US media turn a blind eye to the Israeli occupation

As Communications Director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), I work in the National Press Building in Washington D.C., home to some of America’s most prominent press outlets. I have appeared on several television and radio programmes to discuss issues ranging from Islam in America to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Later in this talk, I will give a few personal anecdotes relating to my experiences in this arena, but I would first like to highlight some of the pervasive journalistic tendencies in American media coverage of the Israel/Palestinian conflict that I would argue signal a clear pro-Israel bias in our coverage.

I object to this pro-Israel bias, which I hope to demonstrate shortly, for several reasons. The first is that the bias simply violates the most basic principle of journalistic integrity; American journalists have gone to extraordinary lengths to cover up, confuse, and obscure some of the most very basic facts underlying the reasons and context of the Palestinians’ justifiable resistance to Israeli occupation, a right that is granted under the Geneva convention. The second reason is that Americans’ ignorance of the full story in the Middle East has reached a point that such ignorance now represents a clear and present danger to American interests and American people.

I will state it frankly: Israel’s brutal military occupation of Palestinian territories, now in its 35th year – making it longer than any occupation in modern history, after the Japanese occupation of Korea - is the number one issue at the root of anti-American sentiment in the entire Arab and Muslim world. No serious analyst of the conflict there will argue otherwise. This is enough of a reason for American’s to start digging deeper into this issue and examining all sides of the story.

The third reason is that I fear that the climate of intimidation surrounding reporting on this conflict may have lasting effects on the overall climate of public discourse in the United States. While we value our freedom in this country to say what we want to say and express what ever view point we want to express, the level of intimidation leading to self-censorship that has surrounded this conflict threatens to erode American’s comfort generally to exercise their right to free speech. It certainly has intimidated Arab Americans and American Muslims.

I will read you a quote from media analyst Seth Ackerman, from the media watchdog group Fair And Accurate Reporting (FAIR): ‘American journalists probably feel more pressure about their coverage of Israel than any other subject. That is true even of my organization, FAIR. Despite having a readership that is overwhelmingly sympathetic to our progressive critique of the media, our Middle East coverage invariably elicits angry letters and complaints, sometimes resulting in cancelled subscriptions. According to Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of the liberal Jewish magazine Tikkun, his publication has felt ‘tremendous pressure’ to alter its editorial position that Israel’s occupation is the ‘fundamental source of the problem.’ Hundreds of subscribers have cancelled their subscriptions, and donors have announced publicly that they will stop giving money to the magazine. This being the case, it is probably inevitable that the editors of many respectable American news outlets may conclude that the familiar principles of editorial balance do not apply to the subject of Israel.’

In reporting on wars, like the one that broke out between the Israeli army and Palestinian fighters in September 2001, a journalist has a few basic duties. The first is to provide readers with the basic reasons both sides are entering into conflict. The journalist should also give the historical and political context behind the fighting and leave ensuing conclusions to the audience. In the case of American reporting of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, even these basic tenants have not been honoured in the American press.

The taboo of occupation

The historical context of Israeli occupation over Palestinian lands is mostly missing from television and press reports. It is nothing short of extraordinary that while Israel’s justification for its every military incursion is hashed and rehashed in the press – ‘fighting terror’, ‘Israel’s existence threatened’, etc., the other side of the story – that Israel has been occupying Palestinian land for 35 years, that the occupation is illegal under international law, that the rest of the world condemns it, that Israel has been building settlements in the Occupied Territories and special, Jewish-only bypass roads to take illegal settlers, many from Brooklyn, to Jewish only petrol stations and super markets, all on Palestinian lands, is almost totally omitted.

Case in point: on 4 December 2000, Time magazine reported: ‘The Palestinians began the latest protest with old-style demonstrations. Then they started shooting at Israeli towns. Now they are attacking settlements. It’s not at all clear what the next step will be, but every step seems to get bloodier.’ Well, besides the fact that no Israeli towns have been shot at by Palestinians, it is noteworthy that the fact these settlements were built on Occupied Territories that are not part of Israel is simply not mentioned at all. In fact, the word ‘occupation’ has all but become taboo in the American press.

