[A brilliant analysis of Israel's image in the world today: reasons for and against it in the media. Ha'aretz is the Left-wing daily newspaper in Israel.]
Why does the world media love to hate Israel?
By Bradley BURSTON
Ha'aretz
23 March 2009
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1073231.html
I was just in the States, speaking to members of Ameinu, an organization which, the times notwithstanding, remains outspoken both in its support for peace and its support for Israel.
Among the topics I was asked to address was the portrayal of the Jewish state in the news media. Phrased a little less delicately, the issue amounts to: "Why does the press love to hate Israel?"
The question has taken on an unusual urgency of late, its pivot points Israel's war in Gaza, the debate over engaging a proto-nuclear Iran, the UN's upcoming Durban II World Conference against Racism, Avigdor Lieberman's Arab-baiting campaign for Knesset, and, not least, disclosures in Haaretz, Ma'ariv, and Israeli broadcast media quoting IDF troops describing moral failings during the Gaza offensive.
Allow me to begin with the underlying first question.
Are there journalists who truly dislike Jews, and allow their Jew-hate to color their coverage?
Yes. I've met and, in fact, worked with, a number of them. Some of them, it will come as no surprise to report, are themselves Jewish. But does this explain or account for a significant portion of negative coverage of Israel in the media? It does not. Not at all.
What does?
1. What Israel says, and what Israel does.
A. In all the world, there is no bait more tempting for a reporter than Israel's assertion that its military is the "most moral in the world." This is the socially clueless Goliath wearing a sign reading "Kick Me." It is the one irresistible soft target of sound bites.
B. Anyone who has been in a war, as a participant, reporter, or civilian bystander, knows that any war, every war, spawns war crimes. The question, when examining the Cast Lead operation in Gaza, was whether there was something different, something exceptional and intentional and, especially, a matter of policy and command direction, that either trapped or targeted large numbers of civilians, resulting in a human tragedy far beyond the horrible reality of the very fact of warfare.
Was, in other words, this war different from all other wars? Or was this war the trigger for an outpouring of anti-Israel animus that was, for lack of a better term, disproportionate?
Although the jury is still out pending further independent inquiry, the likely answer to both is: Yes.
C. There is reason to believe that, at least in certain units, massive and, in retrospect, excessive firepower was employed, the apparent result of a miscalculation about how, and where, Hamas fighters were likely to engage in combat. In the main, Hamas, whose men had fought to the death in previous encounters, refrained from engaging the IDF at all.
There remains a need for intensive and impartial investigation to determine the extent and the cause of actions which led directly to the deaths of innocents.
D. The fact that may be most difficult to digest - either for haters of Israel or its most ardently positive supporters - is that Israel's armed forces have always been marked by an extraordinary degree of autonomy, down to the level of the individual grunt.
As a direct result, there were instances of Israeli soldiers who risked their own lives to save those of innocents, and there were Israeli soldiers who were predisposed to take the lives of innocents without just cause.
2. What Palestinians say that Israel does.
There are journalists who accept without reservation or corroboration the accounts of Palestinians regarding the actions of Israeli soldiers. There are television networks, some of them financed by Qatar, whose coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, even during studio interviews, is accompanied by unending, obscenely graphic footage of infants and children wounded and killed in the war.
The first rule of covering the Holy Land is also in some ways the only rule:
3. Everyone lies to the press here. Everyone. All the time.
This is similar to, but not the same as:
4. Middle East news, like news in general, is marketing.
We are, all of us, in marketing. We are, all of us, in the business of selling a story. This includes the eyewitness, the victim, the military commander, the Hamas official, the Israeli spokesman, the betrayed, the bereaved, the film crew, the pundit.
Every news outlet has a lens through which it believes the story will best sell to an increasingly news-inured public. Every individual, Israeli or Palestinian, has an axe to grind, and a world full of good reasons to grind it.
5. Sometimes Israel looks bad because it is made to look bad. At other times, however, Israeli actions appear brutal because they, in fact, are.
Much has been made of what may be the least translatable word in the Hebrew language, Hasbara, literally, the act of explaining:
"It is true that the world media, generally speaking, doesn't like Israel very much, and stacks the deck against it, but good hasbara starts with not allowing soldiers to vandalize Palestinian homes and shoot Palestinian women," writes Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, a veteran of the IDF, of the disclosures over the past week in Haaretz.
