Palestinian Like Me: The Israeli Journalist Who Went Undercover in Gaza

The story we're about to tell may seem current, but it’s actually not.

In the mid-1980s, an Israeli journalist, a former lieutenant in the paratroopers unit, decided to disguise himself as a Palestinian worker. For six months, he personally experienced the daily life of Palestinians under Israeli occupation.

Thanks to his Middle Eastern features and nearly perfect Arabic, he overcame suspicion and checkpoints, crossing unnoticed the walls dividing the two societies.

An operation that today would not even be remotely possible. Yet we believe that, even by merely comparing it with the present, this story still has something to tell us.

This issue is written by Sacha and edited by Luigi.

Undercover in Gaza in the 1980s

In 1986, the Jerusalem-based Israeli journalist Yoram Binur went undercover in Palestine.

He assumed a fictitious identity, Fat’hi Awad, presenting himself as a Palestinian originally from the Balata refugee camp (in the northern West Bank), where his family had allegedly fled in 1948. He claimed he had just returned from studying in the United States.

Binur decided to begin his experience precisely in the Gaza Strip, already under Israeli military occupation and a place of severe social tensions at the time.

He settled in the Palestinian refugee camp of Jabalia, on the outskirts of Gaza City, where he lived for about a month. To make his new identity credible, Binur wore shabby clothes and typical rubber sandals worn by Palestinian workers. He carried around a crumpled Arabic-language newspaper under his arm, along with a worker's lunch basket containing a pack of local cigarettes (the Palestinian brand Farid). Binur meticulously took care of every detail: he learned how to hold a tea glass, how to walk, and greet others convincingly according to local customs, and even participated in religious practices at the mosque.

Linguistically, he spoke fluent Palestinian Arabic, and when forced to speak Hebrew, he used a deliberately basic register and strong accent. In daily life, he presented himself as a humble Palestinian manual laborer, willing to accept low-paying jobs to earn a small income. He stayed in spartan conditions inside the camp, sharing the tough routine of Jabalia refugees. Here, he befriended several locals, gradually gaining their trust, and encountered influential figures from resistance structures, including members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Marxist-revolutionary faction of the PLO actively organizing political activities in the camp against the occupation.

However, the more he interacted with locals, the more suspicion he attracted. On multiple occasions, Fat’hi was questioned about elements of Islamic faith and Arab culture. For instance, PFLP militants asked him to recite by heart the opening verses of the Quran—a spontaneous test designed to expose him as a possible Israeli spy. Binur, relying on his studies of Arabic and Islam, managed to answer the questions correctly, dispelling immediate suspicions.

The military occupation had turned Gaza into a powder keg, and his role was precarious by definition: each day in Jabalia represented a delicate balance between self-control and the constant fear of being discovered.

To manage these risks, Binur had also planned extreme contingencies. He obtained cover documents and secured support from both Israeli and Palestinian contacts. He even carried a letter signed by Faisal Husseini—at that time an influential Palestinian political figure in Jerusalem—certifying his real identity and genuine intentions. That was his insurance policy if he were discovered: Husseini's note explained that Fat’hi Awad was neither an actual Palestinian nor an enemy spy, but rather a reporter aiming to document the conditions faced by Palestinians under occupation.

In the Jabalia refugee camp, Yoram Binur found himself immersed in extreme living conditions: thousands of people crowded into tight spaces, entire families living in dilapidated shacks without adequate basic services. Palestinian daily life was a continuous series of obstacles: even simple activities like finding and maintaining employment, providing for one's family, or moving freely were rendered almost impossible by bureaucratic restrictions, checkpoints, and regulations defined by Binur himself as resembling an "apartheid" system.

Undercover as a Palestinian, he personally experienced abuses, arbitrary interrogations, wage theft by unscrupulous Israeli employers, offensive remarks, and racist insults, observing firsthand how frequently such abuses occurred.

