New
Prejudices for Old
The Euro press and the Intifada.
By Tom
Gross, who has reported from the Middle East for major international
newspapers for the past six years. Mr. Gross previously served as a United
Nations human-rights adviser on Czech Roma (Gypsies).
Novemeber 1, 2001 10:40 a.m.
Last May, I escorted the editor of London's Guardian newspaper, Alan Rusbridger, and his features editor, Ian Katz, around West Jerusalem and into Palestinian-controlled Bethlehem. It was Rusbridger's first trip to Israel. His paper had been singled out by critics of press coverage of Israel as one of the most unfair.
Unlike many other journalists, who have climbed aboard the anti-Israeli bandwagon over the last months without having ever even been to Israel, Rusbridger to his credit took five days off work to see the situation for himself. He is, after all, heir to the great C. P. Scott, editor of the Guardian for 57 years, who (in Rusbridger's words) "fought tirelessly alongside Chaim Weizmann for the creation of the state of Israel." (Indeed it was Scott who introduced Weizmann to Arthur Balfour).
A few days before our meeting, the Guardian's chief Jerusalem correspondent, Suzanne Goldenberg, had been presented with Britain's prestigious Edgar Wallace Trophy by Prime Minister Tony Blair. In a front-page announcement, the Guardian said that the London Press Club had decided to award her the prize for her "courageous and objective journalism." Even though the prize is meant to cover reporting in general, and has no particular connection with the Middle East, the runner-up was another media crusader against Israel, Robert Fisk of the Independent. Goldenberg's news report in the Guardian, on the morning the prize was announced, was titled "Mutilated Children of a Crippled Palestine" which gives a flavor of the kind of writing which had so impressed her fellow journalists.
Rusbridger, Katz, and I crossed by car into Bethlehem. It wasn't clear whether it was safe to go there that morning. The mutilated bodies of two 13-year-old Israeli boys had been found in a nearby cave just hours earlier, and tension was high. My car had Israeli, not Palestinian, license plates, and in the previous weeks several motorists had been shot dead for just such an offense.
The Journey
Two Israeli soldiers, aged about 18, were standing guard on the Israeli side of the border. When we showed our press cards and asked if we could cross, one of them said in English, "But of course, if you are journalists, you must come in." Then he added with a wry smile, "You are the bodyguard of democracy, after all." Rusbridger jotted down the soldier's observation in his notebook.
"Is it safe to go in this morning?" I asked the soldier. "Yes, the Palestinians don't start shooting until lunchtime these days," he replied. Katz was worried: "You mean they have shooting here!"
We were pressed for time, so our foray into Bethlehem was a short one. But it was long enough for Rusbridger and Katz a contemporary of mine at Oxford, who told me he hadn't been to Israel "since his bar mitzvah" to see with their own eyes that the Israeli soldiers were courteous and polite to Palestinians. They saw that Palestinians were allowed to cross the checkpoint, both by car and on foot, in a matter of seconds. And they saw by contrast how the same soldiers were refusing religious Jews who wished to go and pray at the nearby holy site of Rachel's Tomb entry to Bethlehem.
On our drive down one of Bethlehem's main streets, we passed Palestinian-owned cars of a similar standard to those we had just seen being driven by Israelis in Jerusalem. Rusbridger and Katz also had a chance to observe that the local Arab shops were well stocked. And when we drove back out from Bethlehem into Israel, they could see that Palestinians were allowed to pass quickly in about the same time it takes an average Israeli to enter a Tel Aviv shopping mall or movie theatre, as his bags are searched for explosive devices. The religious Jews we had seen before were on the other side of the road, still pleading with the soldiers to be allowed entry to Bethlehem.
Odd But Not Rare Fruits
Two weeks later, Rusbridger wrote about his trip in a cover story for The Spectator in London. The Spectator was an unexpected choice. It is owned by Conrad Black, one of the few prominent non-Jews in the West to have openly denounced media coverage of Israel. "The BBC, Independent, Guardian, Evening Standard, and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office are rabidly anti-Israel," Black had written in The Spectator a few weeks earlier, "and wittingly or not, are stoking the inferno of anti-Semitism."
Rusbridger began his Spectator article as follows:
In the last, dying days of apartheid I visited South Africa A couple of weeks ago I made my first trip to another much written about country, Israel. As with my earlier journey I found a lot that was shocking, but this time I was genuinely surprised. Nothing had prepared me for finding quite so many echoes of the worst days of South Africa in modern Israel.
