On May 15, 2003, the Palestine-Israel Journal held a roundtable discussion at the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem on media and the second Intifada. The participants were journalist and PIJ board member, Khaled abu Aker, Haaretz military correspondent, Amos Harel, Yediot Ahronot's correspondent for the Occupied Territories, Ronni Shaked, and Radio France Internationale correspondent and TV producer, Elias Zananiri. The moderator was Simon Wilson, senior producer in the BBC's Middle East bureau.


Mr Wilson: My initial thoughts, as a journalist who has covered conflicts in many areas of the world, is that this is undoubtedly the most covered, or over-covered, story in the world - but it's perhaps under-covered in crucial areas, like the question of Yasser Arafat's possible links with terror, or what Ariel Sharon is really up to. Has anyone come to grips with these questions in either the domestic or international media?

Mr Shaked: On the first day of the second Intifada, I wrote that it's not an Intifada, but a real war. Sharon on the Temple Mount was a shock for me. I am an Israeli, but I made a great effort to look for the truth and to make the people - my readers in Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem - understand what happened, why this war broke out and who the players are.
I wrote a lot about what the Palestinians think about the Israelis, about what they want from this war. And that's what I am still doing because, as I said, it's not going to be a short war. We are now just at the beginning of a political process, I hope, but it's going to take a long time.
It's not easy to be an Israeli journalist in this war and have your office on Jaffa Street - a car bomb exploded under my window and I covered that story in the paper. Nor is it easy to then go to Nablus and see your Palestinian friend who was injured by an Israeli tank. I do my best not to let my emotions affect the truth, but it's not always easy. It's my country. I live under the threat of terrorism.
I know that my job is to show people everything that's happening here, the ugly things and the good things, to give them tools to use in elections so they will have the opportunity to vote, not from their stomachs, but from their heads. If you ask me if I've succeeded, I'd say no.

Mr Zananiri: I started in this business back in 1976 with the al-Fajer daily, when it was considered the mouthpiece of the PLO, an ultra-nationalist newspaper. Since 1988, I've been working with foreign media organisations including WTN, MBC, Khalifa TV News and Radio France Internationale. I have the luxury of being sort of an outsider, in spite of the fact that I am Palestinian; reading what the Palestinian newspapers write, listening to the radio, and watching the BBC, while at the same time reading the Israeli newspapers to get a view of how the Israeli press, and other media, are handling the Intifada. When you spend enough years in this business, you become capable of seeing where A and B made a mistake and C was successful.
With regard to how the media in general address this Intifada, we have a terminology problem. Intifada has become a euphemism for suicide attacks, and that is a mistake that the Palestinian, Israeli and the foreign media have fallen into. Most people, when they hear the term Intifada, think only of suicide bombers in Herzliya, Netanya or wherever. The real, limited sense of the word Intifada - uprising - was what happened back in 1987, with mass demonstrations and stone-throwing and so on - a popular uprising against Israeli troops.
The second Intifada began a dark tunnel of mutual escalation. Even so-called popular or passive acts of resistance began to disappear and were replaced by the wave of suicide bombings. Some Palestinians argued that suicide bombings are essential because somebody has to send the message to the Israeli public that this is what they'll get if they carry on with the occupation. I wasn't convinced. My argument was that, if that's the message, it has already been understood on the Israeli side. These attacks should come to an end or they will boomerang and we will be shooting ourselves, not in the foot, but in the head.
I wrote an article about this in a Palestinian daily in Ramallah more than a year ago. There were very sensitive paragraphs addressing the issue of how bad suicide bombings are, how the Palestinians are repeating the same mistakes of 1970, when we allowed extremists and radical left-wingers to hijack and blow up planes. Today, we are making the same mistake in allowing these kinds of activities to go on. The Palestinian dream of statehood will disappear. Parts of what I wrote were deleted.

