The 'Rogue Entity' - Twenty Questions Radio/TV interviewers avoid asking about Israel....
Stuart Littlewood

41_israeli_soldier.jpg

March 29, 2008

The abysmal performance of western TV and radio interviewers when dealing with issues surrounding Israel - that 'Rogue Regime’ or 'Zionist Entity’, as many now call it - is not only embarrassing but a blot on the escutcheon of journalism.

Even the most fearsome inquisitors purr like a pussycat. Their rottweiler instincts evaporate, their investigative skills desert them, objectivity takes a nosedive. Penetrating questions are seldom asked, lies go unchallenged. Any Israeli spokesperson or cheerleader is guaranteed an easy ride.

Have the nation’s truth-seekers fallen under some wicked Zionist spell? Are their researchers on strike? Did somebody nobble the programme editors?

While we wait with mounting frustration for our broadcasters to get their act together, here are 20 simple questions the BBC and others seem anxious not to ask......

On Rockets and Sieges

(1) The numbers of home-made Qassam rockets launched at Israel are diligently counted and quoted, but how many sophisticated munitions have Israel’s F-16s, helicopter gun-ships, armed drones, tanks, occupation troops and navy patrol boats fired into the crowded humanity that packs the Gaza Strip? We are never told.

(2) Why should we believe the claim that the siege of Gaza is about rockets "raining down" on Sderot? Palestinians in the West Bank don't fire rockets yet the Israelis are still in occupation after 40 years, still stealing their land and water, and now dumping their toxic waste there.

(3) Israelis say that if the rockets stop, things will be OK.... Does that mean Gaza will be able to trade freely with the outside world like any other country, and people will be able to come and go freely? Will you and I be able to visit Gaza without Israeli hindrance?

On the Collective Punishment of Gazans

(4) Why can't Gaza's 3,000 licensed fishermen put to sea and earn their living without being harassed and fired on? What is the status of Palestinian territorial waters under international law? Why are half the hospitals’ dialysis machines out of action and the chronically sick dying in agony for want of proper medication?

(5) Which parts of the Declaration of Human Rights and Geneva Conventions don't Israelis understand?

On the War on Christianity

(6) Israelis use 'administrative' controls to disrupt the life and work of the Christian Church in the Holy Land. No Muslim or Palestinian Christian living outside Jerusalem is allowed to visit the Holy Places in the Old City without special permission. Christian priests, many of whom are Jordanian, cannot go home to see their families because Israel's new visa policy would prevent them returning to their parishes. The Catholic priest in Gaza has been trapped there for 9 years knowing that if he visits his folks the Israelis won’t allow him back into the Strip. "We seek a life of freedom—a life different from the life of dogs we are currently forced to live," he says. What should be our response to attempts by Israel to paralyse the Church?

(7) Is it not shameful that our elected politicians, who are mostly Christian themselves, show so little concern? Is it not doubly shameful how the leaders of western Christendom seem oblivious to the Israeli government’s war against Christian communities? Beware those pseudo-Christians in high places, who talk the talk but won’t walk the walk. How many top brass have visited Gaza to show solidarity with the flock? At the present rate there will soon be no Christians left in the place where Christianity began, and churchmen will wake up one morning to find the Holy Land, from which their whole power and purpose are derived, stolen from under their noses.

On illegal Settlements

(8) Israel has expropriated agricultural land and key water resources in the Palestinian West Bank for its own use. More than 38% of the territory now consists of Israeli settlements, outposts, military bases and closed military areas, Israeli-declared nature reserves or other infrastructure that’s off-limits to Palestinians. Jews-only highways linking settlements to Israel, and the 580 checkpoints and roadblocks, have fragmented Palestinian communities, blocked access to their lands and severely restricted movement. How can this be right?