"Public relations isn't a morally relevant category, in any case: The crucial question is, how should a civilized country behave when confronting barbarism? With barbarism? Or with respect for innocent life? Pardon me for saying so, but the Jewish people didn't struggle for national equality, justice and freedom so that some of its sons could behave like Cossacks.
"Please don't get me wrong: I'm not equating the morality of the IDF to that of Hamas. The goal of Hamas is to murder innocent people; the goal of the IDF is to avoid murdering innocent people. But when the IDF fails to achieve its goal, and ends up inflicting needless destruction and suffering, it sullies not only its own name, but the name of the Jewish state. It risks making a just cause - Jewish nationhood - seem unjust, and it ultimately endangers what it is supposed to protect."
6. Israelis, as a people and individually, are execrable at public relations because they abhor and distrust the very concept.
There is a reason why Israelis are so breathtakingly inept at furthering their own cause.
It is not only becuse this war was a frank and literally misguided attempt to redress years of misguidance. Or because the war between the Jews and the Arabs, this war which has raged for more than a hundred years, has robbed both sides of its ability to see the humanity of the other.
It is also because Israelis hate the very idea of public relations. They live in a country which has been under effective world quarantine for nearly all if its history.They live in a society whose trait of unbridled openness has become something of a learning disability. They speak a language which is light years and thousands of literal years away from television English. They are bathed in a culture which insulates itself and armors itself and has had little reason to believe the world will give it a fair shake.They have a shared, largely unspoken truth which is based, in part, on the world's inability to fathom their behavior. And they believe that no matter what they do, much of the world is likely to condemn them. And in this,at least, they have seldom been proven wrong.
===================================================
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_OGhj43GAE
Watch a Palestinian video about Hamas.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Sunday, March 08, 2009
Do Palestinian Arabs deserve a State of their own?
[Lenny Ben David below argues that they don't deserve it yet. There is no doubt that they haven't proven themselves capable of establishing or running a united people's nation-State.
The reality is that they weren't ready in '48 when the UN offered them one;and they haven't been ready to do anything other than fight to try to take over what the Jews have established with their hard-earned toil and tears. Whenever they were given a chance to prove themselves, such as in Gaza where everything was left for their economic infrastructure to succeed as did that of the previous settlers, all they were instructed to do, was to destroy it!
The virulent Islamic mentality of Hamas et al. made sure that no vestige of Jewish success will be utilised to help their own people! How on earth can such medieval hatred of a people towards other people ever succeed to become a worthy nation-State among the world community of enlightened nations, as Israel is? MM]
The Palestinians should get a State, but do they deserve one? Not yet!
by Lenny BEN-DAVID
http://lennybendavid.com
March 8, 2009
http://lennybendavid.com/2009/03/palestinians-should-get-state-but-do.html
Why Secretary Hillary Clinton Didn’t See What I Saw
I spent one day in 1996 in Ramallah visiting the nascent Palestinian state. I traveled the few miles from Jerusalem to Ramallah with a colleague to attend a session of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) – the Palestinian parliament. It was soon after the Palestinian elections, and the scene in the Ramallah parliament was effervescent. Lobbyists were busy plying their trade in the hallways. MPs were jumping up to object to one point or another. And my translator – the daughter of a moderate PLO official stationed in Europe who was assassinated by radical Palestinians – was practically shaking with excitement. The elected body (yes, it was stacked with many of Arafat’s hand-picked candidates) was debating civil service reform, and members kept referring with approval to how things were done “over there.” It was understood by all they were talking about Israel.
Those were the days. And they may never return.
The language of the debate in the PLC was different but the sense of democracy at work reminded me of the debates in the Knesset or the discussions in the corridor outside of the House of Representatives cloakroom.
At that point in history, the close contact between Israel and the West Bank and Gaza was almost 30 years old. Palestinian women’s groups had learned feminist culture from their Israeli sisters. Palestinian newspapers were publishing uncensored stories out of Jerusalem. Agricultural extension experts from Israel’s Ministry of Agriculture were working with their Palestinian counterparts to improve Palestinian agricultural and livestock yields.
Palestinian bankers, businessmen, doctors and nurses were studying Hebrew in the Israeli language school, Ulpan Akiva, so that they could apprentice in Israeli institutions in order to improve skills and facilitate joint projects. Fundamentalist Palestinian Gazans at the ulpan complained to me once that Israeli television broadcasts in Arabic were featuring clips of naked women to entice male viewers, so I introduced them to Israeli feminists so that they could together challenge the broadcast authorities. At the ulpan in Netanya I first met Dr. Ezzeldin Abu Elaish, the Gazan doctor who tragically lost three children during the Hamas-Israeli war in January.
