Ethics in Coverage of the War on Terrorism: The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
© Akiva Cohen
Ancient and Modern Israel and the Modern Democratic Ethos
Israel’s foundational national experience takes place at Sinai where she encounters God’s
terrifying presence, and where Moses descends from his communion with God with the Ten
Commandments.1 These core commandments and their expansion in the Law of Moses serve as
Israel’s Ethical Charter issuing out of her encounter with a Holy God and her call to become “a
kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”2 In spite of Israel’s consistent moral failures, the biblical
narrative bears witness to the imprint of her monotheistic faith upon the surrounding nations. The
moral vision that God gave to Moses and the Hebrew Prophets finds its most sublime expression
in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.3 This biblical vision of ethical monotheism remains the primary
spiritual vision that has shaped the ethos of Western culture.
In the march of Western history, the divine right of kings was challenged by the Magna
Carta in the early 13th century, which directly called into account monarchal authority by
limiting its powers and claims to privilege. The rise of modern democracies and basic civil
liberties trace their beginnings to this charter. The development of this heritage reached its
theoretical highpoint in the writing of modern political thinkers like the seventeenth century
philosopher John Locke. Locke advanced the idea of natural law that undergirds inalienable civil
rights, the separation of powers, representative government, and the rule of law. Locke’s
1
Exod 31:18; 34:1–4.
Exod 19:6.
3
Matt 5–7.
2
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influence is clearly echoed in the United States Declaration of Independence, especially its wellknown second sentence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life,
Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are
instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed—That
whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of
the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation
on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most
likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.4
When founding the state of Israel its leaders adopted this democratic model, wherein its citizens
are governed by freely elected officials who represent them, in an executive led by the prime
minister who is subject to a legislature and an independent judiciary.5
However, in spite of Israel’s vibrant democracy – even taking into consideration its
unique nature as a Jewish democracy – the community of nations and global media outlets
increasingly portray Israel as an oppressive military and racist state. How can the gap between
these two competing narratives be explained?
The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and the Media War
Prior to modern media, political discourse was carried out through the critical analysis of ideas,
and the merits or weaknesses of their principles. In contemporary culture, however, television,
films, the internet, google, Wikipedia, social networks, twitter, etc. are the media that determine
our regular diet of ‘the news’ as they also rewire our brains. We are continually bombarded by
decontextualized images with limited text that seek to form our opinions based upon
4
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html
Freedom House (an independent watchdog organization dedicated to the expansion of freedom around the world),
2015 rankings for Israel are: (1 = best, 7 = worst), 1.5 freedom rating, 2 civil liberties rating, 1 political rights rating.
See https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2015/israel#.VQ25sxDF9so.
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2
reductionistic, agenda-driven packaging. The line between real ‘news’ and entertainment, or
‘reality’ and ‘reality TV’ is increasingly blurred. The danger of this phenomenon is that people
become more vulnerable to the propagandistic agendas of political spin-meisters who prey upon
their emotions and willingness to form an opinion based upon a decontextualized photograph,
video-bite or blog.
We need to think about how this current phenomenon shapes our perception of various
global conflicts and our ability, or lack thereof, to properly evaluate their complexity. A simple
Amazon search, let alone a YouTube one, will readily yield a seemingly ever-growing list of the
latest additions of propagandistic films about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Two such recent
examples are: “Little Town of Bethlehem,” and “Occupation 101: Voices of the Silenced
Majority.” “Little Town of Bethlehem,” according to its director “[S]hares the gripping story of
three men, born into violence, willing to risk everything to bring an end to violence in their
lifetime.”6 The three men are a Palestinian Christian, a Palestinian Muslim, and a former Israeli
helicopter pilot. “Occupation 101,” according to the film’s web site is “A thought-provoking and
powerful documentary film on the current and historical causes of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict.”7
The films “Little Town of Bethlehem” and “Occupation101” have both been hosted at
Universities throughout the USA, often with an ‘anti-Zionist event’ focus. I personally agree
with one aspect of the film, “Little Town of Bethlehem,” namely that the IDF needs to be held
accountable to its own doctrine of “purity of arms.” My problem with the film, however, is that it
implies a narrative of Israel as the unprovoked aggressor. The continual juxtaposition of archival
footage of the American Civil Rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with footage
6
7
http://littletownofbethlehem.org
http://www.occupation101.com
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of Palestinian demonstrators, suggests to the viewer that the conflict is essentially a racial one.
