The caution Arab journalists demonstrate towards their Israeli counterparts is far from surprising, writes Dina Ezzat Egyptian, Jordanian -- and other Arab -- journalists should by now be used to attending press conferences with journalists from Israel. Since former President Anwar El-Sadat visited Israel in November 1977 Israeli journalists have often mingled with their counterparts from Egypt. And as the process of Arab-Israeli peace talks evolved the presence of Israeli and Arab journalists on Arab or Israeli land became customary. "Customary but not normal," is how one senior Arab diplomatic correspondent put it. "I have been covering the Arab-Israeli file since the late 1960s but till now I cannot be 'normal' with them -- not even when my government has a very normal relationship with the Israeli government." They are sentiments shared by many of the Arab journalists who had arrived in Sharm El-Sheikh to cover the summit that brought together Jordan's King Abdullah, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Arab journalists, it became increasingly apparent, even those who have travelled to Israel many times to cover visits of senior Arab officials to Tel Aviv, are unable to accept Israeli journalists as "just" colleagues. "It is not that we are racist but how can we watch the news in the morning and hear that an Israeli court has acquitted a soldier who deliberately killed a Palestinian child when she was not even trying to throw a stone at him and then chat with reporters coming from Israel?" asked one Egyptian journalist. Many journalists are banned by their press organisations from speaking on this particular issue and those who were willing to talk to Al-Ahram Weekly asked for their names to be withheld. "I don't think my editor would be particularly pleased if he received letters accusing the paper of anti- Semitism just because I said I feel uncomfortable with Israeli journalists and cannot forget that my father died in the 1967 war," said one journalist. "I am still a free-lancer and I want to get a contract, not lose my job. Everybody is worried about allegations of anti-Semitism nowadays, especially following the US State Department's report on anti-Semitism," said another. Some Egyptian journalists even pretend that they do not understand English in order to avoid answering questions addressed to them by Israeli journalists. But the psychological barrier is not just about Israeli journalists. More significantly, perhaps, it extends to Israeli officials who were, as usual, much more available to the press covering the summit than their counterparts from Arab delegations, including Egypt, the host. Israeli officials were as keen as ever to get their point of view across in the Arab and Western media. Yet it was impossible to ignore the repeated scene of Egyptian and Jordanian journalists running towards a source making statements only to turn around when they discovered the source was an Israeli official. Some, of course, backtracked because their papers and TV channels have a strict policy of offering no platform to the Israeli point of view. Others returned because they find it unbearable to listen to Israeli officials making statements. Whatever the reasons the result is the same: many journalists have to count on Arab colleagues who work for international press agencies, foreign papers or TV channels to get quotes indirectly. "I have to report on it but I don't have to talk to them," said one Egyptian journalist. Others, who attended Israeli briefings and even requested interviews with Israeli officials, said they "hated" what they had to do but felt that it would be unprofessional not to report on the position of the Israeli delegation when it was the Israelis who were deciding how things will proceed, both at the summit and beyond. Yet among those journalists who communicated with the Israeli visitors, as much as among those who refused, the psychological barrier that the late President Sadat was hoping to break was still very much in evidence.
