From: Francis Feeley <Francis.Feeley@u-grenoble3.fr>
Subject: Edward Herman: Part 3 of
3.
7 April 2002
Grenoble, France
Message from the Center for the Advanced
Study of American Institutions and
Social Movements
Université de Grenoble-3
F. Feeley, directeur de recherches
===========================
ISRAEL'S APPROVED ETHNIC CLEANSING:
PART 3
"HOW THE U.S. MEDIA PROTECTS
IT"
by Edward S. Herman
The U.S. mainstream
media have followed closely their
government's agenda of giving Israel
carte blanche in dealing with
their Palestinian subjects, both
within Israel and in the occupied
territories. This has involved a
major intellectual and moral
challenge, given the facts of serious
racist discrimination, the
long Israeli refusal to exit the
occupied territories as demanded
by an overwhelming international
consensus, Israel's daily
violations of the Fourth Geneva
Convention requirements on
treatment of people in occupied
territories--including a massive
ethnic cleansing openly designed
to benefit the "chosen people"--
and their clear intention to create
a Palestinian system of
dependent and poor bantustans in
the occupied territories,
organized strictly for the advantage
of the ethnic cleansing state.
This brutal, racist
and illegal ethnic cleansing program has
taken place in an era when the United
States and its allies have
proclaimed a new moral order in
which defenseless people will be
protected by the Great Powers, as
allegedly happened in Kosovo. The
challenge of rationalizing the Israeli
ethnic cleansing in this
ideological context has been severe,
but it has been met by the
U.S. media with remarkable success.
Identifying completely with the
Israelis, the media have transformed
them into the primary victims
and treated the populace really
victimized as "unpeople" whose pain
does not count and who do not require
"security" like the
victimizers. And by a comprehensive
system of biased word usage,
framing, eye aversion, and rewriting
of history, they have
demonstrated once again that in
its service to the state the Free
Press can teach a lesson to any
state-run propaganda system.
The bias on the Israel-Palestinian
conflict is sometimes
illustrated dramatically in events
such as long-time Executive
Editor of the New York Times, A.
M. Rosenthal's, receipt of an
award in 1991 as "Defender of Jerusalem"
for his "passionate voice
on Jewish and Israeli affairs,"
or his refusal to allow an
unpleasant fact about Rabbi Meier
Kahane to be published because it
"would generate anti-semitism;"
or CBS news anchor Dan Rather's
enthusiastic participation--contrary
to CBS rules--in a 1992
Jerusalem Foundation fund-raiser
chaired by pro-Israel hawks Martin
Peretz amd Morton Zuckerman. But
the bias is on continual display
in actual media performance.
Let us review
briefly, with some recent illustrations, some of
the modalities by which Israel's
more than half-century long,
massive ethnic cleansing has been
made palatable.
1. Language: Ethnic Cleansing,
Violence, Terrorism, Clashes
The phrase "ethnic
cleansing" is far more applicable to Israeli
actions than to those of the Serbs
in Kosovo. The brutal Serb
mistreatment of Kosovo Albanians
was a feature of an ongoing civil
war, and the killings and large
scale expulsions during the Nato
bombing were war-related actions;
they were not part of a long-term
project to "redeem the land" from
non-Serbs. Albanians in Belgrade
have not been limited in property
ownership as Arabs are in Israel
and the occupied territories, and
Kosovo Albanian homes were not
demolished for the purpose of providing
space for Serbs. Despite
this reality, in the three year
period 1998 through 2000, the New
York Times, Washington Post, Los
Angeles Times, Time and Newsweek
used the phrase "ethnic cleansing"
some 1,200 times in discussing
Kosovo, in about four-fifths of
the cases in reference to Serb
policy, whereas during the entire
decade of the 1990s they used the
phrase only 14 times in discussing
Israel, and only five times
referring to Israeli policy. This
reflects massive internalized
bias.
In media reporting
on Intifada II, "violence" means stone
throwing and shooting, it never
refers to the "structural violence"
of expropriating land, evicting
people from their houses and
demolishing them, seizing and diverting
their water resources for
the use of the chosen people, building
roads that destroy
communities' access to former neighbors
and jobs, closing down
access directly by army orders and
barricades, and tolerating and
protecting settlers' attacks, destruction,
and seizure of Gentile
property. Even though there have
been a substantial number of
killings and injuries inflicted
on the Gentiles by army and
settlers in this process, this massive
low-intensity violence has
been entirely acceptable to the
Clinton, Bush II, and predecessor
administrations, so for the mainstream
media it is not classified
as violence or given serious attention
(as discussed further
below).
But even within their
limited conception of violence, the media's
bias displayed during Intifada II
has been spectacular in giving
far greater attention and exclusive
indignation to stone-throwing
and suicide bombings by Palestinians,
than to the more cruel and
deadly violence of the Israeli army.
The better than six to one
ratio of killings and far higher
ratio of Palestinian injuries to
those of Israelis is neutralized
by greater attention to--and much
greater humanization of--Israeli
victims. In a simple and rough
measure of this bias, of eight front
page photos of Intifada
victims in the New York Times from
September 28, 2000 through
March 9, 2001, six were of Israelis
and two were of Palestinians.
This, along with massive suppressions
detailed later, helps sustain
the identification of "violence"
with the stone throwing and suicide
bombing of the population in revolt.
