Back Stories: U.S. News Productions and Palestinian Politics

 

15 April 2013
The Palestine Center
Washington, DC

 

Dr. Amahl Bishara:
Thank you all for coming. Thank you especially to Yousef Munayyer, Samirah Alkassim and Athena [Hoover] for all of your organizing and for the invitation. A deep thank you to all of you for coming, it’s a pleasure and an honor to see so many wonderful friends and colleagues here whom I know from so many parts of my life.

This is a book about the production of U.S. news during the second Palestinian intifada. So it’s actually an ethnography of news production. Most books and articles that you read about U.S. media are often about the texts themselves; what does this text mean, is it biased this way or that way? These were questions that I’ve pretty much left aside and instead chose to look at how this news is actually produced, what goes on, on-the-ground, to bring us the text that we rely on every day.

In some ways this story started because during the second intifada I would wake up, stumble out of bed, walk to the front door of my apartment, and pick my newspaper as though it was a lifeline because I felt that I needed to know what was going on in the occupied territories with such urgency. As I was doing that, I started thinking, “I’m really relying on these journalists who are bringing me this news.” I also realized that I wasn’t just relying on the American foreign correspondents who had the bylines; I was relying on fixers, reporters, producers, [and] photo journalists who are Palestinian with whom those foreign correspondents work. So the American foreign correspondents cannot do the work that they do every day without those Palestinian journalists working alongside them. So I wanted to look at that process of collaboration up-close. So it’s really the collaboration that is at the heart of U.S. news but is often, generally hidden. I’ll come back to this photograph [slide] later, but this is what the cover image is taken from but cropped down a little bit.

So this is one of the first ethnographies of the second Palestinian intifada and its aftermath. As such, it addresses some of the key themes and events of the second intifada. So I discuss everyday experiences of check-points and closures, Palestinian experiences during Israeli invasions, protests against the separation wall, Arafat’s funeral, the 2005 presidential elections, smaller (but still colorful) local events such as Pope Benedict [XVI]’s visit to Bethlehem, and of course violence against Palestinian journalists. But really what this is about is Palestinian experiences of, and attitudes about, journalism itself, especially international journalism. I expect that most of you don’t read anthropology when you’re reading about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Very often we end up reading histories, or political scientific works, and so I do want to talk at more length about why I think an anthropological approach is so valuable, but I’m just going to move through that for now.

This [slide] is another starting point for my project. I produced a documentary, “Across Oceans, Among Colleagues,” about the work of the Committee to Protect Journalists in 2001-2002. I had done an internship with the Committee to Protect Journalists the previous summer and I was learning more about how restrictions on movement prevented Palestinian journalists from doing their jobs and thus prevented also us from receiving the kind of news we should receive because they were working for U.S. news organizations. And that Fall, I also found out that Mazen Dana, a Palestinian cameraman working in his hometown [with] Reuters, had been working there for about a decade, was to receive a Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists. So I had an opportunity to create a student film about his visit and about the work of the Committee to Protect Journalists. So I just want to show you a little tiny clip from this. [Shows clip]

I will say that I feel that I’m a better writer than a documentary maker. At any point, I feel that it’s very important to share this story because sadly I never saw Mazen again. Mazen went on assignment to Iraq in 2003 to cover the U.S. invasion for Reuters, and its aftermath, and on August 17th, 2003 he was killed outside the Abu Ghraib prison, shot by American forces. His death, to me, underscores how we rely on him and people like him for our news even as he is endangered by our armies.

So words and images are a public trust. Mazen Dana here said this in his award acceptance speech, [and] is expressing I think a very familiar language, what journalism is and why it’s important. So how do Palestinian journalists fit into the set of news values that we are familiar with in American journalism? Obviously one of those central values is objectivity. Objectivity seems like what Tim Mitchell might call a principle that’s true in every country. It seems to have this universal reach. But as Tim Mitchell also goes to point out, those things which seem to be a principle true in every country in some easy simple way are often not.

So objectivity is not a universal value that operates the same way in all these different places around the world. So if you think about what it takes to be an objective journalist in Jerusalem, or to seem objective in Jerusalem, [it} is very different than what it takes to, for example, be an objective journalist in Moscow during the Cold War, or perhaps working in apartheid South Africa. So objectivity itself changes shape in different places, and so I want to examine what are the contours and the demands and limitations of objectivity at this particular site.

