Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 1997, p. 77
Human Rights
DAOUD KUTTAB, often referred to as the “dean of Palestinian journalists,” and currently the director of the Institute of Modern Media at Al-Quds University, filled the Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine lecture room to capacity on Aug. 22, speaking about his arrest, the state of Palestinian TV and radio, and the effects of the August suicide bombings on the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC).
The Oslo accords allowed the Palestinian Authority (PA) only one radio and one TV station. But according to Kuttab, the PA itself did nothing to halt the proliferation of private and pirate stations in the West Bank and Gaza, assuming that “safety in numbers” would make them hard for the Israelis to shut down.
Currently, 19 TV stations and four radio stations play important roles in West Bank political and social life. Kuttab said the radio stations have wildly popular call-in shows which encourage open discussion of pressing social issues. Local politicians vie to be on these stations, said Kuttab, because it gives them a chance to raise their profiles and lets them communicate with constituents. For this reason, local politicians support the radio stations, and because their broadcasts are centrist in nature, the stations are politically acceptable to the PA.
In an effort to increase legislators’ accountability to voters, Kuttab and his colleagues at Al-Quds Educational Television began transmitting live broadcasts of PLC sessions. “It was important to broadcast them live,” explained Kuttab, “because then they couldn’t be edited for political purposes.” Although some legislators were at first wary of the coverage, the broadcasts became extremely popular. The fact that the public was watching their every vote also improved the performance of some council members.
Nonetheless, Kuttab soon found that his broadcasts were being jammed by the PA-run Palestine TV. To circumvent this, he and colleagues taped and made multiple copies of the sessions so that individual legislators could deliver the tapes to their local stations. It was broadcasts of the May 20 proceedings, however, that landed him in jail.
On that day, the PLC released a report charging senior PLC members with corruption and nepotism, and every Palestinian soon knew about it because of Kuttab’s tapes. Due to an international outcry, however, Kuttab was detained for only one week. “Energy on the ground, pushing for my release, created a dynamic that couldn’t be stopped,” he said. The PLC even called a special meeting to discuss his arrest, and later issued a law permitting his broadcasts and establishing a Palestinian FCC.
The July 30 suicide bombings in West Jerusalem’s Menahe Yehuda market put an end, for the time being, to public pressure on Yasser Arafat to clean out his cabinet. Palestinians closed ranks in the face of Israeli closures and mass arrests.
“Rabin was bad, but Netanyahu searched the book for new ways to hurt the Palestinian people,” said Kuttab. “Even though there was no proof that the bombers came from areas under PA jurisdiction, Israel held two million people hostage to Netanyahu’s demands.”
Interestingly, one of those demands was for Arafat to arrest and detain Hamas members and other militant Palestinians and close down their institutions. Kuttab said he has a hard time understanding the Israeli logic—supported by the U.S.—that “so many of the same people who worked to get me released from jail then wanted Arafat to arrest hundreds of others for no reason.” Because of such volatility and unpredictability in the West Bank and Gaza, said Kuttab, Palestinian radio and television stations will remain a vital link between Palestinians, their government, and the world.
—John Vandenberg