The film simply decontextualizes and distorts the situation by focusing upon a handful of
Palestinians and Israelis who advocate for non-violence, without explaining to the viewer that the
IDF’s primary military engagement is to protect its citizens from attacks by various Islamic
militant groups who are not peacefully singing “We shall overcome.”
A central symbol of the film is Israel’s security wall. The film, however, does not
adequately explain to the viewer why the security wall exits in the first place. During the years
2000–2005, hundreds of Palestinian suicide bombings and terrorist attacks against Israeli
civilians killed nearly 1,000 innocent Israeli civilians and wounded thousands of others. In that
context in 2002 Israel’s government decided to construct a security wall that would run along its
1949 armistice lines to protect its citizens. By the time of its completion, terrorist attacks had
almost completely ceased, demonstrating the effectiveness of the security wall.
“Occupation 101’s” web site announces, as I noted, it is “A thought-provoking and
powerful documentary film on the current and historical causes of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict.”8 However, this is the last resource I would recommend to any sincere seeker of moral
clarity to turn to regarding the causes of the conflict.9 The film’s framing of the issues makes
many of its claims completely false and depicts Israel, once again, as the unprovoked and brutal
aggressor and persecutor of Palestinians, with an emphasis upon Palestinian Christians as the
victims of Israel’s ‘aggression.’ For example, early in the film, a media broadcaster describes
Israel as carrying out a military siege of the Church of the Nativity. What the film does not
unpack for the viewer, however, is that Israel’s so-called ‘siege’ of the church was part of an IDF
operation against the Al-Aqsa brigade militants in Bethlehem and cities in the West Bank during
8
9
http://www.occupation101.com
See the following review, http://www.adl.org/israel-international/anti-israel-activity/c/occupation-101.html
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the height of the second intifada, and only a week after a Palestinian suicide bomber blew
himself up during a Passover Seder (ritual meal) at a Hotel in Netanya that killed 30 mostly
elderly Jews. The only reason that the IDF had to ‘siege’ the church in the first place was that
about 50 armed Islamic militants with explosives sought cover in the church, knowing that the
IDF would not pursue them there, and held 200 priests and civilians hostage for almost 40 days
with little food and water. One can be sure that the viewer of “Occupation 101” would be
surprised to know that it was Palestinian Islamic militants who murdered the Arab Christian
director of the Gaza Bible Society, and that it is Israel who protects Arab-Israeli Christians from
persecution from Muslims living in Israel.10
The Media Bias Against Israel
In this brief paper I would like to focus upon some examples of the lack of ethical reporting in
media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One of the most common phenomenon in
media coverage of the conflict is a double standard of reporting as applied to each side in the
conflict. When Palestinian militants commit acts of violence and murder, the act is often
described with the passive voice, whereas when Israeli military acts are described, the active
voice is used. The effect of such unethical reporting is that the identity of one side in the conflict
is thus constructed to be the oppressor and the other side is absolved of moral culpability for
their actions that occur without any apparent moral agency.
This tendency has been lucidly chronicled by Stephanie Gutmann, in her book, The Other
War: Israelis, Palestinians and the Struggle for Media Supremacy.11 Gutmann notes that the
10
See e.g., http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/israeli-priest-defends-israel_819715.html
S. Gutmann, The Other War: Israelis, Palestinians and the Struggle for Media Supremacy (San Francisco:
Encounter Books, 2005).
11
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media watchdog group CAMERA analyzed this trend in the Chicago Tribune (as simply a
concrete example of the same trend practiced by innumerable news agencies) during their
coverage of the second intifada:
On June 5, 2002, a Tribune headline announced that a “Car bomb near Israeli bus killed
at least 14” on June 18, 2002, a “Suicide bombing kills 14 in Jerusalem”; a month later a
“Wave of attacks stuns Israel.” In the same period, however, the Tribune headlines told
us that: “Israeli tank fire kills 4 in Jenin”; “Israeli strike kills at least 12 in Gaza”; “9
Palestinians die as Israel hits Gaza” and “Israeli missile, troops kill 10 in Gaza.” In one
set of headlines, “bombs” seem to explode themselves and kill Israelis, while in the
second set, “Israelis” very clearly kill Palestinians.12
Gutmann further points out that such headlines illustrate an advantage of terrorist tactics in our
media-wired world, namely, until a specific group claims responsibility for an act of terror,
newspapers are consigned to reporting such acts in the passive voice. Nonetheless, the net-effect
of such reporting for Israel is that she is increasingly perceived as the agent of aggression against
a passive agent who, in reality, is the active aggressor of terrorizing Israel’s civilian population.
