[m2c] Diary

[usman x]

the italics get lost cause its a plain text email, so would recommend
people click the link and read from the original website
u

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n05/mend01_.html

LRB 6 March 2008
Yonatan Mendel
Diary

A year ago I applied for the job of Occupied Territories correspondent
at Ma’ariv, an Israeli newspaper. I speak Arabic and have taught in
Palestinian schools and taken part in many joint Jewish-Palestinian
projects. At my interview the boss asked how I could possibly be
objective. I had spent too much time with Palestinians; I was bound to
be biased in their favour. I didn’t get the job. My next interview was
with Walla, Israel’s most popular website. This time I did get the job
and I became Walla’s Middle East correspondent. I soon understood what
Tamar Liebes, the director of the Smart Institute of Communication at
the Hebrew University, meant when she said: ‘Journalists and
publishers see themselves as actors within the Zionist movement, not
as critical outsiders.’

This is not to say that Israeli journalism is not professional.
Corruption, social decay and dishonesty are pursued with commendable
determination by newspapers, TV and radio. That Israelis heard exactly
what former President Katsav did or didn’t do with his secretaries
proves that the media are performing their watchdog role, even at the
risk of causing national and international embarrassment. Ehud
Olmert’s shady apartment deal, the business of Ariel Sharon’s
mysterious Greek island, Binyamin Netanyahu’s secret love affair,
Yitzhak Rabin’s secret American bank account: all of these are freely
discussed by the Israeli media.

When it comes to ‘security’ there is no such freedom. It’s ‘us’ and
‘them’, the IDF and the ‘enemy’; military discourse, which is the only
discourse allowed, trumps any other possible narrative. It’s not that
Israeli journalists are following orders, or a written code: just that
they’d rather think well of their security forces.

In most of the articles on the conflict two sides battle it out: the
Israel Defence Forces, on the one hand, and the Palestinians, on the
other. When a violent incident is reported, the IDF confirms or the
army says but the Palestinians claim: ‘The Palestinians claimed that a
baby was severely injured in IDF shootings.’ Is this a fib? ‘The
Palestinians claim that Israeli settlers threatened them’: but who are
the Palestinians? Did the entire Palestinian people, citizens of
Israel, inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, people living
in refugee camps in neighbouring Arab states and those living in the
diaspora make the claim? Why is it that a serious article is reporting
a claim made by the Palestinians? Why is there so rarely a name, a
desk, an organisation or a source of this information? Could it be
because that would make it seem more reliable?

When the Palestinians aren’t making claims, their viewpoint is simply
not heard. Keshev, the Centre for the Protection of Democracy in
Israel, studied the way Israel’s leading television channels and
newspapers covered Palestinian casualties in a given month – December
2005. They found 48 items covering the deaths of 22 Palestinians.
However, in only eight of those accounts was the IDF version followed
by a Palestinian reaction; in the other 40 instances the event was
reported only from the point of view of the Israeli military.

Another example: in June 2006, four days after the Israeli soldier
Gilad Shalit was kidnapped from the Israeli side of the Gazan security
fence, Israel, according to the Israeli media, arrested some sixty
members of Hamas, of whom 30 were elected members of parliament and
eight ministers in the Palestinian government. In a well-planned
operation Israel captured and jailed the Palestinian minister for
Jerusalem, the ministers of finance, education, religious affairs,
strategic affairs, domestic affairs, housing and prisons, as well as
the mayors of Bethlehem, Jenin and Qalqilya, the head of the
Palestinian parliament and one quarter of its members. That these
officials were taken from their beds late at night and transferred to
Israeli territory probably to serve (like Gilad Shalit) as future
bargaining-chips did not make this operation a kidnapping. Israel
never kidnaps: it arrests.

The Israeli army never intentionally kills anyone, let alone murders
them – a state of affairs any other armed organisation would be
envious of. Even when a one-ton bomb is dropped onto a dense
residential area in Gaza, killing one gunman and 14 innocent
civilians, including nine children, it’s still not an intentional
killing or murder: it is a targeted assassination. An Israeli
journalist can say that IDF soldiers hit Palestinians, or killed them,
or killed them by mistake, and that Palestinians were hit, or were
killed or even found their death (as if they were looking for it), but
murder is out of the question. The consequence, whatever words are
used, has been the death at the hands of the Israeli security forces
since the outbreak of the second intifada of 2087 Palestinians who had
nothing to do with armed struggle.

