Ames Progressive

Ryan Gerdes’ essay was originally published in issue 2.6. Read it here.

The Israeli-Palestinian war is a strange conflict: it inspires people to assume positions of impassioned and often radical advocacy, to make strident accusations and judgments, in spite of colossal ignorance. While defying most of the familiar paradigms of conflict and oppression, it is nonetheless subjected to procrustean categorization and opining of a superficial variety.

Ryan Gerdes’ article on bias in the media and the Mideast conflict was plagued by a number of problematic statements and assumptions, the most salient of which I will respond to.

Gerdes faults the media for its “tendency to report on the Israeli occupation of Palestine in terms favorable to the occupier: to neglect Israel’s responsibility to end the occupation and offer reparations.”

In this first sentence, Gerdes makes a fundamental error: confusing the need for fair and accurate reporting with opinion. A journalist’s opinion about responsibility or culpability in this conflict, or what certain sides must do, should (ideally) have no influence on the reporting of the conflict. Opinion belongs on the op-ed page; reporting must strive to be as factual and accurate as possible. Unfortunately, far too many journalists fail to uphold this basic journalistic standard, and report their facts in a way that indeed expresses their opinion that Israel is to blame for the conflict.

Gerdes approaches the question of bias in the media with sheer naïveté. Such a bias, for him, implies “conspiracy intent,” and is therefore an outlandish notion; claims of media bias are only made to “obscure certain inconvenient facts about the occupation.” While he dismisses the very possibility of an anti-Israel bias, the fact is that many media, consciously or unconsciously, allow their perceptions of the conflict to skew their reporting - to do exactly what Gerdes calls for more of. (See the website of CAMERA, an organization dedicated to ensuring fair coverage of the Mideast, for abundant examples of this: www.camera.org.)

Often, this skewing takes a subtle form. For example, in reporting Palestinian attacks over a 19-month-long period, the Chicago Tribune mentioned the Palestinian identity of the perpetrators in its headlines in 19% of cases. Reporting on Israeli military actions over the same period, the Tribune mentioned the Israeli identity in 78% of cases (http://camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=6&x_article=429).

Another example of the media favoring one side of the conflict: in the course of a year and half, three of the most prominent American newspapers all ran far more op-eds with a pro-Palestinian viewpoint than pro-Israeli. While each ran several pieces by Arab officials, including Hamas, no articles by Israeli officials appeared (http://camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=33&x_article=1439)
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Gerdes brings several cases of bias mentioned by Gary Kenzer of HonestReporting in a lecture held at Iowa State University on April 1, 2008, and attempts to discredit them; for example, when an Associated Press story on a Palestinian attack that killed 20 Israelis featured the headline, “Explosion Kills Bomber in Tel Aviv,” Gerdes offers the explanation, without any citation, that the reporter didn’t know the number of dead. Yet this explanation strains logic: even if true, it would not explain why a purely unbiased Associated Press would make no mention of what it had to know – the attack exacted on Israeli civilians a huge human toll. Instead of informing its readers of the violence perpetrated against innocent Israelis, the Associated Press paid lip service to its reporting obligation by stating the stupendously superfluous: a suicide bomber was killed by his own suicide bombing. Yet Gerdes dismisses the incident, exclaiming incredulously: “HonestReporting went so far as to call this story dishonest”!

It seems that in general, as in the particular case of the UK Sun’s counting Islamist terror incidents in every country except Israel, Gerdes is insensitive to the effects bias can have on reporting and ultimately on readers. He fails to see how these individual examples of bias, when compounded, are a reflection of larger tendencies.

Gerdes reported that Kenzer brought images of Palestinians celebrating in response to terror attacks, for “no good reason, that [Gerdes] could recall” – only, he claimed, in order to “engender hostility towards the Palestinians, to depict them as hate-filled fanatics that cultivate their children to love death.” As Gerdes would have it, mentioning vile actions by Palestinians, as with bias in the media, is only a cover-up, an attempt to obfuscate the true location of fault: Israel. Yet, it is important to know about the hatred many Palestinians bear for America and Israel, and their celebration of acts of violence (street celebrations are a common response to “successful” attacks on Israelis): namely, to understand the cultural ground of the conflict and to recognize perhaps the single most insurmountable stumbling block to its resolution. Although Gerdes tries to brush it aside, the fact is that Palestinian society as a whole does teach its children to “love death” and embrace violent struggle. This is evidenced by internationally funded official Palestinian Authority textbooks that speak of the conflict with Israel as an eternal religious struggle; and Palestinian television, in which the cause of martyrdom via suicide bombing is triumphantly and graphically championed by children - to speak of only the more official manifestations.

