A Letter From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

As an angry Palestinian uprising continued to boil over in the West Bank and Gaza last week, the Israeli army tightened press access to the turbulent refugee camps. That did not stop TIME Jerusalem Bureau Chief Johanna McGeary from crawling through a knee-high hole in the wall to interview residents in a camp. That kind of dogged pursuit is only one of the journalistic skills required to cover the bloody conflict in the Israeli-occupied territories. Besides confronting tear gas, rocks, bullets and Israeli press restrictions, reporters face the daunting logistical problem of following what McGeary describes as a "war without a front," in which violence may erupt without warning in any one of 27 camps. "Being at the right spot on any given day is as much luck as good intuition," she says.

Luck and intuition -- plus a solid news sense -- have often combined to put McGeary in the right place at the right time. She ducked her first stones while reporting for TIME in Boston during protests against court-ordered school busing. As a TIME White House correspondent during the Carter Administration, she followed all 444 days of the Iran hostage crisis. Next came 5 1/2 years as the magazine's State Department correspondent, covering a spectrum of U.S. foreign policy concerns that were often dominated by the Middle East. McGeary's move to Jerusalem last April put her in the front lines of one of the world's most dramatic stories.

Covering the latest round of Palestinian unrest has proved both challenging and painful for everyone in the Jerusalem bureau. "The battle for freedom of the press has been one of the most anguishing parts of the story," says Reporter Robert Slater, who is also head of the Foreign Press Association in Israel. The plight of the nervous young Israeli soldiers who have been sent into the camps to quell the disturbances is another. "I know exactly how they feel," says Reporter Ron Ben-Yishai, a military-affairs expert, who serves in the Israeli army. "Very often I experience a strong conflict between my inner feelings as an Israeli and the professional need to see things as they are." The other side of that conflict is acute for Reporter Jamil Hamad. "It is difficult to report what goes on in the West Bank when you are a Palestinian," says Hamad. "On the one hand, you try to be impartial. To me, on the other hand, the tears of mothers and fathers are not just a scene to report."