Similarly, the media
have continued their long tradition of
finding the Palestinians terrorists,
the Israelis victims--even
"under siege"--and engaging in retaliation
only. Almost without
exception the media make deadly
Palestinian actions terrorism, and
with indignant language attached--the
killing of two Israeli
soldiers was a "sickening lynch-murder,"
a Palestinian attack on a
settlers' bus was "unspeakable"
and a "terrorist outrage" in the
New York Times--but none of the
400 Palestinian deaths were worthy
of such adjectives. Thus, regarding
a massive Israeli bombardment
of a civilian area in Gaza, this
was "predictably...a strong
Israeli response" to a previous
bombing of a settlers' bus. Only
the Israelis respond and retaliate,
and do this "predictably"
(meaning responsively and reasonably).
"Yesterday's Palestinian
terrorism and Israeli retaliation..."(ed.,
NYT, Nov. 21, 2000) is
the formulaic language of deep bias.
Norman Solomon reports that
Nexis search of U.S. media for the
first 100 days of 2001 found
several dozen references to Israeli
"retaliation," but only one
instance where Palestinian actions
were deemed retaliatory.
By the same rule
of bias Ariel Sharon, whose record of
responsibility for killing unarmed
civilians exceeds that of Carlos
the Jackal by a factor of 20 or
more, is never a "terrorist" or
"war criminal" in the mainstream
media, although occasionally it is
said that "they" (Arabs) so designate
him. Rather, he has a "new
air of electability" (Phila. Inquirer,
Jan. 7, 2001) or is "tough"
and a "warrior" as the New York
Times describes him on their front
page of February 7, 2001, or an
"old soldier" on the next day
(earlier, and shortly after the
Sabra-Shatila massacre, "the
forceful general intent on security
for Israel," NYT, Feb. 11,
1983).
Robert Fisk says
that when he reads of death in "a cross-fire"
or "clashes" he knows that this
means the Israelis did the killing.
Fisk notes that even when CNN's
Cairo bureau chief, Ben Wedeman,
was shot in the back in a gun battle
in Gaza, almost certainly by
Israeli soldiers, CNN could not
bring itself to suggest who was to
blame "at this time." And AP reported
that Wedeman had been "caught
up in a crossfire" (Fisk, "Media:
The Biased Reporting that Makes
Killing Acceptable," The Independent,
Nov, 14, 2000). Fisk also
notes how easily the media refer
to a "suspected Palestinian
gunman" or "presumably by Palestinians"
when Israelis are shot at,
whereas Palestinians always die
"in clashes"--"as if they they were
accidentally shot rather than targets
for Israeli snipers."
On March 27,
2001, the New York Times featured on its front page
that "Palestinians Kill Baby Boy
in West Bank," citing "Israeli
officials," with Ariel Sharon adding
that this was a "deliberate,
cold-blooded escalation of violence."
On March 11, however, the
paper showed on its front page a
picture of a dead nine-year old
Palestinian boy, described as shot
by "an errant Israeli bullet."
So by rule of bias the Israeli killing
was "errant" rather than
deliberate, in contrast with the
action of the Palestinians. And
if Israelia snipers shoot numerous
children, often in the eyes or
other vulnerable spot, the media--who
never use the numerous photos
of Palestinian children with eye
damage--are pleased to give
credence to Iraeli army suggestions
that the soldiers are perhaps
just a bit trigger-happy (Joel Greenberg,
"Israeli Military Worries
Some Troops May Be Trigger-Happy,"
NYT, Jan 17, 2001).
The Israelis are not
only "worried" about over-zealous soldiers,
they admit making "mistakes," and
the media sometimes acknowledge
that their responses may be "excessive,"
"heavy-handed," or
"disproportionate" in retaliating
to terrorism--but they are never
engaging in state terrorism and
killing civilians, including
children, deliberately and "unspeakably."
Their killings are never
"massacres," as Serb killings in
Kosovo were often designated.
Palestinian violence is never a
"predictable" response to Israeli
structural violence and direct state
terror.
2. Critical Frames: Featuring
the Violence of the Ethnic Cleansing State.
Framing bias
is closely linked to bias in language, and as I
have just shown, the U.S. mainstream
media use words like terrorism
and violence to describe the retail
acts of the Palestinians, not
the wholesale killings and coerced
structural changes imposed by
the Israelis. They also refuse to
use the words "ethnic cleansing"
to describe Israeli policy, despite
the excellence of the fit. But
there are powerful frames that do
put the locus of blame for
violence on the ethnic cleansing
state and its sponsor. These
critical frames are spelled out
by Israeli journalists like Amira
Hass and Danny Rubenstein, but they
are as scarce as hens' teeth in
the U.S. mainstream press, although
they flourish in the
alternative media.
2A. The injustice frame
The primary alternative
frame we may call the injustice model.
As I showed in Part 1, Amira Hass
writing in Ha'aretz employs a
clear critical frame that explains
Intifada II as an inevitable
response to the complete failure
of Oslo to do anything whatever
for the Palestinians, and their
further decline in welfare and
morale. Robert Fisk says the same:
that the Intifada "is what
happens when a whole society is
pressure-cooked to the point of
explosion" ("Lies, Hatred and the
Language of Force, The
Independent, Oct. 13, 2000). Hass,
Fisk, Danny Rubenstein in
Ha'aretz, and other reporters and
analysts have given similar
interpretations that stress the
continued expropriations by
settlers and the army, the hugely
racist and humiliating treatment
meted out to the Palestinians by
their overlords, and the fact that
recent Israeli-US plans not only
ratify the illegal post-Oslo
"facts on the ground," they provide
for no meaningful resolution of
the refugee crisis, no credible
East Jerusalem sovereignty, and no
viable and independent Palestinian
state.
