Book Excerpt: A Photojournalist’s Chronicles In Ursula Janssen’s ‘Eyewitnessed’

“If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug around a camera.”

—Lewis Hine (1874-1940)

The Middle East, 1994: The Oslo peace process for the Middle East finally led to the signature of various peace treaties, including the Gaza-Jericho agreement that was signed in Cairo by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat in May 1994. It promised autonomy to Palestinians as well as Arafat’s return from exile to Palestine. All parties involved showed great enthusiasm for the progress they’d achieved. Arafat was planning his return after 27 years in exile. But no one informed the press how and where exactly this trip was going to take place. Would he arrive in Gaza or the West Bank? Travel overland or by airplane? Only the night before the event did information leak that Arafat was going to travel by land from Egypt to Gaza. Together with hundreds of other photographers and camera-people, among them his friends and colleagues Alfred Yahgobzadeh and Alexandra Avakian, Manoocher rushed to Gaza. They arrived early in the morning to Rafah, the border crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip. A platform had been erected in what looked like the middle of nowhere, and hundreds of chairs arranged in front of it. It was already awfully hot. Due to the many people who came to see Arafat’s arrival, it was extremely dusty as well. People had come from all over the Gaza Strip, some on horse carts, riding on donkeys, or even on foot. The site slowly filled with spectators and the heat got more and more scorching. Some of the photographers had organized hydraulic ramps, which gave them a better view over the otherwise completely flat plain. Nobody had a clue when Arafat was supposed to arrive. So they waited. At least they had brought enough water, even if it had almost reached the temperature of hot tea. All of a sudden, in the far distance, a cloud of dust materialized and quickly approached them along the road. Shortly after, they could hear the sound of the motorcade. Hundreds and hundreds of people simultaneously jumped from their seats or off the ground where they had been sitting. Chairs fell, were carelessly kicked aside to create a passage, because now everyone was running towards the border crossing where the motorcade had come to a halt. Manoocher and Alfred, though, stayed where they had been. Manoocher held on to his chair with one hand so that it wouldn’t be carried away by the crowd. When the site had emptied, he climbed onto his chair to get a better view. But he couldn’t see a thing apart from a crowd in a dust cloud, not even with his 300 mm telephoto lens. Or could he? What was that? Something was moving amidst the throng. For a brief moment, Arafat was lifted up, protruding above the surging crowd and stretching his right arm up in a greeting. People around him cheered and formed the sign of victory with their outstretched hands. All of this hadn’t taken longer than a few seconds before Arafat vanished again. Manoocher managed to take exactly one frame, but it was a perfect one. A moment later, a new surge of people threw down his chair and, with it, him to the ground. It didn’t matter— he had his picture. Hastily he rushed to one of the motorcyclists who were waiting at several strategic points, hired by the agency to bring exposed film rolls to the AFP office in Gaza as swiftly as possible. He took the film from the camera, placed it inside an envelope and, with a black felt pen, wrote URGENT onto it. The motorcycle courier took it and, with a quick nod, speeded off. Manoocher returned to the convoy to take more photos until it was almost noon, when Arafat drove on towards Gaza City and the heat had become unbearable anyways.

Around 1 pm he arrived at the office, overheated, sweaty, dusty, and thirsty. He washed his face in the bathroom and quenched his thirst with cool water. Then he sat down at a free computer and logged into the image database to see how his photo of Arafat had turned out. He scrolled down the page— there were dozens of photos of waiting Palestinians, hands stretched high or men in uniform. But none in which Arafat could be recognized. He got up in astonishment. Hopefully nothing had happened to the motorcyclist! He approached the photo editor on duty.

“Salut Patrick! Have you seen my photo of Arafat? I told the courier it was really important. What happened?”

Patrick lifted his hand a few inches in a symbolic greeting and looked around his own desk. “Don’t know, I’ll have to check,” he said, rummaged around his papers.

Manoocher discovered the envelope first. “Here it is. It’s the one with URGENT written on it.”

“Oh, that one!” Patrick made a markedly casual gesture. “I wanted to look at it last.”

Before Patrick could say anything else or take the envelope, Manoocher grabbed it and took it to the agency lab, where he developed the photo himself, digitized it, and entered it into the database. Shortly after 2 pm, the photo was finally online, and Manoocher ready for a lunch break. The next morning, the image of Arafat above the crowd had made the covers of many papers worldwide.

