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The human face which lies behind every news story in Israel remains the bread and butter of every good reporter who covers the fledgling Jewish state.
Richard Oesterman, a Danish born journalist who has covered Israel for the better part of the past fifty years for the Scandanavian media, has written a book which should be read by everyone who ever dreams or plans to be a reporter in Israel. Simply put, Oesterman makes each of more than fifty interviewees come alive, in the most unusual of circumstances.
Oesterman provides portraits of people behind the scenes like an Orthodox Jew who founded an organizations that is out there every time a terrorist attack takes place, recovering body parts and providing the basics of religious life support in the most traumatic of times. And then there are the people who have survived loved ones in terror attacks, whom Oesterman shows to be deeply religious and philosophical, despite the terrible traumas that they have experienced. Surprisingly, Oesterman Follows his interviews of terrorist victims with the interviews that he has conducted with Palestinian killers themselves, who speak clearly and matter of factly and with no regret, when they describe their acts of murder.
In order to put things into perspective, Oesterman also features an interview with Bernard Lewis, the preeminent scholar of Islam, who patiently explains to the reader that without an understanding of Islam, one cannot begin to cover the events of the day in the Middle East. And Oesterman covers the visionaries of peace, Amos Oz and Shimon Peres, and he asks them hard questions.
However, when Oesterman portrays his fellow Danish citizen, Peter Hansen, the former head of UNRWA, the UN agency that handles Arab refugees, there is no evidence of tough questions from an experienced journalist of a UN official who had falsely accused Israel of carrying out a massacre in the UNRWA camp in Jenin in April 2002.
Nor does Oesterman ask Hansen about how UNRWA continues to nurture the specious premise and promise of the “right of return” for yet another generation of Palestinian Arab refugees and their descendents to take back Arab villages from 1948 which no longer exist.
Other chapters in Oesterman’s book feature give lively portraits of Israeli archaeology, tourism, science and industry, while giving life and background to the Jewish communities in Sweden, and in Venice, while a very special chapter of EVERY SECOND COUNTS: TRUE STORIES FROM ISRAEL gives special insight into Israel’s most recent winners of the Nobel Prize – Robert Aumann and Daniel Kahneman.
In short, EVERY SECOND COUNTS: TRUE STORIES FROM ISRAEL remains a must for anyone who wants to report from Israel, and for anyone who wants to understands what makes the heart of every Israeli beat.
