“All I see is Palestine”: How I went to cover a Rihanna concert and caused a political firestorm

(Credit: Reuters/Lucy Nicholson)

 

By the time Rihanna showed up, I was annoyed, tired and hormonal. She was more than two hours late for her concert at Tel Aviv’s vast Yarkon Park, where I wandered among tens of thousands of young Israelis, not knowing a soul.

But why would I? I’d only just come to Israel in a desperate Hail Mary move, to continue IVF in a country known for its high success rates. Being in my 40s, I wasn’t a particular fan of RiRi (as I later learned was her nickname), but volunteered to cover the concert for a local English-language newspaper I hoped would hire me, at least until I fell pregnant and returned to New York.

Her performance was short but unremarkable. I jotted down some notes about her outfits and dance moves, and a few hours later went back to our temporary digs to write the story, a typical man-on-the-street article that recapped the night’s events and interspersed adoring quotes from fans in the audience whom I’d interviewed while waiting for her to take the stage.

The next morning when I checked online to make sure the piece had been posted, I got a sick feeling when I read the headline: “Rihanna: ‘All I see Is Palestine,’” was the title, using a line in the story where I’d mentioned how the artist had changed up the chorus to one of her songs to include some local flavor.

When I’d scrawled the line down the night before – as she sang the chorus to “Pour It Up,” All I see/is dollar signs – I’d thought the Palestine mention was a way to show sympathy for the underdog in the region.

I’d been a journalist for two decades, but hadn’t covered politics in a long time.

I had no clue I had just stepped into a Mideast war.

No – not the actual war between Israel and Palestine, where real people lose their lives – but the media war whose battles are fought between various groups hoping to win the news cycle. Jewish publications and media watchdogs accused me and my paper of being so left-wing that we’d fabricated the story, which was quickly going viral around the world.

I watched uneasily as the news was regurgitated in Spanish, French and Arabic, until someone on Twitter posted a video that showed Rihanna singing her song. As originally written. With no mention of Palestine. I had misheard it. I had made a major error. My newspaper retracted it. But it was too late. The pro-Israel camp was gloriously gleeful to show a bias on the part of my paper. The mainstream media did what it always did when celebrity and scandal were involved, reporting, rereporting on what the Washington Post called “The Rihanna Israel-Palestine Controversy That Never Happened,” churning me up in the teeth of its machine and spitting me out, crushed.

That’s how it felt, anyway. Over that long weekend, I cried for three days straight as former colleagues and Twitter strangers taunted me on social media. Maybe it was the hormones, maybe it was watching my career – the one thing I was counting on distracting me while doing IVF in a foreign country – go up in flames. Or maybe it was simply the shame of public humiliation, swiftly increasing like the national deficit tally at Times Square. Another article. Another tweet. Another Facebook mention. I couldn’t even defend myself; I was hoping to hold onto a job.

But that was not to happen. Waiting for the phone to ring with news of my fate, I wandered around our rental apartment rambling like a lunatic. How could I have been so dumb? Why did I make such a terrible error? Why didn’t I check with anyone? As I read what people were saying about me online, I didn’t just feel like a bad journalist: I felt like an abominable human being. A few other reporters called in to regale me with tales of their appalling media blunders, but they were pre-Twitter, so I was hardly consoled.