A key word for me is this idea of balance. Often times when journalists think about objectivity, they think, “O.k., the way to be objective in Jerusalem is to be balanced and to bring the Palestinian side and the Israeli side.” They do this often in text, so for example they choose terminology that they think of as not taking one side or the other. They also sometimes do it with quotes, so they’ll bring a quote from an Israeli official and a Palestinian official, or an Israeli activist or a Palestinian activist or something like this. And they do it in other ways as well.

The effect, unfortunately, of this strategy is that it gives a sense that the conflict itself is balanced, between the Israeli side and the Palestinian side, which as we know is not true in terms of the power dynamics on the ground and not true either in terms of the moral and ethical claims on each side either. The other problem with it is perhaps a bit more subtle, which is that to present these two sides, for example, through this dialogue quote between an Israeli official and a Palestinian official is actually to misrepresent the communicative space of this conflict itself.

The truth is, it’s not easy for Palestinians and Israelis to be in dialogue. There are structures in place that inhibit Palestinians from speaking to Israelis. The wall is one of those structures. Check points are another of those structures, a system of permits and passes, many things that prevent Palestinians and Israelis from having the kind of a dialogue that shows up in our newspapers as though it could happen. So it’s sort of a subtle misrepresentation of this communicative space.

The other thing about balanced objectivity is that it promotes the idea, I think very subtly, of the neutral American. And here it is again in a subtle way, that American journalists have been covering the peace process for decades now. In fact, it’s of course one of the biggest story lines that they have been covering, and in a way, they start to position themselves almost in the same way as the U.S. negotiator, outside and above the conflict, writing about it as this neutral outside person. The problem with this is, and you can see this even in the institutional structures of American journalism. An American journalist will have a staff including Israelis and Palestinians, and when they need to do a complicated story inside Israel, they’ll work with an Israeli fixer. And when they want to do a complicated story in the West Bank, they’ll work with a Palestinian fixer or source or producer. So literally, the institutional structure does have that sort of triangular shape.

But the problem with seeing the American as outside and above is that it of course marginalizes the perspective of Israeli and Palestinian journalists, and especially Palestinian journalists in ways that I can talk about more if you’re interested. And in some ways it also reproduces U.S. power, because it gives that sense the American is outside and above and neutral. Of course, just as we know that the United States is not an outside neutral negotiating party in the conflict, likewise, foreign correspondents are not outside and above this conflict. For one thing, during the second intifada, they were living right in the middle of it. So when they were concerned about political violence, they were concerned for their own families and for their own children. Most foreign correspondents, virtually all of them, were living in Israel. And so they were concerned, for example, about Palestinian political violence. Now that shapes surely their sense of comfort and danger as they work, and journalists have complicated relationships, also biographically, to each side.

So the idea of the neutral American is one that I would like to challenge and complicate. And one way that I would like to do that is through what I call accumulated authorship. So back, when I was a grad student, I was again reaching for my paper every morning and reading these articles and one time it was a day when there had been violence across Gaza and the West Bank. A lot of people had been killed and a lot of little incidents. It wasn’t one big thing. So there was a news article reporting this, and there was this one line that stood out – a quote from an old man whose son had died. And it went something like this, “My son’s blood lay in a pool on the street like the blood of slaughtered sheep.” Months later when I got to the field, this quote was still in my head. I thought, “What did this mean?” I went in there thinking that perhaps this quote had been chosen because it was actually around this time of year, a little bit earlier, so it was around Easter and Passover, and I thought this quote has resonance with those holidays perhaps; obviously it’s also a color quote, if you will, it’s vivid. So maybe it was selected for that reason. I wasn’t sure, but I wanted to figure it out.

So I spoke to the Jerusalem-based producer who worked with the foreign correspondent and I asked him “What did this quote mean?” And he said, “Well, I think that the old man meant that the Israeli forces treat us like animals, and so, he saw his son dying like an animal, and that was the critique of the occupation, that they treat us like animals.” He said, “But I wasn’t there actually, I got this quote from a Nablus-based producer” or fixer, and I can talk about why there’s some ambiguity in those two terms, “so why don’t you talk to him.” So I went to Nablus and I spoke to this Nablus-based fixer, and actually I arranged for him to take me to Abu Karam himself. So we went through the streets of the old city, we met Abu Karam.  Abu Karam told me the story of his son’s death, but I of course did not have the interview skills to ask him what exactly he meant by his quote.