Mr Harel: I have been military correspondent for Haaretz for the past five-and-a-half years. I think the Israeli public is bored stiff with the Intifada. I'm not sure how aware the Palestinians are of that, but if you talk to the average guy on the Israeli street, he would like to talk about anything but the violence. The same goes for most newspaper editors.
For the average Israeli, what's going on in the West Bank could be happening on the other side of the moon. Soldiers, reservists, settlers and peace activists all together comprise less than 10 percent of the Israeli population. My father hasn't been in the territories for 20 years; my wife for 10 or 15; my daughter, never. To them, it's something that happens on TV.
Three or four years ago, innocent Palestinian civilians shot by Israeli troops was big news. Not anymore. You can have an incursion in Gaza with 10 or 15 people killed, and it makes it to about page 15 in Yediot Ahronot - half a page, not more, on the bottom of the page.
The only time Israelis are interested in the conflict is when terror strikes them. Apart from that, there's a very big gap between Palestinians and Israelis. From what I hear about Palestinian media, their whole life has to do with this and that's why these are the major stories all the time. It's not like that with the Israeli media, and the average Israeli reader would like to hear about it even less than he already does today.
We are all emotionally involved - not only are you in danger because of what you do, and of course, we know how many of our Palestinian colleagues have either been killed or wounded - it's part of your life, so we can't be detached. For Palestinians under occupation all the time, it's impossible to sit back and watch it as if you were in London. I think that many of us on the Israeli side are now reaching the painful conclusion that this conflict is actually almost impossible to resolve. The level of hate on both sides is terrible.
There was an incident when 12 Israeli soldiers were killed in Hebron in November, including the highest-ranking Israeli officer killed in the Intifada, Commander Dror Weinberg of the Hebron area. Dror was religious; the speeches at his funeral made by rabbis and friends of the family were amazing. It was like a concentrated dose of settler messianic Judaism. I left there with the feeling that, no matter what happens, even if we reach some kind of solution with the Palestinians, it will be almost impossible to tear these people out of what they see as their land. For me, this was a wake-up call. This was the greatest example I've seen of how hard this is going to be to solve.

Mr Abu Aker: I've known Ronni since I worked for a daily newspaper in East Jerusalem. Our relationship was the result of the intense Israeli military censorship we were subjected to at that time. In order to publish stories, we used to play a cat-and-mouse game. By calling Ronni, or another Israeli journalist, and giving them the story, it would be covered in the Israeli press, and then translated into Arabic. Then the censorship authorities were told that the source was Yediot or Ma'ariv, etc., so it could be published.
At that time, the relationship between journalists was very important to avoid having the IDF spokesman as the sole source of information. It allowed alternative information about what was going on in the field to be transmitted from Palestinian journalists to Israeli journalists.
That kind of relationship helped both sides learn from each other. Those contacts with Israeli and foreign journalists helped me learn what it really means to be a professional. But relationships created before and during the first Intifada have nearly disappeared in the second Intifada. Both sides have gone back to their old positions, looking at the other as the enemy. The priority is now to cover the suffering of your own people, full stop, without getting the Israeli version.
This is a setback for Palestinian and Israeli media. There is no readiness among the editors or the population to listen to the point of view of the other side, or to listen to the voices of reason, if they exist, on both sides.
My colleagues tell me that they follow the instructions of the editors and that editors don't want any stories beyond Intifada stories. It's frustrating for someone who has witnessed how the Palestinian press covered stories before and after Oslo to see how news is being covered now. It is very important, in my opinion, to acknowledge that both sides are playing a destructive role by inciting against each other. Palestinian journalists who work with the foreign press prove that they are professionals, and not just a group of people who only want to spread propaganda.

Mr Wilson: Ronni, I'll ask you bluntly: Haven't Israeli journalists failed to explain what's happening to the Israeli public? Isn't that proven by Israeli society's lack of interest in what's happening in the territories, which allows a master politician like Sharon to get away with policies that Israelis wouldn't have approved of years ago?

Mr Shaked: No. I don't think we failed. I think it's the failure of the public. They ignored what they were reading. In the first year of the second Intifada, I wrote 42 articles, starting with interviews with Marwan Barghouti, Sheikh Yassin and Arafat. But the people who read them ignored them. They hated me. They hated the newspaper. So it's not us. It's the people. It's the situation. We tried.
I want to say something very important about what Khaled said. The cooperation we have from everybody in this Intifada - from Hamas, from Islamic Jihad, from wanted people - is surprisingly open and easy. If I want to talk with the head of the Tanzim, there's no problem. I have his telephone number. He calls me. Yesterday, I got a telephone call from refugees inside the Ashkelon jail. There was a lot of cooperation about getting to Arafat or [security chief Mohammad] Dahlan.
We even have very good cooperation with all the Palestinian journalists working in the field: in Nablus, Jenin, Hebron, Gaza, Rafah and Khan Yunis. I think I can reach every one of them, talk with them freely and get everything I need with no problem. My problem, as a journalist covering the territories, is how to influence my editor to print all the news I bring him. Sometimes not even 10 percent of what I write appears in the newspaper.

