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| Photo credit: Osnat Krasnansky |
Israel Hayom..
24 May '13..
On September 30, 2000, France 2, a French public television station, broadcast the images and the reporter's accompanying statements for the first time. Later on they were broadcast thousands of times by television stations the world over, including in Arab countries. This week it became clear, this time officially, that the story was a modern blood libel. Jamal al-Dura and his son Muhammad could be seen in those images, kneeling in fear behind a barrel at Netzarim Junction. Shots were supposedly fired at them from the nearby Israeli position, and Charles Enderlin, the station's main reporter in Jerusalem, stated against the backdrop of photographs taken by Talal Abu Rahmah (the Gaza station's local photographer): "Muhammad is dead, and his father is seriously wounded..."
That was the beginning of the al-Dura affair, which swelled to monstrous proportions and gave the Palestinians a smoking-gun "proof" that Israelis are child-killers. These photographs became a symbol of the Second Intifada.
* * *
It turns out that Muhammad did not die, at least in that incident. It also turns out that some of the wounds and scars on his father, who was said to have been seriously wounded in the incident, resulted from a 1992 attack by Palestinians and the surgery he later underwent in an Israeli hospital. But the committee appointed by Minister Moshe Ya'alon, whose findings were published this week, did not discover much that was new. It only gave an official state imprimatur to the findings of many others who untiringly tilted at windmills, claiming that the story was a lie that the Palestinian propaganda machine had adopted for its own purposes.
The first to try to stem the flow of lies and ensuing bloodshed -- much like the Dutch boy who put his finger in the dike to stop the trickle that threatened to become a flood -- was physicist Nahum Shahaf of Ramat Gan. Almost everything Shahaf said at the time, when Yom-Tov Samia, then the head of the IDF Southern Command, appointed him as head of the IDF committee to investigate the incident, ultimately received the government's approval after a 13-year delay.
Shahaf, seen as odd and eccentric a decade ago, was right about almost everything. The government committee's examination of the raw footage showed that at the end of the film, in a segment that was never broadcast, the boy is seen alive and it is not certain that he was wounded at all. France 2's raw outtakes show no blood on the wall, the ground or the barrel. While Jamal claimed that he had been struck by 10 to 12 bullets, the film shows no bullet striking his body or any drops of blood on it, and there is a great deal of doubt as to whether any shots at all were fired from the Israeli position.
Rejection after rejection
This week, 67-year-old Shahaf, who said years ago that the film showing the supposed death of Muhammad al-Dura had been staged, recalled everyone who had helped him in the struggle and believed him. He also recalled the officials in the Foreign Ministry, the IDF and the police who tripped him up and refused to help him.
When the al-Dura affair began, Shahaf was a brilliant physicist with a broad record of accomplishments. He played a role in developing unmanned aerial vehicles, technology that would enable people to see through walls and a system for compressed digital-video transmission that won him an award from the Science Ministry. He watched the report about Muhammad al-Dura on television and left a message for Yom-Tov Samia, the head of the Southern Command at the time. Shahaf asked him not to destroy the wall next to which al-Dura had been filmed so that a ballistics investigation could be performed. But Samia was out in the field. By the time he heard Shahaf's message, the IDF had already finished clearing the area around the Netzarim Junction and the wall had been demolished. Still, Shahaf, whom Samia appointed to head the IDF's investigative team, had already reached the conclusion, even without the wall, that there was no angle of fire from the IDF position to Muhammad al-Dura and his father.
"That wasn't all," Shahaf recalls. "There's a concept known as a sun clock. Shadow projection length varies with every hour of the day. One of the things I checked, from the direction of the shadows, was when the incident occurred. I was amazed to find that according to the shadow projection, the incident took place after the boy had arrived at the hospital as a corpse. In other words, according to the direction of the shadow, the boy who was buried under the name al-Dura was buried before the incident took place, before he was supposedly 'shot to death.'"
Although Shahaf's findings aroused interest in the local and worldwide media, they encountered a great deal of skepticism. Shahaf finds it hard to forget the article that was published in Haaretz. "The newspaper ran an article criticizing me, portraying me as insufficiently skilled. Unfortunately, it had an impact. Shaul Mofaz, who was chief of staff at the time, distanced himself. Some of the upper military echelon distanced themselves from me."
"Those were very hard times for me. Some people with whom I worked closely dropped hints, while others said openly that they had been ordered not to work with me."