With all the exciting developments in the Holy Land, his employer asked him to move from Cairo to Jerusalem and to take the post of chief photographer there. Why not? Jerusalem was certainly less noisy and tidier than Cairo. And so unbelievably charged with history.

He spent his first nights in Jerusalem, before finding more permanent accommodation, in the American Colony Hotel in Eastern Jerusalem, the time-honored Ottoman palace of a pasha that had been converted into a hotel at the beginning of the 20th century by the actor Peter Ustinov’s grandfather. Another advantage was that the hotel was situated directly at the ceasefire line and, since its foundation, had been considered a neutral place.

Having just arrived from Cairo, Manoocher looked around the dignified place in amazement. After storing his luggage at the hotel, he went for a long walk through the city, had a light dinner in the hotel’s beautiful palm garden, and went to bed early. He was still lying in bed when, shortly after sunrise, a bang caused the old windows in their leadings to rattle. He got up, quickly dressed, grabbed his photo bag, and rushed to the lobby. “Good morning!” he said to the receptionist. “Do you have any idea what that bang was about? It sounded like an explosion.”

“Good morning! Yes, indeed. I heard that the explosion took place in Bar Ilan, in the ultra-orthodox Jewish neighborhood.”

“Which is in what direction?”

The receptionist pointed in the approximate direction, about northwest. “You’re a journalist, aren’t you? Shall I call you a taxi?”

“No, thank you, my office has provided me with a rental car.”

“Good luck, sir!”

He got into the small and maneuverable car and started the engine. From the small side road, he turned north onto Nablus Road. And now? He saw a group of police cars with blue lights switched on cutting their way through the traffic. If there really had been an explosion, they would be heading in the same direction. He followed them into the street they had turned into. From here they went straight on, towards the increasing noise, until they arrived at a roadblock. The police cars were let through, but a policeman stopped Manoocher.

“You can’t proceed here, the road is blocked,” the policeman said through the open window.

“I’m a journalist.”

“You’ll still have to leave your car here. You can walk in on foot if you like.”

He found a place to parking, left the car there, took his camera bag, and walked towards the direction of the sirens.

As he got closer, a gruesome picture of destruction unfolded: a burning bus, completely torn apart, stood across the street lanes. There was smoke and blood everywhere. Dead and injured people lay in the street, or sometimes only body parts— an arm here, a leg there, and over there something thankfully unidentifiable. A suicide bomber had blown himself up in a fully occupied bus during the morning rush hour, when everyone was on their way to work or school.

Somebody addressed him from behind: “Manoocher!”

He turned around. It was Jim Hollander, his Israeli colleague and old friend from other assignments. “Jim, man, what a morning!” He pointed at the bloody scene surrounding them.

“Welcome to Jerusalem!” Jim said sarcastically.

During the coming weeks and months, Manoocher did a lot of walking through Jerusalem and also visited the West Bank and the Gaza Strip regularly to photograph the transition to Palestinian autonomy. The newly founded Palestinian police force was simply terrible. Trained mainly in Syria, Jordan, and Iraq, they had no concept of human rights or even press freedom. They simply hated journalists. Once in a while they tried to arrest photographers, including Manoocher, for shooting pictures but eventually had to release them against their will because the photographers hadn’t violated any laws.

The Israeli army’s treatment of Palestinians, for example at checkpoints, was bad; worse were the Jewish settlers who felled and burned the olive trees of Palestinian farmers to destroy their livelihoods. But worst of all, Manoocher found, was the way Palestinians were treated by their own administration. Corruption and injustice were the order of the day. The average inhabitant of the West Bank or the Gaza Strip was treated badly from all directions. Within just a few years all the members of Yasser Arafat’s inner circle— from drivers and bodyguards to secretaries— had become millionaires.

Despite his Iranian passport Manoocher had no problems with the Israeli authorities. On the contrary, he was the only one among his colleagues who got waved through at the security questioning at the airport, and didn’t have to wait, probably because he had already been checked out in detail by the secret service. He wasn’t the only Iranian in Israel, but he was probably the only non-Jewish one. Jerusalem had a big Iranian-Jewish community. Manoocher spoke Persian with the shopkeepers on Ben Yehuda Street and they chatted in the teahouse about their old home country. Soon he was invited into their family homes on Shabbat, where he too wore a kippah on his head, and where he would get a good Iranian meal. All the Iranians he got to know were wishing for a speedy return to their home country, after the hopefully imminent end of the mullah regime.