He went on to give some examples taken out of context of shooting incidents, and of Palestinian poverty he had witnessed in what he called the "large prison" of Gaza. He wrote of the "endless humiliating queues waiting to pass through Israeli army checkpoints." There was no mention of our very different experience crossing into the "occupied West Bank."
Not content with drawing analogies with South Africa, Rusbridger also made a comparison with Northern Ireland, implying that the situation is worse in Israel because Israelis don't know what's going on. He wrote (mistakenly) that "The difference in Israel is that almost no Jewish-Israeli journalists ever report firsthand on life and death on the West Bank or Gaza today The exceptions I think there are three are brave and, by and large, despised by Jewish Israelis."
He seemed to have forgotten our conversation about the workings of Israeli democracy, in which I had pointed out that every Israeli newspaper without exception has regular and comprehensive reporting about life in Gaza, some of it highly critical of Israel; that both national Israeli TV channels have correspondents in Gaza; that senior advisers to Yasser Arafat, and even spokespersons for Hamas, are regularly interviewed on Israeli television and radio; and that Israeli Arabs play a significant role in the Israeli media. Indeed, as I had told Rusbridger, probably the single most influential journalist in Israel Rafik Halaby, the director of news at Israel's state-run Channel One TV is an Arab.
In his article Rusbridger also made no reference to the many progressive elements of Israeli Jewish society which we had discussed in some detail. I had asked him why, if Israel is "an affront to civilization" the headline given to a comment piece written by a former British defense secretary in the Guardian's sister paper, the Observer, a few days before Rusbridger's visit the Jewish state should, for example, have some of the most liberal laws in the world for homosexuals, far more liberal than those in the U.S. and Britain.
As for his claim that "nothing had prepared me for finding quite so many echoes of the worst days of South Africa in modern Israel," it made me wonder, for a moment, how carefully he reads his own paper, given that comparisons between present-day Israel and South Africa in the Apartheid era have become part of the Guardian's stock-in-trade.
Take, for example, Goldenberg's report of Saturday, June 3, 2000. It was headlined, "Palestinians feel the heat as police enforce beach apartheid: With peace looming, Israel is keen to establish areas for Jews only." The article itself began:
In these early days of a sweltering summer, the long palm-dotted beaches of Tel Aviv are a natural escape. But if you are a Palestinian, a family day out can mean a night in jail. As Israeli Jews lolled on the sand yesterday, the Tel Aviv police were out in force in a zealous enforcement of beach apartheid [an] operation to create Jewish-only beaches. Palestinians were arrested near the dolphinarium before they could even set foot on the sand...
As someone who lives in Tel Aviv, and goes to the beach most days, I have never seen anything of the kind. Jews and Arabs mix freely on the beach, and did so when the article was written in June 2000, as any resident of Tel Aviv will confirm. This includes the area around the dolphinarium, site of a deadly Palestinian suicide bomb at a beachfront teenage disco exactly a year after Goldenberg wrote her piece.
More Falsehoods
About the same time as Rusbridger published his Spectator article, he wrote a massive editorial in the Guardian, running to well over 2,000 words, entitled, "Between Heaven and Hell." A pull-quote was reproduced in large type in a box on the Guardian's front page. It read:
We are forced to confront some uncomfortable truths about how the dream of a sanctuary for the Jewish people in the very land in which their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped has come to be poisoned. The establishment of this sanctuary has been bought at a very high cost in human rights and human lives. It must be apparent that the international community cannot support this cost indefinitely.
In spite of all this, Rusbridger seems to me to be a divided man. From what I know of him, and from what I have heard from others, he remains friendlier to the Jewish state in private than do many in the British media. When it comes to public pronouncements, however, he usually seems unable to resist the prevailing tide of "enlightened" opinion in Europe a tide which can only encourage attempts to destroy Israel.
In Vogue
Much of this is a relatively new phenomenon. While some distorted reporting, such as that of the notorious Robert Fisk of the Independent, is the result of a long-standing and systematic anti-Israel bias, most of it seems more a question of fashion, and vague or unexamined "progressive" assumptions.
Some diatribes go well beyond political criticism, however, and carry a deeper, more ancient prejudice. One example is the Sunday Observer's "Poem of the Week" (February 18, 2001) by Oxford academic Tom Paulin, which accuses the "Zionist SS" of deliberately gunning down Palestinian children; another is The Economist's description of Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres as a pair of "artful dodgers" (May 5, 2001) "artful dodgers" as in Oliver Twist, with clear overtones of Fagin.