Sometimes, we Americans, shielded from deep-rooted struggles for ancestral land or faith, lose a sense for the hatred that often motivates such struggles. In our reasonableness, we are unable to conceive of a self-destructive will to violence.

Parents sending their children to kill themselves and kill other children is a reality we are not prepared to comprehend. Our moral scope is far too small to contain this fact. In desperation, we reduce conflicts to a tininess that is compatible with our diminutive ethical yardstick; we explain away intransigent hatred and murder by pointing to contributing economic conditions (as if poverty alone could explain how a society embraces death.)

Our conceptions of the Mideast often rest on a number of assumptions which, though a priori reasonable, simply do not conform to the reality of the conflict. For example: it is only reasonable that responsibility for occupation, its perpetuation or termination, rests with the occupier. It is reasonable to assume that the wealthy and well-armed side of the conflict is oppressing the poor and weak side of the conflict. It is reasonable to assume that people simply wish to live and nations wish to be free; that the struggle of one group against another is motivated by interests of self and not hatred of other.

Along these lines, Gerdes asserts that Israel is to blame for perpetuating the occupation. The reality is that Palestinian rejectionism is the cause of their misery. Occupation is perpetuated, quite simply, by those who refuse to come to terms with the presence of the other. The Palestinians have shown this repeatedly, from 1937 and 1947, with the rejection of the Peel Commission and United Nations partition plans, respectively; and as recently as 2000, with Arafat’s demurral at Camp David and orchestration of Intifada violence. The Palestinian Liberation Organization was established in 1964, three years before Israel took control of the West Bank and Gaza. The goal of destroying Israel was enshrined in the PLO charter in 1968, and
remains the watchword of Hamas. Hamas calls for “liberating” not only the West Bank and Gaza but all of Israel. And this is declared day in and day out.

Gerdes would like to believe that self-determination is the ultimate goal of the Palestinian violent struggle – life and not death. Yet time and again, the Palestinians have shown themselves more intent on killing Israelis than developing their own national life.

Contrary to the logic “people are just people; they just want to live,” – implying that no people could possibly work against its own goals, could wage a struggle that is self-defeating – the Palestinians have repeatedly put the cause of their own self-determination behind the cause of fighting Israel. According to Muhammad Muslih, a professor at Long Island University and an outspoken critic of Israel, the Palestinians put aside aspirations for statehood through the 1960’s, focusing instead on “eliminat[ing] the consequences of aggression” (lecture, Brandeis University, December 2, 2007). It was not until 1974 that a Palestinian group started publicly debating the (pragmatic) merits of partition – i.e. recognizing Israel.

The pull-out from Gaza in 2005 is a critical lesson. Israel terminated its occupation of Gaza, removing both its military presence and almost 10,000 civilians, and intentionally leaving behind workable greenhouses and other assets intact; the Palestinians immediately responded by destroying the greenhouses. Since then, Gazans squandered the opportunity to build a civil society, and elected Hamas. Hamas and Islamic Jihad have fired literally thousands of Kassam rockets and mortars on civilians in southern Israel since the pull-out. Gaza thus demonstrates that Israel cannot remove itself from the territories even when it wishes to do so. To answer Gerdes’ question, “[what] will buy Israel her peace”: nothing she can give.

What better symbol for the Palestinian violent struggle in its reality, in its meaning for Palestinian society, than the suicidal martyr, the shaheed, who destroys himself or herself for the sake of destroying the “enemy”? (And that enemy is a civilian, and preferably a child).

Gerdes writes: “Our imperative is one of human rights, and we will criticize and demand justice be done to whosoever may violate them.”

And yet, nowhere does Gerdes even mention the injustices suffered by Israel – a nation of refugees (including almost a million Jews escaping oppression or eviction from Arab countries), subjected to a constant struggle for its survival, forced by Palestinians and other Arab nations to pay for its existence with blood.

A final word on the issue of anti-Semitism: It is absurd to equate criticism of Israel per se with anti-Semitism (although one hears this accusation made, in quotation marks, by critics of Israel). Yet anyone with an understanding of race problems in this country knows how destructive prejudices can exist on the structural or collective level, and how these can lodge themselves in the minds of individuals who have no hatred, yet unknowingly perpetuate the prejudices. The fact that few critics of Israel hate Jews or consciously wish to single out a Jewish state because it is Jewish does not preclude a collective bigotry. The international criticism of Israel, in the UN, the UN Human Rights Council, world media and academia, is, relatively speaking, whoppingly disproportionate to the crimes alleged by Israel’s worst critics. As if by fate, Israel must be the “Jew” among the nations.