My distrust of the Israeli Prime Minister began thirty-four years ago when I produced an investigative report on Israel for CBS 60 Minutes. It concerned what was then—and still is—one of the most dangerous flashpoints in the Middle East-- the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, known by the Arabs as the Haram -al-Rashid.
Here’s my story. Judge for yourself.
For Muslims, the Haram-al-Rashid is one of their holiest sites—where Mohammed ascended to heaven on the back of a winged horse. Jews also revere it as the location of the First and Second Temples. The questions of access and control have always been hotly disputed since Israel conquered the site in 1967. It was decided that the Israeli Army would control the area, and the Jordanian religious authority would supervise it.
From the outset, extremist Jewish groups were determined to take over complete control and drive the Muslims out. The radical Jews were much weaker back then than they are today. Still, with every perceived threat, the Palestinians raced to the barricades. For them, nothing symbolized Israel’s supposed determination to seize all their lands and annihilate their heritage than that struggle.
The battle of slogans and rocks exploded in bloody violence on October 8, 1990, when Israeli border police shot 17 Palestinians dead on the Haram-al-Rashid. These days, with Israelis having killed more than 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza and over five hundred on the West Bank, seventeen dead Palestinians seem hardly worth a second glance.
Back then, however, in that so distant era, it was shocking. Benjamin Netanyahu, then Israel’s deputy foreign minister, immediately called in the press. There was no question, he said, that the Palestinians were responsible.
Most of the world’s media went with that story. A few weeks later, I produced a report with Mike Wallace showing that Netanyahu lied. It was to be one of the most controversial stories that 60 Minutes ever did.
The furious reaction by Jewish groups was also a stark reminder of how passionately most Jews in the Diaspora believed that Israel could do no wrong. A wilful blindness that continues to this day.
Back in October 1990, Netanyahu’s immediate explanation for the bloody killings was that the police had shot the Palestinians only after the Palestinians, egged on by their imams, began throwing rocks at Jews praying at the Western Wall, which lay below the confines of the Temple Mount.
Netanyahu delivered that charge at a dramatic press conference, hefting a large, lethal-looking boulder. He was outraged. Several Jews worshipping at the Wall had been hospitalized.
“The crowd that threw those projectiles wanted to slaughter the Jews,” Netanyahu seethed. “They were heralding their champion, Saddam Hussein, who wants to send a much bigger projectile—missiles—to burn half of Israel.” (Saddam had invaded Kuwait several weeks before on August 2, 1990).
The whole affair, said Netanyahu, “was a deliberate planned provocation aimed at deflecting world attention from the Gulf, from Saddam Hussein.”
The press bought the story. Except for an excellent but lonely investigative piece in the Village Voice, Netanyahu’s claims went virtually unchallenged by the international media.
Arriving in Jerusalem a few days later, intending to research a different subject, I was struck by the fact that all the Palestinians we spoke with were still vehement in depicting the killings as an Israeli atrocity. Those shot on the Temple Mount had been gunned down in cold blood by rampaging Israeli police, they said. And more: there was never any threat to Jewish worshippers praying at the Western Wall.
I decided to investigate further, with significant input from Michael Emory of the Village Voice and other vital eyewitnesses. Most critically, we also obtained the raw videotapes of the actual events from CBS, other U.S. networks, and Israeli TV.
What we found was that the official Israeli version put out by Netanyahu was, as the Palestinians had charged, a total fabrication. There was no other way to describe it.
The tragedy had been precipitated by a radical Jewish group, “the Temple Mount Faithful,” which had long been advocating a complete Israeli takeover of the holy site. In a pure grab for publicity, they announced they were going to march to the Mount in defiance of an Israeli court order.
Determined to defend what they regarded as hallowed ground, a large crowd of Palestinians of all ages assembled on the Temple Mount. Some were armed with rocks. Attempting to control the highly volatile situation was a contingent of only forty-five Israeli border police, who—unwisely--had been stationed on the grounds of the Mount itself.