A fair amount of the venom comes from Jews themselves. For example, Alexei Sayle, a columnist for the (London) Independent, writes at the top of the paper's "Comment" page (October 3, 2000):
If the Zionists wanted a homeland, why didn't they take a piece of Germany? The answer is of course, that Arabs then and now were not considered fully human by the Zionists and therefore could be murdered without qualms I am Jewish, which should make me immune to the charges of anti-Semitism that fanatical Zionists trot out whenever anybody suggests that Israel's constant use of torture and ethnic cleansing might be a bit wrong.
There are exceptions to all this prejudice the editorials (but not the news reports) on the Middle East in some of Europe's conservative-leaning papers are often well balanced, for example and some of the criticism leveled at Israel is, of course, justified. Nor should one forget that the media is full of stereotypes and mistakes about other issues. Yet even after every allowance has been made, the sustained bias against Israel is in a league of its own.
Many readers with a good knowledge of the Middle East are aware that there is a good deal of bias against Israel in the American media, despite certain cherished myths to the contrary. But what they may not fully realize is that any American bias pales in comparison to what can currently be seen in Europe.
United Media
One area in which the 15-member Europe Union has largely managed to coordinate its policy in the last few years is foreign affairs, and in particular its approach to the Middle East. In the old days, some countries France, Greece, Spain stood out for their pro-Palestinian bias. Nowadays, the slanted policy reaches across the EU. Whereas states such as Belgium, Holland, Sweden, and Denmark have recently been leading the way in pressing for increased pressure on Israel, even those European leaders who might wish to adopt a more sympathetic approach notably Tony Blair of Britain and Gerhard Schroeder of Germany find they are not as free to do so as they were in the past.
The European media, too, tend to adopt a single line on Israel. This article focuses on Britain, not because the British reporting is worse (it is not), but to show how even in a country that still has an international reputation for "fair play," and whose prime minister has shown marked philo-Semitic attitudes, the media has been swept along in an almost unstoppable anti-Israel European tide.
If the misreporting and virulent bias were limited to one or two newspapers or television programs in each country, one might perhaps shrug them off. But they are not. They can be found in news reports, cartoons, and comment columns through virtually the entire European print and broadcast media. Israel-bashing even extends to local papers that don't usually cover foreign affairs, as with the recent double-page spread entitled "Jews in jackboots" in Luton on Sunday. (Luton is an industrial town in the south of England.) That a handful of papers sometimes carry pro-Israel editorial pieces hardly balances things out.
Regarding Britain, we have already seen how the Guardian and Observer are slanted against Israel. Although its circulation is not particularly high, the Guardian is highly influential: Overwhelmingly, it is the paper of choice for those who work in education and the media.
(Not-So) Alternative Press
What choice for those Britons who don't wish to read the Guardian? There are three other British broadsheets (in addition to the Financial Times, whose readership is now mainly international). Here, to give a flavor, are extracts from the Rupert Murdoch-owned Times, the Conrad Black-owned Daily Telegraph, and the Independent, which claims to be independent and centrist. They are not isolated examples:
On 12 October 2000, Phil Reeves, the Independent's Jerusalem correspondent, began his news report:
The little boy is lying under a pink flowery sheet, his bandaged head tilted to one side and his cheeks still streaked with a mix of blood and Gaza dust. His pathetically small chest pumps away steadily up, down, up down a human bellows driven by an artificial respirator. His closed eye-lids, sealed by long lashes, are swollen; so are his lips, twisted by the battery of pipes and wires that connect his mouth to the beeping and buzzing life support system at his bedside.
Officially, Sami Abu Jazar a 12-year-old Palestinian who looks no more than nine is still alive. His heart pounds doggedly on. But, in every other sense, he is dead "clinically dead", as the doctors put it because of the Israeli bullet buried in his skull. He never had a hope.
Then, having noted that the death of another Palestinian twelve-year-old, Mohammed al-Durra, was caught on camera for the world to see, Reeves comments: "Unfortunately, Sami's death was not filmed."
Even the Daily Telegraph has not been immune. According to a rival British paper, "under [Conrad] Black's proprietorship, serious critical reporting of Israel is not tolerated," and some anti-Semites have taken to referring to the paper as the "Daily Telavivgraph." Yet the Telegraph has in fact had its own fair share of slanted reporting. On October 17, 2000, Patrick Bishop, formerly the paper's foreign editor and now their roving chief foreign correspondent, began his piece:
There was no flash, no bang as the young man flopped to the ground. The silent Israeli sniper had claimed another victim His targets were a crowd of young men and boys whose stones and slingshots bounced harmlessly in the road.
He continues: "The Israelis are putting their faith in bullets... There is plenty of killing to be done yet."
