Dr. Israel Shahak

I bumped into Colin Jacobson at lunch at Notting Hill's Osteria Basilico last week. Colin was photo editor years ago for The Observer's Sunday magazine and The Independent's magazine. When they, like most other British and American newspapers, abandoned photojournalism for fashion, movies and lifestyle, he started his own magazine, Reportage. It was not unlike Life and Look of the 1940s and 1950s. He published so many of the best black-and-white images of war, famine and poverty that he went out of business. Reportage was expensive to produce, and he practiced something most editors don't: paying photographers real money. Colin said Reportage might have survived if people like me had renewed their subscriptions. Time can afford to remind subscribers to renew 20 times a year. He couldn't.

The tradition of Reportage lives online at reportage.org. Colin offers young photographers, who could make a more profitable living in advertising and paparazzi-ing, a showcase. He posts their pictures and their e-mail addresses, so any editor can contact the photographer direct and buy the photographs.

Why won't magazines and newspapers publish serious photojournalism? I doubt readers have turned their backs on the world, but I know advertisers prefer the congenial editorial environment of puff about Madonna to the pictures of the world's oppressed by Don McCullin or Philip Jones Griffiths, the Robert Capas of their generation. Perhaps someone will explain one day why, when American business is penetrating every corner of the globe, American (and British) journalism focuses on domestic lifestyle (whatever the hell that is). As a citizen in a democratic state that has decisive power in the world, you have a duty to understand, to discuss and to influence foreign policy. The press has the duty to keep you informed. Someone is not keeping the democratic bargain.

An old friend of mine who lived for democracy and didn't give a damn about lifestyle features died recently in Israel. He was Israel's Ancient Mariner, telling anyone who would listen that the state would not survive as a democracy if it went on oppressing the Palestinians. Dr. Israel Shahak was elected chairman of an organization called the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights. A survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, the Poniatwo camp, where his father died, and the extermination camp at Belsen, he ended up in Palestine in 1945 at the age of 12. He took his PhD in chemistry at the Hebrew University in 1961. An experiment gone wrong left his face badly scarred, and he suffered from diabetes. Yet he never, ever let up. He was the first scholar that I know of to document Israel's destruction of 385 Palestinian Arab villages in the areas it conquered in 1948. After 1967 he reported on torture, house demolition, administrative detention and other violations of international law in the territories Israel occupied.

His friend Moshe Machover, a philosopher and mathematician who studied with him at the Hebrew University and was a political ally, is organizing a memorial service for him in London next September. The other day, Moshe told me how Israel Shahak became involved in politics. Although I'd known Shahak since 1974 and visited him often, I had not heard the story. In the late 1950s, when many Africans were studying in Israel, Shahak saw an African student collapse on a Jerusalem street. It was a Saturday, the Sabbath. He asked someone in a house nearby to call an ambulance. The man said he could not use the telephone on Shabbat, because it was forbidden. Shahak answered that, so far as he knew, you could violate shabbat restrictions in order to save a life. The man said that was true, but only a Jewish life. This shocked him, and he investigated the matter, only to be told by Orthodox rabbis that the man was correct.

Thus began a lifelong attachment to the best in Jewish tradition and to unrelenting work to make Israel give justice to the Palestinians. Shahak explained during the first intifada, "After 1967, when I ceased being just a scientist and became a political being, my first reason was that after 1967 the Israeli aim was to dominate the Middle East, which every rational human being knows is impossible. My second reason was that there must be a Palestinian state. It can come into being with a minimum of bloodshed, or a maximum of bloodshed. Even if the intifada were defeated, it would only cause a delay."

When I saw him in Jerusalem last year, at the beginning of the new intifada, he told me why, despite what he saw as Israel's racism and brutality, he loved his country. As I recall, and I ask his posthumous forgiveness if I have any part of it wrong, this was what happened. When he was a young conscript, after obtaining his PhD before taking up his professorship of chemistry in 1963, he was stationed somewhere in the Negev. Yitzhak Rabin addressed the soldiers, and Shahak asked pointed questions. Rabin pulled up a chair, and they argued for hours. Shahak never admired Rabin, not as the "break their bones" defense minister in the 1980s nor as prime minister. But he asked me to name one country on Earth where a private could debate seriously and abusively with a senior officer and war hero. "And that," he said, "is why I love this country."

That Israel Shahak lived as he did is why we miss him and honor his memory.