When I moved to Jerusalem in 2010, the foreign correspondents there offered me some unsettling advice: “The first year here you’ll hate the Israeli government, the second year the Palestinian leadership, by the third you’ll hate yourself.” It’s best to leave before four, I was told, in the interest of sanity. I nodded along thinking how sadly cynical they were. I would do better than that, I told myself. I did not.
I lasted a little under four years in Israel and Palestine. In that time, I reported on forced displacement and punitive bureaucracy (Israel’s occupation is expanded through denied permits, home demolitions and revoked ID cards). I wrote about child killings, war crimes and terrorism (perpetrated by both sides). I tried to explain as best I could the annexation of the West Bank and the collective punishment of two million people in Gaza without using forbidden phrases such as apartheid or war crime. I included the necessary balance of voices and opinions. But still, every report of an atrocity in Palestine was met with highly personal accusations of bias. Editors were often twitchy, readers disengaged.