These examples aren't taken from comment articles or letters to the editor. They come from news reports, all of them accompanied by heart-wrenching photos of Palestinians. If there were comparable reports on Israeli victims of Palestinian attacks, written in the same vein, it might be another story. But there seldom are.
Compare, for instance, the case of Sami Abu Jazar with that of Yehuda Shoham, a five-month-old Israeli baby who was left with severe brain damage following a Palestinian stoning ambush on June 5. As with little Sami before him, the doctors said (on June 5) that there was no hope of saving Yehuda's life and that he would be dead within days. (He did in fact die, on June 11). At that time, Yehuda was the youngest Israeli victim of the conflict born at the beginning of 2001 and murdered before the year was half over and his attack was the lead story in all the Israeli press on June 6. Yet it was hard to find any news about Yehuda in Europe's press that day.
Instead, the Daily Telegraph led the first page of its "World News" section with a story, stretched across seven columns, entitled "Family of 'martyred' Palestinian donates organs to let three Israelis live." The story implied that the Palestinian in question Mazen Joulani, a 33-year-old pharmacist had been shot dead in Jerusalem in a "revenge attack" [the paper's words] by Israel. But there have been virtually no deliberate killings of innocent Arabs by Israelis during the Intifada, and it later emerged that Joulani as was hinted at the very end of the article, for those who got that far was shot by another Palestinian, in a criminal act unrelated to the Intifada.
The Guardian didn't mention any Jewish baby on June 6. Neither did the Independent. It, too, ran a story (albeit a much shorter one than the Daily Telegraph's) titled, "Palestinian's organs go to Israelis." (Incidentally, I haven't seen similar articles when Israelis helped Palestinians as with the donation, on June 12, of the cornea of a teenager murdered in the Tel Aviv disco bombing, which restored the sight of an 11-year-old Arab girl.)
When Yehuda was mentioned in the Daily Telegraph the following day, June 7 ("West Bank violence after baby is injured"), the story was accompanied not by a photo of Yehuda's mother keeping vigil over her dying baby, but by an enormous picture about four times bigger than the text of the story of an angry-looking bearded settler, gun in hand. A reader who looked at the photo and read only the headline and caption could be forgiven for thinking that an Arab baby had been brain-damaged by Jewish settlers, rather than the other way round. A reader who read the full text would have learned that settlers damaged a Palestinian greenhouse before Yehuda's name was even mentioned.
On June 7, the Guardian carried two articles, "Israel slices through the low road to Gaza" and "U.S. creeps back into Middle East." Yehuda was mentioned (though not by name) in half a sentence in the penultimate paragraph of the second article again only in the context of first mentioning that angry settlers had damaged Palestinian property. Do Israeli settlers have to riot to get the Western media to report on murdered Israeli babies?
When, on June 12, the Independent finally carried news about Yehuda (following his death the day before), its correspondent in effect acknowledged, perhaps inadvertently, that the case had not roused much international interest by telling his readers in the second sentence: "The case of Yehuda Shoham, and his six-day battle for life, has made headlines in Israel."
In contrast, the same correspondent's reports about Palestinian victims such as Sami (who, he tells us, was just a school kid whose "dream was to make a living growing flowers"), he had little sympathy to spare for Yehuda or his parents.
On the rare occasions when British papers do attempt to give "settler" victims an identity, they often get it wrong. The Independent, for example reporting on the murder of Assaf Hershkovitz, as he drove home from work, by (as the Independent would have it) "Hamas guerillas avenging Israeli death squads" inserted the wrong photo, that of an unknown bearded man. (Hershkovitz did not have a beard.) A mistake, no doubt, but one that may well point to the subconscious stereotypes the desk editors in London have picked up from the correspondents in Jerusalem.
Yehuda Shoham was not alone in having his plight ignored. When, on March 26, ten-month-old Shalhevet Pass was shot dead in her pram by a Fatah sniper perched on a Hebron rooftop, the Israeli foreign ministry says it took six hours to persuade CNN to show a photo of Shalhevet. Israeli government officials who had to supply the photo themselves (journalists didn't seem very interested in requesting one from the family) say they literally had to plead with CNN, intervening at "the highest levels" before CNN finally agreed to use the photo.
It is difficult to decide which European country has the most anti-Israel media, but Jewish leaders in France claim it is theirs. As one said recently: "Sometimes it is so hard to tell the difference between the reporting on Israel in France and reporting in Syria that you would think France was applying to chair the Arab League." In June, a number of Jewish readers of Le Monde widely regarded as France's most serious daily paper cancelled their subscriptions following reports which they said effectively blamed the Tel Aviv disco bombing on Israelis.