Israel/Palestine – Page 7

The bad news movement: more Israeli propaganda

Published on February 15, 2008

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

Published on January 21, 2008

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.

Silly solutions for serious problems

Published on October 30, 2007

via Unfogged, comes this absolutely fucked-up “solution” for the Israel-Palestine conflict only an economist could love:

Bueno de Mesquita’s answer to this dilemma, which he discussed with the former Israeli prime minister and recently elected Labor leader Ehud Barak, is a formula that guarantees mutual incentives to cooperate. “In a peaceful world, what do the Palestinians anticipate will be their main source of economic viability? Tourism. This is what their own documents say. And, of course, the Israelis make a lot of money from tourism, and that revenue is very easy to track. As a starting point requiring no trust, no mutual cooperation, I would suggest that all tourist revenue be [divided by] a fixed formula based on the current population of the region, which is roughly 40 percent Palestinian, 60 percent Israeli. The money would go automatically to each side. Now, when there is violence, tourists don’t come. So the tourist revenue is automatically responsive to the level of violence on either side for both sides. You have an accounting firm that both sides agree to, you let the U.N. do it, whatever. It’s completely self-enforcing, it requires no cooperation except the initial agreement by the Israelis that they are going to turn this part of the revenue over, on a fixed formula based on population, to some international agency, and that’s that.”

Even if you can take the underlying and unarticulated assumptions of this solution seriously, there’s plenty of criticism to be leveled at this, but the fundamental flaw lies deeper. Mesquita’s solution ignores the realities of the conflict for the politically correct view of it, which is that both parties are equally at fault locked into a conflict neither wants, which mutual distrust keeps going and if only there was some magical formula that could break through the distrust, the conflict could be solved.

Reality is different. The current situation is not the result of two parties desperately wanting peace but afraid to trust each other, but has been deliberately engineered by one of them, Israel. Israel has acceptated that an outright annexation of the occupied territories and/or direct ruling its Palestinian population is now impossible, due in large part to the first Intifada. Instead, why not let a nominally independent Palestinian government do your job for you, while making it impossible for the Palestinian strategies during the First Intifada to work again?

Israel’s post-Oslo strategy therefore has been to force the Palestinians to accept the semblance of an independent state in the territory conquered in 1967, while keeping a firm control of everything of interest within it. So the Westbank has been carved up in a patchwork of Palestinian bantustans, each surrounded by Israeli settler colonies and Israeli only roads, with the Israelis controlling the borders with Israel and Jordan. Which means that each of these statelets can be cut off at will if need be, while the media can be kept outside. Meanwhile the Palestinian Authority only has nominal control over its territority, as it doesn’t control its own airspace, water supplies or even much of its income (with the Israelis e.g. controlling customs and excise). The only real authority the Palestinian government has is the authority to police the population for Israel.

This strategy has made a repeat of the First Intifada, with its emphasis on relatively non-violent direct resistance, impossible, as we’ve seen with the Seconf Intifada, when the suicide bombers took over. If you’re cynical enough, you might say that the emergence of the suicide bomber targeting “soft” civilian targets as the major vector of Palestinian resistance against Israeli rule was an intended side effect of the Israelí strategy, as it kept support at home for repression high, while it got sympathy abroad. Even more so of course for the Palestinian rocket attacks, which are much less lethal than suicide bombings but almost equally dramatic.

The problem therefore is not that both sides are desparately looking for peace but don’t know how, but that one side has already won the conflict, but only in a way that keeps it eternally frozen. So no, silly solutions as “revenue sharing on tourism” will not help here.

Realist empire

Published on October 13, 2007

Jamie explains how the current backlash against the Israel lobby, even if limited, might help to strengthen the power of the (Bush) presidency and hence the American empire:

Take the famous Mearsheimer and Walt book. Responses have centred on whether its portrayal of the dimensions and influence of the Israel Lobby in the United States are accurate; at least when they haven’t been a competition for the most creative ways of suggesting that M & W are anti-semites.

Behind that there’s another point. Lobbies flourish in the US because the law permits them wide latitude to influence public affairs in whatever way they can. You can’t change the terms of trade for Israel without changing them for all the other lobbies. And one of the most efficient ways to do that is to limit Congress’s ability to respond to their lobbying. That in turn implies limiting its freedom of action, something which would automatically strengthen the executive.

I have noticed a … tendency amongst those American liberals brave enough to admit and object to the existence of a Israel lobby to believe that it was largely that lobby that was responsible for the War on Iraq. In a strange way, the wingnut insistence that liberals use “neocon” as an antisemitic slur (don’t bother with the reasoning behind that) also draws from this belief. Having an existing and clearly very succesful lobby to put the blame on makes it of course easier to ignore the flaws and malice in American politics itself that made it possible to start an illegal and immoral war on the flimsiest of reasons.

A puzzler

Published on October 8, 2007

Here’s a puzzler for you. While “foreign insurgents” in Iraq and Afghanistan are routinely condemned as the worst of the worst, which other Middle Eastern country has no problem with letting foreigners like Jeffrey Goldberg serve in its army, with not even a hint of disapproval from the usual suspects?