In this
critical frame, the Palestinian uprising is rooted in
extreme abuse and injustice, disappointed
hopes, disillusionment
with both Oslo and the corrupt and
pitiful Arafat leadership
serving as Israeli enforcers, and
the final provocation of Sharon
and Barak at al-Aqsa. The explosion
was widely expected,
"predictable," and understandable,
and in these senses it was a
"rational" response to extreme abuse
and the absence of peaceable
options.
2B. The Israeli provocation model
A secondary alternative
frame, that actually supplements the
primary injustice model, starts
with the fact that Intidada II was
clearly begun by Ariel Sharon's
visit to the al-Aqsa mosque on
September 28, 2000. Even Thomas
Friedman and the mainstream media
acknowledge that this was a "provocation,"
but by various tricks
they make the Palestinian response
causally more important than the
provocation.
One trick has
been to portray Barak as a man of peace who was
offering a reasonable settlement,
and distancing him from the
provocation. Thus, Thomas Friedman
says that "In short, the
Palestinians could not deal with
Barak, so they had to turn him
into Sharon. And they did" ("Arafat's
War," NYT, Oct. 13, 2000).
But Friedman suppresses relevant
facts. First, Arafat, his chief
negotiator Saeb Erikat, and Palestinian
official Faisal Husseini,
all pleaded with Barak not to allow
the Sharon visit because of its
destabilizing potential, and Barak
not only turned them down he
supported Sharon's provocation with
1000 border police. Second, on
the day after Sharon's visit, Barak's
police were massively present
at al-Aqsa and fired to kill in
the turmoil that ensued, leaving
seven dead and several hundred wounded.
Third, following this
further provocation Barak did nothing
to reduce the tensions, and
in fact offered a further show of
force. But for Friedman and the
mainstream media, this series of
provocations and failure of Barak
to do anything peaceable does not
make him responsible; it was
Arafat who had to call off HIS people.
By rule of deep bias,
while the media have speculated freely on
Arafat's motives in possibly influencing
the Palestinian response--
his "chancy gamble" as Time put
it (Oct. 23, 2000)--they never even
raise the possibility that the Israeli
leaders might have had
political aims leading THEM to provoke
and that might explain THEIR
response. That the Sharon provocations,
with Barak's cooperation,
might have been intended to induce
violence and might be explained
by Israeli political dynamics is
simply outside the apologetic
frames of reference. Eduardo Cohen
argues that the Sharon-Barak
provocations flowed from their political
calculations: Sharon
wanting to take center stage before
Netanyahu's recovery from his
scandal--he was exonerated in a
court case on alleged corruption on
September 27, 2000, the day before
Sharon went to al-Aqsa--and
knowing that a tough stance and
renewed war would serve his
political interests; Barak hoping
to undercut Sharon and
precipitate a crisis and early election
in which his chances would
also be better than if he waited
for the political recovery of
Netanyahu (Cohen, "American Journalists
Should Have Looked a Little
Deeper," undated). Whatever the
merits of this line of argument,
the failure of the U.S. media even
to discuss possible political
reasons for the provocations, and
whether they might have been
intended to provoke the ensuing
violence, reflects overwhelming
bias.
3. Apologetic Frames: Those That
Blame any Violence on the Victims of Ethnic Cleansing.
Almost without
exception the U.S. mainstream media frame their
presentations of the issues in the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict so
as to apologize for Israeli policy
and put the blame for any
violence on Israel's victims.
3A. The injustice model--Barak's
generous offer, Arafat's war, irrational Palestinian outburst.
Essential
ingredients of this dominant mainstream frame are the
assumptions that Barak was a "moderate"
and that his offers and the
"peace process" have been reasonable,
so that any disturbances or
uprisings are therefore irresponsible,
unjustifiable, or
irrational. Trudy Rubin, the editorial
foreign policy commentator
of the Philadelphia Inquirer, is
not alone in finding that
"Irrationality drives violence in
the region" (Oct. 18, 2000).
Absolutely essential to propagating
this frame is the refusal to
discuss issues of justice and to
evaluate those in detail--so you
will never find Friedman, or Rubin,
discussing the Israeli policy
of systematic expropriation of Palestinians
in the occupied
territories, the demolitions, the
appropriation of water for Jewish
use, the doubled settler population
since 1993, the road
construction that makes a Palestinian
state unviable, or the policy
of killing and injuring Gentiles
freely, but not Jews. They never
seriously discuss--let alone urge--the
right of return of expelled
Palestinians, although both Friedman
and Rubin were aggressively
supportive of the right of return
of Kosovo Albanians. The news
columns in their papers, and the
mainstream media more generally,
also follow the official (U.S. and
Israeli) party line and scant
all of these issues.
In his "Arafat's
War," which gives us Friedman's standard
"injustice" model, characteristic
of the Times as an institution,
and predominant throughout the mainstream
media, Friedman mentions
the "old complaints about the brutality
of the continued Israeli
occupation and settlement building.
Frankly, the Israeli
checkpoints and continued settlement
building are oppressive." He
finesses this huge set of issues
by making them "old" (stale), and
avoiding details, numbers, or discussing
the racist violence in
expropriation for Israeli Jews only,
the large-scale violations of
the Fourth Geneva Convention, or
the beggaring of the Palestinians
under Oslo. He also argues that
such matters are now irrelevant
because Barak has offered "unprecedented
compromises," so that if
the Palestinians don't fall in line
with these any violence is
their fault. He never discusses
why Sharon engaged in his
provocation or explains why this
act by an Israeli leader does not
deserve considerable weight; and
he fails to acknowledge Barak's
support of the provocation and never
suggests that these Israeli
actions might be related to Israeli
politics. And he has not one
word of criticism of the Israeli
killings of September 29 or the
ensuing brutal repression. He mentions
the "gleeful savage mob
murder of Israeli soldiers in Ramallah,"
but otherwise there was
only a "week of Israeli-Palestinian
killings," but no "murders" let
alone "gleeful savage murders" of
Palestinians.