Another disturbing trend is the tendency to call the Occupied Territories ‘Israel’. Dan Rather reported, as pictures of the day’s violence on the West Bank and Gaza appeared on the television screen, that ‘As the fighting rages in Israel, there’s word of a possible cease-fire deal.’ Tom Brokaw, on NBC Nightly News on 2 October reported, ‘The ever-widening eruption of violence in Israel.’ Again, the Occupied Territories are not a part of Israel. To call them such reflects the most right-wing Zionist view that the West Bank is actually the Judea and Samaria supposedly promised to the Jews in the Old Testament - a view expressed by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon himself. According to Ackerman, who published a report on media bias in the Journal for Palestine Studies in the early 1990s, the phrase ‘occupied territories’ showed up in hundreds of Associated Press (AP) articles each year – 699 in 1992 and 731 in 1993. Nearly a third of all articles mentioning Palestinians used the term. By the end of the decade, the number of appearances had dwindled to a few dozen. During the first eleven months of 2000, barely 1% of such articles made mention of the dreaded phrase.’

On the three major news networks, ABC, NBC and CBS, at the time Ackerman was writing, the words ‘West Bank’ and/or Gaza was used 99 times. On only 4 of those 99 occasions was the word ‘occupation’ even mentioned. Therefore, 90% of network TV reporting failed to report that the territories were occupied. Contrast this with the London Independent, in which the word ‘occupied’ is mentioned 2/3 of the time. The inverse is true of the New York Times: the phrase is omitted 2/3 of the time. These critical omissions have the effect of making all Palestinian attacks look apparently unprovoked.

‘Violence’ or ‘excessive force’

The phrase ‘Palestinian violence’ is repeated again and again by the American Middle East press corps, while Israeli violence, and, indeed, state terrorism, is characterized almost exclusively as ‘retaliation’. This phraseology contradicts Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Physicians for Human Rights, the UN Human Rights Commission, and the UN Security Council, who have all use the phrase ‘excessive force’ to characterize Israel’s actions. One of the most absurd examples of the lengths our media will go to distance Israel from violence included the following headline that appeared in the New York Times on the first of November, 2000, which read: ‘New Violence After Rocket Strikes on Palestinians.’

Hiding Israeli incursions: I’ll never forget waking up one morning and reading reports from the British and French press of Israelis firing upon a statue of the Virgin Mary with a tank, severely damaging the statue. When I opened the Los Angeles Times, the headline read something like, ‘Statue of Virgin Mary Site of Renewed Israeli/Palestinian Violence.’ Surely, had a Palestinian damaged a Jewish holy site, the matter would have been reported in no uncertain terms, and in the active voice.

Instead of characterizing Palestinian resistance as a struggle to end occupation, which is how the Palestinians perceive their resistance movement, for most American pundits, the Palestinians’ problem is one of pure hatred. As Dan Rather reported on October 14, ‘Hatred now has live ammunition’ In a Washington Post editorial in April 2002, journalist Robert Cohen characterized the problem as a cultural one. Israeli’s are the type of people who weep over the death of soldiers, while Palestinians, dry-eyed, hold processions cheering in the streets. What Mr. Cohen fails, of course, to mention, is that had the American press bothered to interview Palestinian mothers and families and personalize them in the American press to the same extent they personalize and humanize Israelis, I guarantee you, there would be no shortage of crying, screaming, sobbing and suffering. Such a line of argument – dehumanising the Palestinians – is gravely dangerous, setting the stage for untold massacres against a people who are not perceived by Americans to be human.

