Misconceptions | Articles | the bombsite

I don’t think that I’m a particularly controversial person most of the time but when it comes to the Israeli/Palestinian question my views tend to go against the majority. Why is this? I think it’s because I follow the conflict more closely than most. I search for articles about events that tend to be skirted over by the reporting bodies. I firmly believe that most British and American citizens, indeed most of the world, are ignorant of the facts about what is going on, or indeed, why it is going on. This is mostly due to two things; first, the press are quite biased in their reporting and second, political leaders such as Bush and Blair are deliberately turning a blind-eye to the situation. It is only very recently that Europe and the UN has become more vocal in their denunciation of the tactics being used by the Israeli government and it’s armed forces. It is somehow reminiscent of the second world war and how little was done to help the Jewish peoples once it dawned on everyone what was being done to them.

When a Palestinian suicide-bomber manages to make his or her way into Israeli territory and blows up a dozen or more people we hear about it all day. Then we hear what the Israeli government thinks about it all the next day. Then we get all the details of the funerals for the next few days after that. We also hear much discussion about the Palestinian terrorists who are responsible for this carnage. I don’t condone this kind of action but I suspect most people, if they had to live under the sub-human conditions that the Israelis force upon the Palestinians, would certainly have thoughts along the suicide-bomber line even if they didn’t physically follow that line. And should any of those dead Israelis be children then woe betide the Palestinians. Well here’s a fact you might not be aware of. The Israelis have murdered 6 times as many Palestinian children. Does that surprise you? That’s down to the biased form of reporting followed, in particular, by the American press but I should say that the BBC are no better.

Here’s something else you don’t hear about. You will, of course, know about the Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gazza Strip. You can’t miss them. They are such a vocal bunch of Zealots. Palestinian school-children have to have escorts to take them to school where their route takes them near to an Israeli settlement. Kim Lamberty, a member of the Christian Peacemakers Teams (CPT), has reported that a cruel and criminal practice is largely going unreported: settlers are routinely attacking children on their way to school. And Lamberty should know. Unable to walk since a vicious attack on 29 September by Jewish colonists, she says physical assaults on school-children and the volunteers who escort them have all increased in the past two weeks.

“Human-rights abuses are being carried out by Israeli settlers on a massive scale, but the US media continues to choose not to present the whole Palestine/Israel story – just the Tel Aviv version,” she says. “Dozens of volunteers from Amnesty International, CPT, Operation Dove, as well as numerous parents, and of course Palestinian schoolchildren, have all been assaulted this last week alone. We are not talking verbal abuse, taunts and pushes – we are talking punctured lungs, broken arms, fractured ribs and whipping with chains. But Israeli police are not investigating.”

But the absence of interest in investigating attacks on school-children and international peace volunteers is matched by a western media disinterest in reporting it. Alison Weir, the executive director of ifamericansknew.org, says that while Americans are well informed about the deaths of Israeli children, very few realise that approximately six times more Palestinian children have been killed.

“For three and a half months (at the beginning of the al-Aqsa Intifada), Palestinian children were being killed – often by gunfire to the head – and the world’s governments did nothing,” she says.

This can be blamed on a western media bias in Israel’s favour, and this view can be backed up by studies into headlines from prominent US newspapers. One such investigation into the coverage of deaths in Israel and Palestine in 2003, revealed a major pattern of omission. Analysis of the San Francisco Chronicle has shown that headlines reported prominently on Israeli children’s deaths at a rate 30 times greater than Palestinian ones. While 150% of Israeli children’s deaths had resulted in headline coverage (some deaths generated multiple stories), only 5% of Palestinian children’s deaths received similar coverage. But studies of media omissions on Palestinian issues are not limited to the US as I mentioned earlier. Academics studying BBC coverage have reached similar conclusions. Greg Philo and Mike Berry of the Glasgow University Media Unit in the UK studied television news coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and reached some startling conclusions regarding its effect on audiences.

Based on an audience sample of more than 800 people and a detailed analysis of TV news over a two-year period, the main conclusion was that BBC television news on the Israel/Palestinian conflict confuses viewers and substantially features Israeli government views. Israelis are quoted and speak in interviews over twice as much as Palestinians, and there are major differences in the language used to describe the two sides. Philo said TV news says almost nothing about the history or origins of the conflict.