Friedman never
mentions that the vague terms of the Oslo deal
allowed Israel, with total U.S.
support, to double settlements and
create facts on the ground extremely
damaging to Palestinian
welfare. Thus the "old complaints
about brutality" etc., continued
despite that prior good deal. Now
the new good deal gives the
Palestinians a fine alternative--"more
than 90 percent of the West
Bank for a Palestinian state, a
partial resolution of the refugee
problem and Palestinian sovereignty
over the Muslim and Christian
quarters of the Old City of Jerusalem..."
Even Bill Clinton likes
this plan, so what more need be
said about fairness? The "90
percent" figure is the Israeli version,
that allows a "facts on
the ground" Greater Jerusalem to
be counted as part of Israel--so
that 70 to 80 percent may be more
accurate. There is also the
question of the quality of the land,
the implicit Israeli control
of the mountain acquifer under the
West Bank, and the fact that the
land allocations, Jewish settlements,
and "for Jews only" road
networks have broken the "90 percent"
into unconnected enclaves,
with no borders except with Israel.
This is a bantustan solution
that does not yield a viable or
independent state; and of course it
does not return to the Palestinians
any of the property stolen even
since 1993 for Israel's "security"
and lebensraum for some of the
chosen people.
Friedman is satisfied
with the "partial resolution" of the
refugee problem that involves Israel
recognizing Palestinian "pain"
and promising to allow a "return"
to "historic Palestine," which
includes the West Bank where the
refugees are already congregated,
not to their original homes and
not promising compensation in lieu
of such return. Palestinian sovereignty
over the Muslim and
Christian quarters of the Old City
does not include Harim Al
Sharif, and those Muslim and Christian
quarters have been broken
into pieces by expropriations and
massive Israeli construction for
Jews only since the last good deal
(1993).
So "Arafat's
War" rests on the failure of the Palestinians to
acknowledge total defeat: their
unwillingness to accept all the
past injustices, including post-1993
expropriations, a bantustan
system worse than that imposed by
South Africa under apartheid, and
continued military domination by
a country that has been a wee bit
"oppressive" (Clinton and Barak
demanded a demilitarized
Palestinian state, and continued
Israeli occupation rights in the
West Bank, out of consideration
for Israeli security). If Arafat
wouldn't accept this, and sign another
imprecise agreement that
once again left much to the goodwill
of Israel and its sponsor, all
the violence is his doing.
This is the "injustice
model" that amounts to crude apologetics
for ethnic cleansing. And it was
hardly confined to Friedman and
the New York Times editorial pages.
It was pretty standard in the
news as well as editorial pages
that it was Arafat's choice of
"Peace or Victimhood" (Jane Perlez,
"Fork in Arafat's Road," NYT,
Dec. 29, 2000).
3B. Arafat and the return to terrorism
For years
Arafat and the PLO were terrorists for Israeli and
U.S. officials, and therefore for
the mainstream media. Israel has
only engaged in retaliation and
counterterror, by rule of political
bias, whatever the facts. Then in
1991, when Arafat surrendered and
allowed himself to be sucked into
a "peace process" that made him
the Israeli enforcer, but gave his
people absolutely nothing, he
suddenly ceased to be a terrorist
and became a statesman! With
Intifada II, however, and his failure
to perform his function of
keeping his defeated people under
control, he has been tentatively
returned at least in some media
to the terrorist class.
So we find regular
media references to Arafat's responsibility
for failing to contain the violence,
speculations on whether he
actually stirred it up to improve
his bargaining position with
Israel, and admonitions to Arafat
to get his people under control.
Among many other cases, Time
had him taking a "chancy gamble;" the
Inquirer's Trudy Rubin said he "fanned,
or failed to calm,
religious and national passions"
(Oct. 18, 2000), and she asked
"Can Arafat stop the violence" (Nov.
1, 2000). Some of the claims
of his deliberate incitements have
come from Israeli army and
intelligence sources, which the
media find highly newsworthy (Tracy
Wilkinson, "Is the violence beyond
Arafat's control?," Los Angeles
Times, Oct.4, 2000). Jane Perlez
asks "Can Arafat Turn It Off?,"
subtitled "U.S. Officials Debate
Degree of His Control" (NYT, Oct.
17, 2000). There have not been any
articles entitled "Is the
violence beyond Barak's [or Sharon's]
control?," nor have the media
been able to locate anybody to assess
Barak's motives and
responsibility. And in a spectacular
display of bias they rarely if
ever suggested that Barak could
or should have stopped the
wholesale violence that he carried
out from September 29, 2000;
only "Arafat had a choice" (Rubin),
not Barak, or Sharon, who are
implicitly engaging in "retaliation"
and "counterterror," in a
longstanding propaganda tradition.
C. Pushing the children forward
as martyrs
In a similar
and disgusting pattern, the mainstream media have
also latched on to the claim that
the Palestinians are callously
pushing their children forward to
die, that they suffer from a
martyr syndrome, and that the parents,
Arafat, and the penchant
toward martyrdom are therefore responsible
for the numerous
shooting deaths of children (Chris
Hedges, "The Deathly Glamour of
Martydom," NYT, Oct. 29, 2000).
