Articles with the Tag Israel

Dutch media bias in the Middle East

Israel/Palestine, Manufacturing Consent, Zionism
Published on

Branko reports on the findings of political scientist Jacqueline de Bruijn on how the Dutch media reports on the Israeli-Palestine conflict. The results are depressing but unsurprising:

  • the press under-reports Israeli attacks on Palestinians, even when there are dozens of victims, but it reports on every Palestinian attack on Israelis, even when there are no victims;
  • as a result, the few times Israeli aggression is reported on, this makes it seem that the supposedly rare Israeli attack is a response to a continuous stream of Palestinian aggression

As one person cynically noted: dead Palestinians are not news, simply because there are so many of them. Israel’s state propaganda makes handy use of this fact by continuously stressing that its attacks are merely responses to Palestinian aggression (a tactic Israel also uses with the PR for its attacks on Lebanon). What makes the whole matter worse is that Israel’s heavy handed violence against the occupied population is actually beneficial for this PR strategy. There’s no reason for Israel to tone down the murderousness of its regime.

[…]

For the press to combat this bias, it first has to recognize that it does have a problem. Everybody can see that De Bruijn’s qualitative statements are correct simply by opening the newspaper and observing the loaded language, regardless of the merits of De Bruijn’s methodology and quantitative statements. Next, the press has to figure out how to attack this problem.

De Bruijn presented her findings during a meeting in which the press were present. Also there was essayist Mohammed Benzakour who came with an equally interesting observation: several of the major Dutch newspapers have correspondents in Israel who are allied with the Zionist cause. The correspondent for Algemeen Dagblad and broadcaster EO (evangelists) is former chairman of the Nederlandse Zionisten Bond and has a daughter who works as press spokes person for the Israeli army, and the correspondent of the Volkskrant organizes trips to Jerusalem for Cidi. That does not necessarily invalidate their reporting (for all I know they take great care to remain as objective as possible), but it does signal a clear conflict of interest, which should in turn alert news consumers. Then again, why should I consume news from a suspect source?

I’ve noticed the tendency of the Dutch media to largely look at the conflict through Israeli eyes before, so it’s good to see my suspicions being confirmed. It’s also another blow against zionist propagandists like the bad news movement who like to pretend the Dutch media are biased against Israel.

Israeli defence minister threatens Holocaust

Israel/Palestine
Published on

No kidding. That’s what deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai said last week:

Israel’s deputy defence minister has said Israel will have “no choice” but to invade Gaza if Palestinian militants step up rocket attacks.

Matan Vilnai said Palestinians risked a “shoah”, the Hebrew word for a big disaster – and for the Nazi Holocaust.

Mr Vilnai made the comments after rockets hit the city of Ashkelon, 10km (six miles) from Gaza. His colleagues insisted he had not meant “genocide”.

This was immediately followed by a weekend of increased attacks on Gaza, which left over a hundred Palestinians dead, at least half of which were civilians:

According to B’Tselem figures, from 27 February to the afternoon of 3 March, 106 Palestinians were killed in the Gaza Strip. Contrary to the Chief of Staff’s contention that ninety percent were armed, at least fifty-four of the dead (twenty-five of them minors) did not take part in the hostilities. In addition, at least forty-six minors were wounded.

Of course, according to Israel this was all just a response to the rocket attacks launched by Hamas earlier, omitting that these in turn were a response to an earlier Israeli attack that left six Palestinians dead. And so on, ad infinitum, because Israel persists in attempting to create peace exclusively on their terms. Over the decades successive Israeli governments would rather tolerate continuing terror campaigns against their population than deal with the Palestinians on equal terms, refusing to deal with those organisations created by Palestinians to fight for their cause. It used to be Yassir Arafat’s PLO/Fatah that the Israelis considered beyond the pale, until the first Intifada made Arafat the lesser of two evils. Now it’s Hamas that cannot be reasoned with, even though it won the support of a majority of the Palestinians in elections two years ago and even though any “peace” negotiated without Hamas is a farce. Instead Hamas needs to be eliminated, as David Rose made clear.

Why this is? Because Israel want to dictate a peace on the Palestinian people and to be able to do this an ability of the Palestinians to resist needs to be broken. So far this has not yet happened, even with the massive advantages Israel enjoys in money, support and weapons. Which is why we now hear government ministers threatening Holocausts. So far this is just rhetoric.

So far.

Israel is not South Africa

Israel/Palestine
Published on

It may actually be worse, says South Africa’s minister for intelligence services and Anti-Apartheid fighter Ronnie Kasrils:

“When I visited the territories I also passed through Israel and I saw the forests that cover the remnants of the Palestinian villages. As a former forestry minister, this was especially striking to me. I also went into a few settlements. It was insane. Young Americans spat on the flag that was on my car. The occupation reminds me of the darkest days of apartheid, but we never saw tanks and planes firing at a civilian population. It’s a monstrousness I’d never seen before. The wall you built, the checkpoints and the roads for Jews only – it turns the stomach, even for someone who grew up under apartheid. It’s a hundred times worse.

“We know from our experience that oppression motivates resistance and that the more savage the oppression, the harsher the resistance. At a certain point in time you think that the oppression is working, and that you’re controlling the other people, imprisoning its leaders and its
activists, but the resistance will triumph in the end.