So I never exactly found out what Abu Karam thought this quote meant but after the interview with Abu Karam I went back to the Nablus-based fixer who would had taken me to Abu Karam and I said, “What do you think it means?” He said, “No, no no, this man was not making a political critique that the occupation treats us like animals. He was just describing what he saw.” Because what happened was this man’s son had been stopped by the Israeli soldiers, had been asked to take off his clothes, and he was a mentally disabled person, man. So in the midst of all this he was being detained and he eventually grew scared, and he started to run away, and the Israeli soldiers had shot him, and they had prohibited an ambulance from coming to help him. So the father was just describing what was going on in front of him. From a lifetime of experiences of seeing sheep slaughtered, for example, on holidays or for other purposes, and there was just  a lot of blood.

So in doing that, we see these three different ways of looking at this quote. Is it about religious imagery, is it that Palestinians are treated like animals, or is it just a description of events? So for me, what this signals to me is that you’ve got all these people involved in producing this news story, and there are multiple relationships between the quote and the overarching narrative. It could mean this thing, or this thing, or that thing. And there’s no problem with that; that always happens in communication. The complicated thing is that there’s only one time in which there’s an authoritative textualization, one time when that quote sticks. It has one meaning, kind of, from there on out, and that’s when it’s published, by the U.S. foreign correspondent.

So I think we all have a challenge in front of us then, in reading news about the Palestinian conflict or really anything else, which is to think about how can we recognize these multiple perspectives? It’s actually impossible to imagine all the different perspectives and ideas that go into producing even one simple news story like this, but it’s a challenge to us to recognize that complexity as we read the news. So that’s that idea of accumulated authorship.

I’ll talk to you a little bit about violence against journalists now. So Abbey Wright [said] in the documentary, “There’s more than you could ever use,” indeed. During the second intifada the director of the Israeli Government Press Office was named Daniel Seaman, and he was a garrulous man, he probably still is, and so he always was saying these things, which shocked me because they signaled quite directly that, he would explicitly say things that he was more concerned about protecting soldiers than worrying not just about press but also about journalists’ safety. He was very explicit about it even though he was coming from the Government Press Office, which actually is in charge of issuing press cards to foreign correspondents and to Palestinian journalists. So I examined two ways in which Israeli authorities inhibited Palestinians’ ability to speak as journalists. And those two ways are rescinding the Government Office press cards to Palestinian journalists, and shootings of journalists. And the interesting thing is, even though these seem like two very different things, in fact they operate in similar ways.

So, for example, rescinding the press cards to Palestinian journalists restricts their movement because the press cards were used to allow Palestinian journalists to get to checkpoints and also to go into East Jerusalem and into Israel. So once they didn’t have those cards they couldn’t for example go to their home bureaus, and they couldn’t travel as quickly through the West Bank. So that limits news production. And in some complicated way, it also might malign Palestinian journalists’ claims to professionalism and objectivity. So one reason why you all are listening to me as though I’m some kind of expert is not only because I can come here and speak to you, but also because I’ve been able to go to a lot of different places and see a lot of different things and report on them. If I was stuck in one city, or a few cities, most of the time, the sense of not just objectivity, but the sense of perspective would be very different. So when you limit peoples’ ability to move, you in a sense limit their claim to having broad and general knowledge.

The shootings of journalists work in similar ways. Of course, fundamentally, the biggest difference is it harms journalists, it harms their families and their friends and their communities. In addition to that, it also limits news production now, and in a similar way, it maligns Palestinian journalists’ claim to professionalism and objectivity. Because once somebody has been injured, it’s much harder to think of them as somebody who’s potentially objective, because they have clearly been hurt by the struggle. Now these are complicated issues, and so that’s why I say it maligns their claims to professionalism and objectivity, given the structures of professionalism and objectivity that are already in place. I don’t think that it actually necessarily inhibits their work, or their ability to be a good journalist, at all. I think that journalists have been shot and injured and gone on to do amazing work. So really, the problem is with our structures of objectivity and professionalism, perhaps.