At the height of the second intifada, in March 2002, when 88 Israeli civilians were killed,
and 348 wounded by Palestinian suicide bombers and gunmen, Gutmann notes, “If victims were
the currency to buy coverage and moral capital in the television age, Israel was catching up.”13
However, in spite of acknowledging the nightmarish plight of Israeli civilians, in the same month
the New York Times continued to run articles that described the situation as if non-personal
forces were the faceless actors in the conflict. Gutmann offers the following example from the
Times’ coverage of a March 29 2002 suicide bombing by an eighteen-year old Palestinian
woman who blew herself up outside a Jerusalem supermarket killing the store’s security guard
and a sixteen-year old who was running an errand for her mother. The article by Joel Greenberg
was titled, “2 Girls, Divided by War, Joined in Carnage.” Greenberg’s article begins, “The
12
13
Ibid., 30.
Ibid., 161.
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suicide bomber and her victim look strikingly similar.”14 As Gutmann notes, Greenberg seems to
have made every effort to avoid any description of the suicide attack that would be perceived as
judgmental. Although Greenberg does state at the outset of the article that the Palestinian woman
“detonated the explosives killing Ms. Levy and a security guard, along with herself.” In his
subsequent article summary, Greenberg writes, “As Ms. Levy walked up to the supermarket in
the neighborhood of Kiryat Yovel a little before 2 p.m., Ms. Akhras also approached. They
walked to the door, where Ms. Akhras was stopped for a check by a security guard. Then, an
explosion.” Greenberg has, as Gutmann accurately notes, seemingly drained the suicide
bomber’s barbaric act of murder of “any quality of agency.”15
During this intolerable escalation of Palestinian terrorism against Israel’s civilian
population, the IDF launched Operation Defensive Shield in order to put an end to the suicide
bombings. Several Palestinian cities that served as a base for Palestinian militants were targeted,
especially Jenin, which was recognized as “the capital of suicide bombing” according to Fatah’s
(The Palestinian Liberation Movement’s) internal documents.16 By sending in ground troops, as
opposed to air strikes, the operation placed the IDF’s soldiers at great risk due to the nature of
urban warfare. Snipers above, hidden explosives on the ground, and Palestinian militants
embedded amidst a civilian populace, presented highly dangerous and painstaking operational
strategies. Gutmann cites a characteristic example of such warfare, taken from A Psalm in
Jenin,17
Stu watched as two Naval Commando soldiers went to place an explosive brick on a
door. Just as they were about to blow in the door, they spotted a woman sitting with two
children nearby. They approached the woman and her children to calm them down and
14
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/05/world/mideast-turmoil-the-dead-2-girls-divided-by-war-joined-incarnage.html?smid=pl-share (Published 5 April 2002).
15
Gutmann, The Other War, 162.
16
Ibid. 163.
17
B. Goldberg, A Psalm in Jenin (Tel Aviv: Modan, 2003).
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move them out of harm’s way. A sniper bullet caught one of the soldiers in the leg,
severing his femoral artery. Immediately afterwards, an exploding booby trap sprayed the
other soldier with shrapnel.18
Gutmann proceeds to describe a further incident towards the end of the war when a platoon of
IDF soldiers was moving through a clearing between two houses when a booby trap went off and
snipers began firing killing thirteen of the men and severely wounding seven others.19
The purpose of my paper is not to analyze the IDF’s war against terrorism during the
second intifada, but rather to make mention of the conditions in which Israel’s soldiers were
placed during the height of Operation Defensive Shield and the highly sensational and distorted
media coverage of the battle in Jenin, as an example of the unethical media coverage of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As the IDF was engaged in this complex and life-threatening
operation, 1,100 new journalists landed at Ben Gurion airport to catch a piece of the action for
their various newspapers and networks. When reporters arrived at Jenin they found out that the
IDF had closed the city off to reporters until the major operation was completed. This of course
frustrated the journalists, however, the last thing the IDF wanted to add to their already
challenging mission, was to have to discern not only between militants and civilians, while
negotiating snipers and booby traps, but also journalists embedded in the midst of the urban-war
confusion.
A seasoned CNN reporter, Scott Anderson, related to Gutmann that the reporters
congregated at the Israeli blockade waiting to get any piece of news to send back to their home
media outlets. Whenever a Palestinian spokesperson (whether official or unofficial) showed up,
the reporters were “on them like flies.”20 Palestinian Authority spokesman, Saeb Erekat would
Ibid., 189. My full citation is from Goldberg’s A Psalm rather than Gutmann’s (The Other War, 166) partial
citation.