(9) The freezing and dismantling of Israeli settlements are a cornerstone of major peace initiatives. The most recent, the Quartet's 2003 'roadmap’ endorsed by the UN Security Council, is perfectly clear on the question of illegal settlements. Israel is under an obligation to....
a) immediately dismantle settlement outposts erected since March 2001,
b) freeze all settlement activity (including natural growth of settlements) consistent with the Mitchell Report,
c) take "no actions undermining trust, including confiscation and/or demolition of Palestinian homes and property".

Why have none of these obligations been met?

(10) A year ago the General Assembly reaffirmed that Israeli settlements on Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, "are illegal and an obstacle to peace" and demanded "the immediate and complete cessation of all Israeli settlement activities". Why is Israel still stealing Palestinian land for more illegal construction? By vowing to press ahead with settlement building, Israel’s prime minister Olmert again signals contempt for international law and world opinion… further proof (if ever it were needed) that Israel isn’t interested in peace.

On the Evil of the Wall

(11) In 2004 the International Court of Justice, sitting at the request of the UN General Assembly, concluded that the route chosen for the Separation Wall "gives expression in loco to the illegal measures taken by Israel with regard to Jerusalem and the settlements". The ICJ ruled the Wall illegal and declared that it should be dismantled where it encroaches onto Palestinian land. Why hasn't this been done? Why is Israel still building it? If Israelis feel a wall is necessary for security reasons why don't they build one on their own territory?

On House Demolitions and the Right of Return

(12) In 1948 the newly established state of Israel began demolishing the homes of Palestinian refugees to prevent their return. More than 125,000 houses were systematically destroyed. Since 1967 18,000 more have been demolished, making another 100,000 Palestinians homeless. Demolishing homes is a deliberate Israeli strategy to....

* inflict collective punishment and break the Palestinians' will to resist the occupation
* achieve a silent ethnic transfer
* ensure that Israel's control of the Occupied Territories and their resources becomes permanent

Apart from the fact that these acts breach every rule in the book, every convention and every declaration governing civilised conduct, how would the Israelis like it if they were the victims?

(13) Why can any Jew from anywhere in the world, who has never before lived in Israel and whose ancestors have never lived in Israel, go and live in Israel – or 'squat’ in an illegal outpost in Palestine with Israel’s blessing - while Palestinians who can prove title to their former houses may not?

On Imprisonment

(14) Nearly 10,000 Palestinians, including women and children, have been abducted and languish in Israeli prisons, many without charge or trial. 30+ Palestinian parliamentarians, democratically elected, are also imprisoned. What civilised country would do this?

On Ethnic Cleansing

(15) The ethnic cleansing of Palestine, begun in the months before and after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, is still going on in and around Jerusalem and in Gaza. Israel's Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger argues for an ethnic cleansing programme to transfer Gazans out and dump them in the Sinai desert. Haaretz reports that he wants Britain, the EU and the US to assist in the construction of a Palestinian state in the middle of nowhere. "They will have a nice country, and we, the Jews, shall have our country and we shall live in peace." This leading advocate of ethnic cleansing says Muslims should recognize that "our land is the Holy Land and Jerusalem belongs to us". Do we in Britain wish to associate with people who hold such views?

On Terror

(16) Since the land occupied by Israel was taken by terrorist means, employing gangs such as the one that blew up the British mandate government in the King David Hotel in 1946 killing 90, by what moral yardstick do British and other western leaders 'do business' with the Israeli Government but not with Palestine’s democratically elected Hamas leadership?

(17) Remembering that most Israeli prime ministers have been responsible for authorising war crimes against the Palestinian people, why are the words 'terrorist', 'militant’ and 'extremist’ applied only to Palestinians? They fit successive Israeli governments like a glove, and given Israel's lawless and inhuman conduct in Palestine and Lebanon, which has outraged world opinion, why isn't it branded a terrorist state?

On our (uncritical) Support

(18) For decades Occupied Palestine has received British and European aid. If Palestinians had been left in peace, free to trade and develop in the normal way, there would no need for aid. In effect British and EU taxpayers are subsidising Israel's illegal occupation and the economic strangulation it imposes. Why should we think this acceptable and continue to pick up the tab?

