Published by Americans for qÜÉ=iáåâ= Middle East Understanding, Inc. Volume 30, Issue 5 November-December, 1997 ‘People and the Land’ Coming to a PBS Station Near You? Tom Hayes has been BY TOM HAYES The reason I am awake is not there: up against the so much the mosquitoes or the “Are there really goblins Daddy? Reelee?” It's Israeli military in heat. Palestine and pro-Israel already dark in her room. Four, going on five, she’s militants in the U.S. got a tight grip on my hand, suspecting the answer Screams periodically rip Write about it, we might be scary. Still in reentry from a couple of through the barbed wire of the asked him, after viewing months filming in Occupied Palestine, it’s taking me a camp across the road. his documentary film. long time to answer. Jenin is a good-sized And he did. 21,000 market town in the northern words. Only problem Lying here with three tons of hot night on my was, our limit is 10,000. back in Jenin. Hell-bound Palestinian mosquitoes are West Bank. Sweeping down But the words were so relentlessly trying to carry me away. Slapping noises steep slopes leading to an revealing we hated to from the other guys’ rooms indicate a multi-pronged open plain, it is densely lived drop any. So we broke a attack. The crew and I are staying in a house almost in, picturesquely compact. 30-year tradition and Roman aqueducts, added eight pages to this directly across the road from an Israeli military camp. issue, happy in the occupation, Marlboros. Jenin knowledge that his was slugging it out with the feature article, if not his Israeli occupation. film, will appear uncut. The screams, a man’s Speaking of screams, come about every 5 censorship, The Link minutes. Sometimes closer. applauds the Fairfield (CT) University Library for He sounds like a large man, its courageous stand the low pitch the screams start against the cowardly with as they uncoil into the censor who, three times darkness of my room. now, has stolen all of our Links from the library. A Co-producer Riad Bahhur statement by the Library and I had traveled up from Committee is reprinted on our base in Jerusalem on a fair page 24. bet that Jenin would be the Going there, as Tom scene of demonstrations the Hayes would attest, is the next morning. It would be the best way to grasp the evil that Israel is committing anniversary of the Sabra/ with our tax dollars. Shatilla massacre in Israeli- Sabeel, an ecumenical occupied Beirut—and the Palestinian Theology anniversary of the signing of Center, invites Americans the Camp David sellout as to attend its third international conference well. What a stunning this coming February. coincidence that the massacre For details, see page 21. took place on the same date as Tom Hayes’s the Camp David signing. documentary video, along There were the screams with our complete book themselves—and then the selection, is found on pages 22-23. reaction of Jenin’s dogs—that Israeli Defense Forces and Palestinian Women, near (Continued on page 2) —John Mahoney Ramallah, Occupied West Bank. — Photo by George Azar. The Link Page 2 AMEU Board of Directors (Continued from page 1) going into refugee camps where food and Hugh D. Auchincloss, Jr. gnawed against my sleep. With each medical care were available on a sort of “non- Atwater, Bradley & Partners, Inc. scream that rose from the Army camp, denominational” basis. The fighters would Henry G. Fischer (Vice President) dogs in the neighborhood began baying, get patched up and fed, then go back into Curator Emeritus, Dept. of Egyptian Art Metropolitan Museum of Art and as they bayed, dogs farther away Cambodia and kill Vietnamese soldiers. The Bonnie Gehweiler would pick up the cry, then dogs farther Vietnamese Army expressed its displeasure Coordinator, Bethlehem 2000 Project yet. The alarm expanded up the slopes of with 122 mm. shells. Grace Halsell Jenin like waves hitting a reef. A terrible Refugee camps are purposely Writer sound: grief and empathy, warning and impermanent constructions—places to drain Nell MacCracken dread. off humanity into the sky. There is no safe Consultant Inside the wire there was no sound of place to hide but sewage-filled trenches when Robert E. Marsh Independent Consultant empathy all that long scorching night. high explosives come screaming in. More Robert L. Norberg Years later I’m sitting in the studio of than half the population of any refugee camp on the planet is children. You connect the Lachlan Reed Detroit's PBS station doing a program that President, Lachlan International will immediately follow the broadcast of dots—refugee camps, artillery, and Talcott W. Seelye People and the