The Lost Years Radical Islam, Intifada, and Wars in the Middle East 2001-2006
by Charles Enderlin
Other Press
If you asked 100 people in Times Square, or Harvard Square for that matter, who is Charles Enderlin, most if not all would be stumped. But if you asked about Enderlin’s most famous work, recognition would be immediate.
Enderlin is the French reporter who brought to the world the story of Mohammed al Dura, the Gaza child seemingly killed on camera at the start of the most recent Palestinian intifada, or uprising, in September of 2000. Enderlin, who has reported from the region for the public France 2 network since 1990, was not actually there when al Dura was shot, but his Palestinian cameraman was. Enderlin edited and narrated the video, which showed Mohammed and his father sheltering behind a concrete barrel, as Palestinian gunmen and Israeli soldiers shot at each other. According to Enderlin, Israeli gunfire killed the child and hit the father too:
“. . . here Jamal and his son Mohammed are the targets of gunshots that have come from the Israeli position . . . A new burst of gunfire, Mohammed is dead and his father seriously wounded.”
Though the video does not show the child getting hit, and certainly doesn’t prove who, if anyone, shot him, young Mohammed became an icon of Palestinian martyrdom and of alleged Israeli brutality. Even far away Tunisia issued a postage stamp depicting the child’s tragic death.
But soon questions arose about the impossible angle between the Israeli positions and that of the victims, as well as about inconsistencies in the stories of Enderlin and his cameraman. Doubts grew as some outside observers were allowed to see the unedited footage, which seemed to show fakery, including other Palestinians falling to the ground as if mortally wounded, only to get up and walk away moments later. Eventually, even as sober an observer as the Atlantic Monthly’s James Fallows concluded that:
“It now appears that the boy cannot have died in the way reported by most of the world’s media and fervently believed throughout the Islamic world. Whatever happened to him, he was not shot by the Israeli soldiers who were known to be involved in the day’s fighting . . .”
As the controversy grew, some critics charged knowing fraud, and France 2 and Enderlin fired back with a lawsuit, still unresolved, charging their French critics with libel.
The industrious Enderlin has not allowed the controversy to divert him from his work, or from also authoring two books. His latest, “The Lost Years,” contends that through their bullheaded militarism, unilateralism and duplicity, the leaders of Israel and the United States ruined chances for peace with the Palestinians and have “brought the Middle East to the brink of a major victory for radical Islam.”
Enderlin’s book is full of revelations – you thought, as President Clinton has stated, that Israel accepted and the Palestinians rejected the Clinton parameters, the president’s final peace plan offered at the very end of his term? Not so. You thought Arafat planned and controlled the intifada that had started a few months before? Wrong again, Arafat controlled nothing. Myth after myth is shattered. But in checking the copious footnotes meant to support these assertions, there is a troubling red flag – many of the citations are to interviews that were apparently, well, videotaped by a cameraman and then edited by Enderlin. Just like the very questionable al Dura tape. And some of the other footnotes seem equally questionable.
Is Enderlin right, for example, when he claims that in a December 2000 phone call to President Clinton, the Israeli leader Ehud Barak had grievously damaged the chances for peace by “secretly” rejecting the Clinton parameters?
There are certainly problems with this claim. One big one is that, as was widely reported at the time, the Israeli cabinet, including Barak, voted to accept the Clinton parameters if the Palestinians would also accept them.
To support his charge Enderlin cites “Elusive Peace,” a book that accompanied a BBC documentary of the same name, but the documentary does not say what Enderlin claims. The narrator, for example, acknowledges that “the Israeli cabinet soon accepted the Clinton parameters, as long as the Palestinians would as well.” Barak is shown recounting that in a phone call he told Clinton “I don’t even want to discuss these parameters and whether they suit me or not. As they stand, we can’t accept them.” But then Clinton is interviewed saying “Barak, because Arafat had not accepted them, was under enormous political pressure, so he needed some maneuvering room to look like he was backing off of them too, and I understood that.”
In other words, there is absolutely nothing in these BBC interviews with Barak and Clinton to support Enderlin’s fairy tale version of history.
What about Enderlin’s claim that the “Palestinian uprising had been spontaneous and . . . Arafat did not control it”? This is contradicted by numerous statements from Palestinian leaders themselves, such as Ali Abu Mustafa, who stated two months before the intifada began that “we will undoubtedly find ourselves in confrontation with Israel in order to create new facts on the ground. . . . I believe that the situation in the future will be more violent than the [first] intifada.” And Imad Faluji, Arafat’s Communications Minister, stated that “This intifada was planned in advance.” Similarly, in 2002, Brigadier Mazen Izz Al Din, Chief of Political Indoctrination of the Palestine National Security Forces, told a rally in Gaza “We have to be truthful and honest and spell it out. One day history will expose the fact that the whole intifada and its instructions came from Brother Commander Yasser Arafat.”
Desperate to exonerate Arafat, Enderlin ignores all this, and also ignores eyewitness reports from fellow journalists. For example, the Boston Globe’s Charles Sennott, hardly an apologist for Israel, reported that Palestinian leader Faisal Husseini directly controlled the Palestinian attacks in and around the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. According to Sennott, Husseini “acknowledged that yesterday’s protest was orchestrated.” Sennott also reported that the “rock throwers . . . were provided with wheelbarrows full of rocks that came from inside the Al Aqsa compound. And the rock throwers stopped in unison at almost precisely 5 p.m.”
Unfortunately, these examples of Enderlin trying to deceive his readers are typical – similar distortions and even lies are peppered throughout the book.
It would be comforting if Enderlin were an isolated case, but he is not. Other reporters who reflexively blame Israel and exonerate the Palestinians, no matter the facts, include the British journalist Robert Fisk, the BBC’s Orla Guerin, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, and all too many others. And the narrative they pursue – of evil Israelis and freedom-fighting Palestinians – seeps into coverage of events such as this week’s Annapolis meeting.
Journalism has sometimes been called the first draft of history, but in the hands of a Charles Enderlin, journalism becomes the first draft of malicious propaganda. “The Lost Years” is worthwhile only as a study of such pathology.
Alex Safian is the associate director of the media watch group CAMERA.