(19) Why is there such strong support for Israel at the heart of British government? Why have so many MPs and MEPs allowed themselves to be drawn into the 'Friends of Israel’ web? How can supposedly bright people with information at their fingertips still be ignorant of Israel's apartheid practices, wholesale land thefts, careless slaughter of children and other atrocities? Can we take it that they approve of the slow genocide inflicted on defenceless civilians, the middle-of-the-night snatch squads, the house demolitions, the torture and assassinations, and the crushing of Christian and Muslim communities? Is it not foolish and insulting for them to claim we share Israel’s beliefs and values, and should even share foreign policy? A well-respected Jewish MP recently called the Israeli government "a gang of amoral thugs". Isn’t that about right?

On the Two-State solution

(20) Israel and its Zionist stooges are pushing for a two-state solution… eventually, when it suits them and their land grab is complete. To warped minds this will give the racist regime and its supremacist ideals some kind of seal of approval. By that time the shrunken and shredded remnants of Palestine will have become a permanently impoverished and ghettoized mini-state, trashed and raped of its resources, traumatised, subservient, easy to control and never capable of prospering. Israel’s scheming allies, who include western governments (though not western peoples), go along with this grubby plan. Can someone please explain why we, the citizens of a Christian democracy once mandated with responsibility for Palestine’s future wellbeing, would wish to soil our hands with it? The ethical choice, surely, is a single state with Jews living alongside their Arab neighbours as equal citizens and sharing the land within a common legal and democratic framework. That, after all, was the original intention, and the developments of the last 60 years are a gross perversion and betrayal. Only the Palestinians themselves have had the courage to resist it.

When the Day of Reckoning comes to the Middle East - and engulfs the meddlesome West - much of the blame will rest squarely on the lack of journalistic rigour here and in the US, which has allowed a delinquent political élite to work their evil too long.

-ends-

Stuart Littlewood

28 March 2008

Stuart Littlewood is author of the book Radio Free Palestine, which tells the plight of the Palestinians under occupation. For further information please visit www.radiofreepalestine.co.uk

How to Become an Israeli Journalist

Yonatan Mendel

A year ago I applied for the job of Occupied Territories correspondent at Ma’ariv, an Israeli newspaper. I speak Arabic and have taught in Palestinian schools and taken part in many joint Jewish-Palestinian projects. At my interview the boss asked how I could possibly be objective. I had spent too much time with Palestinians; I was bound to be biased in their favour. I didn’t get the job. My next interview was with Walla, Israel’s most popular website. This time I did get the job and I became Walla’s Middle East correspondent. I soon understood what Tamar Liebes, the director of the Smart Institute of Communication at the Hebrew University, meant when she said: ‘Journalists and publishers see themselves as actors within the Zionist movement, not as critical outsiders.’

This is not to say that Israeli journalism is not professional. Corruption, social decay and dishonesty are pursued with commendable determination by newspapers, TV and radio. That Israelis heard exactly what former President Katsav did or didn’t do with his secretaries proves that the media are performing their watchdog role, even at the risk of causing national and international embarrassment. Ehud Olmert’s shady apartment deal, the business of Ariel Sharon’s mysterious Greek island, Binyamin Netanyahu’s secret love affair, Yitzhak Rabin’s secret American bank account: all of these are freely discussed by the Israeli media.

When it comes to ‘security’ there is no such freedom. It’s ‘us’ and ‘them’, the IDF and the ‘enemy’; military discourse, which is the only discourse allowed, trumps any other possible narrative. It’s not that Israeli journalists are following orders, or a written code: just that they’d rather think well of their security forces.

In most of the articles on the conflict two sides battle it out: the Israel Defence Forces, on the one hand, and the Palestinians, on the other. When a violent incident is reported, the IDF confirms or the army says but the Palestinians claim: ‘The Palestinians claimed that a baby was severely injured in IDF shootings.’ Is this a fib? ‘The Palestinians claim that Israeli settlers threatened them’: but who are the Palestinians? Did the entire Palestinian people, citizens of Israel, inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, people living in refugee camps in neighbouring Arab states and those living in the diaspora make the claim? Why is it that a serious article is reporting a claim made by the Palestinians? Why is there so rarely a name, a desk, an organisation or a source of this information? Could it be because that would make it seem more reliable?