Suddenly, there was an explosion. Police had shot teargas into a group of Palestinian women in one corner of the site. In the ensuing uproar, some Palestinians thought the radical Jewish group was about to enter the Mount and began throwing rocks at the armed Israeli police.
Panicking, a few police fired live ammunition into the crowd. At least one Palestinian was killed; others were wounded. That sent the young people into an even greater frenzy. They raced toward the wall on which some of the Israeli police were standing and continued throwing stones. As they later told us, they were throwing rocks at the Israeli police, not—and this is the crucial point--not at the Jewish worshippers completely out of sight on the other side of the wall in the Plaza below.
Indeed, when we looked at all the raw TV footage, we found no Jewish worshippers were praying at the Wall when the rocks were hurled over. They had already been evacuated when the disturbances began—without serious injury.
In fact, despite repeated requests to the Government Press Office, the police, and the hospitals, we were unable to obtain the names of any Jews wounded at the Wall that day by rocks. On the other hand, the raw news tapes clearly demonstrated the use of excessive deadly force when the reinforced Israel border police stormed back onto the Temple Mount.
In one sequence captured by three different cameramen, Israeli police fired point-blank at an unarmed Palestinian man, shooting him in the head. They then fired teargas directly into the shocked crowd around the mortally wounded man.
Palestinians with private cars and ambulances dodged bullets and tear gas in an attempt to aid the wounded. Three Palestinian health workers were shot that day. One of them, a nurse who we interviewed in her hospital bed, described how she was hit while treating the wounded INSIDE an ambulance that had been backed up to the door of the al-Aksa mosque. The police continued to fire at the ambulance even as it pulled away.
Other attempts by Israeli spokesmen to justify the killings also turned out to be false. The charge, for instance, that Muslim firebrands used loudspeakers on the Temple Mount to encourage young Palestinians to violence, urging them to slaughter the Jews.
When we listened to the tape shot of the entire event, it turned out that Palestinian leaders were pleading with the young men to take shelter inside the mosque, not to expose themselves to death. At the same time, they were imploring the Israelis to allow ambulances and doctors to approach the mosque to rescue the wounded.
Our report, which aired in December 1990, was greeted with a storm of indignation from just about every major Jewish organization in the United States--the most extraordinary outpouring of protest ever generated by a 60 Minutes broadcast: We were whitewashing a plot by the Palestine Liberation Organisation. We had lied. We had misrepresented. We were doing the work of the anti-Semites. And, of course, we were self-hating Jews.
Larry Tisch, a prominent American backer of Israel who also happened to own CBS, summoned Mike Wallace and “60 Minutes” Executive Producer Don Hewitt (also Jewish) to a fraught breakfast meeting to defend our report, fact by fact.
The Palestinians were much less vocal in reaction to our revelations. One reason was that Israeli military authorities censored the newspaper reports of the broadcast in the local Palestinian Press.
It was not until July 18th, 1991, nine months after the tragic affair, that an Israeli Judge, Ezra Kama, released the results of an extensive independent inquiry. It was the police, not the Palestinians, said the judge, who provoked the violence. Some of the shooting deaths, he said, were clearly unjustified; he labeled the police explanation that they had opened fire out of fear for their lives “exaggerated and strange.”
Despite the deaths of 17 Palestinians and the wounding of at least 150 others, there was no call for anyone to be punished. And none was
A few days later, Abe Foxman, president of the anti-Defamation League, who had initially fired off a lengthy memo attacking our broadcast, sent a new memo to Don Hewitt:
“Judge Kama rejects some of the claims the officials made and came closer to some of the conclusions raised by 60 Minutes. On that basis, while I still have some problems with the methodology 60 Minutes used, I want to publicly apologize to you, Mike, and the staff of 60 Minutes.”
The broadcast about the Temple Mount was the best investigative report I ever did with Mike Wallace. It received no awards, and unlike many other reports we had done, it was never rerun in the summer repeat season. Abe Foxman’s generous letter, for which he received a good deal of flak from within his organization, was never made public by CBS.
The tragic killings of those 17 Palestinians thirty-four years ago—and Netanyahu’s attempt to justify them--were just a presage of the horrors to come.
Great piece.