OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 24 March 2003 — The handful of Israeli journalists currently reporting on the war from inside Iraq had to hide their Jewish origins to get the necessary accreditation from Kuwait to do their job.
Boaz Bizmuth is one of them.
He has dual nationality and had to use his non-Israeli passport to enter Kuwait, from where the US-led land offensive on Iraq was launched on Thursday.
The US military readily granted Bizmuth and the 10 other Israeli journalists accreditations to be “embedded” with American troops and follow them as they sweep through Iraq.
But to get into Kuwait they had to conceal the fact they would be reporting for Israeli media. Unlike other Gulf states, Kuwait has never had diplomatic relations with the Jewish state, even at the lowest level.
Correspondent Caroline Glick gave a detailed account on Friday in the English-language Israeli daily the Jerusalem Post of the problems she encountered with the Kuwaiti authorities.
Although she was accredited by the US daily Chicago Sun Times, which belongs to the same media group as the Jerusalem Post, she said she was threatened with arrest and forced to pledge never to publish in the Israeli press.
Other Israeli journalists such as public television’s Dan Scemama managed to enter into Kuwait and transmit stories from there. Some have even pushed into Iraq with the flow of foreign correspondents.
Others, such as the correspondent for the second Israeli channel, are working unimpeded in the autonomous Kurdish area in northern Iraq. Israel’s top-selling Yediot Aharonot daily even has a special envoy in Baghdad. But the reporter is said to be a French reporter using a false name and whose real identity is kept secret.
In 1998, the newspaper was the first ever Israeli media to send a reporter to Baghdad.
The French-Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk had then reported on the disastrous effects of the UN embargo on the Iraqi population and the Baghdad authorities thus turned a blind eye on his nationality.
The Haaretz daily is the only one of Israel’s top newspapers not to have a correspondent covering the Iraqi war or embedded with US-British troops.
“We got an accreditation from the Pentagon for a correspondent holding dual nationality, but Kuwait denied him entry on its territory as we did not want to hide the fact he was sent by our newspaper,” a Haaretz editor told AFP.
For its part Iraq has never recognized Israel and is technically at war with it having never signed the 1948 armistice like other Arab countries.
Saddam Hussein supports the creation of a Palestinian state from the Mediterranean to the Jordan river, borders which imply the destruction of the Jewish state.