So, given all these challenges what do Palestinian journalists do? One thing I want to talk about is the special skills that journalists have as they do their work. So why do U.S. foreign correspondents need all these Palestinians to work with them? The most simple answer of course is language. But it’s much more complicated than that. Palestinian journalists have a lot of different skills that American journalists may not have to the same extent. One of the things that I want to talk about is the ways in which intellectual labor comes together with embodied labor. They’re integrated in the way that journalists work. So you saw how Mazen Dana and his colleagues manage to hold onto the cameras, as the settlers were attacking them. That’s certainly an embodied labor. They position themselves carefully at demonstrations and funerals, which means for example not only positioning themselves in a way that they can try to stay safe, but also, for example, at funerals, covering a funeral requires a certain kind of a social knowledge and embodiment that for example I would have a lot of trouble carrying out. So, for example, getting really close to the body as the body is being buried, taking pictures of people who are in agony and grieving. So that’s an embodied thing, you have to have the skills to do that and in a way the practice, the social networks.

And then [there are] simple things like scaling piles of dirt to avoid closures, or realizing that yesterday’s rubble is today’s tripod stand. And again, just to underscore the ways in which the intellectual and the embodied are integrated with each other, here’s a journalist [shows slide] being detained by the army, and he’s handcuffed in an awkward way to the jeep. Despite this, Abed Kousini, this is this journalist, managed to call his office, and say “I’m being detained here”, and so on and so forth. Now, him being able to do that, is not that his office is going to send him emergency forces to free him; it’s kind of a performance, like, “I am a journalist. I will get this done by speaking. You may be treating me like a person who can just be handcuffed in an awkward way, and that I’m completely under your control, but actually I have a little bit of power here and I’m going to produce that power by speaking in this particular way.” So he’s performing calmness under pressure.

Other kinds of what I call, skills of proximity: we often think about journalism as being something about disinterestedness and distance, but there’s a kind of complementary set of skills. Those American journalists could have had their disinterest and distance if it weren’t for the Palestinians who have what I call skills of proximity. So of course, speaking the language, knowing the dialect, knowing the terrain, which is no small thing at a time when there are hundreds of barriers to movement and still are in the West Bank but during the second intifada they were shifting so it was really complicated, having connections with Palestinian society, having deep knowledge of history, including all the small political changes in political parties, and so on and so forth that are quite hard to keep track of. Having experiences of different Palestinian cultures, knowing that you’re going to be acting differently and you’re expected to act differently in Ramallah, than you are in Hebron, and in a village differently than another village. Knowing how to establish rapport on the field, and most of these skills knit together intellectual and embodied skills. And something I could talk about more later, if you’re interested, interestingly, these skills of proximity, the skills of being a good journalist are also the skills of being an active participant in public life under military occupation, something I can talk about more, like how do you handle a protest. You use some of these same skills if you are a participant as if you are a journalist.

So you got the sense earlier that Palestinian journalists are not actually able to determine the narratives that are produced from their labor. They provide facts to foreign correspondents. They direct the foreign correspondent in this way or that. Sometimes they do have influence over an American journalist, but it’s not an obvious clear effect. So, if that’s the case, why are they doing this, given that it can cost them their lives? One thing I argue is that Palestinian journalists have what I call an ethics of practice. So even if they don’t get to tell the stories as they would like to do, their work can be meaningful to them because of the process of doing the work itself. Because covering a protest means challenging the occupation with your own body. Traveling around the West Bank means building connections in a time of closure; particularly during the second intifada, for example there are a lot of Palestinian journalists who are citizens of Israel. Most citizens of Israel don’t get to travel around the West Bank for their work, but if you’re a journalist, you do. And I know for those journalists it was very meaningful to them that they knew people in Jenin, in Ramallah, in Nablus, in Hebron, in Bethlehem, because of their work. So building connections itself is a political act, under these conditions. And then also interviewing and visiting people who have suffered, that’s something you do if you are a good civic activist, or a good community member, and if you’re a journalist, you do it too. You might ask different questions, and the visit might go a little differently, but there’s still something important and meaningful to people about that.

