The Fixer at the Edge of History |
There is a particular kind of silence that descends in the seconds after a story breaks that changes everything. Not the silence of calm. The silence of people collectively holding their breath.
I know that silence well now.
Since October 7, I have been living a double life. By day, I help families move their lives to Israel. Furniture, appliances, and the physical weight of a decision to make Aliyah. By night, and sometimes through the night and well into the following afternoon, I have been working as a fixer for the foreign press corps that descended on this country in the wake of the massacre and never quite left.
The work began periodically. A contact here, a short gig there. I helped crews from Canada, many European countries, Brazil, etc. The fixer’s role sounds logistical on paper: arranging interviews, navigating checkpoints, translating between languages, and, more importantly, between worldviews. In practice, it is something closer to being the invisible co-author of history’s first draft. You are the person who knows which road to take, which source will actually pick up, which detail will make the story land for an audience that has never been to this country and cannot quite picture it.
I was good at it. But I always wanted the big stage.
On the night of October 13, the day Israel declared its own version of Victory Day and the last of the hostages came home, I found myself at a bar somewhere between relief and disbelief, surrounded by journalists and other fixers. We had all lived inside this story for so long that we had forgotten what celebrating felt like. That night, through a haze of drinks and delayed emotion, I met a producer. One of those figures in the television news world........