Six Months on the Other Side

In the guise of Fat’hi Awad, Binur spent six months living and working as a Palestinian between Israel and the Occupied Territories. He took on various menial jobs: he worked as a kitchen helper in a Tel Aviv wedding hall, a dishwasher in a café, a mechanic in a car repair shop, and a manual laborer on a kibbutz. He worked illegally, earning only a few pennies, without any labor protections—like many Palestinians forced to seek employment beyond the Green Line.

The undercover experiment provided Binur not only with insight into the Palestinian reality but also served as an unforgiving mirror reflecting the power dynamics wielded by Israelis—including himself.

Years earlier, during his mandatory military service, Binur had served as an officer in Ramallah, in the West Bank. In his book, he describes an episode that opened his eyes: one evening during a curfew, he caught some young Palestinians breaking the restrictions and severely beat them. A few hours later, during the same curfew, he encountered a desperate Palestinian woman wandering the streets seeking medicine for her sick husband. Overcome by compassion, he helped her obtain the medicine and return home unseen by patrols.

Reflecting later on that moral schizophrenia—brutality and kindness on the same day, by the same hands—he reached a bitter conclusion: "Whether committing brutal violence or performing acts of kindness, the sensation is the same – it is the feeling of the power that one has over others." In these words lies the entire dynamic of occupation: those who exercise power can choose to inflict cruelty or display benevolence, but in both cases, they impose their dominance.

This realization deeply troubled Binur. Even while pretending to be Fat’hi, he knew he actually belonged to the dominant side. Every couple of weeks, the psychological burden of maintaining his cover became unbearable, prompting him to take breaks by returning to his real home in Jerusalem for a few days, catching his breath in the comfort of his Israeli life before returning “to the field.” He could stop whenever he wished; he could interrupt the nightmare with a simple gesture—removing his shabby clothes, showing his true Israeli ID—while the Palestinians around him had no such luxury.

The Book Israel Never Read

Through his immersion, Yoram Binur came to realize “how little we [Israelis] understand about what goes on inside Arab communities.” This awareness—combined with the daily injustices he had witnessed—led him to foresee the imminent eruption of Palestinian anger. He was not at all surprised when, shortly thereafter, the First Intifada (the Palestinian popular uprising) broke out in Gaza in December 1987. He had already seen firsthand the tensions and frustrations reaching a breaking point.

Returning to his role as an Israeli journalist, Yoram Binur collected all of his experiences and reflections in the book “My Enemy, My Self”, published in 1989. In those pages, he meticulously recounted his life undercover. His account—translated into eight languages—helped introduce Western audiences to the reality of Gaza and its refugee camps during the 1980s, exposing the treatment Palestinians received and highlighting the human side of a people often reduced to a faceless “enemy.”

The book was published directly in English in 1989, first in the United States, and quickly translated into multiple languages, under the title My Enemy, My self—but curiously not into Hebrew, the language in which it was originally written by Binur himself. The Israeli public for whom the book was intended never received an edition in their own language (even today, it remains available only in translation).

This lack of publication in his home country perhaps says a great deal about the climate of that era and subsequent ones: in the late 1980s, with the First Intifada underway, a book in which an Israeli "disguised" himself as a Palestinian and implicitly defined Israel as a state practicing forms of segregation would have struggled to find acceptance on local bookshelves. Binur himself, as a young idealist, hoped to shake up consciences at home, but had to content himself with an international audience.

Abroad, My Enemy, My Self caused a stir and attracted significant attention from critics—though not always in flattering terms. The Washington Post described it as “an emotionally powerful but intellectually disappointing and superficial book.”

His “Palestinian” experience lasted an intense but relatively brief six months; he never endured the extreme experiences of torture, nor was he arrested, interrogated, and imprisoned for months, nor did he lose family or friends under army fire—dramatic realities that indelibly mark the lives of Palestinians.

Ultimately, he himself admitted in the epilogue that he had no “far-reaching conclusions” to offer—no easy solutions, only the bleak portrayal of a “dog-eat-dog world” in which he had played the role of a participating observer.

