Israel's 'Mr. TV' Gets Political

TV Anchor Delivers Angry Indictment Against Israeli Occupation

(AP)  Israel's Walter Cronkite, a respected TV journalist who has delivered the main evening news since 1968, has stepped out from behind the shield of measured neutrality with an angry indictment of Israel's settlement policy and occupation of the Palestinians.

Haim Yavin's five-part documentary - part one was being broadcast Tuesday - prompted calls from settlers for his dismissal, but could also mark a watershed in how the nation views its four-decade rule over Palestinians.

Yavin, 72, has anchored the evening news on Israel's public TV channel since 1968, building an image as a dispassionate reporter - much as Cronkite did in the United States. A founder of Israel's public TV station, Yavin is known as "Mr. TV" and commands considerable respect.

Rarely have settlers been portrayed as harshly by Israel's mainstream media as in Yavin's documentary, filmed with his hand-held video camera and interspersed with his commentary.

"Since 1967, we have been brutal conquerors, occupiers, suppressing another people," Yavin comments in the first segment after listening to settlers insist God gave them these lands. "We simply don't view the Palestinians as human beings."

Yavin's stand comes at a time of controversy over the settlements Israel built in the West Bank and Gaza Strip after capturing the lands in the 1967 Mideast war.

Jewish settlers, once coddled and feared by Israeli politicians, feel increasingly beleaguered. Their erstwhile patron, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, is determined to withdraw from all 21 Gaza settlements and four in the West Bank this summer, forcing about 9,000 settlers out of their homes.

Tom Segev, an Israeli author and social commentator, said Yavin's middle-of-the-road reputation could sway some Israelis. "He is Mr. Israel, the voice of Israel, the soul of Israel, and if he comes out with this, it means that apparently a lot of people feel the same," Segev said. "But I'm not sure if people will react."

When Cronkite returned from a reporting trip to Vietnam and told his viewers in an editorial comment that the United States could not win the war, then-President Lyndon B. Johnson observed that if he had lost Cronkite, he had lost middle America.

Yavin said he was able to keep his views out of the many documentaries he made in the past. But when the latest round of fighting with the Palestinians broke out and Palestinian suffering increased, he decided to act.