“We saw the entrance to Qalqilyah, the wall, the people standing hours in line at the checkpoints. It’s a beautiful country, I love its landscapes, but I know that it’s big enough to contain more people. Israel has developed very impressively, but how much more impressive it
would be if you brought about a just solution … I don’t care if it’s two states or one – it’s up to you, the Israelis and the Palestinians, to decide.

“I had coffee with the commander of the Erez checkpoint. It reminded me of the central prison in Pretoria, a place I’ve visited many times. And it was so awful to go through this thing in order to get to Gaza. At first I said that I don’t want to speak with the man at the checkpoint, but then I decided that was foolish. The Israelis were actually very nice to me.

(Via Heathlander.)

The bad news movement: more Israeli propaganda

Israel/Palestine, Manufacturing Consent, Zionism
Published on

In comments to the previous post, Branko suggested I should google for the phrase “bad news from the Netherlands”, as that would produce some interesting results. It turns out there’s a blog with that name, and that this blog is part of a whole range of similar blogs for other countries, all of which only post about negative news from the country they’re dedicated to.

So why are they doing this? Well, it turns out this is an experiment/demonstration to show what happens if you subject people to a constant flow of nothing but bad news about a country: they start thinking badly about the country itself. And why is this done? Because the person behind this experiment, Manfred Gerstenfeld from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, believes this is what has happened to Israel:

In his words, he simply uses the same methodology as the mainstream media, publishing only the bad news in order to create a negative view of, in his case, the Netherlands, and, as a result, showing the power of the media to present almost anything in whatever light they choose: “People form their judgements on countries on the basis of nothing, just a few elements.”

And the Netherlands was just an easy target since the country has a generally positive image and he happens to be reading the newspapers already for his book.

There’s just one or two problems with this methology. Israel has problems with its image not because there’s an international media conspiracy against it, but because it’s an Apartheid state. All negative news out of Israel, with the rare exception, stems from this simple fact. Whether it’s about Israel attacking civilian targets in order to assasinate an alleged Hamas terrorist, a suicide bomber blowing up a pizza parlour, or the latest condemnation by Amnesty for how Israel treats its non-Jewish population, all stem from the same source, what is usually called the “Middle East Conflict”. Gerstenfeld’s blog with bad news from the Netherlands on the other hand is filled with a hodgepodge of news items you can find about most countries: reports about a failing school system, errors in hospital tests, a rise in xenophobia, etc. There’s no connection between the items, other than that they’re about Holland. And for those who might think that Gerstenfeld might have a point with regards as to how the “Middle East Conflict” is reported about: try reading the Israeli press itself sometimes.

This experiment is therefore nothing but propaganda designed to perpetuated the myth that Israel is treated hostile by the Dutch (and other western) press. The sad thing is that it has been partially succesful in this, as several newspapers and newsshows have reported on this experiment without challenging the basic assumptions behind it. Imagine Gerstenfeld doing the same experiment with Iraq and you see how absurd it is. Israel has a bad image because it does bad things, and Gerstenfeld is like the guy who murdered his parents and asked the judge at his trial for clemency, as he was sadly an orphan.

Gaza, Israel and the news

Israel/Palestine, Manufacturing Consent
Published on

One of the things that has me depressed on blue monday, allegedly the most depressing date of the year is the realisation that nothing ever changes in how the media reports on Israel and its treatment of Palestinians. There were quite a few reports on the forced shutdown of an important powerplant in Gaza this weekend. Most reports explained correctly how this shutdown was due to lack of fuel and how this was due to Israel stopping fuel getting into Gaza, as retaliation for increased rocket attacks from Gaza. Some reports went even so far as to gently condemn Israel for this, or at least allow some Palestinian spokeperson to do so.

Missing from most, if not all reports however, was the real context of this story. Israel withdrew its settlements and army from Gaza in 2005, but it has never given up control over it. All border crossings, including the sea and along Gaza’s borders with Egypt, are controlled by Israel; Gaza doesn’t have control of its own airspace, and much of its infrastructure, e.g. the electricity network is dependent on Israel. As one look at a map of its territory shows, the Gaza Strip has no hope of ever being self sufficient in most products. The Gaza Strip depends on being able to exports the few things it can (e.g. cut flowers and citrus fruit) to pay for the import of everything it lacks; therefore when the Israelis close the border Gaza starts to starve. And the Israelis have been playing this game at least since the Oslo Accords, when the Occupied Territories gained a nominal autonomy, trying to starve the Palestinians in submission, with added airstrikes when necessary. In a sense, far from being an independent territory, Gaza is Israel’s largest, open air prison.

But if you depend on the mainstream media to tell you about Gaza, you’d think the problems only started last week, when those thankless Palestinians started launching rockets at Israel, for no apparant reason. The blockade, even when condemned, is only described as a reaction to these bombardments, with all context carefully removed. That these rocket attacks happened in response to earlier Israeli airstrikes, is never explained. Instead every cycle of violence is presented as started by the Palestinians, with a collective amnesia for anything that happened earlier than whatever the latest outrage Israel said was the reason for their actions.