The IDF, as depicted by the Israeli media, has another strange
ability: it never initiates, decides to attack or launches an
operation. The IDF simply responds. It responds to the Qassam rockets,
responds to terror attacks, responds to Palestinian violence. This
makes everything so much more sensible and civilised: the IDF is
forced to fight, to destroy houses, to shoot Palestinians and to kill
4485 of them in seven years, but none of these events is the
responsibility of the soldiers. They are facing a nasty enemy, and
they respond dutifully. The fact that their actions – curfews,
arrests, naval sieges, shootings and killings – are the main cause of
the Palestinian reaction does not seem to interest the media. Because
Palestinians cannot respond, Israeli journalists choose another verb
from the lexicon that includes revenge, provoke, attack, incite, throw
stones or fire Qassams.

Interviewing Abu-Qusay, the spokesman of Al-Aqsa Brigades in Gaza, in
June 2007, I asked him about the rationale for firing Qassam missiles
at the Israeli town of Sderot. ‘The army might respond,’ I said, not
realising that I was already biased. ‘But we are responding here,’
Abu-Qusay said. ‘We are not terrorists, we do not want to kill . . .
we are resisting Israel’s continual incursions into the West Bank, its
attacks, its siege on our waters and its closure on our lands.’
Abu-Qusay’s words were translated into Hebrew, but Israel continued to
enter the West Bank every night and Israelis did not find any harm in
it. After all it was only a response.

At a time when there were many Israeli raids on Gaza I asked my
colleagues the following question: ‘If an armed Palestinian crosses
the border, enters Israel, drives to Tel Aviv and shoots people in the
streets, he will be the terrorist and we will be the victims, right?
However, if the IDF crosses the border, drives miles into Gaza, and
starts shooting their gunmen, who is the terrorist and who is the
defender? How come the Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories
can never be engaged in self-defence, while the Israeli army is always
the defender?’ My friend Shay from the graphics department clarified
matters for me: ‘If you go to the Gaza Strip and shoot people, you
will be a terrorist. But when the army does it that is an operation to
make Israel safer. It’s the implementation of a government decision!’

Another interesting distinction between us and them came up when Hamas
demanded the release of 450 of its prisoners in exchange for Gilad
Shalit. Israel announced that it would release prisoners but not those
with blood on their hands. It is always the Palestinians – never the
Israelis – who have blood on their hands. This is not to say that Jews
cannot kill Arabs but they will not have blood on their hands, and if
they are arrested they will be released after a few years, not to
mention those with blood on their hands who’ve gone on to become prime
minister. And we are not only more innocent when we kill but also more
susceptible when we are hurt. A regular description of a Qassam
missile that hits Sderot will generally look like this: ‘A Qassam fell
next to a residential house, three Israelis had slight injuries, and
ten others suffered from shock.’ One should not make light of these
injuries: a missile hitting a house in the middle of the night could
indeed cause great shock. However, one should also remember that shock
is for Jews only. Palestinians are apparently a very tough people.

The IDF, again the envy of all other armies, kills only the most
important people. ‘A high-ranking member of Hamas was killed’ is
almost a chorus in the Israel media. Low-ranking members of Hamas have
either never been found or never been killed. Shlomi Eldar, a TV
correspondent in the Gaza Strip, bravely wrote about this phenomenon
in his book Eyeless in Gaza (2005). When Riyad Abu Zaid was
assassinated in 2003, the Israeli press echoed the IDF announcement
that the man was the head of the military wing of Hamas in Gaza.
Eldar, one of Israel’s few investigative journalists, discovered that
the man was merely a secretary in the movement’s prisoner club. ‘It
was one of many occasions in which Israel “upgraded” a Palestinian
activist,’ Eldar wrote. ‘After every assassination any minor activist
is “promoted” to a major one.’

This phenomenon, in which IDF statements are directly translated into
media reports – there are no checkpoints between the army and the
media – is the result both of a lack of access to information and of
the unwillingness of journalists to prove the army wrong or to portray
soldiers as criminals. ‘The IDF is acting in Gaza’ (or in Jenin, or in
Tulkarm, or in Hebron) is the expression given out by the army and
embraced by the media. Why make the listeners’ lives harder? Why tell
them what the soldiers do, describing the fear they create, the fact
that they come with heavy vehicles and weapons and crush a city’s
life, creating a greater hatred, sorrow and a desire for revenge?

