The Islamic fundamentalist terror organization Hamas kidnapped Shalit in a cross-border raid on July 25, 2006. “The sanctity of life demands that the entire country’s attention turn to getting this guy home safely,” Fletcher said.
“And yet, there’s a growing sense [in Israel] that, ‘OK, we can’t hold the entire country hostage and make bad decisions for this country on the basis of one guy’s life,’” Fletcher said during a telephone interview.
“Israel is founded on many myths, many narratives. One of them is ‘We’ll do anything to get our boys back’ and that’s become a weakness in the struggle with people whose entire military effort is aimed at kidnapping soldiers because they know they can get so much from Israel for them.”
“This is not being discussed widely, but I think it’s an issue that Israel will eventually have to deal with,” he said.
Fletcher will be the headliner at Milwaukee’s Jewish Book & Culture Fair this month. He will speak about his book, “Breaking News” (St. Martin’s Press, 2008) on Sunday, Nov. 16, 7 p.m., at the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center.
Shalit, Fletcher believes, will be returned to Israel alive. “They can’t kill him,” he said, noting that Hamas has reported repeatedly that he’s perfectly healthy.
“If we start hearing reports: ‘Gilad Shalit has fallen sick’ or ‘We can’t get the right medicines because of the siege,’ those are bad signs…. But they’re not saying that at all.”
Rather, Hamas must return Shalit to maintain its credibility. “Hamas has its own values and its own myths, one of which is, ‘We do as we say,’” Fletcher said.
“I’ve spoken to many Hamas people,” Fletcher added. “They say, ‘We have to keep him alive. We need more like him.’”
That’s not just talk. Ha’aretz, the Israeli daily, reported this week that a Hamas operative was arrested five weeks ago after infiltrating Israel from Gaza with the intent to kidnap Israeli soldiers.
“This is a huge thing,” Fletcher said. “Hamas, which has huge benefits from the ceasefire, is prepared to lose the ceasefire in order to capture one more soldier. They really believe that’s Israel’s Achilles’ heel.”
Fletcher, 61, first arrived in Israel in fall 1973 and has been bureau chief since 1995. He is married to an Israeli woman and has three Israeli sons, one of whom recently completed his three-year mandatory service in the Israel Defense Forces.
Therefore, for him the question of kidnapped soldiers is personal. “If [one of my sons] was kidnapped, I’m sure I’d feel differently,” Fletcher said.
Navigating the line between personal belonging and balanced reporting has been challenging for Fletcher, who has developed continuing and “intimate” relationships with Palestinian terrorists.
“As residents of Israel, my children were on the front line, taking buses to school or to discos in Tel Aviv, all of which are favorite targets of the suicide bombers,” he writes in the book.
“I kissed my sons good-bye in the morning, then went to the West Bank and listened to Al-Aksa fighters tell me how many Jews they wanted to kill. One day I interviewed Jewish victims of suicide bombers; the next day I interviewed bombers and the men who sent them.”
“It was my job to get to know both sides,” he wrote.
“Breaking News” spans Fletcher’s 35-year career covering wars, revolutions and natural disasters around the world. It also, Fletcher hopes, exposes “the haunting dilemmas journalists face as we help write that famous first draft of history.”
For him, writing the book was a process of self-discovery. The child of Holocaust refugees, Fletcher had known little about his family’s history. He certainly didn’t see a connection between that history and his career choice.
“It was when I started writing this book that I asked, ‘Why do I risk my life?’ I understood that there was actually a relationship between my past and wanting to go tell these people’s stories,” he told The Chronicle.
“Witnessing other people’s tragedies and horrors and horrible stuff was a way of me coming to terms with all the stories that were never told at home. The Holocaust history was there but I never touched it really. And it didn’t touch me particularly, except in a subconscious way.”
But it did shape his career, he writes in the book.
“I am proud to say that I have rarely interviewed a head of state or a chief executive officer. I don’t care what the generals have to say. And don’t get me started on the royal family,” he writes.
“Nobody with a story to sell or a policy to spin interests me. What I care about are the people who pay the price, as my family did.”
Cost to see Fletcher is $18, $10 for students.
The Jewish Book & Culture Fair is sponsored by the JCC and co-sponsored by the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations and the Edie Adelman Political Awareness Series of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s Women’s Division.
$18
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