Palestinian Affairs

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Attack on Reporter Exposes Role of Palestinian Journalists in Violence

by TheTower.org Staff |

In the wake of last week’s attack on Israeli journalist Avi Issacharoff and his cameraman, journalist Khaled Abu Toameh examined on Monday the implications of the attack and how it reflected on Palestinian society.

Issacharoff, who wrote a series of articles for The Tower in 2013, recounted the circumstances of the attack for The Times of Israel:

I was there to report on the Nakba Day protests with a cameraman colleague from Walla News. He was some distance from me when he was approached by several Palestinian journalists who told him to “Get out.”
I walked toward them, and told them that if they had a problem, they should be talking to me. One of the Palestinian journalists, a young woman, then called over to a group of masked men, who swiftly surrounded me and began attacking me.

Abu Toameh seized on the identity of the provocateur, a female Palestinian journalist, for his analysis, The New Palestinian “Journalists.”

The attack on Issacharoff and his friend did not come as a surprise to those who have been following the campaign waged by some Palestinian journalists against their Israeli colleagues during the past year. …

The Palestinian Authority leadership chose to ignore the threats against the Israeli journalists; the silence only prompted more hostility. The Palestinian journalists stepped up their campaign.

While some Palestinian journalists contend that their objection to Israeli journalists comes “in response to Israeli security restrictions,” others, according to Abu Toameh, “admitted that they simply do not want to see any Israeli inside their areas because accepting presence of even one would be a form of ‘normalization’ with the ‘Zionist enemy.'”

Abu Toameh notes that Palestinian journalists since the beginning of the peace process “regard themselves as foot soldiers in a revolution,” and have given ” journalism, and especially Palestinian journalism, a bad name.”

The line between journalism and activism has been crossed before. Last year, the Newseum wanted to honor members of Hamas’s Aqsa TV, a designated terror organization, until outrage over the honor forced the journalism museum to reconsider.

[Photo: Palwatch / YouTube ]

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