“The majority of those surveyed did not know Palestinians had been forced from their homes and land when Israel was established in 1948. In 1967 Israel occupied by force the territories to which the Palestinian refugees had moved. Most viewers did not know that the Palestinians subsequently lived under Israeli military rule or that the Israelis took control of key resources such as water, and the damage this did to the Palestinian economy,” he said. “And because there was no account of historical events such as the Palestinians losing their homes, there was a tendency for viewers to see the problems as ‘starting’ with Palestinian action.”

Philo also found that Israeli actions tended to be explained and contextualised – they were often shown as merely responding to what had been done to them by Palestinians. The study concluded that there is also a tendency to present Israeli settlements in the occupied territories as vulnerable communities, rather than as groups of colonists playing a role in imposing the occupation. But as the Israeli historian Avi Shlaim has written, they have a key military and strategic function. They have been built on hilltops to give a commanding position and their occupants are often heavily armed.

“Most viewers knew very little of this – one participant expressed his surprise at learning that the settlements controlled over 40% of the West Bank,” Philo concluded.

However thankfully, there are a few western mainstream journalists who are not afraid to speak out about the issue of poor and confusing media coverage from the occupied territories. Twice chief Middle East correspondent for the BBC, Tim Llewellyn has pointed out the way language is used to spin a one-sided story in the book – Tell Me Lies.

“For a short while on BBC news, ‘occupied territories’ became ‘disputed’. We heard much of Palestinian ‘claims’ of occupation rather than of the 33-year-long fact of it,” he writes. “Illegal Jewish settlements near Jerusalem became ‘neighbourhoods’. Palestinians are killed (it happens); but Palestinians killing Israelis (that is deliberate); dead Israelis have a name and identity, dead Arabs are just, – well, dead Arabs. When Palestinians die their bereaved vent ‘rage’ at apparently riotous funerals; Israeli survivors express shock. The list goes on. The news-speak of the crisis is adjusted to favour the Israeli side.”

And with nothing to suggest that western media coverage is about to change any time soon, CPT activist Chris Brown wonders how the system of apartheid currently practised in the occupied territories is going to change. Suffering a punctured lung for merely walking Palestinian children to school himself, Brown says that the settlement his attackers came from is not “even supposed to be there. It was supposed to be dismantled”. However, he believes Americans do increasingly appreciate that it is their $16 million a day in taxation that allows the settlements to survive. Brown says he can see a day when statements “from the floor of the House and the Senate that this kind of thuggery is not accepted in any democratic society” will be made. It just saddens him that this may happen despite western media coverage rather than because of it.

And here are a few more facts for you. Since the Al Aqsa Intifada began in September of 2000, over 3,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces and 7,480 houses completely demolished. At least 1067 more homes have been damaged by indiscriminate shelling, shooting and bombardment by machine guns, military bulldozers, tanks and other armoured vehicles, helicopter gunships and F-16 fighter planes. 224,415,000 square metres of Palestinian land has been seized, much of it for the sake of constructing the Apartheid Wall. In addition, 73,251,000 square metres were bulldozed and approximately 17.5 million square metres of land in the Gaza Strip, most of it agricultural, has been razed by the Israelis. This represents at least 10% of the arable land available in the Gaza Strip, much of which has been seized by Israeli settlers. The olive industry, a traditional career for a considerable number of Palestinians, is also under attack. Palestine has always been known for its fine olives and 50% of the agricultural land in Palestine is planted with olive trees. It generates up to $800 million annually. The industry represents a vital engine to the moribund economy and has become widely targeted by the Israeli army and Jewish settlers who have stolen and uprooted more than 251,000 trees. Many Palestinian farmers rely solely on their olive groves for income. The unemployment rate in the West Bank and Gaza has been averaging 35% combined. Then there are the checkpoints, roadblocks, incursions and settler violence aided and abetted by the army. Today there are approximately 393,000 Israeli settlers in the occupied Palestinian territories using approximately 85% of the total water supply.

Of course the Palestinians have nothing to complain about do they? They have no reason what so ever to argue over the theft of their country by a mixed band of Europeans, Americans, Russians and a few other nationalities besides. No. They obviously deserve everything that gets dished out to them don’t they? Wake up world! Israel is the only country in the Arab world that possesses nuclear weapons. They refuse to sign-up to the non-proliferation treaty. They refuse to allow international inspections. They ignore UN resolutions. They ignore anything that they don’t agree with. I actually think America is afraid of Israel.

One day Palestine will be a free and internationally recognised country, as it used to be, and it’s people will be able to live in peace under their own governance. I hope it is sooner rather than later. I hope I live long enough to see it.