Last month, as a measure against Qassam militants, Israel decided to
stop Gaza’s electricity for a few hours a day. Despite the fact that
this means, for instance, that electricity will fail to reach
hospitals, it was said that ‘the Israeli government decided to approve
this step, as another non-lethal weapon.’ Another thing the soldiers
do is clearing – khisuf. In regular Hebrew, khisuf means to expose
something that is hidden, but as used by the IDF it means to clear an
area of potential hiding places for Palestinian gunmen. During the
last intifada, Israeli D9 bulldozers destroyed thousands of
Palestinian houses, uprooted thousands of trees and left behind
thousands of smashed greenhouses. It is better to know that the army
cleared the place than to face the reality that the army destroys
Palestinians’ possessions, pride and hope.

Another useful word is crowning (keter), a euphemism for a siege in
which anyone who leaves his house risks being shot at. War zones are
places where Palestinians can be killed even if they are children who
don’t know they’ve entered a war zone. Palestinian children, by the
way, tend to be upgraded to Palestinian teenagers, especially when
they are accidentally killed. More examples: isolated Israeli outposts
in the West Bank are called illegal outposts, perhaps in contrast to
Israeli settlements that are apparently legal. Administrative
detention means jailing people who haven’t been put on trial or even
formally charged (in April 2003 there were 1119 Palestinians in this
situation). The PLO (Ashaf) is always referred to by its acronym and
never by its full name: Palestine is a word that is almost never used
– there is a Palestinian president but no president of Palestine.

‘A society in crisis forges a new vocabulary for itself,’ David
Grossman wrote in The Yellow Wind, ‘and gradually, a new language
emerges whose words . . . no longer describe reality, but attempt,
instead, to conceal it.’ This ‘new language’ was adopted voluntarily
by the media, but if one needs an official set of guidelines it can be
found in the Nakdi Report, a paper drafted by the Israeli Broadcasting
Authority. First set down in 1972 and since updated three times, the
report aimed to ‘clarify some of the professional rules that govern
the work of a newsperson’. The prohibition of the term East Jerusalem
was one of them.

The restrictions aren’t confined to geography. On 20 May 2006,
Israel’s most popular television channel, Channel 2, reported ‘another
targeted assassination in Gaza, an assassination that might ease the
firing of Qassams’ (up to 376 people have died in targeted
assassinations, 150 of them civilians who were not the target of
assassinations). Ehud Ya’ari, a well-known Israeli correspondent on
Arab affairs, sat in the studio and said: ‘The man who was killed is
Muhammad Dahdouh, from Islamic Jihad . . . this is part of the other
war, a war to shrink the volume of Qassam activists.’ Neither Ya’ari
nor the IDF spokesman bothered to report that four innocent
Palestinian civilians were also killed in the operation, and three
more severely injured, one a five-year-old girl called Maria, who will
remain paralysed from the neck down. This ‘oversight’, revealed by the
Israeli journalist Orly Vilnai, only exposed how much we do not know
about what we think we know.

Interestingly, since Hamas took over the Gaza Strip one of the new
‘boo’ words in the Israeli media is Hamastan, a word that appears in
the ‘hard’ news section, the allegedly sacred part of newspapers that
is supposed to give the facts, free from editorialising. The same
applies to movements such as Hamas or Hizbullah, which are described
in Hebrew as organisations and not as political movements or parties.
Intifada is never given its Arabic meaning of ‘revolt’; and Al-Quds,
which when used by Palestinian politicians refers only to ‘the holy
places in East Jerusalem’ or ‘East Jerusalem’, is always taken by
Israeli correspondents to mean Jerusalem, which is effectively to
imply a Palestinian determination to take over the entire capital
city.

It was curious to watch the newspapers’ responses to the assassination
of Imad Moughniyeh in Syria two weeks ago. Everyone tried to outdo
everyone else over what to call him: arch-terrorist, master terrorist
or the greatest terrorist on earth. It took the Israeli press a few
days to stop celebrating Moughniyeh’s assassins and start doing what
it should have done in the first place: ask questions about the
consequences of the killing. The journalist Gideon Levy thinks it is
an Israeli trend: ‘The chain of “terrorist chieftains” liquidated by
Israel, from Ali Salameh and Abu Jihad through Abbas Musawi and Yihyeh
Ayash to Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz Rantisi (all “operations”
that we celebrated with great pomp and circumstance for one sweet and
intoxicating moment), have thus far brought only harsh and painful
revenge attacks against Israel and Jews throughout the world.’

