October 6, 2000

For Pierre Rehov, life only took on true meaning when he began putting it at risk. He had been a movie producer, a novelist, a journalist and a lawyer. But none of those professions satisfied his searching soul. In moments of deep personal introspection he questioned himself, “Who and what am I really?”

For him, the answer came when he turned on the news on October 6, 2000, and saw the images of the shooting of Mohammed al-Dura, the 12 year-old Palestinian boy, whom Israel was summarily accused of targeting. “I was in shock,” says Rehov, who rarely watches the pro-Arab French broadcasts. “In this case, I knew as a producer that there was something very fishy about the images. The angles just weren’t right.”

The day after al-Dura was shot, there was a pro-Palestinian rally in the streets of Paris, where the participants screamed, “Death to the Jews.” Rehov was reminded of one century ago when the exact same antisemitic scene played itself out on the streets of Paris prompted by the Alfred Dreyfus trial. Rehov’s instincts told him that the death of Mohammed al-Dura was another blood libel against the Jews. “I knew that I was no Herzl, but I had to do something,” Rehov says.

And so after the shooting of Mohamed al-Dura and the antisemitic rallies that ensued, Pierre Rehov took his fight off the streets of Paris to the courts of France. He rallied Jewish organizations in France to join him in a lawsuit against the French government for its defamation of the State of Israel. Rehov, who also holds an Israeli passport, was then off to the Holy Land to investigate the circumstance surrounding the tragic, yet suspicious death of al-Dura.

His own research, an IDF investigation, and the sources he interviewed, revealed that the trajectory of Israeli gunfire and the position of the bullet holes were inconsistent. Other inconsistencies were enumerated as well. Al-Dura was buried before any autopsy could be performed. Rehov’s investigations, however, had satisfied his suspicion that it was the Palestinians themselves who killed al-Dura for propaganda purposes. “It is not so hard to believe from some of these extremists who indoctrinate their children to be martyrs and suicide bombers,” he says.

When Rehov returned to France, he found out that the defamation case had been dismissed after only six weeks, with no explanation. Rehov says it usually takes two years for a case to be dismissed in France.

But Rehov's resolve could not be dismissed. With his French passport, Arabic features, and a digital recorder, he went into the territories (which are forbidden to Israeli citizens) posing as a French tourist and began an undercover investigation of what is really going on behind the scenes. He has thus far produced six documentaries from the “tourist attractions” he visited in the territories. http://www.pierrerehov.com/about.htm