When the Palestinians aren’t making claims, their viewpoint is simply not heard. Keshev, the Centre for the Protection of Democracy in Israel, studied the way Israel’s leading television channels and newspapers covered Palestinian casualties in a given month – December 2005. They found 48 items covering the deaths of 22 Palestinians. However, in only eight of those accounts was the IDF version followed by a Palestinian reaction; in the other 40 instances the event was reported only from the point of view of the Israeli military.

Another example: in June 2006, four days after the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was kidnapped from the Israeli side of the Gazan security fence, Israel, according to the Israeli media, arrested some sixty members of Hamas, of whom 30 were elected members of parliament and eight ministers in the Palestinian government. In a well-planned operation Israel captured and jailed the Palestinian minister for Jerusalem, the ministers of finance, education, religious affairs, strategic affairs, domestic affairs, housing and prisons, as well as the mayors of Bethlehem, Jenin and Qalqilya, the head of the Palestinian parliament and one quarter of its members. That these officials were taken from their beds late at night and transferred to Israeli territory probably to serve (like Gilad Shalit) as future bargaining-chips did not make this operation a kidnapping. Israel never kidnaps: it arrests.

The Israeli army never intentionally kills anyone, let alone murders them – a state of affairs any other armed organisation would be envious of. Even when a one-ton bomb is dropped onto a dense residential area in Gaza, killing one gunman and 14 innocent civilians, including nine children, it’s still not an intentional killing or murder: it is a targeted assassination. An Israeli journalist can say that IDF soldiers hit Palestinians, or killed them, or killed them by mistake, and that Palestinians were hit, or were killed or even found their death (as if they were looking for it), but murder is out of the question. The consequence, whatever words are used, has been the death at the hands of the Israeli security forces since the outbreak of the second intifada of 2087 Palestinians who had nothing to do with armed struggle.

The IDF, as depicted by the Israeli media, has another strange ability: it never initiates, decides to attack or launches an operation. The IDF simply responds. It responds to the Qassam rockets, responds to terror attacks, responds to Palestinian violence. This makes everything so much more sensible and civilised: the IDF is forced to fight, to destroy houses, to shoot Palestinians and to kill 4485 of them in seven years, but none of these events is the responsibility of the soldiers. They are facing a nasty enemy, and they respond dutifully. The fact that their actions – curfews, arrests, naval sieges, shootings and killings – are the main cause of the Palestinian reaction does not seem to interest the media. Because Palestinians cannot respond, Israeli journalists choose another verb from the lexicon that includes revenge, provoke, attack, incite, throw stones or fire Qassams.

Interviewing Abu-Qusay, the spokesman of Al-Aqsa Brigades in Gaza, in June 2007, I asked him about the rationale for firing Qassam missiles at the Israeli town of Sderot. ‘The army might respond,’ I said, not realising that I was already biased. ‘But we are responding here,’ Abu-Qusay said. ‘We are not terrorists, we do not want to kill . . . we are resisting Israel’s continual incursions into the West Bank, its attacks, its siege on our waters and its closure on our lands.’ Abu-Qusay’s words were translated into Hebrew, but Israel continued to enter the West Bank every night and Israelis did not find any harm in it. After all it was only a response.

At a time when there were many Israeli raids on Gaza I asked my colleagues the following question: ‘If an armed Palestinian crosses the border, enters Israel, drives to Tel Aviv and shoots people in the streets, he will be the terrorist and we will be the victims, right? However, if the IDF crosses the border, drives miles into Gaza, and starts shooting their gunmen, who is the terrorist and who is the defender? How come the Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories can never be engaged in self-defence, while the Israeli army is always the defender?’ My friend Shay from the graphics department clarified matters for me: ‘If you go to the Gaza Strip and shoot people, you will be a terrorist. But when the army does it that is an operation to make Israel safer. It’s the implementation of a government decision!’

