Reports From a Tightrope

GAZA CITY —  The boys were not armed, but there were a lot of them. They surrounded Suleiman Shafhe and accused him of killing the militant Islamic commander they had come to mourn and avenge.

“I’m just a journalist,” Shafhe told the shoving youths.

Shafhe is a Palestinian, and Arabic his native tongue. But he is a reporter for Israeli television, and on the streets of Gaza, that’s a problem.

Shafhe and his two-man camera crew steeled themselves and quickly finished their report on Israel’s use of a one-ton bomb to assassinate a senior official of the radical Hamas organization. They hurried from the scene, and their report led that evening’s broadcast of Israel’s most popular nightly news program.

Days are like that for Shafhe, who has one of the most difficult jobs in journalism. Because he works for Israel’s Channel Two and his reports are in Hebrew for an Israeli audience, many Palestinians see him as a traitor. But because he is an Arab, many Israeli viewers see him as little more than a mouthpiece for the enemy.

“I get asked all the time, ‘How can you do that job?’ ” he said.

Shafhe, 37, is an Israeli citizen because his family decided to stay in Israel after it became a nation in 1948, when many other Arabs were forced to flee. That means he holds an Israeli passport and can vote in Israel’s elections.

He is Palestinian by virtue of his ethnic and historic identity.

His identities clash head-on, and his allegiances are forever tugged and questioned. In a world that is increasingly black and white, he represents gray, defying standard definitions and straddling two societies at war. Every day, he crosses the front lines, carrying news that some on either side don’t want broadcast.

It’s akin to walking a tightrope and traversing a minefield at the same time. Two years of devastating war have left little room for nuance, and even journalists are cast in “with-us-or-against-us” molds. Propaganda is often valued over truth, patriotism over complexity.

Some Israeli viewers complain about his reports, saying they are sick of seeing people on TV whom they consider to be terrorists. Others worry about the dangers for someone representing an Israeli entity who ventures into the lion’s den. Shafhe has been attacked, arrested or harassed by both the Israeli army and the Palestinian police. Palestinian authorities were especially incensed when he smuggled out of Gaza footage of a firing squad executing a Palestinian man accused of collaborating with Israel.

Shafhe carves his constituency out of those Palestinians who realize the benefits of getting their message across to an Israeli audience, and those Israelis who want to find out more about the neighbors they are fighting.

“Palestinians know a lot about Israelis, but Israelis don’t know enough about Palestinians,” he said. “They need and want to know more and more. Their sons are soldiers working in Gaza. They need to know the atmosphere there.”

Channel Two also reaches most homes in the Gaza Strip, and is the main source of information there about Israelis and Israeli politics. Its daily broadcasts of the soap opera “The Bold and the Beautiful” also bring in thousands of viewers.

Shafhe gives a platform to Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual founder of Hamas, and he shows impoverished Palestinian families whose homes have been flattened by the Israeli military. But he also shows masked Palestinian militiamen planning to attack Israelis, and young Palestinian children at summer camps learning to make bombs.

“Gaza is one big factory of news,” Shafhe said. “Every street, every corner, every family -- there are lots of stories.”

Shafhe figures that by showing Israelis the lives, tribulations and successes of Palestinians, he can help Israelis understand why they fight and resist.

“Israelis need to hear the story,” he said. “Israel has occupied the Palestinians for nearly 40 years, but they only know them as workers .... They don’t try to know their lives, their traditions, their plans for the future.

“For Palestinians, it’s a different question. Palestinians need the press, especially the Israeli press. Maybe they want to influence me, use me as a journalist.”

It is not clear what impact this window into Gaza has on ordinary Israelis.

Rogel Alpher, TV and media critic for the influential Haaretz newspaper, said Channel Two news programming is generally tepid and uncritical because, as a commercial network, it cannot afford to offend too many people.

Consequently, Alpher says, Shafhe tends to be exceedingly careful and lacking an edge. Shafhe, and his numerous admirers, counter that he’s careful, yes, but professional, and that he strives for balance.

Any impact Shafhe might have on Israeli Jews is undercut, Alpher says, by the fact that he is an Arab. News of Palestinian suffering or an Israeli atrocity is easily dismissed when it comes from an Arab, he argues.

But on the streets of his beat, Shafhe is a star.

Taxi drivers on the border smile broadly when they see him; as he moves about, it’s handshakes all around, whether he’s dealing with Israeli soldiers at one side of the Erez checkpoint into Gaza or Palestinian police at the other end of the barbed-wire, sandbagged crossing. With people like this, Shafhe is the consummate schmoozer, and he clearly enjoys the limelight.

And it takes courage to do a report -- in Hebrew -- in downtown Gaza City or in the seething Jabaliya refugee camp. Unlike some reporters, he shuns the protection -- or control -- of police and other authorities. Sometimes, though, he removes from his microphone the Channel Two logo, especially while covering the funerals of young Gazan men.