19
Gutmann, The Other War, 166.
20
Ibid., 171.
18
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routinely call CNN headquarters from cities outside of Jenin and claim that a massacre was
underway in Jenin.21 Gutmann relates that the press eagerly took up such reports in their
coverage of the conflict. For example, the Washington Post reported that “Palestinians have said
that Israeli troops killed hundreds [in Jenin]…. Palestinians compared the killing in Jenin to the
deaths of Palestinian refugees at … Sabra and Shatilla.”22
The New York Times reported Palestinian claims concerning “bodies cut in pieces, bodies
scooped up by bulldozers and buried in mass graves, bodies deliberately concealed under
collapsed buildings.”23 Saeb Erekat told reporters that the IDF had committed a massacre in
Jenin with at least 500 dead.24 The Middle East media watchdog organization CAMERA noted
that “Eventually, Palestinian officials themselves put the figure at 52. Nearly all of them were
combatants, killed in house-to-house fighting in which Israel lost 23 soldiers.”25
In this limited paper I have briefly discussed the lack of ethical reporting of the IsraeliPalestinian conflict by mention of some current pro-Palestinian (i.e. ‘anti-Zionist/Israel’) films
and also by way of examples of irresponsible and highly tendentious media reporting during the
second intifada. I will only briefly add here mention of Israel’s most recent war with Hamas in
Gaza. The background to this conflict is that in 2005, following Israel’s complete and unilateral
withdrawal from Gaza, Gazan militants began to use it as a launching pad for constant rocket
attacks upon Israel’s neighboring city, Sderot and Israel’s southern coastal cities. Since Israel
Ibid. Saeb Erekat is the same PA authority who claimed that Israel’s ‘siege’ on the Church of the Nativity
involved a ‘massacre’ of Palestinians. When the conflict finally ended it became clear to the international media that
the only massacre that existed was the one in Erekat’s propagandistic imagination.
22
Ibid., citing, The Washington Post, “Controversy Swirls Over Jenin Battle; Israeli Army Denies Palestinian
Accounts of Atrocities, Mass Graves,” 13 April 2002.
2323
Gutmann, The Other War, 171, citing, The New York Times, “Jenin Refugee Camp's Dead Can't Be Counted or
Claimed,” 13 April 2002.
24
New York Post, 3 May 2002, http://nypost.com/2002/05/03/why-tv-news-loves-a-liar/
25
M. Kaplan and E. Rozenman, “Saeb Erekat – Highly Visible, Highly Unreliable,” 4 March 2015, accessible at
http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=118&x_article=2957
21
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withdrew its military forces and civilians from Gaza in 2005, Palestinian forces have fired more
than eleven thousand missiles, mortars, and rockets into Israel.
This intolerable situation led to the most recent war in Gaza in the summer of 2014, in
which the IDF launched “Operation Protective Edge,” consisting of both an air and a necessary
ground operation to put an end to the missile and rocket fire upon its citizens and to locate and
destroy the Gazan tunnels, nicknamed “the tube” by Israeli journalists after London’s extensive
underground train network. It is truly a tragic social phenomenon that Hamas, rather than using
her authority and financial capital to establish a viable economy above ground for her citizens;
rather than use endless tons of cement to build schools, Universities, clinics, and cultural
institutions, chose instead to concentrate her financial and political capital in developing this vast
network of tunnels, some of which extended into Israeli territory with the explicit goal of
kidnapping Israelis and carrying out terrorist attacks upon her civilian population.
Perhaps we should not be surprised by this since Hamas’ self-declared goals enshrined in
her charter specifically state that Jihad against Israel is her goal. For example, article fifteen of
the charter states: “The day that enemies usurp part of Moslem land, Jihad becomes the
individual duty of every Moslem. In face of the Jews’ usurpation of Palestine, it is compulsory
that the banner of Jihad be raised.”26 Thus the actions of Hamas are indeed consistent with their
self-declared Jihadic Islamist goals.