This penchant for martyrdom is also
responsible for the breakdown of
peace (John Burns, "The Promise of
Paradise That Slays Peace," NYT,
April 1, 2001).
The Philadelphia
Inquirer played the martyrdom line with relish,
with a news article on "Grieving
Arabs find comfort in concept of
martydom" (Oct. 25, 2000), an op-ed
column by Rubin on "The
children's crusade" that blames
the Palestinians for the death of
their children (Oct. 25), and a
cartoon by Tony Auth showing Arafat
urging children to plunge to martyrs'
deaths over a cliff (Oct. 26).
Auth has twice had cartoons showing
Arafat with blood on his
hands, but never an Israeli leader.
Uri Avnery notes
that this ready attribution of responsibility
for the child killings to the Arab
parents "betrays an obnoxious
racism" ("Israel/Palestine: Twelve
Conventional Lies," Oct. 21,
2000). He also observes that Palestinian
parents can hardly
restrain their children "when they
live under a cruel occupation
and their brothers and sisters provide
examples of heroism and
self-sacrifice" in a tradition going
back to 16 year-old Joan of
Arc. He also points out that there
is a Jewish tradition of
children fighters and heroes, and
that the settlers routinely
exploit their children, "not hesitating
to put them in harms way,"
and without eliciting any suggestions
of irresponsibility and a
desire for martyrdom on the part
of the critics of Palestinian
parents.
"The right
question is why do our soldiers kill these children?
And in some cases in cold blood?"
But that is Eyad Serraj writing
in Le Monde Diplomatique (Nov. 2000),
not a U.S. mainstream news
source. Rarely if ever do the media
point out that the Israelis are
doing the shooting, that many of
the children are shot with the
intent to seriously injure or kill
them, and that non-lethal
methods of crowd control are available
and are used by the
Israelis, but only when dealing
with protests by Israeli Jews.
In
a more general argument for Palestinian voluntary self-
sacrifice and Israeli innocence,
General Wesley Clark, wrote in
Time, that "For Israel, every casualty,
even among the
Palestinians, is a loss. For the
Palestinians, every clash is
strategic and offensive, increasing
the pressure on Israel,
building support in the Arab world
and, with every Israeli
response, affording the opportunity
to further isolate Israel..."
("How to Fight an Asymmetric War,"
Oct. 23, 2000). This apologetic-
-and the article's title points
up its design to advise Israel--
which is based on no evidence, does
not explain why Israel should
engage in aggressive and lethal
responses that are allegedly
"losses," fails to explore the hypothesis
that Israel is repeating
its handling of Intifada I where
its strategy was explicitly to
break the protest movement by terror,
and it assumes that
Palestinian behavior is based on
a plan rather than an
uncontrollable explosion based on
serious injustice, started by the
Sharon-Barak provocation, and kept
alive by Israel's brutal
response.
3D. The United States as honest
broker
The Israelis do not
want any interference with their ethnic
cleansing, so they "rightly resist
any shift to an international
format," as it was expressed in
a New York Times editorial of
November 13, 2000, and the Israelis
are happy to have the United
States, the 50-odd year sponsor
and underwriter of their ethnic
cleansing, as a substitute for a
genuine international presence.
The appropriateness of this arrangement
thus becomes the U.S.
official position and media truth,
and the demand for international
protection of the victims of Israel's
ethnic cleansing becomes not
a moral issue fulfilling that new
Western dedication to protecting
defenceless people but rather "a
favorite of Palestinians" (Keith
Richburg, "Israel rejects international
presence," Phila. Inquirer,
Nov. 11, 2000). Richard Holbrooke
says that "no force would be
supported without Israeli approval"
(Nicole Winfield, "Arafat
appeals for U.N. protection, but
Israel, U.S. oppose," Phila.
Inquirer, Nov. 11, 2000), so that
settles the matter for the
mainstream media. No comparison
with Kosovo, no mention of the
similar performance in East Timor
where the Clinton team deferred
to its Indonesia client, thereby
allowing the destruction of East
Timor.
Nor will the media
ever discuss the huge, long-standing pro-
Israeli bias of the U.S. government
that has protected Israeli
expropriations and ethnic cleansing
for an entire generation. As
noted earlier, Thomas Friedman cites
Clinton's approval of Barak's
peace proposal as if an assessment
by an honest broker, not a
partisan. On the aggressively pro-ethnic
cleansing right, William
Safire postulates that Clinton and
company really are honest
brokers, and decries this fact as
"Israel Needs an Ally, It does
not need a broker" (NYT, Oct. 12,
2000).
Although the
Palestinians have been militarily defeated and
ethnically cleansed by a powerful
combination of a superpower and
its main client, it is essential
that the mainstream press pretend
that the supportive superpower is
objective and not helping the
ethnic cleansing state capture the
fruits of this rather uneven
military contest. The media have
cooperated fully in doing this,
although occasionally the
Times, for example, allows it to be
mentioned that the Palestinians
are becoming a bit distrustful of
the honest broker! (William Orme,
"As New Peace Talks Go On,
Palestinians Criticize Clinton,"
NYT, Jan. 23, 2001).
3E. "Impatient" Israelis versus
Serbian "Willing Executioners"
The
mainstream media repeatedly tell us that the Israelis have
"lost patience" with the Palestinians,
with the "peace process,"
and with their leaders who have
allowed this new spate of
(Palestinian) "violence." If Barak's
approval rating went up from
20 to 50 percent following his and
Sharon's show of force at al-
Aqsa, and if they have voted in
the ruthless Sharon and now support
a more brutal response to the Intifada,
this does not discredit the
populace for murderous attitudes
and extremism. On the contrary, it
is a given to which the world must
adjust. Back in 1999, Stacy
Sullivan asked: what if a people
"supports ethnic cleansing--
actively or passively? In that case,
we do have a quarrel with
the...people...It is the very mentality
of the nation." But she was
talking about the SERBS as "Milosevic's
Willing Executioners" (New
Republic, May 10, 1999), not a populace
supporting an approved
ethnic cleansing.
