THE great Israeli writer Amos Oz once wrote that while knowing history is probably a good thing, knowing too much is a form of tyranny. In the bitter conflict between Jews and Arabs, each side has known too much of its own history and nothing of the history of the other. This must mean that the national narrative of each side must be seriously flawed. Indeed, what it means in this conflict is that each side denies almost totally the historic narrative of the other.
This is not an original insight, which is not surprising given that the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians has been subjected to more analysis and scrutiny than perhaps any other conflict in the past century.
It is a conflict burdened by too many insights, too many opinions, too many facts. Around 400 extra journalists came to Israel to cover last week's elections, joining close to 600 Jerusalem-based reporters who regularly report on the Middle East for newspapers and television around the world. That's a lot of journalists in a country the size of a half a dozen Melbourne outer suburbs.
It would be fair to say that a significant proportion of us journalists who flew into Jerusalem in the past week or so did not come with the burden of too much history weighing heavily on our shoulders. This is not meant as a criticism. We journalists are not historians but rather imperfect and often bewildered people trying to do the impossible: make sense of a conflict that is suffused with great passion and great hatred. And bitterly disputed competing historic narratives.
The best journalists acknowledge their limitations and, where possible, make explicit their prejudices. This means making as clear as possible the paradigm through which they are reporting the conflict. The best journalists resist the enormous pressure on them in a world of media fragmentation and fierce competition to be bold and to "know what's happening". The best journalists admit to doubt and at times, total bewilderment. They tread warily.
It is hard to tread warily in a world of 24-hour cable news services. One day in Ramallah, an American cable network crew did a two-minute report from the Palestinian Legislative Council building to which their "fixer" had brought them and where he had lined up a couple of Hamas spokesmen.
Not all journalists who report from the West Bank or Gaza use fixers, mostly Arab Israelis who know their way around, have contacts in the various Palestinian factions and can line up people for interviews. But most visiting journalists, especially TV reporters — and a fair number of Jerusalem-based correspondents — use fixers.
It is impossible to say just how much this affects the reporting of the Palestinians, but that it does have an effect is beyond doubt. Given the language barriers and the chaos and tension of occupation, the feuding militias and the presence of armed gangs, it is inevitable that the fixer will, to a greater or less extent, be our eyes and ears.
Having met the spokesmen, the cameras rolled and the journalist asked a question: what would be your preferred outcome in the Israeli elections? This is not a terrible question, and it is certainly nowhere near as silly, for instance, as asking a Palestinian who has been stuck at a military checkpoint for hours because of a security alert, how he or she feels.
But it is a question that will inevitably elicit a predictable response and that will allow the journalist to state on camera, with some authority, that the new Hamas Government has no interest in the election outcome, a bold statement, the boldness of which is simply not justified.
Amos Oz, who helped found the Peace Now movement in 1977, also once said that the tragedy of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is that it involves two peoples with equally valid national aspirations, which is another way of saying that each of their historical narratives have moral and ethical force.
When it comes to reporting this conflict, not only do a lot of journalists know little about these narratives, but for obvious and non-malign reasons, they quickly conclude that the Palestinian story, whatever the history, is one that has led them to great suffering and dispossession, which means the Israeli story must be about conquest and occupation of stolen land.
The paradigm is one of victims and victimisers, helpless and hopeless Palestinians on the one hand and brutal occupiers and oppressors on the other. One narrative is true and tragic and one narrative is false, an example of the colonialist's lies and propaganda.
One result of seeing the conflict through this paradigm is that by reducing Palestinians to victims, their leaders are reduced to victims as well and are excused from taking any responsibility for their political failings, for the corruption that they encouraged and from which they personally benefited, from taking responsibility for the opportunities they passed up to improve the lives of their long-suffering people and perhaps even give the Palestinians the state that is so clearly their right.
Why is it that for all the hundreds of journalists covering the conflict, there was no great attempt to expose the massive corruption of Fatah under Yasser Arafat, which most journalists knew about and which led to the squandering of billions of aid dollars that could have been spent, should have been spent, to give the Palestinians an economic future?
The answer seems obvious.
United States correspondent Michael Gawenda is in Israel to report on the election.
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