(h/t Instapundit)
On Friday afternoon in Manar Square, for example, I ran into Ohad Hemo, an acquaintance who covers Palestinian affairs for Israel’s Channel 1 news. By then there was finally some media-worthy action. A few dozen Fatah-aligned fighters had shown up in the square, most traveling on the back of pick up trucks. They wore combat-style uniforms, although some wore street shoes instead of army boots. Their faces were covered in ski masks and they brandished weapons in what the Times called a “a show of force by Fatah.” That sounds very dramatic, of course, but the reality was not very impressive: again, I felt as though I were watching a parody of machismo that seemed a bit silly, if not comic.
Other than stare into the camera and pose, the fighters didn’t do anything at all. It was all pure theatre: I listened and watched as the various foreign television reporters positioned themselves in front of the masked gunmen and spoke seriously to the cameras about the rising tension in Ramallah, trying their best to make it sound as if they were in the middle of a war zone. But if their cameramen had panned out for a wider shot they would have shown crowds of mostly young men hanging around, eating snacks, buying cold drinks from vendors, and taking photos with their mobile phones. There was no sense of fear or menace at all. I even saw one photojournalist, who works for an American newspaper, giggling a bit as she aimed her camera at a masked fighter who was posing as if he were having his portrait painted, his eyes stonily focused on the horizon.If those cameramen had panned out for a wider shot, they might even have seen me and Ohad speaking to one another in Hebrew. Or better yet, they might have caught a rather amusing exchange between Ohad and a middle aged local Palestinian man. Hearing Ohad speaking Hebrew, he walked over, extended his hand with a friendly smile, and said in fluent Hebrew with an Arabic accent, “So, how are things in Israel? What are they saying about us over there?” Ohad switched to Arabic, which he speaks fluently, and told the man that the Israeli media was already referring to Gaza as Hamastan, and to the West Bank as Fatahland. They continued chatting in this vein for another minute or two, and then parted with another friendly handshake.