My First Flak Jacket & Other Stories from Israel

I was in Israel for a month, shooting my documentary about AP photographers called “Deadline Every Second.”

The first morning I walked into the AP office in Jerusalem, the staff outfitted me with a bullet proof flax-jacket, weighing 16 pounds, a steel helmet, a portable telephone and sent me off to document Pulitzer prize-winning AP photographer Oded Balilty covering the "Day of Rage."

I later found out that protective gear comes in two sizes -- “heavy” for war wear and “light” for clash wear. Unfortunately, AP was out of the “light” at the moment.

The uprising, which was called by Hamas, involved "riots" or "clashes," depending on your politics, between young, rock-throwing, tire-burning Palestinians and Israeli police shooting tear gas, stun guns and rubber bullets. The police also used dogs to chase down rioters. The one place you don't want get caught is between the two groups. Especially when police unleashed the dogs who go after the protesters. The dogs, however, cannot distinguish protesters from journalists. The clashes alternated between the masked teenagers, using an overturned garbage container for protection, advancing on the police by throwing stones or using sling-shots to launch stones, and the police repeling the youth with canisters of tear gas and loud stun guns.

The sound of the stun guns made me think I was in the middle of a war. To add to the overall auditory illusion, the Palestinian youth were firing a series of firecrackers. As soon as the tear gas went off, all the kids ran up the hill with me huffing and puffing behind. AP was fresh out of extra gas masks for visiting photojournalists the day I arrived, so I was left to cough, cry, run away from the cloud of gas. Wearing his gas mask, Balility stayed in the thick of the action when the tear gas exploded, as I made a hasty retreat up the hill and shot the action with a long lens.

Two photojournalists were injured during the day at the clash I covered by Israeli police bullets and tear gas canisters. The Reuters bureau photographer wound up with shrapnel in his leg and the AFP (Agency France Press) photographer was shot in the wrist with a rubber bullet. I did not get hit with anything more than tear gas....

Read the whole story of my month in Israel shooting video of AP photographers in action for my documentary "Deadline Every Second" here.

Photos by Oded Balilty.

If Journalists Were Replaced by Poets...

Imagine if the New York Times replaced its staff reporters with accomplished novelists and poets -- if even for just one day. How would the selection of stories, and the way they are told, differ from what is normally reported?

Israel's oldest newspaper, Haaretz, arguably that country's equivalent of the New York Times, did exactly that. For one day last week, they sent their staff home and recruited 31 of the nation's leading fiction writers to tell the truth.

If you don't read Hebrew, you can read more about the charming and whimsical results here and here.

The day's economic news was put in the hands of a children's book author:

“Everything’s okay. Everything’s like usual. Yesterday trading ended. Everything’s okay. The economists went to their homes, the laundry is drying on the lines, dinners are waiting in place… Dow Jones traded steadily and closed with 8,761 points, Nasdaq added 0.9% to a level of 1,860 points ... The guy from the shakshuka [a popular Middle-Eastern egg and tomato dish] shop raised his prices again ...”

The weather report was a "Summer Sonnet."

But it wasn't all fun and games. As the Jewish Forward reported:

David Grossman, one of Israel’s most famed novelists, spent a night at a children’s drug rehabilitation center in Jerusalem and wrote a cover page story about the tender exchanges between the patients, ending the article in the style of a celebrated author who’s treated like a prophet: “I lay in bed and thought wondrously how, amid the alienation and indifference of the harsh Israeli reality, such islands — stubborn little bubbles of care, tenderness and humanity — still exist.”

Novelist Yoram Kaniuk, 79, went into the field to write about couples in the hospital cancer ward. The thing is, he’s a cancer patient, too. “A woman walking with a cane brings her partner a cup of coffee with a trembling hand. The looks they exchange are sexier than any performance by Madonna and cost a good deal less,” Kaniuk wrote. “I think about what would happen if I were to get better…how I would live without the human delicacy to which I am witness?”

Five staff reporters stood by in the event of big breaking news, but apparently there was none. At least, not in the traditional sense. Those who absorbed this radical experiment, however, may have felt otherwise.

Now it's got us wondering: What would happen if we handed videocameras to top Hollywood filmmakers and asked them to come back with an edited non-fiction video story by the end of the day?

NPR in Gaza: The Video

NPR photographer David Gilkey spent a month covering the recent hostilities between Israel and Gaza. He talks about the images he made and the stories behind them in this powerful video slideshow, produced by John Poole.


NPR in Gaza, A Photographer's Journal from NPR .