Mr Wilson: Censorship?

Mr Shaked: It's not censorship. It's just not sexy. Palestinians are not selling the newspaper anymore. The owner of Yediot wants one thing - money. He wants everybody to read the newspaper. Therefore, if there's a love story between a Palestinian girl and an Israeli soldier, that's going to be on the front page.

Mr Wilson: Why is it so different on the Palestinian side?

Mr Zananiri: Ronni just said that he wrote articles that were never published simply because there was no interest. Regardless of what Ronni writes or doesn't write, the Gaza incursion was a half-page story on the bottom of page 15, while a terror attack would be on the front page. The same thing applies on the Palestinian side. When there's a bombing attack inside Israel, you'd see that on the front page of the newspaper, sometimes a huge banner headline. I was at the northern border long before the Israelis withdrew from Lebanon, with Foreign Press Association journalists. An Israeli colonel talking about Hizbollah referred to them in Hebrew as fighters. I asked why he called Hizbollah fighters when the Israelis refer to Palestinians as terrorists. He replied, "That's a good question, but you will not get the answer you want. We are in Lebanon." I was not referring to Palestinians in Lebanon, but to Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Palestinians are branded terrorists by the Israeli media.

Mr Wilson: If you're down in Gaza and a Palestinian shoots an Israeli soldier, is he a terrorist?

Mr Harel: The Haaretz term usually is Palestinian gunman. And a soldier is never murdered, he is always killed. But when it's a civilian, even Haaretz has changed. We used to say settlers were killed. Now we say murdered. Because of the general shift in the Israeli media, Haaretz has also moved more to the center. In a confrontation strictly between armed gunmen and the IDF, Haaretz would usually say gunmen.

Mr Wilson: A government spokesman is allowed to get away with calling any Palestinian with a gun anywhere shooting anyone a terrorist. Certainly in Yediot or on TV.

Mr Zananiri: There has been a change in the way the Israeli media is covering these kinds of attacks. For example, the attack in Hebron where the 12 soldiers were killed - right after it took place everybody on the Israeli side was saying, "Terror attack in Hebron, Israelis killed." I was yelling, "Are they crazy? Why did they open fire at worshippers, even if they were settlers?" It took around 20 minutes to find out what happened. We have seen the Israeli media trend of misleading the public to make you think, at least for the first 24 hours, that every shooting on the West Bank is a terrorist incident involving civilians. Two days later, we find out that, out of eight killed, seven were soldiers.

Mr Harel: I don't agree. Usually the truth is found out very quickly. In 10 or 15 minutes, the reporters know who is a civilian and who is a soldier. But for the first few hours, the military censor doesn't allow you to say that these were soldiers killed. You have to say Israelis - not civilians. This is because the families of those who died should be informed of their deaths before they hear about them on the radio. The public understands that this means soldiers. I agree with my colleague about the events in Hebron. There was an attempt by Israeli politicians, the Foreign Ministry spokesperson and so on, to call it a massacre. It took us exactly half an hour to know the truth.
The analysis I wrote on Sunday morning said there was no massacre in Hebron. It was a confrontation between armed people on both sides. What's sad for us is that the Palestinians won. Three armed Palestinians managed to kill 12 soldiers. This was the analysis for which I got the worst hate mail in the last two years. I was called a PLO supporter, a Hamas supporter, by American Jews.

Mr Wilson: Join the club. I want to stay with the issue of language. Khaled, you're reporting: Suicide bomber, martyr or murderer?

Mr Abu Aker: It depends. One of the arguments, for example, is when to use martyrdom attack or military attack. Even the official newspapers supported by the Palestinian Authority that are officially against the suicide bombings use the phrase martyrdom attacks.

Mr Wilson: Isn't this part of the incitement that Israel accuses the Palestinians of?

Mr Abu Aker: This is a situation where a society is involved in a struggle against occupation.
The influence of the Palestinian press is minimal in comparison with the influence of the Israeli press. I cannot say that more than 10 percent of the population read the newspapers every day.

Mr Wilson: What does al-Jazeera use on this topic?

Mr Abu Aker: I think it's military attack, sometimes martyrdom. It depends on the reporter or the editor.

Mr Zananiri: For me, it's simple. A martyr is whoever is shot dead by the Israelis, by the Israeli army. Somebody who commits a suicide attack inside Israel, I simply call him what he is - a suicide bomber. Even when I wrote for newspapers in Ramallah, I used to call it a suicide attack.

Mr Shaked: And your editor changed it.

Mr Zananiri: In my articles, no. The media has been pulled into this process of radicalization. Patriotism, on some occasions, becomes a higher priority - at the expense of professionalism. Let me say one thing that I know will irritate many of my Palestinian colleagues: If you compare Israeli newspapers and Palestinian newspapers, there's a much greater chance of finding, in the Israeli press, a human-interest story about a tragic incident on the Palestinian side than there is of finding that kind of story in a Palestinian newspaper. You'll never find one.
The Arab press still wants their audience to listen to them, and sometimes ratings come at the expense of professionalism. But the Palestinian media doesn't function in a full-fledged independent state where they should be judged by the rules of the free press in the free world.
Palestinians working for foreign outputs have the luxury of looking in from the outside. There's no boss saying, "Why do you call them suicide bombers. Write it differently."
There is a tendency of radicalization on both sides. In the first months of the uprising, 68 percent of Israelis were in favor of it. I remember an article A.B. Yehoshua published in Haaretz calling for the settlers to leave the Occupied Territories and not to impose their destiny on the rest of the Israelis. You hardly hear this kind of opinion today. Why? Thanks to Hamas, Islamic Jihad and some elements of Fateh, public opinion has switched. You can't find Israelis who understand the Palestinians. For them, it's all terror.

Mr Wilson: Amos, is there more journalists could do on the Israeli side to make people more interested in what's happening?

Mr Harel: I'm not sure. The public is exhausted by the conflict. The hatred is tremendous on both sides. I don't think it's ever been like this before. When you feel you are under siege, there's not much you want to know about the other side's agony.

Mr Wilson: What pressures are you under to put the army point of view across?

Mr Harel: I am sick and tired of media critics inside Israel, most of them from the left, asserting that all military correspondents in Israel are just part of the army institution and so on. It's not exactly true. Different reporters do different jobs.

Mr Wilson: Have you ever felt pressure, self-imposed or from your paper, not to report something?

Mr Harel: Not from Haaretz. There are self-imposed restrictions every now and then, I must admit. Sometimes you say, "Okay, 10 soldiers were just killed. I don't want to deal today with the fact two people were arrested and left without water for five hours. I'll deal with it tomorrow." A lot of my stories put the army in a very tough spot. I was the first Israeli reporter covering the Israeli side of the conflict to publish stories about Israeli soldiers looting during Defensive Shield. Amira Hass wrote about it before from the Palestinian side. It made a lot of noise. There were headlines, follow-ups and international coverage. When the BBC called me, I said I didn't want to be interviewed. It was two weeks into Defensive Shield and there were funerals of Israeli civilians and soldiers almost every day. I thought it was my professional obligation to publish the story, but I didn't want to follow it up. I knew there were enough good journalists who were going to use it.

Mr Abu Aker: Haaretz said they lost subscribers as a result of the coverage of two people - Amira Hass and Gideon Levy. This is a clear indication readers don't want to hear about Palestinian suffering.

Mr Wilson: We know that Ronni and Amira Hass come and go in the territories. Are there Palestinian journalists who move around Israel?

Mr Abu Aker: Palestinians are aware of everything that is going on in Israeli society. They follow the Israeli press and watch Israeli TV. But professional journalists are treated by the Israeli army as suspicious. I am one of the lucky few who can move around. I am from Jerusalem and have an Israeli press card. I can go from Ramallah to Bethlehem to Tulkarem.
For a short period of time, I was denied my Israeli press card. Then, when my media outlet threatened to sue and hired an Israeli lawyer, Gilad Sher, they reconsidered their position. Still, I was summoned to the office of the director-general of the GPO (Government Press Office), and he started questioning me as if I was a meeting an Israeli intelligence officer.
I have colleagues in Hebron who have not been able to go to Ramallah for two years. Those in Ramallah can't go to Nablus, etc. Local reporters cover the story in each city, but still have difficulty getting access to a village next to the city where there was an incident. Coverage of the story becomes totally different. Many reporters depend on the phone to cover the story, and not on going into the field.

Mr Wilson: Some people reading these discussions might be surprised that Israeli journalists move around in the territories as Israeli citizens, in general, don't. How many journalists do what you do, and how has that affected the coverage in Israel generally?

Mr Shaked: I think not more than 10 Israeli journalists go into the territories. Israeli television has to go with bodyguards and so on. When I go to Nablus, first of all, I'm a Jew. I'm sorry to say that one of my most terrible times was when I heard people start yelling Yehudi, and then start chasing me. When I go to Nablus, I have to take somebody from Hamas or Tanzim or the others with me.

Mr Wilson: There are reports that people want to kidnap the few Israelis who do go into the territories. Do you view that as a real threat?

Mr Shaked: Sometimes I am frightened to go. Sometimes I get phone calls from Tanzim or Hamas telling me not to even try to come to Gaza after I wrote an article against Hamas. But I go. I know those people are talking from their emotions. Perhaps they're prepared to do something, but I have to do my job to bring the truth to the Israeli readers.
Sometimes I can't go by car. I have to take a Palestinian taxi or go with other people. Because of insurance, when I go from Jerusalem to Nablus, I have to go in an armored car or I'm not allowed to go. Even though my car has TV on it in big letters, sometimes that's not enough.

Mr Zananiri: Most of the Palestinian journalists who live in the West Bank and Gaza have no permits to come to Jerusalem or enter Israel. A whole generation of journalists on the Palestinian side has only one side of events, either a follow-up from Arafat's office or an Israeli army incursion, or whatever. They don't see the story on the Israeli side.
If it were not for the articles that reach them through the media, like the ones written by Ronni and others, they wouldn't have a clue about what goes on inside Israel or behind the barbed wire. This is a big problem. The Palestinians need to understand how Israelis think. Once, when I was working with French television, there was a suicide attack on a bus outside Haifa. I was 20 minutes away. We arrived while they were literally still pulling bodies out of the bus. That was the first time in my life that I saw this in person. It was terrible. I had tears in my eyes. That same week, my team was the first to get into Jenin camp on April 14. Again, the same kind of thing, bodies here and there, destruction. As a human being, you have to feel. Even as a Palestinian seeing Israeli victims. As a journalist, when you have the chance to go to both sides, you also have the privilege of understanding the agony of the other side. Once you understand that, it becomes easier for you to present the case. The morning after a suicide attack in Tel Aviv, I stood in front of the camera, reporting in Arabic. People around me started yelling. They couldn't even understand what I was saying. Had they understood, maybe they would have shut up and listened. I was saying that this kind of attack is only detrimental to the Palestinians. It will boomerang. Many people believe that, but sometimes it's difficult to make the point clear.

Mr Wilson: Let's talk about the changes in technology between the two Intifadas. The Internet has arrived, and on the Palestinian side, there's been a complete revolution in terms of satellite television coverage. How have these changes affected the situation?

Mr Zananiri: You have reactions in real time. That's the main change. During the first Intifada, there were no Arab satellite stations. The first one, MBC, started in 1991. Today, you have loads of Arab satellite stations and the minute something happens, they go live. The day the Israeli army besieged Arafat's compound and there were live pictures, we saw people taking to the streets after midnight in Ramallah because they saw what was happening in Arafat's compound.

Mr Abu Aker: It's very important to understand that the Palestinian press, I am sad to say, doesn't influence the population. Even Israeli television is more influential than Palestinian media. People are more influenced by Arab satellites than by local Palestinian media. Of course, people are pushing journalists to cover the story the way they want it. They want to hear more about their own suffering. They don't want to hear about what is actually going on. It's very important to be a professional journalist, but how do you force people to respect your coverage? Palestinian journalists lost respect and credibility when they failed to make the PA accountable. It's impossible now to come and ask them to play a role.
The failure of the Palestinian press to play the role of watchdog helped spread rumors and created a gap between Palestinian newspapers, journalists and society. I can understand that Palestinian journalists don't feel protected. They have no union. If they get into trouble with the Palestinian security apparatus, nobody will defend them. Their editor asks them to follow the story from this angle and not from that one. Therefore, the alternative is the Arab satellite channels, which present different points of view. Palestinian journalists need to rebuild their media institutions differently.

Mr Wilson: Amos, I have had personal experience of being allowed by the Israeli army to get my camera closer to get shots of what they're doing to Arafat's headquarters. What sort of political pressure is there on the military to come up with media-friendly operations?

Mr Harel: It's quite an issue, and was even more of an issue before Defensive Shield. Some of the media spin tactics were pretty primitive. There was a time when, at eight o'clock sharp, just for the eight o'clock news, they would bomb Gaza after a suicide attack. Incursions into the West Bank, before Defensive Shield, would always start about 12 o'clock. We'd get phone calls from officers saying, "You should know for tomorrow's front page headline, that we are entering Nablus. Top secret." Five minutes later, I'd get a call from someone at al-Jazeera saying, "There's all kinds of tank movement around Nablus. Do you know what's going on?" For a week at the beginning of Defensive Shield, we were unable to join the soldiers in the field. There was a great struggle behind the scenes and now the army admits it was a mistake. I interviewed one of the top generals a month ago. He said, "If I knew then what I know now, I would have let news teams, even foreign teams, in on every incursion inside Jenin in the first days of Defensive Shield."
The Israeli army spokespeople are no great professionals. Sometimes the way they deal with the international press is a joke. The new spokesperson is a more experienced media advisor, and she is trying to bring about a change. But all you have to do is look at the ridiculous number of officers who can speak English and who deal with the foreign press and you'll see how absurd it is. This is one of the reasons why the IDF spokesperson's credibility among foreign journalists is so low. One more point: The Internet has changed things a lot. Haaretz's English web site is now considered the most important news source. The change has been amazing. People know a lot more. I am told by Western diplomats who work here in Tel Aviv that a lot of what they report is already known in the State Department or in the Foreign Office in London because they all check the Internet, and read Haaretz.
Every now and then I check how my articles are used on the Internet by running a name check on Google. Some are used by foreign media organizations that are objective. But 50 percent of my pieces are used by pro-Palestinian or Palestinian organizations trying to show how bad Israel looks in the territories, IDF misconduct, etc., while the other 50 percent is used by Jewish and pro-Israeli organizations taking other parts of what I report, trying to show how bad Palestinian terrorism is and how involved the PA is in what's going on.

Mr Zananiri: Three years ago, I lectured at Bir Zeit University on television journalism. I spent the first five days talking about what objectivity means. Give me the facts. I make up my own opinion, as a leader or as somebody who watches television. Don't try to impose your point of view on me. If the Israelis kill one Palestinian, say they shot one Palestinian dead. Don't say they killed a number of Palestinians, and only a week later we find out they only killed one. Report events as they are. Foreign occupation is a fact. It doesn't need any exaggeration because it's totally appalling anywhere in the world. Nobody needs to sensationalize the occupation of another nation.

Mr Wilson: I'd like each of you to summarize the media's influence on the second Intifada.

Mr Shaked: I think people on both sides are much better informed about what happens in this Intifada. Israelis focus on what happens to Israelis, but they know the suffering of the Palestinians. I'm sorry to say that hasn't made them change their minds. The conflict is going to continue. Therefore, the much more important part of our job is to put into the hearts, minds and consciences of the new generation that there is another people here.

Mr Harel: I am pessimistic. Part of that relates to media coverage. When you come to editors here, there is an attitude of cynicism about everything going on. How many people killed? Four. Even if people from your side are killed, you don't get that emotional. It's not new. And part of news, of course, is reporting a new phenomenon.

Mr Abu Aker: I think many Palestinian journalists have succeeded in demonstrating their professionalism. They have worked on many stories in a balanced way. I also believe that the Israelis have pushed many Palestinian reporters and journalists into a corner and made them part of the conflict through the way they were treated, by prohibiting them access not only to Jerusalem, Gaza or the West Bank, but even from one city or village to another. These are things that need to be looked at.

Mr Wilson: As an international journalist here, the bravery on both sides of people being prepared to go out there and say things is a constant source of inspiration. I think your overwhelming feeling is a pessimistic one, but the spirit of journalism is alive, at least in this room. Let's hope more people out there try to push it forward in the years ahead.