We met with several Palestinian legislators in the Ramallah parliament building, including a young firebrand, Marwan Barghouti, the Secretary-General of Fatah. He was determined to fight Palestinian corruption and to push for independent Palestinian statehood. We thought that it was a positive sign that Barghouti was channeling his passions in the legislative body. But in 2002 Barghouti was arrested by Israeli troops as the mastermind of terrorist attacks against Israelis. He was convicted for the murder of four Israelis and one Greek Orthodox priest and is currently sitting in Israeli prison.
When Secretary of State Clinton travelled to Ramallah from Jerusalem last week she undoubtedly asked herself, “What went wrong?” What turned Barghouti into a murderer, or was he always a terrorist masquerading as a legislator? What evil force dispatched Palestinian suicide bombers into Israeli streets just a few years later? Why did Palestinian security forces, often trained by the CIA and armed by Israel, turn their guns on Israeli civilians and soldiers? What generated the winds of war that could only be blocked by the building of fences and walls separating Arabs and Jews? And now the Katyushas, Grads and Kassams fly over the fences by the thousands. Today, my meetings at Ulpan Akiva seem like fantasies, and in all honesty, I would not venture into Ramallah today for fear of being lynched as a Jew. That was the fate of two Israeli reservists who accidentally wandered into Ramallah four years after my visit.
What went wrong? Critics of Israel quickly respond that Ariel Sharon’s 2000 visit to the Temple Mount (Haram el Sharif to the Arabs) was the catalyst. But we know today that Arafat was planning the second “Intifada” months before Sharon’s visit, even as he met with President Clinton and Prime Minister Barak at Camp David in the summer of 2000. Some of Israel’s detractors would argue that the Israeli settlements led to Palestinian despair and violence. But settlements had existed since 1968; and already in 1997 Palestinian diplomats with whom I dealt were willing to cede 10 percent of the territories, including the settlements, to Israel.
The blame falls primarily on Arafat for poisoning the tentative but promising ties that were developing between Israel and the Palestinians. All cooperation was stopped after he arrived in Gaza in 1994. Local Palestinian leaders and heads of Palestinian government agencies were replaced by Arafat’s minions who accompanied him from Tunis. The “multilateral talks” established in the 1991 Madrid Conference to discuss the vital issues of water, environment, arms control, refugees and economic development were permanently shelved.
It became clear to American negotiators that Arafat was opposed to the two-state solution. “He was not interested or capable of doing an agreement that ended the conflict,” American negotiator Dennis Ross explained before Arafat’s departure from this world. “As long as [Arafat] didn’t have to make an irrevocable commitment, he was quite prepared to sign up to any agreement. Arafat is someone who will never close a door, never foreclose an option. He has to be able to say that he still has claims, still has grievances, and in light of that, the conflict at a certain level goes on....He doesn’t want to be the one that goes down in Palestinian history as the one who precluded a one-state solution [emphasis added].”
Frankly, the U.S. and Israel share some of the blame for covering up Arafat’s aggression. Palestinian newspapers, radio and TV amplified Arafat’s anti-Israeli line. The preachers in Palestinian mosques were appointed by Arafat and spewed forth anti-Semitism. And Palestinian children were poisoned by a toxic, anti-Semitic, bellicose curriculum even before Hamas gained its political power. While serving as a senior Israeli diplomat in Washington in the late 1990s, I was instructed by Israel’s leaders not to circulate a video called Jihad for Kids, a frightening collection of anti-Semitic TV broadcasts recorded off of Palestinian TV. Israeli and American leaders did not want to endanger what remained of the peace process and chose to ignore the venomous pollution of the Palestinian grassroots.
Hillary Clinton came to realize the danger of the Palestinian incitement. While serving as Senator, she reviewed Palestinian propaganda and concluded in a Palestinian Media Watch press conference two years ago: “This propaganda is dangerous. You know, words really matter. Some people sort of downplay the importance of words. But words really matter. Because in idealizing for children a world without Israel, children are taught never to accept the reality of the State of Israel, never to strive for a better future that would hold out the promise of peace and security to them, and is basically a message of pessimism and fatalism that undermines the possibility for these children living lives of fulfillment and productivity.”
