Respected journalist delivers angry indictment of Palestinian policy in documentary
ASSOCIATED PRESS - May 31, 2005. 05:05 PM EST
JERUSALEM — A respected Israeli TV journalist who has delivered the main evening news since 1968, has stepped out from behind the shield of measured neutrality with an angry indictment of Israel's settlement policy and occupation of the Palestinians.
Haim Yavin's five-part documentary — the first part was being broadcast today — prompted calls from settlers for his dismissal, but could also mark a watershed in how the country views its four-decade rule over Palestinians.
Yavin, 72, has anchored the evening news on Israel's public TV channel since 1968, building an image as a dispassionate reporter, much as Walter Cronkite did in the United States. A founder of Israel's public TV station, Yavin is known as Mr. TV and commands considerable respect.
Rarely have settlers been portrayed as harshly by Israel's mainstream media as in Yavin's documentary, filmed with his hand-held video camera and interspersed with his commentary.
"Since 1967, we have been brutal conquerors, occupiers, suppressing another people," Yavin comments in the first segment after listening to settlers insist God gave them these lands. "We simply don't view the Palestinians as human beings."
Yavin's stand comes at a time of controversy over the settlements Israel built in the West Bank and Gaza Strip after capturing the lands in the 1967 Mideast war.
Jewish settlers, once coddled and feared by Israeli politicians, feel increasingly beleaguered. Their erstwhile patron, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, is determined to withdraw from all 21 Gaza settlements and four in the West Bank this summer, forcing about 9,000 settlers out of their homes.
Tom Segev, an Israeli author and social commentator, said Yavin's middle-of-the-road reputation could sway some Israelis. "He is Mr. Israel, the voice of Israel, the soul of Israel, and if he comes out with this, it means that apparently a lot of people feel the same," Segev said. "But I'm not sure if people will react."
When Cronkite returned from a reporting trip to Vietnam and told his viewers in an editorial comment that the United States could not win the war, then-president Lyndon Johnson observed that if he had lost Cronkite, he had lost middle America.
Yavin said he was able to keep his views out of the many documentaries he made in the past. But when the latest round of fighting with the Palestinians broke out and Palestinian suffering increased, he decided to act.
He said in a telephone interview today that he didn't believe that he had become more dovish but Israelis had become more hawkish.
"We have to go through a mental revolution," Yavin said. "The Palestinians are a people and we have to share this land ... We have to wake up from our dream."
In his documentary, Yavin repeatedly shows Palestinians suffering at the hands of arrogant settlers and soldiers. In one scene, he filmed a crowded Israeli army roadblock, showing sick women and crying children waiting in the hot sun for hours.
Israel set up the roadblocks at the outbreak of the current round of fighting in 2000, saying they were needed to prevent Palestinian suicide bombers and gunmen from reaching Israel.
At one point, Yavin shifted the camera toward the Israeli soldiers to ask why they weren't letting people through. "I look for danger in these people and I can't find it," Yavin said in the film.
In another scene, settlers chased Palestinian olive pickers out of an orchard, accusing them of planning terror attacks. The scene ended with an elderly Palestinian woman asking: "Is it forbidden for us to pick olives? Isn't it a sin not to let us pick?"
Settlers were outraged over the documentary, which was broadcast by the private Channel Two, rather than by Yavin's station, Israel TV. Israel TV declined to air the documentary, Yavin said, but he claimed the decision was not politically motivated. Fewer than a dozen settlers held a demonstration outside the offices of Israel's Broadcasting Authority, which oversees Israel TV.
A leader of the Settlers' Council, Bentsi Lieberman, demanded Yavin's dismissal in a letter to the authority. "It is unacceptable that Haim Yavin will continue to anchor the news of the national station that professes to be objective," Lieberman wrote.
Authority chairman Uri Porat said Yavin would not be fired since he had not violated his contract.
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