Mick Hartley

Historian Richard Landes’ new website The Second Draft is now up and running (via Solomonia). One of the topics he covers is what he terms “Pallywood”: the way the Palestinians stage scenes for the benefit of Western media. Here Landes describes a visit to Charles Enderlin’s France2 studios in Jerusalem in October 2003, viewing some footage from Talal abu Rachmeh (the man responsible for the infamous Muhammad al-Dura pictures):

At one point, some youth are evacuating a “wounded” comrade, when one of them sees another ambulance with more cameramen. He put the wounded boy in a headlock and yanked him over to the other ambulance, dragging the other “evacuators” with him. The experience of watching Talal’s work was literally surreal, Alice in Wonderland. I was astonished. It gave me information vertigo. What was going on?

At another point, a boy faked a leg injury, but instead of drawing big kids who could pick him up and rush him past the cameramen to an ambulance, he only attracted little kids. He shooed them away, looked around, and, seeing that no one was coming to evacuate him, straightened up and walked away without a limp. An Israeli cameraman working for France2 who was watching the film with me and Enderlin at the time, laughed at this point. When I asked him why, he said, “because it looks so fake.” “That’s my impression as well,” I responded. Enderlin responded, “Oh, they do that all the time. It’s their cultural style. They exaggerate.”

When I walked out of the office, I was in shock. They do this all the time!?! It’s their cultural style? Enderlin’s condescending “orientalism” really disguised an information catastrophe. The joke was on us all – the responsible media, the trusting public, the “scoop”-hungry journalists who rummaged through these cheap scenes, looking for something they could use in the evening’s broadcast. That’s when the term Pallywood first occurred to me.