He walked a lot through Jerusalem’s Old City, which is unbelievably photogenic and offers plenty of opportunities to take photos. He used to regularly meet, for example, King David, singing and wandering the streets in a long gown, a spiked crown on his head and holding a lyre. The man was a patient of a local sanatorium that specialized in the religious delusions of people regarding themselves as biblical personalities— the so-called Jerusalem syndrome. According to rumor, at one point they had accommodated three Jesuses at the same time, each of them claiming to be the true Messiah and accusing the others of being impostors. Moses, John the Baptist, Saint Peter, and the Virgin Mary were quite popular, too. Not surprising in a city that was so deeply religiously and emotionally charged, and that attracted visitors from all over the world, many of whom were traveling abroad for the first time in their lives. The only real problem was that the three religions present in the city are apparently unable to live alongside each other peacefully and eventually clash, over and over again.

(...)

And then the great dream of peace burst like a bubble. A Swedish AFP photographer called Sven Nackstrand had been sent to a big peace rally in the Kings of Israel Square in Tel Aviv. In the late afternoon, he called Manoocher at his office in Jerusalem. “I took a few photos, but I don’t think anything else is going to happen here,” he said. “Rabin is holding a speech and that’s it. I’d better get back and get the photos online.”

“Okay, Sven, see you later.” And he hung up.

Only five minutes later, the phone rang once more. It was Sven again. “I just heard somebody took a shot at Rabin. I’d just left, and now I’m on my way back.”

“Okay, I’m coming as well.”

The moment he hung up, the phone rang again. The caller had the same message: someone had shot Rabin. After that, the phone didn’t stop ringing. Manoocher took a car and drove to Tel Aviv like a madman. He arrived within a half hour— normally he needed twice that much time.

In the Kings of Israel Square, where the shots had been fired, people gathered, cried, held each other, or lit candles. At this point, nobody knew what had become of Yitzhak Rabin yet. Everybody hoped he would make it. The gunman’s identity was already known though: Yigal Amir, a student and a right-wing extremist who refused peace with the Palestinians and wanted to eliminate the peacemaker Rabin, who was in his eyes a traitor. As they would soon find out, he had succeeded in his plans. Rabin died in the hospital shortly after the deed. The consequences for the peace process were, as the world soon would find out—dramatic.

The Sniper

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.“ Rumi (1207–1273)

Ramallah and Paris, 1996-99

Manoocher was in Cairo when the news came out from Jerusalem: the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had opened the highly controversial tunnel along the Western Wall of the Temple Mount to the public, and thus set a powder keg on fire. The Palestinians feared that the Dome of the Rocks would be undermined in the true sense of the word. The atmosphere was already toxic due to the tardy implementation of the peace accords, and so, on September 24th, 1996, a Palestinian insurrection broke out, leading to the first clashes between the newly founded Palestinian security forces and the Israeli army. Manoocher took the next flight from Cairo to Tel Aviv and, from there, drove to the office in Jerusalem. By the second day, the riots had extended to the Gaza Strip and the whole West Bank, and several Palestinians had been shot dead. Manoocher decided to photograph the unrest in nearby Ramallah. He left Jerusalem early in the morning on September 26th. A few miles before Ramallah, he found himself standing in line at an Israeli checkpoint. Most cars were being sent back and turned around towards Jerusalem.

“You cannot continue here, sir. There are security issues, please turn around.” The young, heavily armed soldier slickly rattled off his sentence while his comrades looked around attentively. Manoocher observed other Israeli soldiers in the background heaving boxes with heavy ammunition onto a truck. That was rather unusual and a sign of a real escalation of violence.

“That’s why I want to drive to Ramallah,” he replied and held up his press card. “I’m a journalist,” he explained.

The young man took the ID and studied it carefully. “Alright, sir, but you have to leave the car here nonetheless.” “But it’s still several miles to Ramallah, couldn’t you...?”

“No, I can’t. You can park over there. You should make it to Ramallah in about one hour.” With his hand, which had been resting on his gun the whole time, he pointed to a site where several cars were already parked. With those words, the conversation was over.