The second part of the book is actually about the ways in which U.S. journalism and international journalism in general, and I can talk to you about why that line is a little bit blurry for me in this particular study, how international journalism affects Palestinian politics and society on the ground, and it’s something that I’m going to move through a little bit so that we have time for discussion. Basically there were so many tripods on the ground that people really had a sense of being watched and performing for international news. And also there’s an unusual configuration of the public sphere in the West Bank because for example when Palestinians are protesting against the wall, who are they really protesting for? Israeli authorities have built the wall unilaterally, I mean there have been a few court cases that challenge little pieces of the wall, but it’s not like there’s a large scale process of consultation, obviously. So who are people protesting for? In a sense they’re protesting for domestic audiences because they’re reviving and maintaining a tradition of popular protest; in a sense they’re protesting for international audiences to gain solidarity, and in a sense they’re protesting, I am sure, for Israeli audiences. But I mean this is a very complicated structure, and there’s more to say about that.

So, media play an especially important role because of the complexity of this political situation.  And because of the complexity of the situation, because there are so many people on the ground covering these stories, even before media are published they can have social and political effects, so I talk at length in the book about these two images [shows slide], of protest against the separation wall in Bethlehem.  For the one on the right, why was this poster produced, why was the protest organized as it was, why did the photojournalist take this picture, why did the photojournalist show up at all? These are all interesting questions.   And for this one [slide], why did this young man confront the soldier in this way – I was at both of these protest and was able to talk to people involved with this, so in order to do a long ethnography of these images, they have a long pre-life. It seems that you just take an image in a second, but they have a long pre-life. And then, I looked at the circulation of the images afterwards. In particular, this one [slide], which has actually been this guy’s profile picture on Facebook, and other peoples’ profile pictures on Facebook, when they want to express their solidarity, or affection or whatever for this young man, who was only fifteen when this was taken, but now is much older.

The last thing I want to talk to you about in depth is graffiti on the separation wall, which for me sums up a lot of these ideas, about whose voices we tend to hear in U.S. media and also about the way in which the Israeli military occupation affects Palestinians’ abilities to speak. So I was at this protest at the separation wall in 2004 in Abu Dis, and I got there early, as a good ethnographer will, and the bottom part of the wall had been painted white, as though to clear the path for more graffiti that day. So a little girl of about twelve goes up to the wall and she writes, “children against the wall”. And you can see that several photographers gathered around her to take a picture of her. And for me this was a funny moment, because obviously it’s nice to see people involved with political expression and getting attention for it, but on the other hand there’s something really strange and unrealistic about this. It sounds like an election slogan, “children against the wall” at a time when there are no effective elections. So what does this mean, what does it mean when people write on the wall, and what does it mean when people take pictures of writings on the wall? There were a lot of pictures of graffiti on the wall, around this time.

Here [slide] is one by a really incredible photojournalist named Kevin Frayer also taken from Abu Dis. It says “peace comes from agreement not separation”. If you look at it you notice the handwriting is really clear and calm, the language is very abstract, you can imagine this language working perhaps in other conflicts as well. It’s very abstract, and the picture is made more powerful because you see these people peering from behind the wall. So it’s a very powerful statement. When I saw it though I was sure that this graffito had been written by internationals and not by Palestinians, and thank goodness I was an obsessive photographer at the time of graffiti, because I had in my archives this image or these two images which I put together, “peace comes by agreement, not separation” by Ireland for peace. So indeed, it was written by internationals, and the other interesting thing about this image is you can tell that the wall is not the full eight meter wall; this is the wall that was sort of temporary, the barrier that was temporary before it was built at either fiver or eight meters at this location.  So you can see people are going around it. So the conditions of producing this image, where you can see the people peering through behind, are actually that the wall is not even completed. If the wall were completed, you couldn’t take that image. You couldn’t even say that, Kevin Frayer could not have said this if the wall were complete because they closed the spaces.

And there’s a lot of images of graffiti and murals written by internationals with Palestinians in the foreground. And it’s a very strange thing about voice because you have a Palestinian presence but not a Palestinian voice. And that I think is very significant, again, speaking to the difficulty of Palestinians expressing themselves in the international media, about their own lives and circumstances. So when Palestinians write on the wall, they might write something like this, “Lah badrub il layl en yanjali, lah badrub il qayd en yankasr”, yet this does not make a great picture for international media for two reasons: first of all, it’s in Arabic; and second of all, even if you can read the Arabic and more or less understand it, you may not know that it’s in reference to a very very famous anti-colonial poem by the Tunisian anti-colonial poet Abu Al Kassem el Shaabi. So when Palestinians do write things that are powerful and eloquent on the wall, they require a lot more translation, than some things that internationals would write, [this is] another barrier to expression.