Q. Who received such orders? Who gave them?
"Official personnel who deal with measurements and mapping stopped working with me, for example. There was also a building contractor, who was Jamal al-Dura's boss. When I asked him for information about Jamal, he promised to help me only if he got permission from the Southern Command. But according to him, officials from the IDF Spokesperson's Office in the command told him they weren't working with me anymore, so I found myself more or less on my own.
"In that near-impossible situation I contacted Ariel Sharon's adviser, Raanan Gissin, and Danny Seaman, who was the director of the Government Press Office at the time. Both of them listened to me. They watched the footage and saw the potential right away. Their behavior was professional and straightforward. I got endless support and help from them. Sharon, for his part, supported them, but other people put heavy pressure on them not to work with me. I don't understand that to this day."
Danny Seaman said this week that Foreign Ministry officials "were not at all enthusiastic, to put it mildly, about my work on the al-Dura affair, during Olmert's time too. The Prime Minister's Office put me under a lot of pressure, which included threats of dismissal, if I didn't leave the subject alone." Foreign Ministry officials commented on Shahaf's statements: "The approach to the al-Dura affair was completely professional. The assessment was that as long as there was no solid material that could show the lies for what they were, such work could do more harm than good, and even cause the images to be broadcast all over the world yet again."
International support
But the threats did not deter Shahaf. His big breakthrough came in the form of an article by a supporter, James Fallows, a consultant to President Clinton, in the June 2003 issue of The Atlantic. The Wall Street Journal ran another article supporting Shahaf's research and hinting that the incident had been staged.
In February 2005, Shahaf gave a lecture in front of 750 criminologists at the American Society of Criminology in New Orleans, the world's highest-ranking professional forum of jurisprudence. Afterward, he was invited to lecture at other universities and met with Robert Morgenthau, the district attorney of New York. The support he received abroad reopened the doors in Israel that had been slammed shut. Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland, who at first tended toward supporting the assertion that IDF troops had shot al-Dura by mistake, met with Shahaf and Danny Seaman and watched a 20-minute presentation. The presentation impressed him and he made it public.
In 2007, Shahaf screened a film he had produced in which Muhammad al-Dura is seen changing position after his "death." He had the help of an expert, a pediatrician from the Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer, whom he had asked to view the film. The government investigative committee also published those images this week. On Channel 10's current-affairs television program London & Kirschenbaum, Shahaf confronted Charles Enderlin, who told him to his face that he was talking nonsense. When London asked Shahaf whether he did not fear a libel suit, Shahaf invited Enderlin, on live television, to sue him.
As the various events unfolded, France 2 brought a libel suit against Dr. Yehuda David, who claimed that the scars Jamal al-Dura said were bullet wounds were actually from an operation that he, David, had performed on him in 1994 after Hamas operatives, who suspected al-Dura of collaborating with Israel, attacked him with knives and axes.
This week, Dr. David said, "Jamal al-Dura showed those wounds and claimed that they had been caused in the incident at Netzarim Junction. That was a lie." When David lost in the first round, he appealed, and in February 2012 the court of appeals in Paris acquitted him, ruling that some of Jamal al-Dura's wounds had been inflicted before the incident at Netzarim Junction.
A glittering Saudi production
A close look at the influence of the al-Dura case and its role in encouraging terrorism and violence shows how far things have gone. In Syria and in Darfur, more Muslim children are killed by Muslims in one month than in all the years of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But a single fiction about a Gazan child was inflated to monstrous proportions and provided inspiration for terror attacks and an ongoing delegitimization campaign against the state of Israel.
Ya'alon's committee, which was headed by Yossi Kuperwasser, the director-general of the Strategic Affairs Ministry, wrote in its report published this week, "Many leaders in the Arab sector who appeared before [the committee] held the opinion that the images of Muhammad al-Dura, which were broadcast by the media, were among the factors that led people of the Arab sector to go out into the streets during the events of October 2000."
But the al-Dura affair's influence was many times more tangible and concrete than that general statement. The crowds that lynched the two Israeli reserve soldiers who entered Ramallah by mistake in 2000 shouted for vengeance for the blood of Muhammad al-Dura. Nabil Faraj al-Areir, the first suicide terrorist of the Second Intifada, concluded the will he wrote before blowing himself up as follows: "To conclude, I say that I dedicate this act of martyrdom to the shahid Muhammad al-Dura and to all the shahids of Islam."
The Palestinian Authority itself used the al-Dura story to encourage children to take part in violent acts and sacrifice their lives. An excerpt from a video that was broadcast hundreds of times on official Palestinian television begins as follows: "I wave to you, not in farewell, but to say 'Follow Muhammad al-Dura.'" In the video, Muhammad al-Dura--played by a boy actor--runs joyfully in heaven, fying a kite and visiting an amusement park.