Israeli correspondents on Arab affairs must of course speak Arabic –
many of them indeed studied it in the security establishment’s schools
– and they need to know the history and politics of the Middle East.
And they have to be Jews. Strikingly, the Israeli-Jewish media prefer
to hire journalists with average Arabic rather than native speakers,
since they would be Palestinian citizens of Israel. Apparently, Jewish
journalists are better equipped than Arab Israelis to explain ‘what
Arabs think’, ‘Arab aims’ or ‘what Arabs say’. Maybe this is because
the editors know what their audience wants to hear. Or, even more
important, what the Israeli audience would rather not hear.

If the words occupation, apartheid and racism (not to mention
Palestinian citizens of Israel, bantustans, ethnic cleansing and
Nakba) are absent from Israeli discourse, Israeli citizens can spend
their whole lives without knowing what they have been living with.
Take racism (Giz’anut in Hebrew). If the Israeli parliament legislates
that 13 per cent of the country’s lands can be sold only to Jews, then
it is a racist parliament. If in 60 years the country has had only one
Arab minister, then Israel has had racist governments. If in 60 years
of demonstrations rubber bullets and live ammunition have been used
only on Arab demonstrators, then Israel has a racist police. If 75 per
cent of Israelis admit that they would refuse to have an Arab
neighbour, then it is a racist society. By not acknowledging that
Israel is a place where racism shapes relations between Jews and
Arabs, Israeli Jews render themselves unable to deal with the problem
or even with the reality of their own lives.

The same denial of reality is reflected in the avoidance of the term
apartheid. Because of its association with white South Africa,
Israelis find it very hard to use the word. This is not to say that
the exact same kind of regime prevails in the Occupied Territories
today, but a country needn’t have benches ‘for whites only’ in order
to be an apartheid state. Apartheid, after all, means ‘separation’,
and if in the Occupied Territories the settlers have one road and
Palestinians need to use alternative roads or tunnels, then it is an
apartheid road system. If the separation wall built on thousands of
dunams of confiscated West Bank land separates people (including
Palestinians on opposite sides of the wall), then it is an apartheid
wall. If in the Occupied Territories there are two judicial systems,
one for Jewish settlers and the other for Palestinians, then it is an
apartheid justice.

And then there are the Occupied Territories themselves. Remarkably,
there are no Occupied Territories in Israel. The term is occasionally
used by a leftist politician or columnist, but in the hard news
section it doesn’t exist. In the past they were called the
Administered Territories in order to conceal the actual fact of
occupation; they were then called Judea and Samaria; but in Israel’s
mass media today they’re called the Territories (Ha-Shtachim). The
term helps preserve the notion that the Jews are the victims, the
people who act only in self-defence, the moral half of the equation,
and the Palestinians are the attackers, the bad guys, the people who
fight for no reason. The simplest example explains it: ‘a citizen of
the Territories was caught smuggling illegal weapons.’ It might make
sense for citizens of an occupied territory to try to resist the
occupier, but it doesn’t make sense if they are just from the
Territories.

Israeli journalists are not embedded with the security establishment;
and they haven’t been asked to make their audience feel good about
Israel’s military policy. The restrictions they observe are observed
voluntarily, almost unconsciously – which makes their practice all the
more dangerous. Yet a majority of Israelis feel that their media are
too left-wing, insufficiently patriotric, not on Israel’s side. And
the foreign media are worse. During the last intifada, Avraham
Hirschson, then the minister of finance, demanded that CNN’s
broadcasts from Israel be closed down on the grounds of ‘biased
broadcasting and tendentious programmes that are nothing but a
campaign of incitement against Israel’. Israeli demonstrators called
for an end to ‘CNN’s unreliable and terror-provoking coverage’ in
favour of Fox News. Israeli men up to the age of 50 are obliged to do
one month’s reserve service every year. ‘The civilian,’ Yigael Yadin,
an early Israeli chief of staff, said, ‘is a soldier on 11 months’
annual leave.’ For the Israeli media there is no leave.

Yonatan Mendel

Yonatan Mendel was a correspondent for the Israeli news agency Walla.
He is currently at Queens’ College, Cambridge working on a PhD that
studies the connection between the Arabic language and security in
Israel.

-- 
"Until all of us are free, the few who think they are remain tainted 
with enslavement." Lee Maracle
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