Why Israel Gets Spun
Hillel Halkin
National Post. February 17, 2006

There was a time in Israel when I occasionally watched the news on BBC and CNN. Although they did a mediocre job of presenting it, they covered the globe more fully than did the Israeli television channels.

Eventually, though, I got so angry that I stopped. I can remember one of the last times before I did. A suicide bombing had killed several Israelis that morning and there had been a retaliatory air strike against a PLO installation in Gaza that the Israeli air force knew to be empty of people. While nobody was injured, one bomb fell on a wing of a building that was used by a Palestinian marching band. CNN took ample note of this. After mentioning the terrorist attack in a sentence, with no footage shown of its victims, it dwelled for long moments on the mangled trumpets and shredded drums of the marching band. Clearly, only a ruthless enemy would take revenge on innocent musical instruments.

In her new book, The Other War: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Struggle for Media Supremacy, Stephanie Gutmann remarks that media treatment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has of late grown slightly more balanced. But slanted reports like the one on CNN, appearing day after day in numerous major newspapers and television newscasts, continue to be the main reason for Israel's poor image around the world. What the average person knows, or thinks he knows, about this conflict comes almost entirely from the media, and media bias against Israel has been enormous.

Gutmann does not dwell on the "big" explanations commonly given by Israel's supporters for its unpopularity: anti-Semitism, Israel's place in contemporary anti-colonialist discourse, its close association with America in an increasingly anti-American world, and so forth. What concerns her, rather, is the nuts and bolts of reporting from the field and the ground-level vantage point of those doing it, about which she has perceptive points to make.

Some of these I can personally vouch for from three years in the mid-1990s in which I functioned as an Israeli correspondent for the New York weekly Forward.

Most foreign correspondents go from one posting to another and rarely stay at any for more than a few years. They usually arrive in a country with only a cursory knowledge of its history; rent living quarters in an expensive and far from typical neighborhood in its capital; never learn to speak its language or languages with any proficiency; and socialize among themselves.

Everywhere, this tends to produce foreign correspondents who are heavily dependent for their information and point of view on each other and on the small number of official and unofficial native sources they manage to cultivate; who have little time for research, being required to churn out copy at a steady rate; who are forced to concentrate on the dramatic and superficial at the expense of the in-depth and explanatory; and who fear nothing worse than being caught out of step with their colleagues.

Moreover, while in Israel, as in any democracy, journalists are free to go where they wish and talk to whom they want, there are two crucial and closely related exceptions to this rule. One involves places in the occupied or Palestinian territories to which access is limited or barred by the Israeli army; the other, the danger posed to free movement in these same territories by armed Palestinians, who are everywhere a law unto themselves. And because these exceptions directly affect that aspect of reporting from Israel which foreign journalists are most interested in, namely, Jewish-Arab violence and everything surrounding it -- a military dragnet in the West Bank, say, for wanted terrorists, or an interview with a Palestinian "resistance fighter" in a refugee shantytown, or an army closure on a Palestinian city -- they assume great importance and force the foreign correspondent to deal frequently with two types of intermediaries.

On the Israeli side, there is the military, whether in the form of commanding officers in the field or the spokesman's office of the Israel Defense Forces, which briefs reporters on military events, answers their queries, lets them know what is off-limits at a given moment, and sometimes provides them with an English-speaking escort when they wish to visit sensitive areas.

On the Palestinian side, there is the "fixer," as he or she is called by journalists. This is a person, generally young, educated, and with a good command of English, who accompanies correspondents in the territories, informs them of interesting subjects and possible scoops, arranges appointments and interviews for them, translates for them from the Arabic, explains to them nuances of scenes or conversations that they may have missed, knows the back roads and streets that will get them around military checkpoints, and acts as a guarantor of their safety, assuring local residents that they are not Israeli secret agents and negotiating their way into and out of potentially difficult situations. "Fixers" are not cheap, but a good one is an indispensable asset, and just about all foreign correspondents in Israel have their regular or regulars on whom they depend.

Here is where a major part of the problem sets in. A journalist's dealings with the Israeli army, or with institutions like the government press office and the foreign ministry, are of a formal nature and frequently cumbersome and annoying.

With one's "fixer," on the other hand, it is just the opposite. Everything is informal and personal. There are no rules and regulations, decisions can be made and carried out on the spur of the moment, and the more personable and skillful the "fixer" is, the more he or she can do for you. Needless to say, too, the more it is likely that a friendship, or at least a shared sense of camaraderie, will develop from this.

Since one's "fixer" is generally an intelligent and articulate expounder of the Palestinian point of view, this puts Israel at a disadvantage -- all the more so because, whereas the correspondent's dealings with Israelis take place mostly in offices, at press conferences, and at army roadblocks, the "fixer" often brings him to Palestinian homes, where he is introduced to families, treated graciously, and told the stories of the people he meets and their complaints against the Israeli occupation. He is thus far more likely to encounter Palestinians who have suffered from Israeli military action than Israelis who have suffered from Palestinian terror.

It is not surprising, then, that even if they do not take up their posts with a bias against Israel, many journalists develop one during their stay there.

Gutmann documents case after case of events being badly distorted to Israel's detriment by supposedly responsible journalists. These include the Muhammad al-Dura affair, the lynching of two Israelis by a Palestinian mob in Ramallah in October 2000, the interception by Israel's navy of the arms-running Palestinian freighter Karine A in January 2002, and the Israeli assault on Jenin in April of that year.