The committee appointed by Ya'alon and headed by Kuperwasser said this week that the report on France 2 served as an inspiration and justification for terror attacks, not only for Palestinian groups, but for global ones as well. The most significant use of the affair was made by Osama bin Laden, whose spokesperson mentioned the image of Muhammad al-Dura in a statement broadcast in October 2001.
Bin Laden himself alluded to the incident in an audio recording broadcast on Al-Jazeera, saying, "Pharaoh, the leader of oppression and unbelief, was known as a child-killer. But the sons of Israel do the same thing to our children in Palestine. The whole world saw how Israeli soldiers killed Muhammad al-Dura and many others like him..."
The video showing the beheading of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal's South Asian bureau chief, by members of a Pakistani terrorist group, also included a brief excerpt of the report on France 2.
The Kuperwasser committee noted this week that the images of al-Dura were not only used as a justification for acts of terror. In Arab and Muslim societies, they also served as a symbol of the cruelty of Israelis and Jews and of the splendor of martyrdom in the struggle against them. "Muhammad al-Dura is celebrated in hundreds of Arabic songs, poems, movies, websites and Facebook pages in which Abu Rahma's and Enderlin's original accusation, that the child was murdered by Israel in cold blood, is taken as a given."
Al-Dura became the subject of a full-length animated documentary filmed at a studio in Turkey and produced by Saudi Arabia. Its title is "The Martyr of the World: Muhammad al-Dura." Produced at a cost of about a million Saudi riyals, it is replete with images of Israeli soldiers shooting and beating Palestinians. In the film's climactic scene, an Israeli soldier stands in front of Jamal and Muhammad, who are hiding behind a barrel. The soldier aims and shoots Muhammad in the chest as girls sing on the soundtrack: "Our martyr, al-Dura. We yearn for martyrdom. Our country is free and our death is happiness."
Anyone reading the committee's report on this subject will encounter many other examples showing that the al-Dura affair also played a significant role in legitimizing the comparison of Israel to the Nazis. The affair certainly contributed to the demonization of Israel.
"Let them sue me"
Like Dr. Yehuda David and engineer Joseph Doriel (the latter passed away several months ago), Nahum Shahaf fought for years to bring the truth of the al-Dura affair to light and provided Kuperwasser's committee with a great deal of information -- despite the fact that the state had not been helpful at first.
"Sometimes it was hard to understand why things were being done this way in Israel," Shahaf said this week. "I got more respect and appreciation abroad, but in Israel I was treated with indifference and sometimes with hostility. It was frustrating. Foreign Ministry officials didn't always cooperate with me, and sometimes they hindered me. I find it very odd since the subject was and still is of the highest importance to the state of Israel. Some of the people who showed indifference or hostility to the struggle I waged did so because of their political attitudes, while others did so because they didn't accept my research."
Q. Do you believe Muhammad al-Dura is still alive?
"I don't know. I know only that he was not harmed at all in that incident, and that there is evidence that he was seen at Netzarim Junction shortly after the incident."
Q. What evidence? Who saw him?
"I asked Reuters for hours of footage of the junction from that time. What was found was that a video clip that was filmed several days after the incident shows a boy whose identity has a high likelihood of being that of the boy France 2 depicted as Muhammad al-Dura. He's wearing the same clothing, the same shirt, the same denim trousers, the same sandals, the same cranial structure. It's all the same, yet there's a shred of doubt. In the film from France 2, al-Dura was photographed from the side, and the boy shown at the junction after the incident is shown from the front. That could be the reason the committee didn't include it in its report."
"Several years after the incident, additional testimony was received that a boy who resembled al-Dura was known in the Gaza market, and that was also his name, because he resembled al-Dura. I claim he doesn't look like him, but rather that he's the same boy from the incident."
Q. So how many Muhammad al-Duras are there?
"It is certainly possible that this story comprises three different boys. The first is the boy at the junction who was filmed by France 2, who was an extra and not [Jamal] al-Dura's son, and who was not harmed or killed in the incident. The second boy is one who died and was buried and presented as al-Dura even though he was not. The images of the boy from the hospital clearly show that he was not the boy from the junction. The third boy is the real al-Dura, the son of Jamal, whom I don't know by sight, but who is still alive. The committee did not allow itself to say so, but I can, and if the French television network or al-Dura's family think I am making anything up, I invite them once again to court. Let them sue me."
Link: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=9501
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