*

Abed Katib, a 30-year-old news photographer based in Gaza who worked with Shafhe during the first Palestinian uprising in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, was asked about his old friend’s appeal.

“The Palestinians like him because he’s a Palestinian,” he said.

Then why do Israelis like him? “Because he’s Israeli.”

It is not unusual to see Shafhe with a cellular phone to each ear, barking orders in Hebrew into one, in Arabic into the other.

He lives in Rahat, a town of 40,000 Israeli Arabs in the Negev desert just north of Beersheba. Its low-slung buildings are sprinkled between two dry riverbeds, with the minarets of five mosques reaching into a sky so bright it seems whitewashed. Rahat is home to the Bedouin Heritage Museum.

His father and his grandfather were farmers from a village destroyed by Israel near what is now the Israeli city of Petah Tikva, almost 60 miles to the north. Much of the family scattered after 1948, some landing in Jordan or in West Bank refugee camps. Shafhe’s parents settled in Rahat, where the family owned land. He was born two years before Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1967 Middle East War.

Today, his brother lives next door, his parents down the street. Shafhe lives with his wife Suad, also 37, and their four daughters and two sons, ages 7 to 17. They built their comfortable, two-story home 10 years ago on a plot with olive and pomegranate trees. An arbor laden with overripe grapes shades the side porch against a backdrop of bleating sheep.

“As an Arab, in Israel, there are a lot of jobs you just can’t get,” he said. “I hope, after the conflict is resolved, my kids will have a future where I can say to my sons that they have opportunities equal to Jewish kids. We deserve that.”

Suad, who covers her hair in traditional style, hails from the West Bank city of Nablus. Because of restrictions imposed by the Israeli army, she has not seen her parents or siblings for more than a year.

Her more immediate concern is her husband’s safety. Every day when he sets out on the 20-minute drive to Gaza, her chest tightens. She frequently begs him to find another line of work.

“I’m surprised when he comes back,” she said.

There were a few times he almost didn’t. Early in the 25-month-old conflict, the Israeli army arrested him every time he attempted to leave the Gaza Strip. Demonstrations and gun battles were raging almost daily. With Israeli citizenship, Shafhe was not supposed to go to Gaza.

More recently, he knew he was in trouble with the Palestinian Authority after he obtained, from a masked, secret source, a tape of the execution of an accused collaborator. Palestinian officials did not want to show the world an example of such brutal, summary justice. Its appearance on Israeli TV, and then on networks everywhere, infuriated the Palestinian Authority and, reportedly, Yasser Arafat himself.

Shafhe had a scoop, and death threats. He was warned to stay out of Gaza, and he did. For a week.

“I’m used to being in a place where death, blood and killing is something normal,” he said. “I know my family is suffering. But it’s my job. I like it. I need it.”

*

The late-morning sun had already turned the Erez crossing into a furnace. Shafhe talked his way past the Israeli soldiers who declared the Gaza checkpoint a “closed military zone,” which means journalists may not enter.

Once beyond the first barrier, he obliged the next set of guards with the required paperwork. Among journalists, Israelis, even the Arab ones, have to sign a waiver when they go into the Gaza Strip, absolving Israel of any responsibility for their safety.

That done, he strode across the gray-tarmac no man’s land to the Palestinian checkpoint at the other end, again breezing through and hooking up with his waiting camera crew. The day’s story would be the expulsion from the West Bank of two siblings of a man Israel had declared a terrorist.

With dozens of other journalists, Shafhe spent the next several hours awaiting the arrival of the expelled pair, Kifah Ajouri and his sister Intisar.

They never appeared. Israeli authorities sent a decoy vehicle to the Erez Crossing and used a military convoy to slip the two into Gazan territory by another route.

When journalists at Erez caught wind of the ruse, they made a high-speed dash through the chaotic streets of Gaza, dodging donkey carts, children and rickety trucks, to reach the Ajouris.

Shafhe was in the lead vehicle. “Slow, slow!” “Now, now!” he shouted instructions at the adrenaline-powered driver.

Shafhe was the first local journalist to find and catch up with the prey. In seconds, he and his crew were on a sidewalk quizzing the Ajouris in what would be the most complete interview they gave that day.

For all the anarchy, it was what passes here for success. Of course, it doesn’t always go that way.

Traveling with a couple of Jewish Israeli reporters last year to cover an Arab summit in Jordan, Shafhe was taken aside at Israel’s border and subjected to long interrogation by Israeli soldiers, because he is an Arab.

The next day, in the Jordanian capital of Amman, when Jordan’s authorities decided they didn’t want Israeli press around, Shafhe was expelled along with the Jewish reporters for being Israeli.

“I live the two sides,” Shafhe said. “That’s my part of this tragedy.”