Another interesting distinction between us and them came up when Hamas demanded the release of 450 of its prisoners in exchange for Gilad Shalit. Israel announced that it would release prisoners but not those with blood on their hands. It is always the Palestinians – never the Israelis – who have blood on their hands. This is not to say that Jews cannot kill Arabs but they will not have blood on their hands, and if they are arrested they will be released after a few years, not to mention those with blood on their hands who’ve gone on to become prime minister. And we are not only more innocent when we kill but also more susceptible when we are hurt. A regular description of a Qassam missile that hits Sderot will generally look like this: ‘A Qassam fell next to a residential house, three Israelis had slight injuries, and ten others suffered from shock.’ One should not make light of these injuries: a missile hitting a house in the middle of the night could indeed cause great shock. However, one should also remember that shock is for Jews only. Palestinians are apparently a very tough people.

The IDF, again the envy of all other armies, kills only the most important people. ‘A high-ranking member of Hamas was killed’ is almost a chorus in the Israel media. Low-ranking members of Hamas have either never been found or never been killed. Shlomi Eldar, a TV correspondent in the Gaza Strip, bravely wrote about this phenomenon in his book Eyeless in Gaza (2005). When Riyad Abu Zaid was assassinated in 2003, the Israeli press echoed the IDF announcement that the man was the head of the military wing of Hamas in Gaza. Eldar, one of Israel’s few investigative journalists, discovered that the man was merely a secretary in the movement’s prisoner club. ‘It was one of many occasions in which Israel “upgraded” a Palestinian activist,’ Eldar wrote. ‘After every assassination any minor activist is “promoted” to a major one.’

This phenomenon, in which IDF statements are directly translated into media reports – there are no checkpoints between the army and the media – is the result both of a lack of access to information and of the unwillingness of journalists to prove the army wrong or to portray soldiers as criminals. ‘The IDF is acting in Gaza’ (or in Jenin, or in Tulkarm, or in Hebron) is the expression given out by the army and embraced by the media. Why make the listeners’ lives harder? Why tell them what the soldiers do, describing the fear they create, the fact that they come with heavy vehicles and weapons and crush a city’s life, creating a greater hatred, sorrow and a desire for revenge?

Last month, as a measure against Qassam militants, Israel decided to stop Gaza’s electricity for a few hours a day. Despite the fact that this means, for instance, that electricity will fail to reach hospitals, it was said that ‘the Israeli government decided to approve this step, as another non-lethal weapon.’ Another thing the soldiers do is clearing – khisuf. In regular Hebrew, khisuf means to expose something that is hidden, but as used by the IDF it means to clear an area of potential hiding places for Palestinian gunmen. During the last intifada, Israeli D9 bulldozers destroyed thousands of Palestinian houses, uprooted thousands of trees and left behind thousands of smashed greenhouses. It is better to know that the army cleared the place than to face the reality that the army destroys Palestinians’ possessions, pride and hope.

Another useful word is crowning (keter), a euphemism for a siege in which anyone who leaves his house risks being shot at. War zones are places where Palestinians can be killed even if they are children who don’t know they’ve entered a war zone. Palestinian children, by the way, tend to be upgraded to Palestinian teenagers, especially when they are accidentally killed. More examples: isolated Israeli outposts in the West Bank are called illegal outposts, perhaps in contrast to Israeli settlements that are apparently legal. Administrative detention means jailing people who haven’t been put on trial or even formally charged (in April 2003 there were 1119 Palestinians in this situation). The PLO (Ashaf) is always referred to by its acronym and never by its full name: Palestine is a word that is almost never used – there is a Palestinian president but no president of Palestine.

