Perspective: Israel’s War on Independent Palestinian Media Goes Back Decades

Israel’s recent closure of the offices of the Palestinian media company Marcel in Beit Hanina follows a decades-old Israeli strategy that aims at negating every form of Palestinian national representation and symbols of a democratic society. For Israelis, as Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, recently claimed, “there is no such thing as Palestinians, because there is no such thing as the Palestinian people,”1 and therefore they have no national rights, whether that be the right to self-determination, political rights, the right to raise a flag, the right to paint in with the colors of the Palestinian flag or wear clothing in them, or the right to freedom of expression, with a national media corps and professional journalists.

Israel apparently has no problem with individual Palestinians working for international media, whether it is the BBC or even the Qatari Al Jazeera. But having a national radio and TV station is prohibited and is fought tooth and nail, especially in Jerusalem, where the presence of such a voice could suggest a competing claim to sovereignty over the city. On January 20, 2002, in a campaign aimed at ending the Second Intifada, Israel bombed the Voice of Palestine (VoP) radio broadcasting tower in Ramallah, which had been inaugurated in 1936 during the days of the British Mandate, as well as the offices and studios of Palestine TV.2

My firsthand experience with the Israeli attitudes to Palestinian media began decades ago in the 1980s, when I was working for the Jerusalem-based Palestinian newspaper al-Fajr. Having returned home to Jerusalem from the United States, I was shocked to learn about Israeli military censorship policies, which applied largely to the Palestinian press3 and to a lesser degree (mostly during intensive war situations) to the foreign and even the Israeli press. For the Palestinian press, we were ordered to show galleys of everything we were planning to publish and would get either approval, rejection, partial rejection, or delay. At times, Israeli censors would only change words, for example changing “martyrs” to “terrorists,” and numbers of injured Palestinians; at other times entire articles, even poems, and certainly some cartoons were totally banned.

We were not allowed to leave any empty space in the place of an article that had been slated to appear, say, on the front page, forcing us in the late midnight hours to scramble and find some other suitable copy to fill the space emptied by the Israelis.

In the 1990s and as a result of the First Intifada, I remember working with my colleague George Khleifi to set up the Jerusalem Film Institute, where we invited Palestinian filmmakers to be present as their works were screened for the first time to Palestinian audiences. I clearly remember speaking at a side event of our Jerusalem Nights festival in 1992 and telling fellow creative colleagues that we should be ready to have our own radio and TV stations, because one day we would be able to get a permit, only to discover that we have the license for a Palestinian national media outlet but no trained personnel with the requisite skills to staff it.

This idea was turned into a workshop a year later in June 1993, when Sari Nusseibeh asked Nabhann Khreisheh and me to head a media committee as part of the Palestinian technical committees. We were allowed some limited resources thanks to a grant from Sweden, and so we decided to stage a mock Palestinian TV evening news.

For two weeks, we trained journalists in TV skills, and on the last day, we presented exactly at 6 p.m. at the el-Hakawati National Theatre the Palestinian nightly news with jingles, news, reports, live studio interviews, and even sports and weather. The program was called Experimental Television News. At the time, interviewed about it by the New York Times, I said, “We’re sick and tired of being the object of the news. We want to design our own narrative, our own news in our own words.”4

Palestine TV and VoP radio were born as part of the Oslo Accords. The justification at the time was that Palestinians could not have elections for their legislative council without having a radio and TV station.