Manoocher sighed and parked his car as ordered, took his camera backpack, and started walking. It was still quite early in the morning and the late summer heat hadn’t become unbearable yet. As he walked, the development became more urban, but the houses remained comparably humble. The closer he came to town, the clearer it became that Ramallah was in a state of emergency. Many shopkeepers had their shops blocked up. He had a quick coffee standing up in one of the few cafés that had nevertheless remained open. A few elderly men were sitting on chairs in front of the café, hav ing a heated debate. He greeted them as he passed and continued on, following the noise. All of a sudden, he found himself in the thick of the action. He recognized some colleagues who had arrived before him and were now waiting for things to come, hiding away behind a wall, just in case. He joined them, waved hello to his friend Jim and looked around. At this moment, a heated discussion was taking place between some young men in civilian clothes and the Palestinian security forces. Apparently, the civilians were trying to convince the policemen to join the insurgency and shoot at the Israeli troops standing within sight. They were undecided, but when a young stone-throwing demonstrator was hit by a bullet and slumped to the ground, the situation suddenly escalated. Palestinian police forces were shooting at the Israeli army, only two years after the autonomy accord! Naturally, the Israelis intensified their fire as well, result-ing in a street battle. Whoever was able to took immediate shelter. One Palestinian ran in the direction of the wall behind which some of the photographers and cameramen, among them Manoocher, were seeking shelter, but he didn’t make it. Just before reaching the wall, he was hit by a bullet and collapsed to the ground. Apparently, there were snipers shooting from the surrounding houses. Manoocher impetuously took a step forward towards the man— and fell to the ground himself. He looked around in astonishment. Why was he lying on the ground? He didn’t feel any pain. He had tilted for ward and absorbed his fall with his forearms. He looked at his hands and arms— apart from some abrasions, there was nothing to be seen. He rolled onto his side and looked at his right leg: raw shreds of flesh, bone splinters and blood— lots of blood. His mind was in a haze; as though in a dream, he looked at the gaping wound. “I have to take a picture” was his first thought. He twisted the telephoto lens off his camera to change it to a wide-angle lens. In that moment, though, the pain kicked in and his strength abandoned him. The lens fell from his hand and rolled across the ground.

A group of young Palestinians lifted him up in all haste and rather roughly— they were still under fire— and tossed him onto the back seat of a minibus. The pain had become so unbearable that Manoocher was repeatedly fainting. Later, he would only remember fragments of the hours that followed. The minibus brought him to the hospital in Ramallah. It was horrendous. The floor was a giant puddle of blood, people were walking in blood, hundreds of injured lay on the bloody ground. Manoocher’s blood mingled with that of the many other wounded. His huge wound would not stop bleeding; his leg must have been hit by an expanding projectile, and it was clear that at least one of his arteries was shredded. Someone gave him a blood infusion, then he fainted again.

He awoke in a room with several other people. His leg was now in a cast but there was still blood oozing from it. Which idiot had put a plaster cast around an open wound? He called for a doctor, straining to be heard over the other patients’ shouts. Finally, an obviously harried physician appeared. He looked exhausted but got visibly angry when he saw the blood leaking from the cast. Grumbling and swearing, he advised an assistant to remove the cast immediately. Shaking his head, he inspected the wound re-emerging underneath.

“The bone is dashed to shivers, half the leg shredded, all we can do is amputate,” he said. Manoocher fainted again.

When he woke up the next time, he was being rolled in a stretcher to the operating room to have his leg amputated. Now his spirits revived. “No, no, don’t amputate,” he resisted, “let me go! Bring me to another hospital, bring me to Jerusalem, but leave my leg!”

Which was— fortunately— exactly the moment when AFP photographer Osama Silwadi found him. He had been sent to look for him because the agency had organized an ambulance to bring him to Jerusalem. He had arrived just in time.

The ambulance drove with its siren wailing and blue light flashing through the streets. All of a sudden there was a bang, then another, and again another. The two paramedics ducked down on the floor and kept their heads down. Above the stretcher three bullet holes gaped in the side panel. They could hear loud swearing from the driver’s cabin, then the driver jerked the wheel violently and the ambulance headed back in the direction from which it had come.

“What’s going on?” Manoocher asked faintly.

“The Israelis shot at us. They don’t want to let the ambulance pass.”

In the meantime, the phone lines were ablaze to make the emergency transfer happen. Osama called the office in Jerusalem, from where Luc called the French embassy, which in turn prompted the respective Israeli authorities to let the ambulance pass. Finally, they gave their authorization and the ambulance could get through unhindered to the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. Manoocher just managed to see the sign at the hospital entrance before he blacked out again.