‘A society in crisis forges a new vocabulary for itself,’ David Grossman wrote in The Yellow Wind, ‘and gradually, a new language emerges whose words . . . no longer describe reality, but attempt, instead, to conceal it.’ This ‘new language’ was adopted voluntarily by the media, but if one needs an official set of guidelines it can be found in the Nakdi Report, a paper drafted by the Israeli Broadcasting Authority. First set down in 1972 and since updated three times, the report aimed to ‘clarify some of the professional rules that govern the work of a newsperson’. The prohibition of the term East Jerusalem was one of them.

The restrictions aren’t confined to geography. On 20 May 2006, Israel’s most popular television channel, Channel 2, reported ‘another targeted assassination in Gaza, an assassination that might ease the firing of Qassams’ (up to 376 people have died in targeted assassinations, 150 of them civilians who were not the target of assassinations). Ehud Ya’ari, a well-known Israeli correspondent on Arab affairs, sat in the studio and said: ‘The man who was killed is Muhammad Dahdouh, from Islamic Jihad . . . this is part of the other war, a war to shrink the volume of Qassam activists.’ Neither Ya’ari nor the IDF spokesman bothered to report that four innocent Palestinian civilians were also killed in the operation, and three more severely injured, one a five-year-old girl called Maria, who will remain paralysed from the neck down. This ‘oversight’, revealed by the Israeli journalist Orly Vilnai, only exposed how much we do not know about what we think we know.

Interestingly, since Hamas took over the Gaza Strip one of the new ‘boo’ words in the Israeli media is Hamastan, a word that appears in the ‘hard’ news section, the allegedly sacred part of newspapers that is supposed to give the facts, free from editorialising. The same applies to movements such as Hamas or Hizbullah, which are described in Hebrew as organisations and not as political movements or parties. Intifada is never given its Arabic meaning of ‘revolt’; and Al-Quds, which when used by Palestinian politicians refers only to ‘the holy places in East Jerusalem’ or ‘East Jerusalem’, is always taken by Israeli correspondents to mean Jerusalem, which is effectively to imply a Palestinian determination to take over the entire capital city.

It was curious to watch the newspapers’ responses to the assassination of Imad Moughniyeh in Syria two weeks ago. Everyone tried to outdo everyone else over what to call him: arch-terrorist, master terrorist or the greatest terrorist on earth. It took the Israeli press a few days to stop celebrating Moughniyeh’s assassins and start doing what it should have done in the first place: ask questions about the consequences of the killing. The journalist Gideon Levy thinks it is an Israeli trend: ‘The chain of “terrorist chieftains” liquidated by Israel, from Ali Salameh and Abu Jihad through Abbas Musawi and Yihyeh Ayash to Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz Rantisi (all “operations” that we celebrated with great pomp and circumstance for one sweet and intoxicating moment), have thus far brought only harsh and painful revenge attacks against Israel and Jews throughout the world.’

Israeli correspondents on Arab affairs must of course speak Arabic – many of them indeed studied it in the security establishment’s schools – and they need to know the history and politics of the Middle East. And they have to be Jews. Strikingly, the Israeli-Jewish media prefer to hire journalists with average Arabic rather than native speakers, since they would be Palestinian citizens of Israel. Apparently, Jewish journalists are better equipped than Arab Israelis to explain ‘what Arabs think’, ‘Arab aims’ or ‘what Arabs say’. Maybe this is because the editors know what their audience wants to hear. Or, even more important, what the Israeli audience would rather not hear.

If the words occupation, apartheid and racism (not to mention Palestinian citizens of Israel, bantustans, ethnic cleansing and Nakba) are absent from Israeli discourse, Israeli citizens can spend their whole lives without knowing what they have been living with. Take racism (Giz’anut in Hebrew). If the Israeli parliament legislates that 13 per cent of the country’s lands can be sold only to Jews, then it is a racist parliament. If in 60 years the country has had only one Arab minister, then Israel has had racist governments. If in 60 years of demonstrations rubber bullets and live ammunition have been used only on Arab demonstrators, then Israel has a racist police. If 75 per cent of Israelis admit that they would refuse to have an Arab neighbour, then it is a racist society. By not acknowledging that Israel is a place where racism shapes relations between Jews and Arabs, Israeli Jews render themselves unable to deal with the problem or even with the reality of their own lives.

