is supposed to be able
to distinguish them from armed men or stone-throwers from a distance.
The army's spokesmen, after all, take pride in their sophisticated equipment,
which can spot armed men at night from a distance. If the equipment
is so advanced, why can't it identify a woman at a window during a curfew
or reporters and cameramen or medical evacuation crews? The fact that
these people have been wounded and killed doesn't prove that the army
doesn't have the vision enhancement equipment, but that it doesn't always
bother to use it.
That's why the
professionals who move in the dangerous areas always wear flak jackets
plastered with day-glo writing with various identifications. It presumably
helps the soldier using the sophisticated equipment to spot them. Darwazeh
was very close to the soldiers who were stuck Saturday in a tank at
the western entrance to the old city of Nablus' Yasmina neighborhood,
near the girls' schools Abed Nasser and Fatima just as the girls were
on their way to class. True, Darwazeh went there. People say that in
the last two-and-a-half years, he showed courage as someone who would
be among the first to reach dangerous places.
In other words,
he had "battle" experience. As a freelancer, he naturally
learned the rules of safety and how to get around. Like his colleagues,
he learned to stay away from armed Palestinians, even from children
throwing rocks. Grab a distant corner, be enough in the open not to
be mistaken by the soldiers for an armed man, and stay put in one place,
that's better for documentation (and safer) than running like the gunmen
who are constantly on the move from cover to cover in the alleyways
and on the roofs.
The soldiers
stuck in a tank that didn't want to move had every reason in the world
to panic in the middle of a neighborhood that is known as a terrorists'
den. Less than a week earlier, a soldier was killed there. Perhaps he
was a friend of theirs. Was it panic motivating the shooting soldier,
who was documented by another camera firing one shot, which apparently
was the one that hit Darwazeh? Was it panic that made him shoot straight
at a man who was standing 15-50 meters away from him? Maybe it was the
flash of sunlight that made him think the camera was a weapon? In other
words, a regrettable human error, as the IDF inquiry will say.
In any case,
it wasn't panicky fire in every direction. That happened elsewhere that
day, wounding 18 people, mostly schoolgirls, some distance from the
cameramen.
The shot that
killed Darwazeh was intentional, precise, on target. One shot that was
aimed at the upper torso. Israeli soldiers have been heard saying what
the Palestinians have felt: a shot to the upper torso is meant to kill.
The difference between shooting an armed man and shooting a cameraman
is that the former is hiding while the latter is the coin you find under
the streetlamp.
Did the soldier
decide on his own - or with his buddies and commander - that a direct
hit of one man will scatter the crowd, make them concentrate on the
wounded person, and enable a quicker escape for the stuck tank? The
Palestinians were quick to deduce that the shooting of the cameraman
was deliberate; so nobody would document the tank's failure, the children
running under whistling bullets, and the panic of the soldiers from
the strongest army in the Middle East (except the Americans) in the
face of some poorly trained armed men and schoolgirls.