Visual imagery of the occupation

Americans are also not shown visual imagery of the occupation on their nightly television screens. Americans are not shown scenes of terrified Palestinian children hiding under their kitchen tables as their refugee camps -- literally bursting with civilians -- are under fierce attack. Never are Americans shown the extraordinarily humiliating manner (as if a matter of Israeli policy) in which Palestinians are treated as checkpoints. Even more egregious is media coverage of illegal Jewish settlements. Not only are the settlements’ illegality scarcely ever highlighted verbally, but pictures of the settlements are never contrasted with Palestinian villages, as the hideous contrast between fortress-like, green-lawned and swimming pooled Israeli settlements and impoverished Palestinian villages would be instructive for the American public. When settlements are shown on the nightly news channels, they convey the stories of colonizers claiming that they are ‘peaceful’ and feel ‘besieged’ by their neighbours, without mentioning that these colonies are built on confiscated Palestinian property and agricultural lands.

Pro-Israel lobby

Research on media bias on this issue tends to focus on the influence of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States, who regularly put massive pressure on American news outlets to report news in the occupied territories from a strictly pro-Israel perspective. The Israeli foreign ministry has formed a public relations department in New York, including ‘some of the most well known PR firms in America.’ Among the many tactics this steering committee uses in combating so-called ‘pro-Palestinian bias’ includes relentlessly targeting individual journalists. Rula Amin, CNN’s West Bank correspondent, is one of the primary targets of this campaign. Israeli spokesperson Nachman Shai told his listeners in October 2001, and I quote, ‘We are putting real pressure on the heads of CNN to have Amin and other reporters replaced with more objective pro-Israel reporters that are willing to tell our side of the story’, as if the words ‘objective’ and ‘pro-Israel’ are somehow interchangeable.

According to Ackerman, ‘The feeling against Amin is probably motivated more by her Palestinian background than the content of her reporting, which, though somewhat more sympathetic to the Palestinians than most American fare, is not much different than what typically appears on, say, the BBC. It is worth noting that a very high number of American reporters and editorialists on this issue have Jewish backgrounds – yet to suggest that the ethnic or religious backgrounds of these reporters somehow taint their objectivity would be loudly, roundly and rightly condemned as anti-Semitic.

The other major instance of media bias is the pervasive myth that the Israelis made a very generous offer at Camp David from which the Palestinians, in their lust for war, simply walked away. Gone is any analysis of the Camp David accords, which to most serious observers offered the Palestinians a ‘Swiss cheese’ state composed of a series of Palestinian slums, similar to South African Batustans cut with Israeli bypass roads, military installations, and settlements. The repeated mantra, ‘Arafat walked away from an unprecedented, generous offer’ is repeated again and again as a means of justifying Israel’s current savagery against the civilian Palestinian population.

The Jenin massacre

While the rest of the world was busy trying to gather evidence of a massacre in Jenin – Amnesty International was bringing a formal law suit against the IDF calling for access to the camps - the American press was simply parroting the right-wing Israeli line (it is worth noting that Shimon Perez described Jenin as a ‘massacre’ in Ha’aretz) that a massacre did not occur. On April 17 the Washington Post and Washington Times reported stories to the effect of ‘while there is massive destruction and human suffering in Jenin, there is no evidence of a massacre.’ But that’s precisely the story! The IDF is being charged with covering-up evidence of a massacre in Jenin. The role of an investigative journalist would be to confirm or deny these charges by bravely trying to enter the camp and get the information, not simply repeat the official line of another government regarding its own military incursions. Indeed, headlines in the British newspaper The Independent, read, by contrast, ‘Aid the Ruins of Jenin, the Grisly Evidence of a War Crime’.

Another problem is our press’ reporting on the stance of our government. As Bush sat in his Texas ranch, mindlessly repeating his demand that Yassir Arafat, trapped by candlelight in two rooms, ‘do more’ to stop the violence, the American press seemed to take it as in incontrovertible fact that Yassir Arafat was in full control of every suicide bomber in the Occupied Territories, ignoring that this is a man who has a history of summary arrests and detentions of his own citizens whom he suspected of being militants. Meanwhile, the Israeli press itself was much more forthright, reporting widely that it was clear that president Bush was leaving a ‘window of opportunity’ for Israel to undergo more incursions and wreak more havoc on the Palestinians.