In reference to the
Serbs, the official and therefore media party
line was that what the Serb armed
forces were doing to the
Albanians in Kosovo was ugly and
criminal and must be stopped, so
the idea of Serb "impatience" with
the Kosovo Albanians for their
resistance and "terrorism" would
have been viewed as outlandish.
The question was: how guilty were
ordinary Serbs for the crimes of
their government, and even though
the Serbs were alleged to be
suffering under a "dictatorship,"
Anthony Lewis, Blaine Harden, and
Thomas Friedman in the Times and
Stacy Sullivan and Daniel Jonah
Goldhagen in the New Republic, and
many others, found the Serbs
guilty, either because of their
indifference concerning their
government's crimes or their positive
support, as "willing
executioners."
In the case of Israelis,
many more of them than Serbs have been
openly in favor of violence against
their state's victims, and
there are numerous available quotes
of Israelis saying "I would
kill all Arabs," "Arabs must be
eliminated," and that Palestinians
are mere "grasshoppers" and that
these "vipers" should be
"annihilated" (Rabbi Ovadia Yosef,
spiritual leader of Israel's
Shas party, speaking on April 9,
2001). But here, in this case of
an approved ethnic cleansing, the
media not only don't suggest
Israeli citizen guilt, Israeli support
of escalated state terrorism
against Palestinians is reported
antiseptically and even
sympathetically, as the Israelis
are the victims of "terrorism" but
never themselves terrorize. They
may be killing and wounding
innocent civilians at a rate 20
or more times the rate of their
victimization by the "terrorists,"
but that doesn't affect an
equation where the value of lives
of the terrorists and their
families is zero.
4. Suppression of Inconvenient
Facts
Eye aversion
is extremely important in protecting the approved
system of institutionalized injustice
and ethnic cleansing. Thus,
the mainstream U.S. media simply
won't discuss the laws applying to
an occupying power and their responsibilities
under the Fourth
Geneva Convention, and Israel's
massive violations of these rules
in expropriations, discriminatory
use of water and other matters
are barely noted. The violence of
Israel in imprisonments, torture,
beatings, killings and injuries,
and aid and protection to settler
violence is enormously greater than
Palestinian violence against
Israel, but it is downplayed and
relevant information on these
matters is subjected to massive
suppression.
Let me give a
small sample illustrative of suppressions, taken
from a very large pool, by class
of suppression. It should be noted
that what is suppressed is very
often reports by UN bodies, human
rights groups, Palestinian and Arab
sources, and other individuals
and reporters who fail to meet agenda
standards. They put Israel in
too bad a light, or mention U.S.
military or counterinsurgency aid
not helpful to the image of an honest
broker. Barak, Sharon,
Israeli army sources, and U.S. officials,
although hugely biased
and guilty of repeated lies, are
the steady basis of the "news"
agenda, which explains why whether
Arafat can control the violence
is an issue but not whether Barak,
Sharon and Clinton or Bush can
do the same
UN DOCUMENTS:
1. UN Special
Report on Israel for the Committee on Economic,
Social, and Cultural Rights, dated
Nov. 13, 2000, strongly
condemning Israel violations of
the Geneva Convention, Oslo
agreement, and human rights, was
not mentioned in the U.S. media.
2. UN report of
Feb. 26, 2001, which described the Israeli
closures on the West Bank and Gaza
as being "the most severe and
sustained set of move restrictions
imposed on the Occupied
Palestinian Territory since the
beginning of the occupation in
1967," was completely ignored in
the U.S. mainstream media.
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL AND HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH REPORTS:
1. Human Rights
Watch's report charging that "Israeli soldiers
have abused hundreds of Palestinian
drivers, beating them and
slashing their car tires on roads
in the West Bank," released on
February 27, was not cited anywhere
in the U.S. mainstream media.
2. Human Rights
Watch's report of April 11, 2001, "Center of
the Storm," called "a very severe
report on the killing and
wounding of Palestinian civilians
in Hebron by Israeli Defense
Forces soldiers and Jewish settlers,"
was featured twice in
Ha'aretz and once in London's Independent,
but was mentioned in
passing only in the Washington Post
(April 16), and was otherwise
entirely blacked out in the U.S.
media.
3. AI's report
of December 8, 1999, on the Israeli policy of
house demolitions, was unreported
in the U.S. mainstream media.
4. AI's report
of Oct. 26, 2000 charging that Israel's failure
to investigate deaths cheapens life
was mentioned briefly in the
Washington Post (Nov. 2) and Boston
Globe (Nov. 2), but was
featured nowhere in the mainstream
media.
5. AI's Nov. 3,
2000 report condemning Israel's attacks on
civilians was mentioned in the Los
Angeles Times (Nov. 5), but was
not featured there or mentioned
elsewhere.
6. AI's Nov. 9, 2000
report charging that mass arrests in
Jerusalem and northern Israel are
often followed by police beatings
was mentioned (but not featured)
only in the Chicago Tribune (Nov.
15), Chicago Sun-Times (Nov. 14),
and The Oregonian (Nov. 16).
