Can You Tell Messy Human Stories in a War? Should You?

A Letter From Belfast to Jerusalem

Dear RT’er,

You know how travel can fill your soul, or slap you in the face, and sometimes both at the same time? I’d like to share one such sobering moment with you. It happened last month in Belfast, and, well… I’m still trying to make sense of the sting.

First, a bit of business: I have turned back on the option to become a paid subscriber of this Substack. I had switched it off during my hiatus so that current subscribers wouldn’t get charged. If you joined in the last few months when “free” was the only game in town, please consider upgrading to a paid plan. I promise at least one post a month. And of course, whatever plan you go for, please keep the craic going by commenting, sharing your thoughts and giving your two cents.

Now where was I? Yes. The slap. So last month I flew to Belfast to follow a crew of Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers. They were shooting a documentary about The Troubles: the sectarian violence that gripped Northern Ireland from the late 60s to the late 90s. Leaving behind their own conflict, feeling hopeless about their own future, they hoped to find inspiration in the story of people who had known intractable conflict and found their way out. “In order to be able to imagine peace, you have to have an image of peace,” explained one of the crew.

If that sounds like a crazy plan, it’s my kind of crazy. (Think about any Rough Translation episode that you heard that might have taken you somewhere around the world but left you with a new perspective on home.) When they invited me to watch them work for a few days, I bought my ticket the next day. Belfast, Failte!

Monument To the Unknown Woman Worker, Belfast

And Besides, Messy Human Journeys Make Great Audio

I wanted to follow their trip for lots of reasons — I was curious about the creative collaboration between Israelis and Palestinians, curious about the parallels of Northern Ireland to the Middle East, curious about travel as a means of firing up one’s imagination out of despair. But also, I was drawn to this story because I don’t particularly like telling stories about people’s opinions.

Let me explain. Opinions are necessary, obviously. They are a big part of journalism, of course. How many times, as a correspondent arriving in Ukraine or Somalia or Central African Republic or other zone of conflict, have I been asked, by an NPR host, “what are people thinking about…?” (Fill in: The government’s statement, the rebel’s position, the upcoming election, etc etc.) And, as best as I could, I would try to answer. But I came to feel that asking people caught up in a war their opinion about these big things was not really fair.

And it wasn’t that revealing.

How could I know how much of these opinions were the truth? And how much was prompted by fear? Or trauma? Or some pressure or incentives that I didn’t understand? And more than that- did someone’s opinion really matter to an audience back home? Was it good radio? Did it create empathy?

So I learned to listen for the human moments. The unscripted moments. In my opinion, this is where the medium of audio really shines: when you hear the sound of people thinking aloud and grappling with feelings that surprise even them. In the business of audio journalism this is sometimes called “emotional tape.” (Emotional tape, despite the name, is not necessarily the sound of people sobbing or laughing. Emotional tape can be very quiet. It just has to feel present. Emotional tape is the opposite of scripted. It’s the opposite of people saying the thing they already decided they were going to say before you walked in the room. Emotional tape is messy. It is human.)

And so, one reason I was excited to follow this team to Belfast was the chance to witness six people - three Israelis, three Palestinians - putting themselves in a unique but relatable situation: might an encounter with a different conflict help them see something different about their own? Creative collaboration between Israelis and Palestinians is so rare, now more than ever: How would they work together? Would they learn things about themselves? About each other? How would they experience Belfast, as individuals and as a team? Can you make a film about peace that speaks to a region at war? These seemed like more interesting questions than asking them to explain their politics or their opinion about the war in Gaza.

Arrival in Belfast

On a raw Monday evening, I flew to Belfast to meet up with the bleary-eyed crew. I was jetlagged, but they were on another level. Some had traveled from Jerusalem, the trip taking 40 hours instead of 10 because of cancellations and delays. We toured downtown. It was a bit of a weird scene. Our tour guide, James, would stop us in front of some trendy boutique or cozy coffee shop to describe a bomb blast or mass shooting that took place in that spot. I was reminded that the war here ended more than a quarter century ago. I admit I started to feel some doubts about what we were doing here, or the relevance for a region in conflict now. We ended the tour at a memorial that was so understated, I mistook it for a bricked-up parking garage.

We stepped closer. What had appeared to be a construction site now revealed itself as a memorial of numbers, carved in green and brown terracotta squares, stacked one on top of the other like toy blocks. According to a plaque on the bottom corner, this giant sudoku-looking square included every number from 1 to 1500. Each number, a death.

James explained that this is the only public memorial in the city centre that honors dead on both sides of the sectarian conflict. (As opposed to honoring only Catholics or only Protestants). The clay was cold to the touch. I couldn’t help but do some grisly comparative math. It took seven years, from 1969 to 1976, to hit the 1500 dead memorialized on this wall. That number is hit in Gaza in… how many days?

But whatever doubts I had about the relevance of this trip were dispelled when I watched the team doing interviews. These interviews were as full of hurt and anger as anything I’d heard in Afghanistan or Ukraine or South Sudan. And the images that these interviews evoked – kids throwing stones, tanks in the streets, bombings in cafes, random checkpoints, tense debates over international philanthropy and integrated education – all triggered memories of the conflict back home.  

