People Like Us (17 page)

Radically different stories could be told about the same events. The Western media had to choose between them, and during my time they opted for the opinions and issues that were relevant to the two parties at the negotiating table. Their priorities dominated the news, and their positions were set against each other’s: “According to the Israeli government, the attack proves once again that the Palestinians don’t want peace. The Palestinian Authority says the occupation is the problem.”

This was how the international media made sense of it all, and with them their viewers, readers, and listeners. But this narrowing of vision brought with it a new problem—that of “objectivity.” You could promise to present “just the facts,” but which facts? You can show off about getting both sides of the story, but what if there are more than two sides to that story? And then you still have the problem of partisan vocabulary, even if you only put two players under the spotlight. The story of the moment was the derailing of the peace process. Spokespersons from the Palestinian Authority said, “The peace process is about land in exchange for peace. We demand therefore that the ‘illegal Jewish settlements’ be
dismantled and the
occupied
areas be
given back.
How can Israel ‘negotiate’ over land that it doesn’t own?”

Israel spokespersons said, “The peace process is land in exchange for peace. This is what we are negotiating—in exchange for Palestinian concessions, Israel
gives up
part of the
disputed
territories while other ‘Jewish settlements’ will stay with us. Negotiation always involves give and take.” Both positions sounded reasonable; but, depending on whose terms the media used, one or the other party came out of it better.

 

 

T
here were more, many more, problems if you wanted to report on the situation objectively. A media war is also about the sympathy vote. The public generally identify with the weaker power, and so both parties wanted to maneuver themselves into the position of the underdog. They tried to get the blood of their own dead and wounded onto the television as much as possible, while making their opponents look as bad as they could. It was logical but, for the concerned correspondent who wanted to be as objective as he could, it was a new problem. What if one side was able to display its suffering much better than the other? I encountered this right away, on my first trip to the Holy Land, and only later did I realize what I had seen.

It happened during that very first time in the Holy Land, when the Palestinian lynching in Ramallah had sent me rushing over, together with hundreds of colleagues from all over the world. When I arrived I had to go to the sophisticated press center in the Isotel for my press pass. A predigested version of the events was waiting for me there: These two people were torn to pieces by rampaging mobs; look what kind of blind hatred Israel has to defend itself
against. Everything—the images, the great quotes, the information dossiers—was tailored to deliver the same message: “They are killing innocent Jews; the problem is Palestinian hatred and terrorism.”

Next I drove to Ramallah, where there was no press center, and journalists didn’t need to register their presence. If you called the Ministry of Information no one picked up, or you finally got an engaged signal after a long wait. The lynched Israeli soldiers had been reservists. What were two soldiers from perhaps the best trained army in the world doing in the center of a city in revolt? You might think that journalists should take the time to find out. But news happens too quickly for that; and if a ready-made Palestinian version of events isn’t at hand, the Israeli version will dominate.

 

 

T
he Israeli government was much better equipped than the Palestinian Authority to fight the media war. When I saw how the Israeli government handled PR disasters, I understood how that difference fed through to the reporting.

Every now and then, images of Palestinian women and children who’d been killed by Israeli bullets popped up. These portrayed the essence of the conflict, according to the Palestinians: The problem is the occupation, and look at the brute violence that the Israeli army uses against innocent Palestinian civilians to maintain the occupation.

However, instead of waiting until the storm of bad publicity blew over (as the Palestinian Authority often did), the Israeli government would launch a counterattack. Prominent and sincere-looking Israelis immediately would appear on Western television channels and in opinion pages to declare that they were ashamed of their country, and that this stain on
the Jewish state had to be investigated in depth. PR officials would express their regret, and emphasize that Israel never meant to kill innocent children, women, or senior citizens—what would the Jewish state gain from that? Often, the same spokespeople would go on to question whether the victims had really died from Israeli bullets ... This would be investigated most carefully, and that would take some time. Next, the same people would explain how murky such “violent occurrences” in the “disputed territories” were, and how tiny the areas were in which this kind of “tragedy” took place. “Terrorists” deliberately hid in residential areas in the hope that Israel would accidentally kill Palestinian civilians, and so with all this attention to this tragedy we in the media were unintentionally playing into the terrorists’ hands.

This was how the Israeli government tried to minimize the damage: leaving the occupation out of it, distancing themselves from the events, isolating them as rare incidents, sowing doubt on the facts, and shifting the blame . .. I had to see this a few times before I understood how poorly the Palestinians had handled the PR fallout from the lynching. Imagine if they’d had a professional PR machine like Israel’s, with Palestinian politicians who were popular in the West, human rights activists or writers who’d instantly express their horror and their sympathy for the relatives on CNN or in American opinion pages. Spokespersons could have explained immediately what only came out three days later—that the day before the lynching, the mutilated body of a young Palestinian had been found in a nearby Jewish settlement. This “victim of the Israeli occupation” had just been carried by large crowds to his final resting place (hence the cameras being in Ramallah) when a rumor went round that two Israeli commandos had forced their way into the
city for a new “massacre.” People were already violently incensed because in previous weeks Israel had killed more than fifty civilians. The spokespersons would have emphasized that nothing could explain away this atrocity—what had the Palestinian Authority to gain from such a lynching? The Palestinians wanted nothing more than what they were entitled to according to the UN and international law: Their own state, and an end to more than three decades of Israeli occupation.

