Lecture: Erik Schechter

By Josie Garthwaite

Erik Schechter described the January 29, 2004, bus explosion in the Rahavia neighborhood of Jerusalem, a bombing that nearly killed him, in cinematic detail: the flash of light, the silence that followed, with 11 people dead and dozens stunned by the sensory overload of a seven-kilogram bomb. "I'm looking around, realizing, 'Oh, I'm in a bombing,'" said Schechter. "Realizing I can't move and I can't talk, and thinking, 'Oh, I'm dying.' The paralysis passes, and you realize you can, in fact, move. And now you're on the floor in the bus, in pain."

Schechter, a freelance journalist and World Press Review contributing editor, was speaking to an audience of about 20 students at New York University's Bronfman Center on November 9, 2004, as part of the Taub Israel Advocacy Lecture Series organized by Gesher, a pro-Israel student club on campus. While the series' title reflects the dominant perspective of its organizers (and of the speakers they invite, such as former Executive Director of the American Jewish Congress Phil Baum and President of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee Bernice Manocherian), Assistant Director of the Bronfman Center Adam Gaynor insisted that the lectures are intended to open a dialogue, at NYU, about the Israel-Palestine conflict, rather than to steer students toward a particular conclusion.

Gaynor's sentiment echoes statements made by Professor Ronald Zweig during his recent inaugural lecture at NYU's new Taub Center for Israel Studies. "We're committed to straight scholarship, not advocacy," he said. Former senior vice president of NYU and the current Bronfman Center chairman, Naomi Levine, told Jewish Week reporter Gabrielle Birkner in an interview that "on various campuses there has been tension between pro-Palestinian and Jewish students, and it seemed to me the argument for the existence of Israel was not well known." She added, "I believe that when you have an education, and [know] the facts, that is the strongest form of advocacy."

"Here I am, this suicide-bombing victim, [talking with] a would-be suicide bomber, and we're joking. We're talking about the Koran, I'm asking him what his favorite verse is. You wouldn't know I'm a victim. We're just having a blast. I'm trying to get him to talk."

Gesher invited Schechter to speak on his too-close-for-comfort brush with death in a lecture titled "Suicide Bombings: Inside and Out."

Despite his harrowing experience, Schechter claimed, he escaped with his ability to report the Israeli-Palestinian conflict truthfully intact. Bias is part of who we are, he argued; the trick is to recognize our prejudices and keep them in check. "Any journalist who tells you that they're going to come into something without a bias is just lying," he said. "You come with a bias, and you need to be aware of it and, ultimately, learn a little self-control."

Not that Schechter walked away from the blast unchanged. Before the bombing, he said, he used to run his name through Google for links to his articles — "ego-surfing," as some writers wryly call it. "It used to be a pretty ego-boosting experience, to do that once in a while — until the bombing," Schechter said. Afterward, plugging his name into the search engine forced him to confront sobering portrayals of "me as a victim, rather than me as a journalist. That's when I crossed over from being the person who reports things to being the person who is reported on."

Schechter's account of the bombing was gut-lurching: "When I finally slumped to the floor and looked down at my left leg, it seemed to be shredded at the knee; faded blue jeans gave way to a chunk of skinless flesh dappled with blood. I knew what it meant, but, God, I could not fathom a life without running or dancing."

The explosion left the reporter with shrapnel wounds, a broken knee, a fractured shoulder blade and a severed vein below his kneecap aside. The transition from journalist to victim was a difficult one for him to make. "You can just choke on frustration" over your powerlessness, said Schechter, "or you can take something from it, which is what I did."

He spent about two months in recovery, undergoing surgery and physiotherapy at Jerusalem's Shaare Tzedek Hospital. In time, he returned to work at The Jerusalem Post — on crutches. When a coworker suggested he write about his experience, the idea of abandoning the notion of reportorial objectivity and writing the story from a victim's-eye perspective made intuitive sense to Schechter. "It's a very unique perspective," he said. "Here you have someone who's a journalist, who can now talk about what it's like to suffer nightmares of the blast."

