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Profile: Israeli Television Anachor Haim Yavin Sparks Controversy With His New Documentary
Morning Edition: July 5, 2005
Israeli Documentary Criticizes Jewish Settlers
RENEE MONTAGNE, host:
In Israel, there is controversy over a television documentary about the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and the Jewish settlers who live there. It was made by Israel's best known television news anchor, and it presents a harsh picture of the occupation and how it affects Palestinian lives. NPR's Linda Gradstein reports.
LINDA GRADSTEIN reporting:
In the opening part of his documentary series, Haim Yavin stands at an Israeli roadblock in the West Bank with a hand-held video camera, filming the Palestinians who have been waiting for hours for Israeli soldiers to let them pass.
SOUNDBITE FROM "DIARY OF A JOURNEY"
Mr. HAIM YAVIN (News Anchor): (Through Translator) Early morning, the Al-Hada roadblock. In the West Bank, there are two kinds of roads: settlers by themselves and Palestinians by themselves. I hear there's no alternative. It's part of the war against terrorism. But as I stand filming, I think we simply don't see the Palestinians as people.
GRADSTEIN: It's the kind of observation that has earned Yavin's work both glowing praise and strident criticism here.
SOUNDBITE FROM "DIARY OF A JOURNEY"
Mr. YAVIN: (Through Translator) I am coming now from the roadblock. I am coming from a woman who had to give birth at a roadblock because they didn't let her go through, and I say to you this isn't Jewish what we're doing here.
GRADSTEIN: In Israel, Haim Yavin is known as Mr. Television. He has anchored the nightly news on state TV for almost four decades. Until the advent of the commercial channel and cable about 10 years ago, an estimated 70 percent of Israelis watched Yavin's nightly newscast. Yavin first offered his five-part series, called "Diary of a Journey," to his bosses at Israel Television. When they turned him down, he sold it to the commercial network, Channel 2.
In his documentary, he traces the beginnings of the settlement movement from a few dozen people in 1967. Today there are close to a quarter of a million settlers in the West Bank and Gaza and another 200,000 in traditionally Arab East Jerusalem. In an interview, Yavin says the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising in September 2000 and the wave of violence that swept both Israel and the occupied territories pushed him to make the film, which he worked on for the past two and a half years.
Mr. YAVIN: And I came to the conclusion that we cannot go on with the occupation. Resettlements are a block on the road to peace. There's no way around that. And all the world recognizes this, except for the settlers themselves.
GRADSTEIN: Not surprisingly, Jewish settlers have reacted angrily to the series. Yisrael Medad, a settler spokesman and vice chairman of the advocacy group Israel's Media Watch, says the documentary is not balanced. He says Yavin should resign as the anchor of the evening news.
Mr. YISRAEL MEDAD (Israel's Media Watch): If Haim Yavin wanted to make that program, he should have found funding, and he should have said, `I am now releasing myself from my Walter Cronkite-Tom Brokaw position.' He's the Mr. Television of the public broadcasting authority that we have here, and I think it's nasty for him to do what he did.
GRADSTEIN: Yavin says he agrees that the presentation of news should be as objective as possible, and he insists he's always tried to do that. But he says his documentary wasn't intended to be objective.
Mr. YAVIN: The different thing and the special thing about this series is that it's not objective. I declare it's not objective. I do a personal diary, personal account of my feelings, of my experiences and, you know, I hold a little camera in front of my people who I interview--Palestinians, Israeli settlers, what have you--and, you know, it's person-to-person. It's very intimate.
GRADSTEIN: Gadi Wolfsfeld, a professor of communications at Hebrew University, says Yavin's series is different because it tries to humanize the Palestinians.
Professor GADI WOLFSFELD (Hebrew University): The press prefers to report about these sensitive issues in a technical, diagnostic manner. I mean, my own research has shown, as have others, that the reporting usually tends to be largely ethnocentric, really not too concerned with deaths on the other side as, of course, is the Palestinian reporting be totally ethnocentric, not concerned with death on our side.
GRADSTEIN: Yavin says the ratings for the first two parts of his series were higher than he expected, and some foreign television networks have expressed interest in airing the programs. Yavin says his goal was to contribute to a public debate about the future of the Jewish settlements, and in that, he's already succeeded. Linda Gradstein, NPR News, Jerusalem.
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