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.
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