He never asked for the intimate understanding of suicide bombings granted by that short bus ride with Ali Muneer Jaara, a 24-year-old Palestinian police officer and human bomber. Nonetheless, said Schechter, he strives for an insider's perspective in all his stories. A self-described "reporter who hates reporters," Schechter is generally critical of his profession. "We are incredibly jaded, cynical know-it-alls who come into a situation and think we can solve everyone's problems," he said, filing a particular complaint against foreign journalists who "just parachute in for a year or so, and they don't know the language, they don't know Hebrew, they don't know Arabic, and they just come with certain models. I wish journalists would do a lot more reading of the social sciences before they come in and just spew out the clichés."

By contrast, Schechter's experiences, from college onward, have prepared him for his beat. Graduating from Montreal's McGill University with a degree in political science and Middle East studies, he went on to become a White House intern in the first Clinton administration.

After receiving a master's degree in international relations from the University of Chicago, he moved to Israel and soon became a writer for The Jerusalem Report for three years. After a serving in the army, Schechter wrote for The Jerusalem Post, a conservative English-language Israeli newspaper whose online edition draws more than 1 million users every month.

True to form, when he recovered from the bombing that nearly earned him an obituary, Schechter decided to pick up the story where the explosion had dropped him off. He began by interviewing some of the other passengers from the Number 19 bus, including a 25-year-old woman who had "caught the blast in her face." Said Schechter, "It's horrible to happen to anyone, but this was the belle of the ball, and here she was scalped, with second degree burns and a damaged eardrum." Schechter said the woman's political views changed drastically as a result of the experience. "She used to be very left-wing," he said, but "now she is further right than Genghis Kahn."

After speaking with other victims of the attack, Schechter felt "the catharsis was all over," for him, but the reporting was not. Refusing to be one of those reporters who "come in and just spew out the clichés," he decided, "Enough with the victims, enough with the blast; we know it's very bad to be inside a suicide bombing. What about the guy who actually volunteers for a mission like this?" Resolving to frame his own experience within the larger picture, he decided to "talk to the perpetrators."

Schechter's search for the truth of the story led him to Rifat Mukdi, an inmate at Shikma prison in Ashkelon, 40 miles south of Tel Aviv. Mukdi, 25, had been ready to commit a suicide bombing, but had chosen not to detonate the explosives strapped to his body. Schechter went to Shikma in search of an answer to the question, "Why does someone like Mukdi agree to be a martyr?"

In the published story based on his interview with Mukdi, Schechter wrote:

When Mukdi enters the enamel-white interrogation room of Shikma Prison, he turns back to his jailers in confusion: He had been expecting a talk with a prison official, not a journalist. It takes some gentle prodding, but the young, thinly bearded man agrees to clip a microphone to his lapel.
And so, my interview with a would-be martyr begins.

Distancing himself from his subject was essential to getting at the deeper truths in his story, Schechter said. "Here I am, this suicide bombing victim, [talking with] a would-be suicide bomber, and we're joking," he recalled. "We're talking about the Koran. I'm asking him what his favorite verse is." When Mukdi asked the reporter what his religion was, Schechter lied about his Judaism, saying he was an atheist in order to prevent Mukdi from cutting the interview short. "You wouldn't know I'm a victim when I'm talking to him," said Schechter, "because we're just having a blast. I'm trying to get him to talk."

Schechter has come to the conclusion that Palestinian media play a major role in the proliferation of suicide bombings. By "media," he didn't mean "just Hamas leaflets," he clarified, but "official media" as well, which he believes are instrumental in "generating these types of attacks, generating the desire."

In addition to speaking with Mukdi, Schechter interviewed two suicide-bomber "dispatchers" at Hadarim Detention Center in Tel Mond. "They're the people who send other people out to die," Schechter said. "They're not the Rifat Mukdi who feels the pain of his people and wants to go out and do something." The reporter compared the bombers themselves to "a poor man's precision-guided missile," and said they are "interchangeable," but the dispatchers are "indispensable."

Schechter said he couldn't empathize with his subjects, but the inability to do so didn't interfere with the interviews. "Because I don't come from that environment, I could only take what they said and try to role-play. I was able to distance myself [from the subject matter]. I could talk with them and not hate them, as if I was talking with some CEO of a toy company. That's the best I could do."

Josie Garthwaite is a senior at NYU, majoring in journalism. She hopes to cover the arts and culture beat for a major daily.

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