The United Nations Charter declared in 1945 that “All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.” That declaration is the basis for many nations’ claim to statehood, including the Kurds, Chechens, Basques and the Palestinians.
Many Israelis believe that right of self-determination should apply to the Palestinians, and Israel proved itself ready to help the development of the Palestinians’ civil society toward that goal. But, after the Palestinians retreated from all forms of cooperation with Israel, choosing a path of confrontation leading to a judenrein one state solution, it was not surprising that a majority of Israelis signaled at the polls last month that they wanted leadership to put the brakes on the establishment of a Palestinian state in the near term. The UN Charter is applicable to “all people” as long as they do not seek the destruction of another. As long as the genocidal Hamas rules a large part of the Palestinian population and threatens to capture control of even more Palestinians in the West Bank and the teeming refugee camps of Lebanon, the Palestinian people will not deserve statehood.
The writer's visit to Ramallah took place when he headed the Jerusalem office of an American Jewish organization, not as an Israeli diplomatic official.
The reality is that they weren't ready in '48 when the UN offered them one;and they haven't been ready to do anything other than fight to try to take over what the Jews have established with their hard-earned toil and tears. Whenever they were given a chance to prove themselves, such as in Gaza where everything was left for their economic infrastructure to succeed as did that of the previous settlers, all they were instructed to do, was to destroy it!
The virulent Islamic mentality of Hamas et al. made sure that no vestige of Jewish success will be utilised to help their own people! How on earth can such medieval hatred of a people towards other people ever succeed to become a worthy nation-State among the world community of enlightened nations, as Israel is? MM]
The Palestinians should get a State, but do they deserve one? Not yet!
by Lenny BEN-DAVID
http://lennybendavid.com
March 8, 2009
http://lennybendavid.com/2009/03/palestinians-should-get-state-but-do.html
Why Secretary Hillary Clinton Didn’t See What I Saw
I spent one day in 1996 in Ramallah visiting the nascent Palestinian state. I traveled the few miles from Jerusalem to Ramallah with a colleague to attend a session of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) – the Palestinian parliament. It was soon after the Palestinian elections, and the scene in the Ramallah parliament was effervescent. Lobbyists were busy plying their trade in the hallways. MPs were jumping up to object to one point or another. And my translator – the daughter of a moderate PLO official stationed in Europe who was assassinated by radical Palestinians – was practically shaking with excitement. The elected body (yes, it was stacked with many of Arafat’s hand-picked candidates) was debating civil service reform, and members kept referring with approval to how things were done “over there.” It was understood by all they were talking about Israel.
Those were the days. And they may never return.
The language of the debate in the PLC was different but the sense of democracy at work reminded me of the debates in the Knesset or the discussions in the corridor outside of the House of Representatives cloakroom.
At that point in history, the close contact between Israel and the West Bank and Gaza was almost 30 years old. Palestinian women’s groups had learned feminist culture from their Israeli sisters. Palestinian newspapers were publishing uncensored stories out of Jerusalem. Agricultural extension experts from Israel’s Ministry of Agriculture were working with their Palestinian counterparts to improve Palestinian agricultural and livestock yields.
Palestinian bankers, businessmen, doctors and nurses were studying Hebrew in the Israeli language school, Ulpan Akiva, so that they could apprentice in Israeli institutions in order to improve skills and facilitate joint projects. Fundamentalist Palestinian Gazans at the ulpan complained to me once that Israeli television broadcasts in Arabic were featuring clips of naked women to entice male viewers, so I introduced them to Israeli feminists so that they could together challenge the broadcast authorities. At the ulpan in Netanya I first met Dr. Ezzeldin Abu Elaish, the Gazan doctor who tragically lost three children during the Hamas-Israeli war in January.
We met with several Palestinian legislators in the Ramallah parliament building, including a young firebrand, Marwan Barghouti, the Secretary-General of Fatah. He was determined to fight Palestinian corruption and to push for independent Palestinian statehood. We thought that it was a positive sign that Barghouti was channeling his passions in the legislative body. But in 2002 Barghouti was arrested by Israeli troops as the mastermind of terrorist attacks against Israelis. He was convicted for the murder of four Israelis and one Greek Orthodox priest and is currently sitting in Israeli prison.
