January/February 2001, Pages 21, 52

Special Report

Israel’s Spin-Doctors Wage War of Images and Words Against Palestinian Rock Children

By Delinda Curtiss Hanley

A small, solitary figure in slacks and a white shirt stood up to a column of 17 tanks heading to Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on June 5, 1989. The previous day’s massacre had killed 155 Chinese students camped in the square and wounded some 65 workers, students and children.

As the first enormous tank swerved right to miss the young man, later identified as 19-year-old student Wang Weilin, the boy moved right to block the lead tank. When the powerful machine next turned left, Wang moved left, too. Finally he climbed up onto the tank and reportedly said to the driver, “Why are you here? My city is in chaos because of you.”

Newspapers around the world declared that one lone “Everyman” had defiantly stood up to the People’s Republic of China and its massive arsenal of weapons to become a symbol of Chinese freedom. When newsmen asked Chinese leader Jiang Zemin a year later what had happened to the young man, Jiang replied, with some uncertainty, that Wang had not been killed.

On Oct. 29, 2000, another courageous youth faced down a tank—this time on the outskirts of Gaza City. As young Fares Udah defiantly hurled his rock at the menacing Israeli tank, Associated Press photographer Laurent Rebours took a photo that may come to symbolize the Palestinian “Everyman.”

Tragically, we know with dreadful certainty what happened to Fares Udah, the fearless 13-year-old boy on the cover of the Washington Report’s December 2000 issue. On Nov. 8, nine days after his picture was taken and while the Washington Report with his cover photo was still being printed, Fares was shot in the neck and killed by Israel Defense Force troops.

Fares’ weeping mother, Enaam Udah, 41, told Associated Press reporters on Nov. 24 that she repeatedly told her son to stay away from the Kami crossing point between Gaza and Israel, the site of daily confrontations. After Israeli soldiers killed his 17-year-old cousin, Shadi Udah, at the crossing, Fares vowed to keep throwing stones and continued to disobey his mother’s entreaties to stay out of harm’s way. Now, in death as in life, Fares joins 12-year-old Mohammed al-Durra, who was killed in his father’s arms on Sept. 30, as another heartbreaking symbol of the al-Aqsa intifada.

A Dec. 5 article in Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper about the Israel Defense Force’s killing of Fares cited Fahed Qawasmah, who served as mayor of Hebron 20 years ago before being deported by Israel. Qawasmah once said, “The stones hurled by our boys are stronger than all the tanks of the Arab armies.”

The Ha’aretz story went on to say: “A random selection of pictures, illustrations, posters and cartoons currently appearing in the Palestinian territories (and throughout the rest of the Arab world as well) indicates that stone-throwing has become a permanent, everyday metaphor. Old women are photographed carrying stones in their dresses to bring them to the boys…The Palestinian spokesmen make use of the stones to show the popular, spontaneous nature of the current events. The stones allow them to depict the clashes as an uprising of a destitute people against an army using all forms of modern weaponry.”

As the Ha’aretz article indicates, Israel is only too aware of the power of the image of a Palestinian child throwing stones at massive Israeli tanks and other modern weaponry. The Detroit Jewish News reported that, in response to the initial negative press generated during the first weeks of the al-Aqsa intifada, “The Israeli government is sending out diplomats and other officials throughout Europe and the United States to offer a different perspective.”

As a result of the spinmasters’ labors, and in defiance of all logic, the new American media spin declares Jewish settlers “besieged” by Palestinians and Israeli soldiers forced to defend themselves as cowardly Palestinians armed with rifles hide among rock-throwing children. Any photos accompanying these stories focus on weeping Jewish relatives or masked, shouting Palestinian demonstrators. Rarely are the Palestinian victims of Israeli violence portrayed in individual, human terms.

The conflict portrayed in photos, news stories and cable TV broadcasts in the Middle East seems to be about a conflict taking place on another planet, so far removed are they from the coverage available to Americans.

Arab reporters interview Palestinian mothers like Enaam Udah, who must worry each day that her children will be killed before nightfall. Israeli sharpshooters fire at Palestinian children as the students walk home from school. Because of Israeli border closures, some children can’t even get to school. Those closures also mean that Palestinian youngsters are hungry, because many of their fathers can’t get to work. Gun-toting right-wingers from illegal Jewish settlements shoot at and sometimes kill Palestinian farmers working in their fields. When Palestinian parents put their children to bed they may wake up to find an American-made or -financed rocket in their home. Many have lost hope that the day when their families will live in peace and prosperity in a country called Palestine ever will arrive.

