Palestinians Embarrassed By Closing Of TV Office

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RAMALLAH, West Bank, March 22 — A senior Palestinian official clicked his finger at his nostrils. “We are not just shooting ourselves in the foot,” he said. “We are shooting ourselves in the nose.”

The official was referring to the Palestinian Authority's decision to shut down the West Bank and Gaza bureaus of al Jazeera satellite television station for what were seen by some as insults to Yasir Arafat's dignity.

Al Jazeera is a highly popular pan-Arab station based in Qatar with an avid following in the West Bank and Gaza, where many Palestinians disdain their own news media as unobjective or propagandistic.

“Our office is now under Palestinian closure,” said [illegible] [illegible], al Jazeera's correspondent in the Palestinian territories, referring tongue-in-cheek to the Israeli sealing of Palestinian areas. The stated reason for the closing? Al Jazeera, in its promotional advertisements for a special series on Lebanon, has been playing and replaying some old film from Beirut.

In the film clip, an opponent of Yasir Arafat is holding a poster of Mr. Arafat that is draped by a shoe. The shoe is dangling in the face of the Palestinian leader. “In our culture, showing someone your shoe is an insult,” a Palestinian journalist said. “You never want to sit with your shoe in someone's face.”

The Palestinian officials felt that al Jazeera would not have shown any other Arab leader with a shoe in his face. The Palestinian reaction was not exactly a governmental decision, the official in Ramallah said. Rather, the official said, a senior aide to the Palestinian leader took it upon himself to rush zealously to the defense of Mr. Arafat by shutting down the station.

The official pressed his temples and cringed. “Please don't ask me about this,” he said. Al Jazeera's Lebanon series, which includes an in-depth look at the events surrounding the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, was impeccably timed for broadcast when Prime Minister Ariel Sharon took office. Mr.

Sharon was the mastermind of the Israeli invasion, and an Israeli inquiry commission found him indirectly responsible for the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinian refugees by Lebanese Christian allies of Israel. But Mr. Sharon's history is entwined with Mr. Arafat's, and the series has also been shining a spotlight on Mr. Arafat's past. And it is Mr.

Arafat, or at least his senior aide, who has ended up peeved. Some believe that the shoe is only part of what offended him, and that he did not like the way he was portrayed in the documentary series, either. Al Jazeera has been beaming images of the Palestinian uprising throughout the Arab world. Its coverage has served to unify the Arabs behind the Palestinian struggle.

Still, the station has needled Palestinian officials as it has Arab officials everywhere because it is not beholden to any government and does not allow itself to be censored. At a recent training course for Palestinian journalists, Marwan Kanafani, a spokesman for Mr. Arafat, lamented the lack of professionalism in the Palestinian news media.

He blamed Palestinian officials for manipulating the news media, and the Palestinian government for the fact that 80 percent of Palestinians get their news from non-Palestinian sources — al Jazeera and “even enemy news sources,” that is, the Arabic-language Israeli news programs.

“Any action which prevents anyone from, or punishes anyone for, speaking out, is more dangerous than the speech itself, regardless of its nature,” Mr. Kanafani said. “A state that cannot tolerate differing opinions, cannot convince the world of its steadfastness on other more dangerous issues.”

Mr. [U/O]man, the Jazeera correspondent, said that the station was asked on Monday to stop playing the commercial because it insulted Mr. Arafat. He said that before al Jazeera officials had a chance to discuss the request, armed security officers visited the bureau and gave them two hours.

On Tuesday and today, Palestinian guards were posted out front to make sure that no transmissions took place. In a telephone interview broadcast on al Jazeera, Hanan Ashrawi, a prominent Palestinian official, said that she regretted the closing of the offices.

“I am trying with many colleagues and others not only to reopen the office but to make sure this doesn't happen again,” she said. Today, al Jazeera moved its operation, at least temporarily, to West Jerusalem so that it could keep broadcasting.

“We have to stop working in Ramallah and Gaza, so we will start working in Israel,” said Wael Abu [illegible], the bureau chief, whose father happens to be Mr. Arafat's human rights adviser.

How this transcription was made

SEPARATE CLIPPING, NOT part of the keep_together article on this slide. Maria's slide label — “New York Times Jan 9 1994 ** same article keep together / New York Times March 23 2001” — reads correctly: s079_2 and s079_3 are the two parts of the Joel Greenberg schools piece, and this scan (s079_1) is the unrelated Deborah Sontag piece. Judged from the pages themselves: different byline, different dateline, different subject, and the Greenberg article runs continuously from s079_2 into s079_3. Transcribed from 9–28x sharpened crops; see scan_quality and illegible. — No masthead, no running head, no folio. This is a single narrow cut column. Internal evidence: dateline “RAMALLAH, West Bank, March 22”; the closure began Monday, guards were posted “On Tuesday and today”; Ariel Sharon has just “took office” (he was sworn in March 7, 2001). A March 23, 2001 paper fits. Consistent with Maria's label; the date is not printed on the scan. SEPARATE CLIPPING — see source_note. — POOR. The source image is 146 pixels wide. Even at 20–28x with unsharp masking, several proper names will not resolve. Everything below marked [illegible] was attempted at maximum magnification and left as a gap rather than guessed. The body text is readable; the names are the problem. — Three places, all proper names, all attempted at 20–28x with autocontrast and unsharp masking: (1) The al Jazeera correspondent's full name at first mention — two words, roughly 5 letters each, the first appearing to begin with W and the second with O or U. Not resolvable. (2) The same man's surname at second mention, set as “Mr. [U/O]man” — four letters, first letter U or a damaged O. Recorded as [U/O]man rather than chosen. (3) The bureau chief's surname — “Wael Abu [illegible]”, four letters beginning with D. Not resolvable. Also uncertain but read: “Hanan Ashrawi” — at 26x the surname is a 7-letter word reading Ashr--i; the given name, the pronoun “she” and the description “a prominent Palestinian official” all fit, and I have transcribed it as Ashrawi, but the glyphs themselves are degraded and a reader checking a clean copy should confirm it. “Marwan Kanafani” is also a degraded reading, though a firmer one.

Cite this clipping

"Palestinians Embarrassed By Closing Of TV Office," The New York Times, 23 March 2001. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2001-062. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2001-062