The same denial of reality is reflected in the avoidance of the term apartheid. Because of its association with white South Africa, Israelis find it very hard to use the word. This is not to say that the exact same kind of regime prevails in the Occupied Territories today, but a country needn’t have benches ‘for whites only’ in order to be an apartheid state. Apartheid, after all, means ‘separation’, and if in the Occupied Territories the settlers have one road and Palestinians need to use alternative roads or tunnels, then it is an apartheid road system. If the separation wall built on thousands of dunams of confiscated West Bank land separates people (including Palestinians on opposite sides of the wall), then it is an apartheid wall. If in the Occupied Territories there are two judicial systems, one for Jewish settlers and the other for Palestinians, then it is an apartheid justice.

And then there are the Occupied Territories themselves. Remarkably, there are no Occupied Territories in Israel. The term is occasionally used by a leftist politician or columnist, but in the hard news section it doesn’t exist. In the past they were called the Administered Territories in order to conceal the actual fact of occupation; they were then called Judea and Samaria; but in Israel’s mass media today they’re called the Territories (Ha-Shtachim). The term helps preserve the notion that the Jews are the victims, the people who act only in self-defence, the moral half of the equation, and the Palestinians are the attackers, the bad guys, the people who fight for no reason. The simplest example explains it: ‘a citizen of the Territories was caught smuggling illegal weapons.’ It might make sense for citizens of an occupied territory to try to resist the occupier, but it doesn’t make sense if they are just from the Territories.

Israeli journalists are not embedded with the security establishment; and they haven’t been asked to make their audience feel good about Israel’s military policy. The restrictions they observe are observed voluntarily, almost unconsciously – which makes their practice all the more dangerous. Yet a majority of Israelis feel that their media are too left-wing, insufficiently patriotric, not on Israel’s side. And the foreign media are worse. During the last intifada, Avraham Hirschson, then the minister of finance, demanded that CNN’s broadcasts from Israel be closed down on the grounds of ‘biased broadcasting and tendentious programmes that are nothing but a campaign of incitement against Israel’. Israeli demonstrators called for an end to ‘CNN’s unreliable and terror-provoking coverage’ in favour of Fox News. Israeli men up to the age of 50 are obliged to do one month’s reserve service every year. ‘The civilian,’ Yigael Yadin, an early Israeli chief of staff, said, ‘is a soldier on 11 months’ annual leave.’ For the Israeli media there is no leave.

Yonatan Mendel

Yonatan Mendel was a correspondent for the Israeli news agency Walla. He is currently at Queens’ College, Cambridge working on a PhD that studies the connection between the Arabic language and security in Israel.

Monday, 14 February 2005, 3:25 pm
Opinion: Sonia Nettnin

U.S. Media Coverage of Israel-Palestine Conflict

Few Americans realize that U.S. mainstream media coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict passes through America’s political elites, Israeli public relations organizations and private American organizations, before it reaches the public.

One of The Media Education Foundation’s latest films, “Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land: U.S. Media and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” directed by Sut Jhally, examines how these filters distort the realities on the ground. It demonstrates how through word choice, limited historical context and one-sided perspectives, U.S. journalists provide the American public with limited news coverage.

This MEF documentary, in memoriam of Edward W. Said (1935-2003), describes the public relations strategies of U.S. corporations and lobby organizations to manipulate news coverage for the financial and political interests they represent. Since American public opinion is malleable, the media’s misinformation can mold the foundation of public perceptions. Hence, people draw conclusions based on biased news reports.

