Thursday, February 7, 2008

'Confused & Confounded': David Hardaker Takes His Leave

"I think it's fair to say," intoned presenter, Elizabeth Jackson, on Radio National's Correspondents Report, "that some of the best material that has aired on this program has been written and delivered by the ABC's Middle East correspondent, David Hardaker. After nearly 3 years, David is leaving Jerusalem and returning to Sydney to await the arrival of his second child. So, what was he thinking as he packed his bags and headed home?"

On came the familiar voice of David Hardaker. What he had to say left me shaking my head:-

He began by musing on the theme of justice. A friend had "ventured the view that what happened to Hamas after it won the Palestinian elections seemed so unjust. Unjust. She was, of course, talking about the international effort to make it impossible for Hamas to govern, given that they're defined as a terrorist group, even though they won the election. But the word 'unjust', suddenly it seemed to be an alien concept. I don't think I've lost my moral compass completely - it's only that, in the ME, words like 'just', 'unjust', 'justice' seem to have no meaning. " By way of illustration, he talked about Egypt(!), "where I lived for 18 months," and asked, "What's just about studying as hard as you can and doing the best you can, but being denied a job because your family doesn't have any connections?"

Yes, quite unjust, but how, I thought, can being denied the job of your choice be up there with the nonexistent prospects of a typical resident of Gaza who has had both his country and his life stolen (or even taken), just as his father's life, and his grandfather's, right back to the Catastrophe of 1948, had been stolen, and who now finds himself under siege (and undernourished) in the world's largest open-air prison? Another irrelevant story followed, about a wealthy Cairene friend whose light-fingered chauffeur had died in police custody.

The moral? "By the time I got to Jerusalem 'justice' as a concept was on its last legs. I know they say you need moral outrage to be a good journalist. I'm not sure that's the case when it comes to covering the ME. In fact, I think you can end up being outraged all the time, and in the process miss what's going on."

Here was a man who couldn't see the wood for the trees, one who could rattle off one case of personal injustice after the other to the point where he's convinced that the Middle East is a place apart, a morality-free zone. One can see him sipping his lattes in Sydney in the coming months, and telling the old joke about the frog and the scorpion: how the scorpion persuades the frog to carry him across the Red Sea on his back after first promising him that he will not sting him to death, which would mean suicide for them both. Halfway across, the scorpion stings the frog. 'Why did you do that?' asks the frog. 'Now we're both going to die!' 'This is the Middle East', replies the scorpion, as they both descend to a watery grave. Hardaker may not "miss what's going on" on the surface, but he appears to miss an understanding of the underlying dynamics at work in Israel's unrelenting, decades long, no-holds-barred project of wresting Palestine from its indigenous Arab population.

There were cliches: "In the end there's power, and how you can use it to your advantage. There's a great phrase to capture the strange alliances that form in the Middle East, it's 'the best of enemies'. How else to explain a secular government like Syria hosting the leaders of the Islamic Hamas movement, especially when not too many years ago, then president, Hafez al-Assad ordered an operation which killed something like 20,000 members of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas' fellow travellers, just to teach them a lesson. Or how else to explain the sudden transformation of the Palestinian Fatah movement from a group of so-called 'terrorists' to best friends of the US Government? The rise of Hamas has made them the best of enemies."

On Planet Middle East, politics is all about Power, while here in the Real World it's all about Principle, right? And Religion is sooo important that an alliance between Syria and Hamas is inexplicable, even though Israel is breathing down both their necks, right? And that, "not too many years ago" - if Hardaker had done his homework, he'd have known that while Assad was tangling with the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas had yet to be born. As for the Fatah-US alliance, what's so "sudden" about that? Arafat and Fatah had been pinning his hopes on the Dishonest Broker for well over a decade. What did I say about the wood and the trees?

There was homey wisdom: "A Canadian colleague of mine believes 3 years is enough to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He knows a guy who snapped at the start of his fourth year, he says, because of the lies. An American newspaper couple...is heading out of town after 5 years, feeling tired from it all. Why? 'The lies, the lies, the lies', Craig says. Personally, I don't find all the lying, coming from both sides, to be the problem. For me the difficulty is grappling with the various truths, the multitude of various Palestinian and Israeli groups who are certain that their vision of this land - its past and its future - is the right vision. The big picture of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and indeed the whole Middle East, can be confusing and confounding."

It's all just too hard, isn't it? But is it? Only if your premise, like Hardaker's, is a false equivalence between the two sides. Only if you can't see who's doing the hammering and who's being hammered. Only if you can't see the wood for the trees.

There were platitudes: "There was the time Israeli border guards killed a 10 year-old Palestinian girl who happened to be near a demonstration...Her father just happened to be a former militant, a man who once carried a gun, but gave it up to work for peace with a joint Israeli-Palestinian group. It was, as the cliche has it, a cruel irony. But here's what's wonderful: despite what happened, that man swore that the death of his little girl would only make him work harder for peace."

The assumptions, the assumptions! As a "former militant," the Palestinian was once ipso facto a warmongering fanatic, and so, an enemy of peace. Only by giving up the gun could he become a peacemaker. Israelis, of course, are never warmongering militants, they're border guards or soldiers or armed settlers, peacekeepers in fact, and hence peacemakers. What's more, these trigger-happy (but peacekeeping) folk not only get to keep their guns, but can even shoot the children of reformed Palestinian militants without running the risk of being seen as warmongering militarist bullies by the 'confused and confounded' Hardakers of the international media.

That the Palestinians have little option but recourse to violence seems far from obvious to Hardaker. Given that they are up against a ruthless enemy who will only get off their case if they give up their rights and pack their bags, they will, as Canadian philosopher, Michael Neumann, correctly points out, "continue to choose, sometimes violence, sometimes nonviolence, most often a mixture of the two. They will presumably base their choices, as they have always done, on their assessment of the political realities. It is a sort of insolent naivete to suppose that, in their weakness, they should defy the lessons of history and cut off half their options. The notion that a people (in any sense of the word) can free itself literally by allowing their captors to walk all over them is in historical terms a fantasy. In short, the Palestinians had to use violence of some sort: it might not work, but there was at least some historical precedent for it working." [The Case Against Israel, p 135]

When one listens to hacks such as Hardaker, it is well to recall the words of veteran BBC correspondent, Tim Llewellyn: "Since the Palestinians began their armed uprising against Israel's military occupation three years and eight months ago, British television and radio's reporting of it has been, in the main, dishonest - in concept, approach and execution. In my judgement as a journalist and Middle East specialist, the broadcasters' language favours the occupying soldiers over the occupied Arabs, depicting the latter, essentially, as alien tribes threatening the survival of Israel, rather than vice versa. The struggle between Israel and the Palestinians is shown, most especially on mainstream bulletins, as a battle between two 'forces', possessed equally of right and wrong and responsibility. It is the tyranny of spurious equivalence." [The Observer, 20/6/04]

For what it's worth (not very much in my opinion, obviously), Hardaker's farewell to this can of worms may be found at: http://www.abc.net.au/correspondents/content/2008/s2152829.htm

No comments: