Through a different lens

Otago Daily Times

08-08-2025

You can take a journalist off the television, but he'll just find other ways to share the stories, Rob Harley tells Tom McKinlay.
Rob Harley reports that his leg is playing up, when he picks up the phone to talk.
Fair enough, too. The longtime Kiwi journalist — for decades one of the most recognisable faces in television current affairs — has put in the miles over many years, running down some of the country's hardest hitting stories. He's 71 now and semi-retired in a lifestyle block north of Auckland, he says.
It doesn't sound a bad place to be laid up. But that's not really Harley's style.
And indeed at the merest suggestion that he might consider charging straight back into the thick of the world's most dangerous story, the leg and the bucolic views are quickly forgotten.
"Oh, God, I'd be on the next plane over there with a press jacket on. I'd probably get shot, but you know, I'd consider it no less than my duty if anybody ever gave me the budget and the ability to actually go there and see it again," he says.
Harley is talking about Palestine, which he first visited back in 2012 — on assignment — and which will be among the topics he'll be addressing on a visit to Dunedin next week.
"I did a [social media] post the other day saying, how can men in this country cuddle their tāmariki and their mokopuna in front of their TVs and watch these kids with parchment-thin skin, with their backbones and ribs sticking out and just shrug their shoulders and say, well, that's too hard for me. No, no, no, no, no.
"You see, we in this country, we helped bring down apartheid because we spoke. We spoke out and we marched and we demonstrated," he says.
Harley's Dunedin visit is a result of "several little destinies", as he puts it.
He has a couple of books of his own to promote, as well as a novel by a friend and former Dunedin resident, the late Kristin Jack, called Fire and Faith to help launch. And he's been working on a documentary with Shakti, to mark 30 years of the organisation's work supporting women from migrant and refugee populations affected by domestic violence. It's work he's long been interested in, dating back to a documentary he made over eight years, starting from 2002, called Broken Promises, Broken Brides. He'll be catching up with Shakti supporters in the city.
Then, material from his books and his work with Shakti will be wrapped into a talk on Thursday at the University of Otago College of Education called "Tragedy and Triumph through the Camera Lens".
One of his books, Relentless, subtitle People Who Wouldn't Quit — Stories That Wouldn't Die, touches on Palestine from a couple of different angles.
The first is via a story he did following New Zealand film-maker Paula Jones, who was documenting the work of the one hospital in Palestine with an intensive care unit for babies. The hospital is propped up by visiting doctors from elsewhere, including at that time, Dr Alan Kerr from New Zealand. Jones' work is now the film The Doctor's Wife.
"Going to the West Bank in 2012 changed my life," Harley says of that time.
Before that, he was ignorant of Palestine's history, he freely admits.
"It was absolutely, personally transformational. Because to actually go to the West Bank and realise the prison-like, outrageous conditions in which Palestinians have been living for decades now, it's just, it's outrageous nonsense."
Harley followed up that experience by interviewing Dr Izzeldin Abuelaish, a Palestinian doctor whose three daughters and a niece were killed by an Israel shell in Gaza in 2009. The doctor, who had been working in an Israeli hospital, treating Israeli patients, went on to write a book I Shall Not Hate — in which he explained his determination to continue a "journey on the road to peace and human dignity".
During the current conflict, an Israeli missile hit a shelter in the Jabalia refugee camp, in Gaza, and killed another 22 of Dr Abuelaish's relatives, Harley says.
The accumulative impact of those experiences, travelling to Palestine, interviewing Dr Abuelaish, means he now sees the situation in Palestine and Israel very differently.
"You know, any time you ever heard the word Palestinian, the next word out of their mouth was terrorist," he says of the narrative that dominated reporting for many years.
But then he learned about the Nakba, the "catastrophe" that befell Palestine as the post World War 1 British Mandate ended and the state of Israel was born in blood.
"Overnight in 1948, Israeli militias, some of them led by future prime ministers of Israel, like Menachem Begin, murderous militias, basically committed mass murder, buried bodies, and put car parks over the top of them, and made 750,000 Palestinians into refugees overnight," he says.
Now 80 years on, Gaza lies devastated, many of its residents refugees for a second time.
He's been told to stay out of it, Harley says. But he's having none of it.
"Somebody said to me, actually a woman who is a humanitarian photographer, and she said, 'oh, Rob, love your stuff but stay away from Palestine. It's too complex'. So I just posted her off a couple of things this morning.
"I said, too complex? Well, take a look at this. And one of them is sort of a home video made by a bunch of Israeli snipers — it's actually shot down the scope of a high-powered rifle," he says.
In the background you can hear the Israeli soldiers talking.
"They're discussing which kid are we going to shoot, the kid in the blue shirt or the pink shirt. And they shoot him and they hoot and they holler and say, 'that's a good one. Man, that's going in the library'."
The second piece was a report by Al Jazeera, which also involved incriminating evidence blithely recorded by the IDF.
"It's shot from a drone which has just spent hours and hours and hours following these four Palestinian guys wandering through the wreckage of Gaza, young men seeing whether any of their homes were left.
"And the drones just picked them all up, blew them to pieces one by one ... You can watch it. I've said to several people, too complex? You've got to be kidding me. This is mass murder and it's unfolding on our phones. What we did about this will define this generation."
It's easy to imagine Harley covering such a story in all its harrowing detail for one of the prime time documentary shows that were once commonplace on New Zealand television.
And he's more aware than most of their absence.
"I think there's a general lament," he says of the light entertainment that has replaced those shows — Frontline, Eyewitness News, Assignment, Fair Go, Sunday, 60 Minutes, 3rd Degree, Holmes and Close Up. He lists them off.
"Hopefully, it's not us old buggers saying, hey, we were the heroes of the age. No, we just did a job."
But they were given the time to do that job well, he says.
"I mean, the second story in my latest book is an investigation I did over a year with Gil and Lesley Elliott over the death of Sophie. I investigated the whole phenomenon of pathological narcissism."
Revisiting such stories and reworking them for publication in his books has provided an opportunity to think again about the value of such long-form journalism.
"I'm semi-retired but I'm repurposing a lot of investigative stuff that I did and saying, 'OK, what was the story? What did we learn? Are we any the wiser? Are we any the better? Did any of that stuff actually matter or are we just whistling in the wind?'
"And what I've attempted to do through these last two books is say, no, hang on, investigative journalism actually matters — we're not the total answer but we are part of the force for change for the better in a community."