Through interviews with journalists, media analysts and political activists, the film explores the co-opted media’s techniques for reporting the conflict and mobilizing public opinion. For example, on September 3, 2001, a news network did not want its journalists referring to the Israeli settlement, Gilo, as a “settlement.” Instructions given to journalists explained that “…we don’t refer to it as a settlement…” so in one of the network’s news clips that followed, the journalist reporting from Gilo used the officially substituted word “neighborhood.” The word change altered the perspective of the news report drastically because it removed any perception of colonization from the report’s context. Clearly, replacing or eliminating words from a report can assist with removing skepticism about the nature of its subject matter. Moreover, it helps modify public perceptions as to who is the aggressor.

PR-media strategies explain why the news continues to emphasize the violence directed against Israelis. However, the media reports do not include international law in their coverage, with regards to human rights, the rights of Palestinian refugees and the obligations of occupying forces. The Geneva Conventions and several UN Security Council Resolutions are solid sources for reference. If news reports included the historical fact that Israeli settlements in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem exist on Palestinian land, the background information may cause Americans to raise questions about the legality of those settlements. Moreover, people may begin to reassess the root causes of the conflict. When news consumers have thorough, accurate information, the conflict between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians can reflect different meanings or interpretations, absent from the current patterns of news coverage.

The film shows news footage of the Israeli Army as they attack Palestinian civilians. In response, Palestinians throw rocks. Without historical background in the news report, it appears as a violent conflict over disputed land, where Israeli Defense Forces use tanks and gun ships against the Palestinian people. If the media reported the conflict’s history, then news consumers may see a military regime’s occupation of Palestinian land and its indigenous people. With tanks and gun ships, Israeli soldiers attack Palestinian civilians. The color of media’s stock images change with history’s clarifying hue.

Other unfair aspects of the media’s conflict coverage are the absence of news reporting about the Palestinian’s daily life with checkpoint violence and curfews; and the organizations that protest their living conditions. Overall, the U.S. media does not cover the Israeli peace movement. When 2,000 Israeli and Palestinian women from the organization, Women in Black, marched down the streets of Jerusalem, the U.S. media did not cover the demonstration. Whenever an organization, such Gush Shalom (which considers itself the core of the Israeli peace movement) has a demonstration, it is not in U.S. news coverage.

However, the media is not just the news, but artistic and intellectual endeavors also. People communicate through storylines, public discourse and art, which shows their everyday life. If the Arab countries expressed their humanity in American pastimes, then it would create a Transatlantic, cultural bridge for American public awareness. Movies, music, magazines, radio programs, and television shows (maybe even a soap opera) entertain people, but it engages their beliefs and their values also. Cultural catalysts would reverse the adverse affects of current news coverage. Over time, the stereotypes and racial hate embedded in the American psyche would have no room on the political stage.

The Arab media and the Arab socio-political elite could contribute for these cultural initiatives. The alternative, media sources would focus on the people of the Middle East, and the media’s cultural lenses would reach American families in their homes. Cultural pastimes cultivate global awareness in people. The potential result is American media consumer’s understanding of the Middle East. After American families see Arab families across the world, they would realize that the similarities outnumber the differences. When they learn about families with common problems and aspirations, the use of the word “terrorist,” in America’s lexicon, would prove a linguistic challenge.

Since journalism is about public enlightenment, some of these educational endeavors would help Americans comprehend the daily violence endured by the Palestinians. If anything, Americans will gain more understanding about the pain and the suffering of Palestinians caused by the occupation. The tragedies within the Palestinian narrative cannot be filtered away anymore.


*************
Sonia Nettnin is a freelance writer. Her articles and reviews demonstrate civic journalism, with a focus on international social, economic, humanitarian, gender, and political issues. Media coverage of conflicts from these perspectives develops awareness in public opinion.

Nettnin received her bachelor's degree in English literature and writing. She did master's work in journalism. Moreover, Nettnin approaches her writing from a working woman's perspective, since working began for her at an early age.

She is a poet, a violinist and she studied professional dance. As a writer, the arts are an integral part of her sensibility. Her work has been published in the Palestine Chronicle, Scoop Media and the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. She lives in Chicago.

www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0502/S00151.htm