Although most Israelis were fully supportive of the army’s incursion into Gaza, and
clearly understood that Israel had no option other than to carry out Operation Protective Edge in
order to protect her civilian population, Israel’s leading daily, HaAretz, which is known for its
far-left highly critical stance towards Israel’s right wing parties, was clearly less supportive. The
26
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp
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ceaseless barrage of critical lead articles in HaAretz served to illustrate Israel’s vibrant free press
and democratic principles. The contrast between Israel’s transparent media coverage and Hamas’
suppression of media coverage from Gaza, highlights the difference these two societies. For
those of us who followed the media coverage, one could not avoid noticing that there were
virtually no images of Palestinian militants published by the international media reporting from
Gaza. Furthermore, only after Operation Protective Edge was over, did some foreign journalists
begin to report on the fact that Hamas fighters used civilian institutions like hospital areas to fire
their rockets, and also reported on some of the ways that Hamas suppressed and censored any
unfavorable reporting and threatened reporters who attempted to report the war based upon what
they actually saw taking place by Palestinian militants.27
The Cause of Palestinian Suffering
In sum, in this brief paper I have not made the claim that the IDF is above the moral scrutiny of
both the Israeli and international press in times of war. In all wars unfortunate mistakes and at
times questionable military strategies are engaged, especially in the complexity of urban warfare
and the immoral practice of an enemy who uses human shields. Media coverage of the IsraeliPalestinian conflict has grown increasingly pro-Palestinian in recent years and increasingly
irresponsible and one-sided in its reporting. Such reporting is at worst blatantly pro-Palestinian,
reductionistic, and often propagandistic, and sometimes at ‘best’ makes claims for a type of
moral equivalency in the conflict. The root of the problem, however, is not the Israeli
‘occupation of Palestine,’ but rather fundamentalist Islam’s glorification-of-death culture. Rather
than the protection of civil liberties and the establishment of the rule of law so that Palestinian
27
http://legalinsurrection.com/2014/07/media-cover-up-of-hamas-crimes-starting-to-unravel/
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society can flourish, Hamas and even the PA continue to steer their people towards violence and
continue to suppress their civil liberties and entrench their oppressive tyranny over their
populace.
An article that appeared in the Economist in 2014 entitled, “The Middle East: The
tragedy of the Arabs,”28 begins by acknowledging that Islam enjoyed a renaissance of learning in
the Middle Ages, but then goes on to discuss how modern fundamentalist versions of Islam are at
the heart of the Arab peoples troubles; how the development of independent political institutions
is stunted by a lack of separation between mosque and state. Commenting upon the fact that most
Arab countries are relatively young nations, the editorial notes, that since the collapse of the
Ottoman Empire:
Arab countries have not yet succeeded in fostering the institutional prerequisites of
democracy—the give-and-take of parliamentary discourse, protection for minorities, the
emancipation of women, a free press, independent courts and universities and trade
unions. The absence of a liberal state has been matched by the absence of a liberal
economy. After independence, the prevailing orthodoxy was central planning, often
Soviet-inspired. Anti-market, anti-trade, pro-subsidy and pro-regulation, Arab
governments strangled their economies. The state pulled the levers of economic power—
especially where oil was involved. Where the constraints of post-colonial socialism were
lifted, capitalism of the crony, rent-seeking kind took hold, as it did in the later years of
Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. Privatization was for pals of the government. Virtually no
markets were free, barely any world-class companies developed, and clever Arabs who
wanted to excel in business or scholarship had to go to America or Europe to do so.
Economic stagnation bred dissatisfaction. Monarchs and presidents-for-life defended
themselves with secret police and goons.29
Sadly, in our day, whatever hope the Arab Spring began to give birth to, has, at least for
the present moment for the majority of Arabs, been suppressed by the resurgence of dictatorial
leaders and fundamentalist Islamic militants. On the other hand, Israeli Arabs, including their
28
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21606284-civilisation-used-lead-world-ruinsand-only-locals-canrebuild-it
29
Ibid.
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Christian minority, live in a democracy—albeit an imperfect one—and thus enjoy the rule of law
and educational and social services alongside their Jewish counterparts. International media
outlets (and even the Israeli daily, HaAretz) spin out Palestinian propaganda that paints Israel as
the military aggressor and abuser of Palestinian civil rights.30 However, until the Palestinian
leadership stops focusing upon destroying another nation, and instead invests in building their
own; until they lead their people towards a life-affirming culture, or are replaced by a leadership
that will, the future for the next generation of Palestinian is not a very hopeful one.
When HaAretz does run a story that holds Israel’s government, military, or citizens morally accountable for their
actions, it is of course is fulfilling the essential role of a free press in a democratic society. In spite of the blatant leftleaning bias of HaAretz, and the editorial board’s tendency towards blaming Israel’s government for the ills of
Palestinian society, the paper nonetheless represents a very high level of cultural engagement and an example of
uncensored freedom of expression.
30
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