Zionism

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.

Remembering the Nakba

Amsterdam, Israel/Palestine, Zionism
Published on

On May 14th it will be exactly sixty years ago that the state of Israel was founded. A moment of celebration for the Israelis, but for the original Palestinian population of the country that day in 1948 was the start for a gigantic humanitarian tragedy: the Nakba, or catastrophe.

The Dutch Tropical Museum now has put up an exhibition on the Nakba, showing the eyewitnesses testimonials of those Palestinians caught up in it. Much of the video material used in this exhibition originated with the Nakba Archive, an international attempt to document and research the experiences of the first generation of Palestinian refugees from what would become Israel. This is important, because this generation is slowly dying of old age and this is the last opportunity to document their stories. The exhibition itself is also important, because the story of the Nakba is little known in the Netherlands, whose sympathies traditionally lie with Israel rather than the Palestinians. That an exhibition on such an important aspect of Palestinian history can now be shown in such a renowned museum with none of the usual zionist outcry is a good sign

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.

Recognising Israel

Israel lobby, Israel/Palestine, Zionism
Published on

Ellis Sharp explains why recognising Israel’s right to exist is not as simple as all that:

Now of course in one obvious sense Israel exists. But as anti-Zionist bloggers have repeatedly asked: which Israel is to be recognised? The Israel defined by the United Nations in 1948, which handed over land held by a majority Arab population to European Jews? The Israel of 1949, when the first major phase of ethnic cleansing had been completed, and Palestinians had not only been driven out of the U.N.’s defined Jewish state but a huge area of land on top of that? Or should it be Israel in 1967, when within Israel yet more ethnic cleansing had been surreptitiously carried out, and when the rest of historic Palestine was occupied? Or Israel in 2006, which has flouted innumerable UN resolutions and grabbed even more occupied land from the Palestinians? Israel 2006, presumably.

The Israeli writer Yizchak Laor once observed that as an ideology Zionism has always been closer to racism and fascism than to liberalism. But, historically, it has always succeeded in co-opting liberals to its cause, right back to the days of George Eliot and Daniel Deronda. The British Labour movement throughout its history appears (as far as I can tell) to have always been strongly pro-Israel.

To succeed in getting even Harold Pinter to demand “recognition of Israel” and to have the GMB passing blatantly Zionist motions is, to my mind, quite remarkable. Recognition of Israel’s right to exist requires beaten-up victims to recognise that thieves have a right to stolen property. But that’s not what recognition is really about. Recognition is about accepting Israel’s right to exist as a sectarian state which defines citizenship by religion and comprehensively discriminates against citizens who do not belong to the master religion. Israel has no general anti-discrimination legislation and no commitment to equality. Israel accords second-class status to non-Jews.

Decent people cannot recognise Israel as a state with a right to exist until it stops being an Apartheid state, like decent people could not support South Africa’s right to exist as an Apartheid state either. Now it may seem today that this will never happen, but it seemed that way with South Africa in the eighties as well, with its Black population herded into bantustans and only let out to serve as cheap labour, almost slave labour, the South African army rampaging across the Frontline states at will, Mandela and other resistance leaders locked up or killed and no negotiation with the ANC possible. Yet a few years later the system was broken down, South Africa made peace with its neighbours and Mandela became president. Israel could do the same, but will not do it voluntarily. Therefore, we need toboycott Israel like South Africa was boycotted.