When awakening this time, Marie, his colleague Luc’s wife, sat at his bedside. His first words were, “I’m alive, I’m alive!”

The operation had taken almost eight hours and miraculously saved his leg. One of the best Israeli surgeons, Dr. Moshayev, a master of his trade and therefore also surgeon of the Israeli national soccer team, had reassembled his leg from other body parts: a bit from the hip bone, a muscle from here, a little skin from there, all held together by an external metal fixation.

Thus saved from amputation, Manoocher studied his patched-up leg with a mixture of fascination and horror. When the surgeon visited the next day, his reaction was more straightforward: “It is beautiful!” he exclaimed, admiring his own work.

“How long will the healing process take, approximately?” Manoocher asked him.

“Oh, about a month,” he replied, obviously striving at optimism. (...)

He ended up staying about a year at the Hôpital des Invalides before finally being able to leave the hospital. But he was still on crutches. In the last weeks of his stay at the clinic, he had been talking a lot with a World War II veteran.

“I’m going to Germany again next month to meet my good friend Ernst,” he said. “We meet every year, you know, once in Germany and once in France. And in between we write letters.”

“How did you get to know each other?”

“At a veteran meeting. We compared our former positions and emplacements and it turned out that he must have been the one who shot me all that time ago. We became best friends.”

So Manoocher decided to return to Israel to find the soldier who had shot him. In collaboration with an American documentary filmmaker, Ana, he departed to find the sniper and make a documentary about his quest for truth and reconciliation. Shooters was the title they had planned for the film, referring to the sniper and the photographer whose stories the documentary would tell. The quest took two months, in which several witnesses confirmed that the shot must have come from a building about 500 yards away. No, not the shot, in fact, the shots. Several reporters were deliberately shot that day, and one Palestinian cameraman even died.

With their camera team they visited the Hadassah hospital, interviewed some of the physicians and nurses who had been on duty at the time, and even re-enacted some scenes.

In the beginning, the Israeli army appeared cooperative. They drew up a map showing the emplacements of the different parties and military divisions that day. An officer even showed him the house that had served as the position for Israeli military snipers that day.

The army spokesman emphasized during an interview: “We do not shoot at journalists.”

Manoocher took out a list he was carrying on him. “Look here, these are the names of journalists that were shot at by the army that day.”

The spokesman took the list and scanned the names. “These are not journalists, they are all Palestinian names.” He looked at Manoocher. “And you look like a Palestinian, too.”

After tedious research and many negotiations, they managed to arrange a meeting with the presumed sniper. Allegedly he was a member of the secretive Duvdevan Special Forces, an Israeli elite unit specialized in urban warfare. Neverthe- less, the sniper had agreed, via a contact man, to meet Manoocher and Ana in a café. One hour before the meeting was scheduled, just as Manoocher was about to leave the house, his phone rang. The caller identified himself as a spokesman of the Israeli army.

“Mr. Deghati, I hear you have arranged a meeting with one of our special forces.” “That is correct.”

“It won’t take place.”

“What do you mean, it won’t take place? The man has agreed to meet me.”

“He has changed his mind.”

“Okay. Can I interview you instead? Maybe we can meet later?”

“I have to decline that, too. We have been very helpful so far, as you can surely confirm, but now you are going too far. We won’t allow putting one of our people at risk for being sued. As you know, we don’t shoot at journalists. Your mission is over, and you don’t have any business here anymore. Good evening.”

And with these words, he hung up. I must have stirred up a hornets’ nest, Manoocher thought.

Shortly after, he received a call from Ana. “Manoocher, we have to stop this project. I’m leaving tomorrow.”

“Listen, let’s not be rash. They called me, too. It’s just a cancelled meeting, but we still have enough film material and witness statements to make a solid documentary. Maybe I’ll try again via that contact man to get to the sniper. I’m sure we’ll be able to arrange something.”

“You’ll have to do it without me, then. I’m leaving tomorrow!”

“You’re going overboard about this. Okay, we can take a break, have a look at the material we have so far. Then you cut the film and we see what is still missing. Alright?”

“Nothing is alright!”

The next day, she left. Shooters were never produced.

(Excerpted with permission from Ursula Janssen)