Land. The follow-up will be a children—the results are utterly and Former U.S. Ambassador to Syria ruthlessly predictable. That trip left an half-hour program to—what, calm people Donald L. Snook down? “update” the one-hour program? I Jack B. Sunderland (President) gather from the moderator’s tone that the President, American Independent Oil Co. real intent is to denigrate my journalistic L. Humphrey Walz style. I’m doing my level best to be polite. Associate Executive, H.R. Presbyterian Synod of the Northeast A member of the station’s board, who Miriam Ward, RSM is also associated with the Anti-Defamation Professor, Religious Studies League (ADL), threatened to resign when Mark R. Wellman (Treasurer) his opposition to the broadcast was Financial Consultant overridden. Detroit was something like the Marshall W. Wiley fifteenth (of 283 PBS affiliate stations) to Attorney, Former U.S. Ambassador to Oman broadcast People and the Land. AMEU National Council The broadcast of People in Miami Hon. James E. Akins seemed to take the ADL by surprise. Isabelle Bacon William R. Chandler Maybe the program director failed to solicit David S. Dodge ADL’s approval. Abraham Foxman, ADL’s Barbro Ek National Director, issued a press release Paul Findley Joseph C. Harsch condemning People and the Land and Dr. Francis H. Horn howling outrage at the Corporation for Dr. Cornelius B. Houk Public Broadcasting for letting it get O. Kelly Ingram Moorhead Kennedy funded in the first place. The Detroit Ann Kerr Jewish press called me an “amateur John D. Law Prof. George Lenczowski filmmaker with a history of anti-Israeli Dr. W. T. Mallison films.” David Nes Bishop John Nolan Well you might ask how in God’s Author filming in Ramallah, 1989.—Photo by Dorothy C. Herbert Oliver name I got my leg caught in this thing. Thigpen. George L. Parkhurst Marie Petersen In the late 70s I made a film about Fr. Joseph Ryan S.J. displaced Indochinese people who were impression like a tattoo on my neocortex. John J. Slocum eventually resettled in the United States. Dr. John C. Trever The resulting film, Refugee Road, was Don W. Wagner, Jr. The documentary followed a single family, broadcast nationally on PBS. It was picked Dr. George H. Weightman the Nouts, starting with their life in the up again by WNET, the New York City PBS AMEU Staff camp and staying with them through their affiliate, for a series on immigrants that was first year in the United States. John F. Mahoney, Executive Director broadcast during the rededication of the Shibabaw Wubetu, Accounts Manager My arrival in Thailand coincided with Statue of Liberty. Never once, in all the artillery attacks by the Vietnamese screenings of Refugee Road I attended, was the Occupation Army in Cambodia against the term “balance” ever mentioned. AMEU (ISSN 0024-4007) grants permission to reproduce camps on the Thai side of the border. material from The Link in part or in whole. We ask that Six months after Refugee Road was credit be given to AMEU and that one copy be sent to our Khmer Rouge resistance fighters were released Kamphong Nout, the protagonist, office at 475 Riverside Drive, Room 245, New York, New thought to be stashing their weapons and York 10115. Tel. 212-870-2053; Fax 212-870-2050; E- died in agony of complications from surgery. Mail [email protected]. The Link Page 3 My family and the Nout family had over time melded as allowed to return to their homes, two-tier legal systems, one. Kamphong’s death here in the States, after the hell he international law being used as toilet paper. and his family had already endured, overwhelmed me. I The more I dug up, the more peculiar I found the decided filmmaking was a worthless waste of time. I began stories that came out of the public (NPR/PBS) and picking up courses at Ohio State, prerequisites for medical corporate media—as though a huge crevasse had school I had missed as an undergrad. I suppose it was the swallowed all reality relating to Palestine. helplessness I had felt in the face of Kamphong’s pain. Palestine was not alone in that respect. In 1981 there I was supporting myself working freelance on wasn’t a serious national dialogue on South African commercials and industrial films, doing school part time. I apartheid either. This reality gap—and I’ve met lots of remember quite clearly the morning I stepped into that Palestine veterans who have experienced the sensation—is a black hole marked Palestine. It’s funny how the pivotal constant irritation. Like all your underwear is too tight. You moments of our lives are so innocuous, so little preparatory can’t pick up a paper, or watch the news without the fanfare.