A-Durra footage is still debated

BENJAMIN JOFFE-WALT THE MEDIA LINE

A father and his 12-year-old son crouch into a nook aside a concrete pipe sitting against a street side wall in Gaza. Dazed, insecure and in a huddle, Jamal and Muhammad A-Durra hold one another, the little boy crying in fear as bullets and dust swirl across the scene as Israeli and Palestinian forces shoot at each other.

Pop! Pop! Pop! ... Both Jamal and Muhammad are shot and slump over one another, seemingly dead.

Talal Abu Rahma, a freelance Palestinian cameraman, claimed he caught 18 minutes of the incident on film, and told Charles Enderlin, France 2 Television’s bureau chief in Israel, that the footage was of Israeli troops firing on Palestinian bystanders in cold blood. Abu Rahma claimed the Israelis had even fired on the ambulance as it tried to rescue father and son.

An incendiary one-minute clip of the original footage, and this accompanying narrative, was immediately dispatched to media outlets all over the world, infuriating a Palestinian public already outraged by Israeli behavior, and later seen by many Palestinian and Israeli analysts as one of the main triggers that sparked the popular uprising now known as the Second Intifada.

The public lynching of two Israeli army reservists in Ramallah one month after the incident was attributed as a response to the Muhammad A-Durra incident, as was the Al-Qaida beheading of Jewish-American journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in 2002.

Almost a decade later, images of Muhammad A-Durra are still used regularly throughout Arab media and can be found on posters throughout the Muslim world. Morocco now has an A-Durra Park, Jordan commemorative A-Durra stamps and Egypt reportedly renamed the street on which the Israeli embassy in Cairo sits, Muhammad A-Durra Street.

The issue lives on in western media, too, with an MSNBC story in December, a BBC documentary airing even more recently, a 60-minute Italian documentary set to air shortly, and more in the works.

“This is the first picture that is used all over the world ... and they are using it, using it, using it,” said Philippe Karsenty.

And that’s exactly what still bugs him.

For almost a decade, Karsenty, the deputy mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine, the Parisian suburb where French President Nicolas Sarkozy was once the mayor, has led a small, international crusade of sorts to expose what he feels is the truth behind the Muhammad A-Durra incident.

“Charles Enderlin was not the one who filmed the document,” Karsenty explained. “It was filmed by his cameraman in Gaza while he was in Ramallah. He just listened and believed the comments of his cameraman, who’s a liar. We’ve caught him in lies for many years so we know that he’s not a credible journalist.

“When [Enderlin] got the raw material, CNN also got the raw material, but CNN refused to air it and they said it doesn’t look real,” he added. “But [Enderlin] edited it, put his voice-over and said that the Israeli forces targeted the boy and his father.”

Palestinian advocacy groups adamantly defend the authenticity of the original video, but Israeli commentators who have followed the case are divided into two camps, which Adi Schwartz of the left wing Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz has dubbed the “minimalist” and “maximalist” narratives.

The minimalist narrative contends that A-Durra was shot by Palestinian security forces. Advocates of the minimalist view contend that the trajectory of the bullets that hit the wall where the A-Durras were seeking shelter could not have come from the Israeli army’s position.

The maximalist narrative claims a larger Palestinian conspiracy or staging of the event, without the knowledge of France 2, to damage Israel’s international reputation. Karsenty, who subscribes to this view of this incident, points to the sudden blurring of the France 2 footage at the moment the two were shot, the decision by the television station to exclude footage of the boy moving his elbow after being shot and the alleged absence of an autopsy, ballistic tests or any recovered bullets.

“It never happened,” Karsenty said. “It’s a complete staged hoax that has been fabricated.” In fact, he continued, “Muhammad A-Durra was not killed.... At the end of the film, the boy raises his elbow, looks at the cameraman, puts down his elbow. Despite the 15 bullets that the boy and the father presumably received, there is not a single drop of blood at the end of the film.... Quite strange, no?

“For the last nine and a half years we have brought more than 100 pieces of evidence showing that this was staged,” Karsenty added.

In 2004, France 2 sued Karsenty for libel. During the case, then-president of France Jacques Chirac wrote a letter defending the integrity of Enderlin, a dual French-Israeli citizen who recently received the Legion of Honor, France’s highest decoration. France 2 won the case in 2006, but the ruling was overturned in 2008 by the Paris Court of Appeal. France 2 has now taken the case to the French Supreme Court.

