by Matthew Kalman
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

Mohammed al-Dura’s gut-wrenching death is run­ning again on tele­vi­sion screens across the world, seven years after the 12-year-old boy died in his father’s arms in a hail of bullets.

An appeals court in Paris has demanded to see the exclu­sive footage shot by state-owned France 2 tele­vi­sion to resolve a libel case brought by the chan­nel and its vet­eran Jerusalem bureau chief Charles Ender­lin against a com­men­ta­tor who accused them of fab­ri­cat­ing the Sept. 30, 2000, inci­dent on the sec­ond day of the intifada uprising.

The images of Mohammed’s death after he was caught in cross fire between Pales­tin­ian gun­men and Israeli sol­diers at the Net­zarim junc­tion out­side Gaza City became the most potent icon of the Pales­tin­ian upris­ing and per­haps the most fre­quently broad­cast image of the Palestinian-Israeli strug­gle in the Arab world.

The boy has been men­tioned by Osama bin Laden, and his pho­to­graph could be seen on a wall where the Amer­i­can jour­nal­ist Daniel Pearl was mur­dered in Pak­istan in 2002. Streets, parks, youth camps and pub­lic build­ings have been named in Mohammed’s honor by the Pales­tin­ian Author­ity, and some sui­cide bombers said they mar­tyred them­selves in trib­ute to his memory.

The 2001 Mitchell Report, a U.S. study on the state of the Israel-Palestinian con­flict headed by for­mer Sen. George Mitchell, referred to the impact of Mohammed’s killing on Pales­tin­ian pub­lic opin­ion. “From the per­spec­tive of the PLO (Pales­tine Lib­er­a­tion Orga­ni­za­tion), Israel responded to the dis­tur­bances with exces­sive and ille­gal use of deadly force against demon­stra­tors; behav­ior which, in the PLO’s view, reflected Israel’s con­tempt for the lives and safety of Pales­tini­ans. For Pales­tini­ans, the widely seen images” of Mohammed “rein­forced that perception.”

Israeli offi­cials at first apol­o­gized for the boy’s death, but have spent the sub­se­quent years try­ing to prove that he died from Pales­tin­ian bullets.

Years later, even though the Pales­tin­ian intifada was even­tu­ally crushed, inci­dents such as Mohammed’s death have con­tributed to a sense among Israelis that they were the losers in the conflict.

“This broad­cast brought about a huge rage and storm of emo­tions in the Mus­lim Arab world. It was the real emo­tional pre­text and one of the major rea­sons for the avalanche of Pales­tin­ian vio­lence against the Jew­ish nation and the state of Israel,” Nit­sana Darshan-Leitner, attor­ney for the Israel Law Cen­ter Shu­rat Hadin, wrote to the direc­tor of the Israel Gov­ern­ment Press Office ear­lier this year, demand­ing he rescind France 2’s press credentials.

Her inter­ven­tion brought to a head lin­ger­ing doubts about the authen­tic­ity of the 59-second clip broad­cast. In response, Daniel Sea­man, direc­tor of the Israel Gov­ern­ment Press Office, openly accused Ender­lin and his cam­era­man, Talal Abu Rahma, of a “mod­ern blood libel” against Israel.

“With­out any deep and seri­ous inves­ti­ga­tion, the global media con­victed the state of Israel in the mur­der of a lit­tle boy, and his image remained tat­tooed and engraved in the col­lec­tive Arab mem­ory as a sym­bol for the cru­elty of the Zion­ist nation,” Sea­man responded to Darshan-Leitner on Sept. 23.

He accused Abu Rahma of the “sys­tem­atic stag­ing of action scenes” but said he was not allowed to with­draw press cre­den­tials from the bureau.

In an inter­view, Ender­lin said he stood by the orig­i­nal broadcast.

“The video is authen­tic, and we will con­tinue fil­ing libel suits against peo­ple who say con­trary,” Ender­lin said. “The story was not staged.”

Ender­lin said he was 70 miles away that day in the West Bank city of Ramal­lah, but kept in close touch with Abu Rahma when his cam­era­man reported he was pinned down in the mid­dle of a firefight.

“The tape begins with a nor­mal intifada scene — Pales­tin­ian youths throw­ing stones and Molo­tov cock­tails at the Israeli posi­tion,” said Ender­lin. “Then the shoot­ing begins — from the Pales­tin­ian posi­tion — and then there is mayhem.”

Ender­lin said France 2 had refused to release the full footage on prin­ci­ple “just as any news­pa­per will refuse to show the pri­vate notes of jour­nal­ists.” But he said he wel­comed a deci­sion by the French appeal court to screen the 27 min­utes of raw footage next month in court.

“I am very happy about that,” he said. “I hope to have the pos­si­bil­ity to show our work.”

Natan Sha­ran­sky, a for­mer Israeli Cab­i­net min­is­ter who is now chair­man of Adel­son Insti­tute for Strate­gic Stud­ies at the Shalem Cen­ter in Jerusalem, called on France 2 to release its raw footage.

“The al-Dura inci­dent wasn’t the only media report to inflame pas­sions against Israel in recent years, but it was the one with the high­est pro­file,” Sha­ran­sky wrote this week in the Wall Street Jour­nal, link­ing it to “the insid­i­ous trend in which West­ern media out­lets allow them­selves to be manip­u­lated by dis­hon­est and polit­i­cally moti­vated sources.

“Trag­i­cally, there is no way to repair the dam­age inflicted on Israel’s inter­na­tional image by the France 2 report, much less restore the Israeli and Jew­ish vic­tims whose lives were exacted as vengeance. It is pos­si­ble, how­ever, to deter slan­der­ous news report­ing — and the vio­lence that often accom­pa­nies it — by set­ting a prece­dent for media account­abil­ity,” he wrote.

But Nach­man Shai, a for­mer Israeli army spokesman who is writ­ing a report on the inci­dent, said Israel had noth­ing to gain from its re-appearance on the front pages.

“We the state of Israel lose on this issue,” Shai said. “It was a mis­take to take respon­si­bil­ity ... but we will never be able to prove it. Now that the story is out there again, we are blamed again, the story is turned against us again and there is no benefit.”

Shai said he had been invited to view the full tape by Ender­lin, but it did not show any­thing new. He said there was no point demand­ing its release.

“From what I saw, we don’t learn any­thing more. There is no new evi­dence there,” he said. “Now the pic­tures will be broad­cast again and again. Mil­lions of peo­ple who never saw these images because they were broad­cast six or seven years ago have now seen them in the past two days and it’s back on the agenda.”

In Gaza, Jamal al-Dura stood by his son’s grave and said there was no ques­tion an Israeli sol­dier had fired the fatal bul­lets. He offered to exhume his son’s body for bal­lis­tic tests, which he refused to do seven years ago.

“The Israelis killed my son. Now they are try­ing to deny respon­si­bil­ity. They want to erase the case of my son,” he said.