When Secretary of State Clinton travelled to Ramallah from Jerusalem last week she undoubtedly asked herself, “What went wrong?” What turned Barghouti into a murderer, or was he always a terrorist masquerading as a legislator? What evil force dispatched Palestinian suicide bombers into Israeli streets just a few years later? Why did Palestinian security forces, often trained by the CIA and armed by Israel, turn their guns on Israeli civilians and soldiers? What generated the winds of war that could only be blocked by the building of fences and walls separating Arabs and Jews? And now the Katyushas, Grads and Kassams fly over the fences by the thousands. Today, my meetings at Ulpan Akiva seem like fantasies, and in all honesty, I would not venture into Ramallah today for fear of being lynched as a Jew. That was the fate of two Israeli reservists who accidentally wandered into Ramallah four years after my visit.
What went wrong? Critics of Israel quickly respond that Ariel Sharon’s 2000 visit to the Temple Mount (Haram el Sharif to the Arabs) was the catalyst. But we know today that Arafat was planning the second “Intifada” months before Sharon’s visit, even as he met with President Clinton and Prime Minister Barak at Camp David in the summer of 2000. Some of Israel’s detractors would argue that the Israeli settlements led to Palestinian despair and violence. But settlements had existed since 1968; and already in 1997 Palestinian diplomats with whom I dealt were willing to cede 10 percent of the territories, including the settlements, to Israel.
The blame falls primarily on Arafat for poisoning the tentative but promising ties that were developing between Israel and the Palestinians. All cooperation was stopped after he arrived in Gaza in 1994. Local Palestinian leaders and heads of Palestinian government agencies were replaced by Arafat’s minions who accompanied him from Tunis. The “multilateral talks” established in the 1991 Madrid Conference to discuss the vital issues of water, environment, arms control, refugees and economic development were permanently shelved.
It became clear to American negotiators that Arafat was opposed to the two-state solution. “He was not interested or capable of doing an agreement that ended the conflict,” American negotiator Dennis Ross explained before Arafat’s departure from this world. “As long as [Arafat] didn’t have to make an irrevocable commitment, he was quite prepared to sign up to any agreement. Arafat is someone who will never close a door, never foreclose an option. He has to be able to say that he still has claims, still has grievances, and in light of that, the conflict at a certain level goes on....He doesn’t want to be the one that goes down in Palestinian history as the one who precluded a one-state solution [emphasis added].”
Frankly, the U.S. and Israel share some of the blame for covering up Arafat’s aggression. Palestinian newspapers, radio and TV amplified Arafat’s anti-Israeli line. The preachers in Palestinian mosques were appointed by Arafat and spewed forth anti-Semitism. And Palestinian children were poisoned by a toxic, anti-Semitic, bellicose curriculum even before Hamas gained its political power. While serving as a senior Israeli diplomat in Washington in the late 1990s, I was instructed by Israel’s leaders not to circulate a video called Jihad for Kids, a frightening collection of anti-Semitic TV broadcasts recorded off of Palestinian TV. Israeli and American leaders did not want to endanger what remained of the peace process and chose to ignore the venomous pollution of the Palestinian grassroots.
Hillary Clinton came to realize the danger of the Palestinian incitement. While serving as Senator, she reviewed Palestinian propaganda and concluded in a Palestinian Media Watch press conference two years ago: “This propaganda is dangerous. You know, words really matter. Some people sort of downplay the importance of words. But words really matter. Because in idealizing for children a world without Israel, children are taught never to accept the reality of the State of Israel, never to strive for a better future that would hold out the promise of peace and security to them, and is basically a message of pessimism and fatalism that undermines the possibility for these children living lives of fulfillment and productivity.”
The United Nations Charter declared in 1945 that “All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.” That declaration is the basis for many nations’ claim to statehood, including the Kurds, Chechens, Basques and the Palestinians.
Many Israelis believe that right of self-determination should apply to the Palestinians, and Israel proved itself ready to help the development of the Palestinians’ civil society toward that goal. But, after the Palestinians retreated from all forms of cooperation with Israel, choosing a path of confrontation leading to a judenrein one state solution, it was not surprising that a majority of Israelis signaled at the polls last month that they wanted leadership to put the brakes on the establishment of a Palestinian state in the near term. The UN Charter is applicable to “all people” as long as they do not seek the destruction of another. As long as the genocidal Hamas rules a large part of the Palestinian population and threatens to capture control of even more Palestinians in the West Bank and the teeming refugee camps of Lebanon, the Palestinian people will not deserve statehood.
The writer's visit to Ramallah took place when he headed the Jerusalem office of an American Jewish organization, not as an Israeli diplomatic official.
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