Until Lee Hockstader’s report appeared in the Dec. 11 Washington Post, most U.S. newspapers had failed to pick up the Associated Press story about the IDF killing of Fares Udah. Hockstader’s article finally informed Americans about what happened to the Palestine “Tiananmen Square Boy.” However, describing Fares as a daredevil who threw stones for the fun of it, rather than to make a political statement, Hockstader left his readers with the impression that the boy deserved his fate.

When stories about the “stone children,” as they were known during the first intifada, do appear in the American media, they can be a powerful counter to Israel’s version of events. Perhaps for this reason, they often include the Israeli-induced spin that Palestinian parents push their children to become martyrs, or that the children take unnecessary risks just for excitement.

Recently heads of Washington-based U.S. think tanks that focus on the Middle East held an informal and off-the-record meeting with a visiting Palestinian leader. The Washington leaders suggested that a completely pacifist, nonviolent Palestinian movement would constitute a serious public relations blow to Israel. If photos and articles of peaceful, nonviolent demonstrations reached American and European TV screens and newspaper pages, no Israeli spin-doctor could alter the public’s perception and recognition of the nature of the conflict. Fair-minded Americans historically support countries trying to win freedom from oppression. Our history books highlight pacifist techniques and their successful outcomes—starting with our own Boston Tea Party.

After he was thrown off a train for traveling in a first-class compartment reserved for whites, Mahatama Gandhi began a civil rights movement in South Africa. World outrage over apartheid was a direct descendant of this movement. In 1915 Gandhi took his philosophy of nonviolent struggle for political and human rights through to India, where he helped win that country’s independence from Britain. Gandhi demanded restraint from his followers even in the face of British attacks. He advised Indians to boycott British goods and even held hunger strikes.

One famous Gandhi campaign in 1930 was a 24-day march, which gathered thousands of supporters. According to British law Indians could not produce salt, but instead had to buy it from licensed salt factories, all of which were British-owned. Gandhi’s followers marched to the sea and made their own salt, and the British were left looking unfair and foolish.

Many Americans can recall civil rights moments in our own history when African-Americans were fighting for many of the same rights Palestinians struggle for today. Three memorable marches took place in Selma, Alabama as African-Americans sought voting rights. The first march started on March 7, 1965, a day that came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.” Marchers attempting to cross the Edmund Pettus bridge were met by police and state troopers, some on horseback, with orders from Gov. George Wallace to stop the march. Camera footage and photographs of police using clubs, tear gas and dogs against nonviolent demonstrators rocked the nation, and America began to change.

To protest the police brutality, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led a second march to the Pettus bridge, where he held a prayer, then turned around. A third march took place from March 21 to 25. This time, President Lyndon Johnson federalized the Alabama National Guard to provide protection to the marchers. They crossed the bridge and continued on to Montgomery. Five days later 25,000 marchers arrived at the Alabama capital. On Aug. 6, 1965 President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law.

Because Israeli spin-doctors have been successful in portraying the victims as the aggressors, Israel’s brutal killing of almost 300 Palestinians and injuring of more than 10,000 has provoked little outrage in the U.S. The pens in the hands of American media seem able to portray Palestinian dead and wounded only as numbers, not as individual human beings. Most journalists and editors are so accustomed to the image of Palestinians as terrorists that they don’t even question that stereotype.

If Palestinians adopted Gandhi’s successful method of nonviolent non-cooperation, their true situation would be impossible to ignore. Picture thousands of unarmed, silent, hungry and cold men and women, young and old, seated across an Israeli-only bypass road. Picture thousands of worshippers marching quietly across Israeli checkpoints to pray at Al-Aqsa mosque. Picture hundreds of Palestinian mothers putting their children down to sleep on blankets surrounding Israeli military outposts in the occupied territories.

If Americans, Europeans and even Israelis were exposed to the stories and pictures contained in the Arab press, and to new images of nonviolent, peaceful Palestinians, lacking even rocks to defend themselves, public opinion might finally change. Israel would find it increasingly difficult not to accept an independent Palestinian state based on U.N. resolutions and international law.

“When I see his picture my heart is torn to pieces,” Fares’ mother told The Washington Post. “I guess I feel proud for him being called a hero, standing in front of a tank and all that. But when I see his classmates come around after school, all I can do is cry. And this is what I was just telling my neighbors—that I’m so afraid that Fares’ death will be for nothing. That everything will just go back to normal. And the only thing that happened is that I’ll have lost my son.”

The world looked on in admiration and awe at the young man who faced the military might of the People’s Republic of China in Tiananmen Square. Fares Udah’s heroic gesture and tragic killing deserves a similar response: that this boy, who put his life on the line against the Israeli military machine, was fighting for freedom and justice, and did not deserve to die.

Delind Curtiss Hanley is the news editor of the Washington Report.