Part of the team at work

The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in Belfast

I wasn’t prepared for how present the Israeli Palestinian conflict would be here. Palestinian flags flew from Catholic windowsills, while Israeli flags flew from Protestant ones. (The proxy struggle that both sides in Northern Ireland see in Israel/Palestine deserves its own separate post.) We entered Falls Road, a Catholic stronghold, and stood before the recently unveiled “All-Gaza Mural,” depicting Israeli soldiers in death masks murdering hungry Palestinian refugees. 

All Gaza Mural, Belfast

And that’s when the team had its first open disagreement.

I wouldn’t even call it a fight. Not at all. A somewhat tense exchange. When I inched closer to ask them about it, some looked wary. “We need a minute alone,” one said. 

No problem. I wandered over to the other end of the street, while they huddled talking quietly. I wanted to honor their wish to sort out their responses and feelings privately among themselves. This, after all, was the hard work of collaboration in a mixed team that they’d come here to do. After what felt like forever, I was called back over. But the wariness was still there. 

I knew that the war had made it risky for these filmmakers to be seen as part of a mixed group at all. Some had admitted to me that they’d were risking being branded traitors, or collaborators, or normalizers in their own families or communities, simply for joining. They knew ahead of time that virtually everything they’d be putting into the film – and certainly every interaction with each other - would be picked apart and scrutinized.  I hoped to observe how they’d untangle these pressures – if they’d only let me get close enough. 

That evening we’d be meeting to have a debrief to discuss their feelings about it all. I’d seen hints of those feelings emerge in the interviews, but I was eager to hear how they would talk about what they’d learned.

But as the day wore on, it dawned on me that it wasn’t just their disagreements that people were wary about me observing. Even their positive emotions were guarded with suspicion. One of the Palestinian crew members, who asked to remain anonymous, mentioned as we walked that he felt “between here and there,” that is, between Belfast and Jerusalem. “Between hopefulness and hopelessness.” I pulled out my recorder to ask him more, but he backed away with a worried expression, as if worried that confessing to any feelings of hope, however fleeting, might annoy or alienate people back home who felt no hope at all.

“I don’t like the word hope,” admitted Amira, the Palestinian script writer on the team, speaking to me before the trip began. (The team is collaborative in each job role, so there are Israeli and Palestinian directors, Israeli and Palestinian script writers, etc.) “It’s a privilege to feel hope, and we don’t.”

I felt like this team was navigating a minefield - a minefield of how people back home might interpret their every thought and emotion. At at least in this moment, that minefield was me. They were observing Ireland, but I was observing them, dealing with their own trauma. I can’t say I was even surprised when - five minutes before we were all supposed to gather for a debrief, I got a Whatsapp message asking me not to attend. It wasn’t personal, they said. They just needed more time, alone, as a group. They were still getting to know each other as a team. It was too soon.

Messy, Human… and Dangerous?

I sat at the hotel bar, nursing a local brew. Above me the TV news showed clashes between police and protestors on a US campus. It was a surreal feeling to be in post-conflict Belfast, looking at scenes of unrest over Gaza in the US, while in an adjoining conference room, three actual Israelis and three actual Palestinians were trying to do the hard work of talking honestly and frankly to each other about processing what they’d seen. Peace never felt more fragile, or more fraught.

I wanted to be in that room, listening to them unpack their feelings, trying to understand Northern Ireland and this process through their eyes, but I also wondered, did I have a right to be? What if my approach to this work was all wrong?

When audiences are so quick to judge, and the costs of saying the wrong thing are so high, can we expect people to let us feel and think aloud with them: at their doubts, disagreements, and – yes – even their improbable moments of hope?

I slept fitfully that night.

My flight back home was leaving early the next morning, and I had little to show for the trip. No emotional tape. No messy human moments, at least that they’d let me record. I looked forward to being able to tell their story one day, but I didn’t know when that would be. At 4 in the morning, I packed my bag, dropped it off with a tired front desk clerk, and wandered outside, my footsteps loud on the rain-slicked cobblestones. Only after I started walking did I realize where I was headed.

The streets were empty except for an occasional taxi and passing vans that wafted the smell of freshly baked bread and freshly printed newspapers.

Finally I arrived: at that weird memorial of numbers. A clock tower across the street cast a blueish light on the raised edges of the type blocks. Each number represented a death, but whether Catholic or Protestant, fighter or bystander, the numbers weren’t saying. Which seemed to be the point: Not to privilege one side’s deaths over another. Not to tell us how to feel. The memorial told no stories, took no stand, named no names. I was struck by the totality of its silence. I felt the limitations of my own medium, and the tricky business of having to tell stories with the words of real people. People who would be inevitably judged for those words that were never all there was to say.

Holding up my hand to the stones I felt a surprising warmth. Then I realized: the terracotta surface had absorbed the sun’s rays during the day. It was releasing that heat back into the air. This clay memorial that had seemed at first so cold and clinical now felt almost alive. A snail (seeking a bit of warmth in the chill night) made its way up the wall of numbers, as if slowly counting its way down through the nameless dead.