Black Like Me and the dilemmas of disguised empathy

The idea of disguising oneself as the "Other" to understand the experiences of an oppressed group was not new. In 1959, American writer John Howard Griffin darkened his skin and traveled through the segregated Southern states, recounting in his famous book Black Like Me the daily humiliations experienced by Black Americans.

In Binur’s book, there was no skin-color barrier—Israelis and Palestinians are indistinguishable—but Binur himself acknowledged this similarity in intent: just as Griffin sought to awaken the conscience of white Americans, Binur aimed to open the eyes of Israelis to injustices they preferred to deny. The result was a firsthand account intended to generate empathy by showing Israeli readers "what it feels like on the other side."

But dressing up as an oppressed person remains controversial, both then and now. While such operations bring uncomfortable truths to light, they also raise accusations of cultural appropriation. Just as Griffin was criticized for the temporary nature of his experiment—being able to remove his black appearance after a few weeks—Binur was similarly reproached for the temporary nature of his own experiment.

Some critics found the very idea offensive: Binur was accused of teaching something Palestinians had already been expressing for years. Why should an Israeli have to narrate Palestinian suffering to make it believable? Why weren’t the Palestinians' own denunciations sufficient to move people’s consciences?

Other critics, however, suggested that these kinds of investigations, despite their controversy, could serve as a "bridge." A member of the dominant group speaking to his peers perhaps has a greater chance of being heard, partially breaking down walls of mistrust.

In Binur’s case, as noted in an academic journal, he served the Palestinian cause precisely because he was a Jew speaking to other skeptical Jews: he helped to "confirm, clarify, and catalog the range of injustices experienced by Palestinians (which they themselves denounce)," convincing Israeli readers who would otherwise remain unconvinced by Palestinian testimonies alone. Nevertheless, it remains a delicate balance: giving voice to the voiceless can easily transform into overshadowing the original voices.

From the Front Lines to the Garage: Farewell to Journalism

After My Enemy, My Self, Yoram Binur continued his journalistic career for several years, becoming one of the prominent faces reporting on the Arab world for Israeli media. In the 1990s and 2000s, he worked as a leading correspondent for Israel’s Channel 2 television, closely following events in the West Bank and the broader Arab world. Over time, however, something broke in his relationship with the profession. In 2008, Binur disappeared from the screens. Recently interviewed, when asked if he missed covering current events, he replied without hesitation: "Do I miss being a reporter? No, not at all."

He reinvented himself in an entirely new role: as a motorcycle mechanic, opening a small repair shop in Tel Aviv. Today, now in his early sixties, he lives in the Shapira neighborhood of Tel Aviv, a working-class, multi-ethnic area, leading a simple life far removed from media elites. Binur has never renounced his ideas nor disavowed his experiences, but he has deliberately chosen a life away from the public eye.

Another Era, Another Journalism

The story of Yoram Binur and his disguise as a Palestinian now belongs to a different era. Nearly forty years later, the media and political context has radically changed—and not for the better. Today, a journalist attempting a similar endeavor would face nearly insurmountable barriers.

Since October 7, 2023, it has become impossible for an outside observer to physically enter the Gaza Strip. Israeli authorities, with very rare exceptions orchestrated for propaganda purposes, prohibit access to foreign journalists in Gaza.

The result is an almost total blackout: only Palestinian journalists already inside—who themselves live under the bombs—are documenting what happens, risking their own lives.

According to various international organizations, over 200 journalists have been killed in the Gaza Strip alone in less than two years. Many died wearing jackets marked "PRESS," hit during bombings. Nearly all were Palestinians, as no international reporter has been able to enter and witness events directly on the ground.

In this devastating context, attempting to make human contact across the dividing wall now appears simply impossible. Yet, one lesson remains from Binur’s writings: an Israeli disguised as a Palestinian once tried to look his “enemy” in the eyes—and found himself.

Until the next Debrief,
Luigi and Sacha