7. AI's Nov. 24, 2000
call for the deployment of human rights
observers was mentioned only in
the New York Times on the back page
and dismissively (Nov. 28, 2000),
and in The Deseret News (Nov. 25,
2000)
8. AI's Jan. 24, 2001 report
charging impunity in the case of
the killing of Palestinians (specifically
criticizing a nominal
sentence for a settler's murder
of an 11 year old Palestinian
child) was unmentioned in the mainstream
media.
EVIDENCE OF U.S. SUPPLYING OF
DEADLY WEAPONS AND COUNTERINSURGENCY SUPPORT
AND TRAINING:
1. The Hebrew
weekly Kol Ha'ir reported on January 26 that
"U.S. Marines Trained with Tsahal
[IDF] for Reconquest of the
Territories of the Palestinian Authority."
Picked up by Agence
France Presse on January 27, 2001,
this was unreported in the U.S.
media.
2. Defense journals
and Boeing reported the Boeing sale of nine
Apache Longbow helicopters to Israel
in February 2001, but the
mainstream media failed to report
this transaction (and other major
weapons sales and transfers to Israel
were of equal disinterest).
3. Israel and the "honest
broker" also carried out joint
exercises in February 2001 to test
Patriot air defense missiles
transferred from U.S. bases in Germany
to Israel. This evidence of
an extremely close military relationship
between the two countries
was mentioned in passing in the
Washington Post (February 20,
2001), but nowhere else in the mainstream
media.
EVIDENCE OF EXCEPTIONAL ISRAELI
CRUELTY:
1. The Palestine
Monitor reported on March 19, 2001, that
"Israeli soldiers at Al Ram checkpoint
fired tear gas canisters and
sound bombs directly at Palestinians
participating in a peaceful
women's march. Women were beaten
with the butts of rifles by the
soldiers. 15 women have been transported
to nearby hospitals. The
march was organized by the Union
of Palestinian Women's Committees
to protest the continued Israeli
imposed closure and siege on the
Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Eyewitnesses report that the
march from Ramallah to Al Ram checkpoint
was completely peaceful
from the Palestinian side." This
incident was unreported in the
U.S. media.
2. On February
20, 2001, the National School for Blind Girls in
al-Bireh was shelled by Israeli
tanks and heavy weaponry for three
hours, seriously damaging the building
and terrifying the disabled
girls. The attacks apparently resulted
because a nearby Jewish
settlement had been fired upon by
unknown parties. This incident
was unreported in the U.S. mainstream
media.
3. In early January
a 10 year-old Palestinian girl Ella Ahmed in
El Sawiya, near Nablus, died of
a burst appendix after Israeli
soldiers twice refused to allow
passage to a hospital in Nablus.
This was reported in Ha'aretz on
January 9, but was not picked up
in the U.S. media.
4. Sabreen Balout
was born in a taxi on January 24, as the
Israeli Defense Forces refused to
allow passage to a hospital, and
in fact insisted that the passengers
in the taxi, including the
baby still linked to her mother
by an umbilical cord, get out of
the cab on a cold rainy night. This
was reported in Ha'aretz, but
not in the U.S. media.
5. UNRRA director
Peter Hansen issued an unusual press release
and report on March 11 declaring
that Israeli policy in the West
Bank and Gaza in destroying roads,
uprooting trees, and damaging
agricultural land in the interest
of "security," not only violated
international norms and law, it
threatened a "humanitarian
catastrophe." This UNRRA material
was not picked up in the U.S.
mainstream media.
6. Normalizing Structural Violence:
Demolitions
The media's treatment
of Israel's systematic demolitions of
Palestinian homes provides an enlightening
case study in bias. The
policy of demolitions is horrendously
inhumane and with its racist
concentration on Palestinian homes
is reminiscent of Nazi practice.
There has been a steady stream of
stories on the web issued by the
Ethnic NewsWatch, Israeli Committee
Against House Demolitions
(ICHAD), the Palestinian Land Defense
Committee (PLDC), Christian
Peacemaker Teams (CPT), the Hebron
Solidarity Committee (HSC), and
other groups, that describe army
demolitions that push out
Palestinians virtually without notice.
(Check out the website of
the Hebron Solidarity Committee:
"CPT Hebron" <cptheb@mail.palnet.com>.)
These stories
are numerous, dramatic, and often heart-breaking
as Jewish Israeli protesters and
Christian teams often struggle to
protect Palestinians from the racist
onslaught of the army and
settlers. The stories often describe
demolitions of houses being
rebuilt by protesters and then being
bulldozed out of existence by
the army for a second or third time.
As noted earlier, Amnesty
International had a report on this
savage policy, stressing the
racist essence, the widespread Palestinian
fear of being
demolished, and the murderous character
of the policy--in one case,
100 border police coming without
notice, starting to destroy a
house, Palestinians starting to
throw stones, and the police
shooting dead Zaki 'Ubayd, a 28-year
old father. This AI report was
ignored by the Free Press.
A Nexis
search of coverage of demolitions of Palestinain homes
in the New York Times, Washington
Post, Los Angeles Times, Time and
Newsweek for the five years from
January 1, 1996 through December
31, 2000, comes up with only 23
articles: none in Time, one in
Newsweek, five in the New York Times,
11 in the Washington Post,
and six in the Los Angeles Times.
With only a single exception in
the Washington Post, these articles
never mention the Israeli
Committee Against Demolitions, the
Hebron Solidarity Committee, and
the Palestinian Land Defense Committee.
Only two of the 23 articles
made the front page, and only five
give substantial detail on the
brutality of the practice and suffering
of the Palestinian victims.
