A few weeks before the Gaza peace deal was agreed, the father of a hostage held by Hamas flew to Qatar to meet the nego­tia­tors. It’s stretch­ing a point and then some to infer he nudged the talks over the final line, but what he did is a salient les­son for the next stages of the deal.

Jonathan Dekel-Chen told the BBC World Ser­vice he want­ed his son Sagui and the oth­er hostages to be more than “a list of names on an excel sheet” in front of the peace nego­tia­tors. So he decid­ed “to look them in the eye” and “plead for them to do every­thing pos­si­ble to get our son back home.”
Pleas and demands for action on the hostages began right after they were tak­en on Octo­ber 7, 2023. The com­pli­ca­tions and stum­bling blocks bedev­illing a nego­ti­at­ed deal were myriad.
But, the bom­bast and intran­si­gence that slowed progress towards one that at times amount­ed to a glacial pace, were undoubt­ed­ly eas­i­er to scat­ter across the table because none of the par­tic­i­pants had to metaphor­i­cal­ly, nev­er mind phys­i­cal­ly, look each oth­er, or any­one else, in the eye.
Be they the arche­typ­i­cal “heart­less bureau­crats”, polit­i­cal­ly or human­i­tar­i­an-moti­vat­ed nego­tia­tors or the pub­lic, humans react more hon­est­ly when they can­not get away with look­ing away.      

                     WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU’LL THINK       

After the Oct 7 attacks, for­eign and local press were tak­en to the area while fight­ing was still going on.
The Israeli author­i­ties want­ed the world to see, feel, to nev­er for­get it.
Fig­u­ra­tive­ly – and right­ly in my view — they sym­bol­i­cal­ly made the world look the vic­tims in the eyes.The result was the hor­ror of that day is engraved in the minds of peo­ple with no con­nec­tions to the vic­tims or the place, no mat­ter what their polit­i­cal leanings.
It’s also why cyn­i­cal­ly, but from their point of view wise­ly, the Israelis have enforced a total ban on for­eign jour­nal­ists enter­ing Gaza to report inde­pen­dent­ly, with­out mil­i­tary escorts or censorship.
The only on-the-ground report­ing is by Pales­tin­ian jour­nal­ists work­ing with extra­or­di­nary courage and men­tal and phys­i­cal endurance.
As of Jan­u­ary 17, 2025, at least 152 jour­nal­ists and media work­ers have been killed in Gaza. Dozens more have been wound­ed or are miss­ing. In a num­ber of doc­u­ment­ed cas­es, in spite of wear­ing pro­tec­tive gear clear­ly marked PRESS,  the vic­tims were deemed to have been delib­er­ate­ly tar­get­ed by the Israeli mil­i­tary, which its spokesper­sons have repeat­ed­ly and vehe­ment­ly denied.
Whichev­er view is cor­rect, one thing is true: kill the mes­sen­ger and you not only kill the mes­sage, you blind the audi­ence, and what peo­ple don’t see, they don’t gen­er­al­ly care much about.
The Israelis also claim that a num­ber of Pales­tin­ian jour­nal­ists use Press iden­ti­ty as a cov­er for being Hamas sym­pa­this­ers or operatives.
In some cas­es, maybe.
But that’s no more a cap­i­tal crime than FOX claim­ing to be a “fair and bal­anced” news out­let while report­ing and run­ning pro-MAGA “com­men­tary” with­out caveats, fact-check­ing or, except in excep­tion­al cir­cum­stances, skepticism.

                         TELL DON’T SHOW DILUTES

Main­stream TV has its own guilt to bear when it comes to obscur­ing the eye­ball view. Field report­ing is weight­ed ever more heav­i­ly on the side of cor­re­spon­dents as talk­ing heads, walk­ing about wav­ing their hands and bab­bling about what they’ve seen or is “right  behind me” (out­thrust arm and slight turn de rigeur), than in direct­ing view­ers’ eyes to the events in question.
Tele­vi­sion has a unique pow­er, and respon­si­bil­i­ty, to take view­ers places they’ve nev­er seen, to show them things they’ve nev­er seen in order to inform them what they do not, but need to know.
That of course requires judge­ment on the spot and in the edit­ing room of how much suf­fer­ing and hor­ror the eyes can take before the mes­sage becomes too much, or slips into voyeurism.
Apply­ing a blind­fold with the warn­ing “some view­ers may find images in this report dis­turb­ing” is in effect wil­ful blind­ing of the viewer.
The suf­fer­ing imposed on the inno­cent, be it from high explo­sives or hostage-tak­ing, will only be damned and cur­tailed if peo­ple are hor­ri­fied and protest. And nobody expends much time oppos­ing what they haven’t been made to see in some form or another.

                          BUT THEN AGAIN

What can we expect when lumi­nar­ies such as Repub­li­can Sen. Tim Shee­hy who, when tasked with and giv­en the oppor­tu­ni­ty to look the pro­posed U.S. Sec­re­tary for Defense in the eye and ques­tion how he would deploy the might of the U.S. mil­i­tary, leaned for­ward and earnest­ly asked Pete Hegseth how many push ups he could do.As wise as the adage “Before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes” is, I think even more per­ti­nent and use­ful is the one implied by Jonathan Dekel-Chen’s self-assigned mis­sion to the Qatar peace talks: “To under­stand what those des­per­ate­ly depend­ing on you need done, look them in the eye.”. 

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