Israeli governments would have handled it this way, but the Palestinian Authority didn’t tackle it like this at all. What they did do afterwards was to immediately confiscate all images of the lynching—something that all the Arabic camera teams complied with. An Italian reporter did get his footage out, and was pestered and threatened for weeks by the Authority.

 

 

B
efore I went to the Holy Land, I had heard of the “Israel Lobby.” I understood that the Israeli government could afford the most expensive lawyers and PR agencies in Europe and America, and could count on thousands of extremely well-educated sympathizers, lobbying groups, local branches of Likud and the Labor Party, the World Zionist Organization, and smaller Zionist associations. There were active synagogues and a battery of Christian fundamentalist movements with great influence on the conservative media in America.

Despite this, I hadn’t realized how advanced Israeli media policy was. Israeli ambassadors and lobbyists also visited leading editors and producers at television networks, cable news television, and the main daily and weekly newspapers in many Western countries. Pro-Israeli Jewish and Christian
fundamentalist clubs in America invited “good” correspondents and commentators to give lectures, for attractively high fees. In the same country, former Mossad employees set up a media center that scoured Palestinian and Arabic press for anti-Semitic, anti-American, and anti-Western propaganda. Their reports would turn up verbatim in the press back home quite regularly—in columns, articles, and parliamentary questions, often without any mention of the source.

A soft drinks manufacturer once told me he’d carried out a “gap analysis” in Israel. This was a marketing method to measure the gap between a product’s worth in general and your brand in particular. Number one: Do you like soft drinks? Number two: Do you like Pepsi? Whoever answered yes to the first question and then no to the second would be sensitive to an advertising campaign. The businessman told me that the market-research company’s client list included a customer who was mean to remain anonymous. After insisting, he’d learned who it was: The Israeli PR apparatus had commissioned its own gap-analysis research among certain defined groups in the West. The questions were, What do you think of the State of Israel? What do you think of this particular government? The findings were used for campaigns—for example, to invite specially selected members of parliament, editors-in-chief, columnists, commentators, trade unionists, or student leaders on visits to Israel.

That was how it worked, and the investment paid off. Wafa, the Palestinian news agency—or whatever went by that name—once announced that Israeli planes were air-dropping poisoned sweets. They presented no proof, and the Israeli PR machine went into motion with astonishing speed. Not just correspondents, but also Dutch members of parliament, columnists, and editors were sent “Black Books” showing that
this kind of propaganda was far from uncommon. There had been official Palestinian “warnings” that the Israeli army was using “depleted uranium, poison gas, and radioactive material”; Palestinian television had broadcast sermons in which Jews were compared to “monkeys and pigs”; and Palestinian schoolbooks contained anti-Israeli passages.

The Israeli government had to have collected this material beforehand and to have waited for a good time to use it. Wafa’s statement about poisoned sweets was perfect; it gave journalists, columnists, and MPs a basis from which to mention not just this one instance of incitement, but to extrapolate from it—see how Palestinians are being taught to hate Israel.

It was a professional piece of work, and very effective because the inverse didn’t happen. Quite a few Israeli schoolbooks avoid mentioning the fact that Palestinians were living there before the foundation of Israel. Some rabbis want to burn down the Aqsa mosque; Israeli generals have called Palestine “a cancerous growth”; and the ultra-Orthodox Jewish party has pleaded for the “extermination of Arabs.” There was enough material for a long-term campaign in which such inciting remarks could be linked to questions such as, “Is this why their soldiers shoot so many Palestinians?” and “Does Israel really want peace?”

But the Palestinian Authority didn’t release any Black Books. Correspondents might occasionally report on Israeli propaganda, but such reports remained marginal. Media war is about marketing. The frequency with which you manage to get your message to the target group is just as important as what the message is.

 

 

T
he Israeli government was simply much better at playing the game. During the second intifadah, “violence” alternated with stand offs. A few times, Hamas literally blew up the ceasefire, but other times there were weeks of ceasefire until Israel suddenly liquidated a Palestinian bigwig. A murder like this would be rapidly followed up by a stream of press releases about “increased vigilance” and “extra security measures.” It worked quite often; the news mentioned “Israel’s fear after liquidation,” instead of “Israeli assassination ends ceasefire.”

Sometimes the popular Shimon Peres went on a media tour. He wouldn’t meet the eleven Dutch correspondents in Israel, but would come to Holland. The interviews were done by domestic editors, who didn’t know enough to ask him difficult questions. Intensely critical follow-up questions were impossible anyway because he only gave ten minutes to each medium.

At the beginning of the second intifadah, the Israeli army often turned their guns on stone-throwers, and aimed above the waist. Dozens of children were killed; hundreds were wounded. An Israeli PR operation managed to redirect the question from “What right does Israel have to use such violence on adolescent stone-throwers protesting against the occupation?” to “Why on earth do Palestinian parents expose their children to such danger?” The answer was in the Black Book: They hate us—look at how they are being incited.

P
alestinians often complained about the Western media, and I came to understand why. But I saw a different reason for the distortion than they did. Many Palestinians
suspected a Jewish conspiracy—sinister forces controlling the media behind the scenes. We’d get into heated discussions, and I didn’t always manage to take the sting out of it with a joke—for example, by looking at my watch and saying, “Can I just make a call? My secret boss in Israel is going to dictate tomorrow’s article to me.”