US media are also very scant in explaining to Americans the links our officials have with pro-Israel groups both now and in the past. In an article entitled ‘The “Do More” Chorus in Washington’, Charles D. Smith, professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Arizona, recently exposed the affiliations many of our top-placed government officials have with right-wing Israeli groups. He singled out, for example, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, the latter two appointed to major positions in the Pentagon under Rumsfeld. According to Smith, Feith was recently identified by Ha’aretz as closely linked to right-wing settlers on the West Bank, and as a constant opponent of the Oslo accords. Richard Perle established a Defence Policy Group independent of but linked to the Pentagon. Perle was identified by Seymour Hersh, in his 1979 biography of Henry Kissinger, as someone whom Kissinger discovered to have ‘spied for Israel while a National Security Council staffer’. Perle was not dismissed for these charges.

Also unexposed by the media is the unsavoury relationship between the extreme Christian right and its influence in Congress (and, presumably, the executive branch) and ardent supporters of Israel. It is largely hidden from Americans that much of our congressional leaders’ strong support of Israel has to do with notions of Armageddon and the return of the Messiah that hardly belong in US political discourse.

A final word courtesy of Robert Fisk

One of the longest serving Middle East journalists in the Middle Eastern press is Robert Fisk. In The Independent newspaper of April 17, 2001 he wrote:

‘And there were little tell-tale stories that showed just how biased and gutless the American press has become in the face of America’s Israeli lobby groups. “I wrote a report for a major paper about the Palestinian exodus of 1948,” a Jewish woman told me as we drove though the smog of downtown L.A. “And of course, I mentioned the massacre of Palestinians at Dir Yassin by the Stern Gang and other Jewish groups - the massacre that prompted 750,000 Arabs to flee their homes. Then I look for my story in the paper, and what do I find? The word ‘alleged’ has been inserted before the word ‘massacre’. I called the paper’s ombudsman and told him that the massacre at Dir Yassin was a historical fact. Can you guess his reply? He said that the editor had written the word ‘alleged’ before ‘massacre’ because that way he though he would avoid a lot of critical letters.”

‘By chance, this was the theme of my thoughts and lectures: the cowardly, idle, spineless way in which American journalists are lobotomising the stories from the Middle East, how the “Occupied Territories” have become “disputed territories” in their reports, how Jewish “settlements” have become Jewish “neighbourhoods”, how Arab militants are “terrorists” but Israeli militants only “fanatics” or “extremists”, how Ariel Sharon – the man held “personally responsible” by Israel’s own commissioners’ inquiry for the 1982 Sabra and Shatilia massacre of 1,700 Palestinians – could be described in a report in the New York Times as having the instincts of a “warrior”. How the execution of surviving Palestinian fighters was so often called “mopping up”, how civilians killed by Israeli soldiers were always “caught in the crossfire”. I demanded to know of my audience –and I expected the usual American indignation when I did – how U.S. citizens could accept the infantile, “dead or alive”, “with us or against us”, “axis of evil” policies of their president?

‘And for the first time in more than a decade of lecturing in the United States, I was shocked. Not by the passivity of Americans – the all-accepting, patriotic notion that the president knows best - nor by the dangerous self-absorption of the United States since 11 September 2001, and the constant, all consuming fear of criticizing Israel. What shocked me was the extraordinary new American refusal to go along with the official line, the growing angry awareness among Americans that they were being lied to and deceived… So for the first time, it wasn’t my lectures they objected to, but the lectures they received from their president, and the lectures they read in their press about Israel’s “war on terror” and the need always, uncritically, to support everything that America’s little Middle Eastern ally says and does.’

Sarah Eltantawi is Communications Director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, Washington DC and Los Angeles, USA. Website: www.mpac.org