In the first and last of these incidents, Israel was accused and convicted by foreign journalists, with a powerfully negative impact throughout the world, of atrocities it never committed. In the second, an especially brutal horror carried out with the collaboration of the Palestinian police was treated by the media as simply one more link in the chain of Israeli-Palestinian violence, even though it did more than anything else in those years to revolt Israelis and harden their attitudes. In the third, a dramatic instance of Palestinian Authority duplicity, so great that it contributed to the Bush administration's reevaluation of Yasser Arafat and its decision to cut its ties with him, was downplayed.

Another important factor is Palestinian intimidation. The mixture of authoritarianism and lawlessness that characterizes the Palestinian Authority and the society very partially governed by it makes it easy to threaten foreign correspondents and to ensure that, if they value their jobs and their persons, they will not investigate or publish stories that may embarrass the wrong people or the right cause.

In the case of the Ramallah lynching, for instance, TV cameramen on the scene were warned not to film it and, when they did, were forced to surrender their tapes (one had his camera smashed to the ground); the Israeli bureau chief of the Italian channel RTI, the only TV station to get a tape of the incident out and show it to the world, was forced to leave her post by Palestinian threats on her life; and a rival Italian channel's producer wrote a fawning letter to the Palestinian press apologizing for RTI's footage and promising that his own team would "always respect the journalistic rules of the Palestinian Authority."

One might think that such intimidation would backfire, yet it rarely seems to. Indeed, there are some journalists who, like Riccardo Cristiano, the Italian producer, actually condone it. After all, if the story they are covering is that of the oppression of one people by another, it is surely possible to understand that the oppressed have the right to take measures that will get their message across.

Relating a conversation with an American reporter who considered Israeli soldiers "absolutely barbaric" and defended focusing his camera on Palestinian children throwing stones while deliberately turning it away from Palestinian gunman carrying arms, Gutmann comments: "What really bothered me was that, once again, I was seeing a journalist (a photojournalist in this case) who seemed to live very comfortably with dual standards on the issue of press censorship. In other words, it was okay for Palestinian fedayeen to virtually dictate how they would be covered ('they don't want to be photographed with guns, so I don't do it'), while Israeli soldiers and government officials weren't given the right to a choice."

Looking beyond the behaviour of journalists, the larger problem is this: The Zionist narrative, as gripping as it may seem to those who tell it as their own, is not, when set against the Palestinian narrative that opposes it, terribly convincing in an age that has a short attention span and distrusts the claims of history.

It is complicated, that Zionist narrative, a long account of many wanderings, homes, transformations, and identities, especially as compared with the simple Palestinian narrative of a people that has ostensibly always been who and where it is. The Zionist narrative summons as its witnesses sacred texts and ancient documents, its interpretation of which it expects others to accept as relevant and correct. It is associated with Western colonialism and its injustices rather than with the colonized and their struggles. It pits Jewish exile and the Holocaust against the Palestinian refugee problem and the Israeli occupation; the sufferings of the past and of the dead against those of the present and the living; first-world victims of terror against third-world victims of dispossession; national rights against human rights.

For most contemporary intellectuals, this is a narrative that quite simply does not have what it takes. At best, it is put by them on a par with its Palestinian rival: Here is a people that has suffered and here is a people that has suffered; here is one with great traumas and here is one with great traumas; here a lost homeland has been repossessed and here a possessed homeland has been lost; here and here is the inability to recognize the "Other," making both sides brutal and murderous with rage and hatred.

And as these narratives are symmetrical, so are the acts committed in their names: the death of an Israeli killed by a Palestinian suicide bomb in Tel Aviv and the "targeted assassination" of the bomber's dispatcher by an Israeli rocket in Gaza.

Knowledge of the past is not most journalists' strong suit; for most of them, the 1967 war that brought about the occupation of the territories is an ancient event of uncertain origins, to say nothing of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, the British Mandate, and the Balfour Declaration, let alone the story of Zionism, much less the Jewish history that preceded it. It is easier for them not to bother with such things and to think of the events they are reporting on as self-enclosed, the vicious tit-for-tat of a blood feud that began when Israel conquered the West Bank and the Gaza Strip or, at the very earliest, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to flee their homes by the creation of a Jewish state, and that is therefore Israel's fault. To ask what came before this, or what the larger meaning of it might be, makes no more sense to the average journalist than it would make to ask what existed before the universe was created.

Israel's battle to make its case heard and understood is part of a larger battle to assert the importance of history and historical truth in a world in which they no longer matter very much.

Unless Israel perseveres in making its case in a thorough and honest way, it will continue to lose the war for public opinion. In the long run, the truth is its most reliable weapon, even if it is one that can only be wielded effectively by those willing to risk self-inflicted wounds. For if the truth is, generally speaking, on Israel's side, it may not be so in every case, and the temptation to tailor it when it is not, which hasbara has not been free of, is the temptation to resort to propaganda.

And in a war of Jewish propaganda versus Arab propaganda--or, if one prefers, of Jewish versus Arab narratives -- the Arabs will always win. They are simply much better at it. The first rule of warfare is to fight on the ground that is most advantageous to oneself.

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