Twenty of the 23 give the Israeli
rationale that the Palestinian
homes were illegally built, and
nine mention the demolitions as
being a response to Palestinian
violence; only six note that
Palestinians are not allowed to
build, and only one suggests even
indirectly that the demolitions
and settlements violate the Oslo
accords as well as the Fourth Geneva
Convention.
In that
single exceptional case, Steven Erlanger says that
"While Labor governments have also
expanded existing settlements
and the Oslo accords do not limit
them from doing so, the
Palestinians have complained that
Israel now builds large new
neighborhoods near existing settlements
in order to call them
expansion, rather than label them
new." (NYT, Sept. 12, 1997). Note
first that Erlanger's statement
that Oslo does not preclude
expanding settlements is strictly
the Israeli interpretation of
general language; and he cannot
admit that new settlements have
taken place, but only speaks of
Palestinian complaints. He does not
discuss whether doubling the number
of settlers and other Israeli
actions might possibly violate the
spirit of Oslo.
In sum, in a period
of intense demolition activity by Israel, the
five print media examined treated
the issue in very low key, with
zero editorial attention. They created
a phony balance by giving
serious weight to alleged building
code-violations and responses to
Palestinian terrorism as the basis
for Israeli policy, downplaying
the violations of Oslo and international
law, the hugely
discriminatory features of Israeli
law, and the direct terroristic
abuses of the army and settlers
in demolishing and taking over
Palestinian property. They handled
the issue in such a manner that
the U.S. public would hardly know
of this practice, and would
hardly be roused to indignation,
in contrast with their responses
to the media's focus on Palestinian
stone throwing and other
misbehavior.
7. Rewriting History
In systems
of propaganda, not only are inconvenient facts
blacked out or treated in very low
key where awkward, but history
is also rewritten. Thus it has long
been an important part of
Israeli, U.S. official, and hence
mainstream media propaganda that
Arafat and the PLO have always been
"rejectionist" whereas Israel
and its sponsor have been patiently
awaiting a negotiating partner.
However, it has been shown time
and again that this is an Orwellian
inversion--that in fact only the
ethnic cleanser and its sponsor
have rejected an international consensus,
long accepted by the PLO
and Soviet Union as well as everybody
but the "nyet duo," that
would have returned the "occupied
territories" to the Palestinians
and involved mutual recognition.
(For convincing evidence, Chomsky,
Fateful Triangle, Updated Edition,
chap. 3; or his World Orders New
and Old, chap. 3.)
Another
key myth has been that the Palestinian flight of 1948-
1949 was carried out voluntarily,
not mainly by deliberate Israeli
violence. This myth was long ago
exploded by Israeli historians
like Benny Morris and Simha Flapan,
among others, but it also
continues to live even today within
the U.S. propaganda system.
Thus, Elie Wiesel says that "Incited
by their leaders, 600,000
Palestinian left the country convinced
that, once Israel was
vanquished, they would be able to
return home" ("Jerusalem in My
Heart," NYT, Jan. 24, 2001), and
this fabrication is not only
published by the Newspaper of Record,
it is not corrected in the
letters columns or "Corrections."
It also shows up uncorrected in
the "news," where reporter John
Kifner says that 52 years ago
"750,000 people fled the fighting
that commenced with the Arab
attack on the newly created state
of Israel" (NYT,Dec. 31, 2000).
They didn't "flee the fighting,"
most of them were deliberately
driven out in the first phase of
"redeeming the land."
8. Conclusions: The Media's Supportive
Role in Ethnic Cleansing; Where
Will It End In Making a "Safe"
Israel?
Robert Fisk notes
that "Oddly, you can now learn more from the
Israeli press than the American
media. The brutality of Israeli
soldiers is fully covered in Ha'aretz,
which also reports on the
large number of U.S. negotiators
who are Jewish. Four years ago, a
former Israeli soldier described
in an Israeli newspaper how his
men had looted a village in southern
Lebanon; when the piece was
reprinted in the New York Times,
the looting episode was censored
out of the text" (Independent, Dec.
13, 2000).
The U.S. mainstream
media's coverage of Middle East issues shows
a genuine propaganda system in action.
As I have shown, the media
have done a truly outstanding job
of supporting state policy by
making Israel's ethnic cleansing
palatable, finding the victims the
source of the violence, and thus
facilitating virtually any level
of wholesale violence Israel deems
necessary to protect itself
against "terrorism." As its ethnic
cleansing policies inevitably
produce secondary reactions to the
primary (Israeli) violence, the
media therefore contribute to an
escalating process with no decent
end in sight.
A "safe"
Israel could be obtained by accommodation to a
Palestinian presence with justice,
but that has never been
consistent with the Israeli policy
of "redeeming the land" from the
Gentiles, and there is no evidence
that it has been seriously
considered as a policy option in
the Clinton and Oslo years or in
any Bush signals or media perspectives.
The other routes to a
"safe" Israel, although cruel, dangerous,
and almost certain to
fail, are more consistent with the
drift of actual policy, Sharon's
victory, and media apologetics for
everything Israel has done up to
this moment. One route is a more
aggressive policy of expulsions
from any contested territory, a
solution long advocated by
Netanyahu and Sharon. The other
route, easily combined with a
policy of expulsion, is a still
more violent crackdown that would
kill or injure even larger numbers
in the hope that this would
escalate an exodus, directly deplete
Palestinian numbers, and keep
any remnants passive from fear.
I
have no doubt that this semi-genocidal and dangerous policy,
already approached in the Intifada
II crackdown, would be
effectively rationalized by the
mainstream media as a regrettably
necessary response to "violence"
and the demands of Israeli
"safety."