THE VOICE OF PALESTINE

by Arlynn Nellhaus

The Western Wall of the Second Temple beneath the Al Aksa Mosque (from the Municipality of Jerusalem website)

The Voice of Palestine has a different tone these days. Since the violence began between Palestinians and Israelis more than a month ago, Palestinian radio and television has a new goal, according to a media authority, and that is to keep the population stirred up.

Michael Widlanski, who is writing his Ph.D. dissertation on Palestinian media, is a fluent Arabic speaker and a former journalist. He has been listening to the VOP for years, but now spends 12 hours a day monitoring it.

Until a month ago, VOP radio started each broadcast with an announcement concerning Palestinian authority President Yasser Arafat's activities. The goal was to preserve Arafat's power, but now the goal is more than that, said Widlanski, speaking at a Jerusalem forum on the VOP.

Now "the broadcasts are a mobilization device, and not only to keep Arafat in power, " the American-Israeli said. "Arafat, who controls the VOP, thinks the most popular thing he can do on radio now is to lead in with the number of `martyrs,' buried and wounded."

After a young Palestinian blew himself up on October 26 in a failed attempt against Israeli lives, VOP broadcast a song in which a father sings of his son's sacrifice and of his son as a martyr.

"You have to conclude," said Widlanski, "that the Palestinian Authority is encouraging martyrs." He called the song a subtle call to violence. "When Arafat gets on the radio, he says, `We are moving toward Jerusalem and full return of the refugees," Widlanski said. "The song leading into his speech says, `Let's to Jaffa, Haifa and Galilee.'

"The message isn't `We want 90 percent of the West Bank,' but, `We want it all and there is no room here for both Jews and Arabs.'" Widlanski said that until this change, if someone on VOP referred to Israelis as Jews, he was off the air for a while. Now, that is the usual term for Israelis.

"Israel is increasingly referred to by top PA officials as the `Zionist enemy' or simply, `the enemy,' he said. "(Israeli Prime Minister) Ehud Barak is called, `the criminal.'"

Widlanski, who studied at the American University in Cairo, said Arafat became the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization precisely because of his expertise in using the news media.

Widlanski related that in 1996, three years after the Oslo Accords, when the Israelis announced plans to open the Western Wall Tunnel, next to, but not under the Temple Mount on which Moslems built the Al Aksa Mosque, Arafat spread a murderous rumor.

He said "that Israel would attack the Temple Mount and build a third Temple. The result was tremendous riots, in which at least 70 people were killed, 15 of them Israelis."

Widlanski said that more and more the VOP tone is "Islamic," and Arafat is copying other Arab leaders who have used Islam as "a rallying cry. Whenever Arafat thinks he's in trouble with his constituents, he stirs things up."

Widlanski doesn't believe the VOP can be heard in Egypt or Jordan. "The leaders would be terrified of the message," he said, "because when the street becomes stirred up, you never know where it will end."

After two Israeli reserve soldiers who mistakenly drove into Ramallah were gruesomely murdered by a Palestinian mob in October, the VOP said nothing for hours. Then it claimed that these men, who were wearing IDF uniforms, were "settlers pretending to be Arabs," Widlanski said.

"Later, the VOP described the event as a deliberate provocation by Israelis, as if Israel deliberately sent these two men to die. When Israelis are murdered, either it isn't reported or reported passively like `a guard was shot.' Who did it? Who knows."

So who's paying attention to the Palestinian media? Surprisingly, not the Israeli government. When Arafat, after the Oslo Accords with Israel, called for jihad in a Johannesburg mosque, then Foreign Minister Shimon Peres called the tape a forgery.

Monitors then switched to video, but they, too were called forgeries by Peres and Itamar Rabinovitch, then ambassador to the United States. Widlanski said that when he worked as a journalist, he rarely could get information about the VOP aired, even in Israel.

As for the United States, he said it takes about three months for information from the American Embassy in Israel to reach the State Department, and there are few Americans who know Arabic well. The US State Department isn't interested, according to David Bedein, chief of Israel Resource News Agency, which sponsored the form. He said that information used during a Washington conference for Congress on what Palestinians are saying to Palestinians, sponsored by a private Jewish group, never reached the general press.

"The State Department quashed it," Bedein said. "The only reports on the event appeared in the Jewish press.

"Meanwhile, Edward Abbingdon, the former American consular in Jerusalem, now is a PLO employee in Washington. He sends out daily information to Congress and Jewish organizations that says the Palestinian media is peaceful and that the Palestinian schools teach peace. Neither of which is true."

Arlynn Nellhaus is a former Denver Post reporter now based in Jerusalem and the author of Into the Heart of Jerusalem.