Israel's "Mr. Television" Condemns Occupation, Settlements

May 31, 2005
Israel's 'Mr. TV' Faults Settlements in Documentary
By STEVEN ERLANGER

JERUSALEM, May 30 - For nearly 40 years, Haim Yavin has been the calm, objective face of Israeli news, the anchor of Channel 1's broadcast since the founding of Israeli television in 1968.

Now 72, Mr. Yavin, known here as "Mr. TV," is about to deliver a documentary about Israel's settlements in the West Bank that is pessimistic, angry and intensely personal.

"Since 1967, we have been brutal conquerors, occupiers, suppressing another people," he says in the documentary, "Yoman Masa,"' ("Diary of a Journey"), which he filmed by himself, with a hand-held video camera and without a crew, in the West Bank and Gaza Strip over the last two and a half years.

He speaks to settlers, Palestinians and soldiers. While Israel is planning to pull its 9,000 settlers out of Gaza this summer, Mr. Yavin sees no end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, where more than 230,000 Israelis live beyond the 1967 boundary lines, plus 200,000 or so in East Jerusalem, annexed by Israel after that lightning war, in which he fought.

Talking of the missed chances of many governments, both Labor and Likud, to end or reduce the steady occupation of the West Bank, Mr. Yavin says astringently: "This merrymaking will never be stopped."

His own employer, Channel 1 - the state television station - which Mr. Yavin helped to found and where he has also been director of television news, chose early on not to televise the documentary. So Mr. Yavin, who has his own company, sold it to Channel 2, a commercial channel. Its license holder, Telad, has lost the franchise to another group, and beginning Tuesday night, for five weeks, it will run Mr. Yavin's cri de coeur as a kind of goodbye to Israeli television.

In an interview in the dim cafeteria of Channel 1, Mr. Yavin, tall and genial, says he sympathizes with the settlers, but his portrait of them and the security network to protect them is harsh. He describes a Palestinian woman giving birth while waiting at a checkpoint and tells a settler, "It's not Jewish, what we're doing there."

He films a soldier who complains that the settlers keep pressing him to shoot Palestinian children. When a settler tells him that if the army can keep the peace, "Muhammad" will make the Israelis coffee, Mr. Yavin retorts, "I'm not willing to rule another people, not willing for 'Muhammad' to make me coffee."

The more he traveled, the more obsessed he became, he said, with the cycle of "occupation, settlements and this terrible terrorism of the Palestinians, which no explanation can condone and which harms themselves, their cause and the Israelis."

"I call it a Greek tragedy, because I don't see any solution," he said. "The settlers are so strong. In a way, they run the country, or run the agenda of the country."

"I don't see anyone undoing what they've done" in combination with Israeli governments, he continued, which is "an annexation of land that goes against a viable state for the Palestinians."

Asked about government involvement, he said: "A settler said to me, 'What do you think? That we had the money to do this ourselves?' "

Much of the world regards Israel's settlements and annexation of East Jerusalem as illegal. Mr. Yavin says many Israelis admire the settlers as real Zionists and pioneers in a soft age. "I also have sympathy for them," he said. "They are idealists. But they are wrong, and they are endangering us."

Mr. Yavin has been criticized for making such a personal film and yet continuing to anchor the nightly news. "There's already a tumult about it," he said. "But I have my answer. I reject being personal when you report the news. But a personal travelogue is transparent and is a different matter."

Mr. Yavin, who worked in Washington, remembers the impact of the CBS anchor Walter Cronkite, who visited Vietnam after the Tet offensive in 1968 to make a special report and judged that the United States was failing in the war. "We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds,"' he said, adding famously, "We are mired in stalemate." President Lyndon B. Johnson told aides, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America." Five weeks later, Mr. Johnson said he would not seek re-election.

Mr. Yavin says that he has no such intent and that the conflict is entirely different. "Don't compare me!" he said, laughing. "This will not have such strong repercussions."

"Who am I?" he asked. "I don't think I can move things. I don't pretend to have solutions. It takes more than another book or film or series to make this change. You need something more cataclysmic. I hate to say 'Yom Kippur' " - the surprise attack by Arab armies against Israel in 1973 - "but some trauma to hammer this into the minds of people, to gather ourselves and take ourselves in our own hands and decide the boundaries of Israeli power."

With the Gaza pullout, he feels some change in the air. But he is not optimistic. "If the Israeli citizen knows he'll really get peace with the Palestinians - like the U.S. and Canada - he'd give up half of Jerusalem," he said. "But there is such an abyss between Israelis and Palestinians, and this distrust is so big, on both sides." Mr. Yavin trailed off, then asked, "Is Israel really and sincerely doing its best to compromise?"

Then he said, "I'm not sure any power on earth can move a people to give any land to your enemy, one that really wants to harm you."