A final barrier is that the wall can’t actually be thought of as a blank slate, because the wall is, in the end, the space of the state. It’s the space of the Israeli military occupation. So, for example, here is a graffito that perhaps says something about stopping injustice, but it was dismantled and re-used as part of a lane marker at a checkpoint. This is the way that it would direct traffic at a checkpoint, to not go from this side to the other. So graffiti can be dismantled on the wall and used for other purposes. So in all of these ways I just want to problematize the relationship between speech and state power. From 1967 to the beginning of the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994, Israel censored every word that was published in the occupied territories, read everything and decided whether or not it could be published, and that system melted away after 1994. And so it seemed in some ways like there was free press, of course the Palestinian Authority also attacked and criticized journalists and censored journalists, but from the Israeli side in some sense it seemed like there was free press. But you see here that because the Israeli military occupation continues there is still a control, there’s still ways in which the Israeli control limits what Palestinians can say, and what others can say. And then you can also see the dynamics between what internationals can say and what Palestinians can say.

So, I’m going to move through that to tell you one more thing, and unfortunately I have another ending point for this talk, today, something which is not in my book. The graffiti stuff is the last bit in my book. This image is taken by Mohamed Al Azza, who is the same photographer who took the picture on the cover of my book that you saw at the very beginning. He’s a 23-year-old photo-journalist, and he also works as a teacher of media production to youth, in Aida refugee camp. This is a photograph that he took that is also in my book. Unfortunately on Monday, last Monday, a week ago, April 8th, he was injured. It was a calm afternoon, and soldiers entered the camp, and he was working at the center, which is right next to the road that that soldiers were coming down. So, really good positioning, for a journalist, and for a photographer to be able to stand up from his desk, walk out the patio, the balcony and start taking pictures, which is what he did. These are some of the pictures he took that day [shows slides]. The soldiers told him to stop taking pictures. And he’s a really smart, funny guy, so he said, “You want me to stop shooting? You guys are the ones that are shooting. I’m just taking pictures.” But, he did go inside. He closed the door, and he just kept enough space open to take pictures. He continued taking pictures; he took this picture, and about ten minutes later, kids had been gathering to protest the Israeli presence in their camps, and this soldier shot him in the face, and shattered his right cheekbone. And he is going to be ok, but he’s had a lot of operations, and he’s obviously got a long path to recovery.

For me, he’s a collaborator and a friend, and this is a strange full-circle moment for this project. One of the first things I did when I found he was injured, I called the Committee to Protect Journalists, I called Reporters without Borders. One feels obviously very helpless in these circumstances. I think also an interesting thing about this story, is Mohamed is doing different work in some ways than Mazen. Mazen was doing work that was seen all around the world on a daily basis through Reuters; Mohamed al Azza, quite young, 23, what he’s been doing over the last six months is photographing a very local uprising in Aida refugee camp, against the wall; this is really brave work, and it’s really important to his community, because they don’t get to see images of their resistance, they don’t get to see what they can do, and he’s been providing people with those images, and that’s very important. And it’s also very important that he teaches youth photography and documentary production. His work is going to be screening next week at the Chicago Palestine film festival, a documentary that he made about water, there’s a severe water crisis in his home community, of Aida refugee camp, has actually mobilized an international movement for environmental justice. So, it just calls attention to me for the different ways in which journalists support their home communities and communities for people all around the world who need to learn about this conflict. So today I’ll leave you with warm wishes for his recovery, and I’m really excited to hear from you, obviously, questions.


Amahl Bishara is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University, where she teaches and conducts research on media, the state, and human rights, especially in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She directed the documentary Degrees of Incarceration (2010), which explores how, with creativity and love, a Palestinian community responds to the crisis of political imprisonment. An earlier documentary, Across Oceans, Among Colleagues, traces the advocacy of the Committee to Protect Journalists for journalists in the Middle East during perilous months of 2001 and 2002. She is currently beginning a research project on the relationship between Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank as they play out in the fields of media, infrastructure, agriculture, and civil society.

This transcript may be used without permission but with proper attribution to The Palestine Center. The speaker’s views do not necessarily reflect the views of The Jerusalem Fund.