“This is a smear campaign led by Mr. Karsenty who, already in 2002, said that he wants to ruin me,” Enderlin claimed. “There was never any official accusation against us and no Israeli government ever asked us to participate in any inquiry. If the Israeli authorities had any proof that there was any conspiracy I believe it would be out by now and we would be on trial.

“I don’t know who shot the kid,” Enderlin added. “I said that the bullets came from the Israeli position. We don’t believe that the Palestinians shot the kid because they did not shoot from that direction.”

Enderlin took particular issue with various public comments by Karsenty questioning Enderlin’s loyalty as an Israeli citizen.

“I am an Israeli citizen,” Enderlin said. “I have lived here for 42 years and fulfilled all my duties to the state, as well as all my children. I don’t need any lesson on Zionism from a French Jew who conducts an Internet smear campaign.”

But over the past few years, Karsenty has been less engaged in a direct war of words with Enderlin over the case, instead taking on a much more unexpected adversary: the state of Israel.

“The problem is the Israelis.... This is the worst picture which has ever been created since the creation of the state of Israel,” Karsenty declared. “This picture went all over the world and became a postage stamp in many Arab countries, was used by Bin Laden to incite before 9/11, and was the starting point for the Second Intifada. So many people have been killed because of this video. So many Arabs, so many Jews.

“Despite all that, the state of Israel has never asked the French public TV to retract and admit that it’s a fraud,” he continued. “I’ve met people at the Prime Minister’s Office, they’re not doing anything. I’ve met people at the Foreign Ministry, they’re not doing anything.

“They say that it is not in their interest.... They want to forget it, but they should forget about forgetting it. The legitimacy of the state of Israel is completely down now all over the world because you have these kinds of pictures, and Jews have been assaulted all over the world because the state of Israel has not been defending its good name.”

Daniel Seaman, director of Israel’s government press office, said there is some truth to Karsenty’s claims.

“In general he’s right but it’s not completely accurate,” Seaman said. “It is the official position of the state of Israel to question the validity of the Muhammad A-Durra story. In the past, the case was being heard in the courts of France, so it was thought it would be better that we not get involved. But now we have a basis for being more active about this and that’s where I personally think he’s right and we failed.

“This story is symbolic no matter what we do and not questioning it undermines Israel’s credibility,” he added. “There are no pictures of Israel shooting, there are no pictures of the boy dying and the journalist was not even there. So I think it’s our job as government officials to defend the name of the state of Israel, especially when it’s so clear that the accusations leveled against Israel have no basis in reality.”

Speaking off the record, officials in Israel’s Foreign Ministry said they felt Karsenty’s work was counterproductive.

“Karsenty has taken this on as a life mission and sees everything that happened there as kind of a conspiracy,” a senior Foreign Ministry official explained. “The general understanding within the ministry is that Muhammad A-Durra was not killed by Israeli bullets and we believe that taking responsibility for it so quickly without checking was not the right thing to do at the time,” the official continued. “But what Karsenty expects is the government of Israel to sue France 2. We don’t think it’s the government’s role to go after TV channels. That’s not the way a government should conduct itself.”

Dr. Eitan Alimi, a political science lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, argued that the Israeli government’s choice to not aggressively respond to the predominant A-Durra narrative reflects a lack of capacity.

“Palestinians, partly because they are the weaker side, have to really make an effort to try and balance the situation,” he said. “They invest a lot of money and resources in coming up with an oiled machinery of framing. So I think that the Palestinians are more into being bright than being right, while the Israelis, on the other hand, still work according to the assumption of who is right.

“But political framing is about constructing and conveying a message,” Alimi continued. “In terms of framing conflict, a central question is who gets framed as the victim. For that reason, this instance is framed as a classic story of a bad guy, the stronger force disproportionately using his weapons and ammunition, and the good victim, a young boy caught up in this exchange of fire.... But almost every story, especially when it comes to a conflict, has at least two story lines,” Alimi concluded. “Each side is trying to tell his or her story of what is really going on, and this explains why Muhammad A-Durra is so important and still an ongoing matter.”

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