In his post about the world’s lust for Jewish moral failure, Jeffrey Goldberg writes:
One story the media isn’t telling, because it’s impossible to get this story in these circumstances (especially because Israel stupidly won’t allow foreign reporters into Gaza) is how much resentment the Hamas policy of using Palestinians as human shields causes among Gaza civilians.
While I agree and have blogged that Hamas may actually be losing support among their constituents despite what the media say – see this recent story too – I don’t think that it’s stupid for Israel to restrict foreign reporters into Gaza. Why would Goldberg expect them to tell the story he saw? They haven’t in the past.
Since at least 2005, for example, Hamas has been smuggling increasingly sophisticated materiel into Gaza and yet there have been precious few reports about how this threat grew. I didn’t learn that Hamas had built a network of underground bunkers from a newspaper, but from a think tank. The media were filled with many stories about the deprivation suffered in Gaza – even many that were untrue – and most blamed Israel. Little or nothing was reported to suggest that perhaps the people of Gaza were suffering because Hamas chose to devote its resources to increasing its terror threat, rather than the standard of living of its citizens.
Of course press restrictions bother Samir Kuntar’s BFF, Dion Nissenbaum. Of course why anyone should listen to a fellow who writes press releases for an unrepentant child killer is beyond me. Still there are media folks who are bothered.
Ethan Bronner of the New York Times is one. (via memeorandum)
Like all wars, this one is partly about public relations. But unlike any war in Israel’s history, in this one the government is seeking to entirely control the message and narrative for reasons both of politics and military strategy.
“This is the result of what happened in the 2006 Lebanon war against Hezbollah,†said Nachman Shai, a former army spokesman who is writing a doctoral dissertation on Israel’s public diplomacy. “Then, the media were everywhere. Their cameras and tapes picked up discussions between commanders. People talked on live television. It helped the enemy and confused and destabilized the home front. Today, Israel is trying to control the information much more closely.â€
In his devastating critique of the role the media played in undermining Israel in its war against Hezbollah in 2006, Marvin Kalb wrote (.pdf):
Add one other crucial ingredient to this journalistic wartime stew of charge and countercharge—and that was the Internet. This was a live war, in which the information battlefield played a central role. Here the Israelis suffered from the openness of their democratic society. They succumbed to the public pressures of live 24/7 coverage. They couldn’t keep a secret. Hezbollah, on the other hand, controlled its message with an iron grip. It had one spokesman and no leaks. Hezbollah did not have to respond to criticism from bloggers, and it could always count on unashamedly sympathetic Arab reporters to blast Israel for its “disproportionate†military attack against Lebanon.
The subtitle of Kalb’s report is “The Media As A Weapon in Asymmetrical Conflict” an implicit acknowledgment that the media during the war served to help Hezbollah. So Israel has learned from bitter experience that controlling the media is necessary for its military success. And I don’t recall reporters complaining 2 and a half years ago that Hezbollah controlled the information they were getting. They were all too happy to act as amplifiers for Hezbollah.
Back to Bronner.
Foreign reporters deny that their work in Gaza has been subject to Hamas censorship or control. Unable to send foreign reporters into Gaza, the international news media have relied on Palestinian journalists based there for coverage.
Have you heard of Alan Johnston? Or of Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig?
And it isn’t just a few isolated incidents.
But it seems that many Israelis accept Mr. Seaman’s assessment and shed no tears over the restrictions, despite repeated protests by the Foreign Press Association of Israel, including on Tuesday.
Given the media’s record, this reaction is hardly surprising.
This attitude has been helped by supportive Israeli news media whose articles have been filled with “feelings of self-righteousness and a sense of catharsis following what was felt to be undue restraint in the face of attacks by the enemy,†according to a study of the first days of media coverage of the war by a liberal but nonpartisan group called Keshev, the Center for the Protection of Democracy in Israel.
But those self-righteous feelings were not universal. Surely you could read Gideon Levy or Amira Hess in Ha’aretz. And of course this begs the question if there’s a parallel group in Gaza that critiques the official media there. But still given the threat, I fail to understand what is wrong with feelings of self-righteousness. Is openness necessarily equated with being self-critical?
On Tuesday, the press association released a statement saying, “The unprecedented denial of access to Gaza for the world’s media amounts to a severe violation of press freedom and puts the state of Israel in the company of a handful of regimes around the world which regularly keep journalists from doing their jobs.â€
Oh please. Again where were all these journalists when Hamas was building its threat. Yaacov Lozowick notes that the media are ill-prepared to understand what they are reporting anyway.
And yet, although for the past ten days I’ve been focusing intensely and extensively on this operation, it’s only in the past two or three days that I feel I’m beginning to understand what is going on; even now there are large gaps in the picture, and lots of fog of war. The possibility that reporters with deadlines to meet – even Israeli ones, all the others even more so – could march into the battle zone and have anything useful to tell us, is, frankly, remote. The best they’d be able to do is point at ruble, recent or not, and breathlessly tell about the tremendous havoc the IDF is wreaking; then they’d troop off to the Shifa hospital in Gaza ind interview the civilian casualties (alas, there are many of them) without ever recognizing which of the uniformed personnel are hiding Hamas leaders, nor where the steps down to the bunker are.
In other words the press association would benefit from a little humility.
Back to Bronner.
Israelis and their supporters think that such quick descriptions fail to explain the vital context of what has been happening — years of terrorist rocket fire on civilians have gone largely unanswered, and a message had to be sent to Israel’s enemies that this would go on no longer, they say. The issue of proportionality, they add, is a false construct because comparing death tolls offers no help in measuring justice and legitimacy.
There are other ways to construe the context of this conflict, of course. But no matter what, Israel’s diplomats know that if journalists are given a choice between covering death and covering context, death wins. So in a war that they consider necessary but poorly understood, they have decided to keep the news media far away from the death.
That’s really the argument in a nutshell. Unfortunately Bronner’s not done.
John Ging, an Irishman who directs operations in Gaza for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, entered Gaza on Monday as journalists were kept out. He told Palestinian reporters in Gaza that the policy was a problem.
“For the truth to get out, journalists have to get in,†he said.
John Ging, of course, being an official of the UN doesn’t even have a passing familiarity with the truth. Here he’s talking about yesterday’s Israeli strike against mortar firing terrorist near a UN school.
Further on in the story we find out what Ging left out:
Israeli military officials said soldiers operating in the area around the Jabalya refugee camp in northern Gaza came under mortar fire and responded by targeting the source: the U.N.-run al-Fakhora School. Ging, the U.N. official in Gaza, said that all U.N. facilities are clearly marked with flags and that the Israeli military has been given precise Global Positioning System coordinates.
“When you’re fired at, you have to fight back,” said reserve Brig. Gen. Ilan Tal, a military spokesman.
Tal said two known Hamas gunmen were killed in the Israeli strike just outside the school, in addition to members of a mortar squad.
U.N. officials said they did not know whether fighters had been in the school, and wanted the matter investigated.
I’m sure they didn’t know. This isn’t the first time it happened.
(The Washington Post leaves out a key bit of the story that the NYT included – h/t Barry Rubin
A young witness from Jabaliya, Ibrahim Amen, 16, said that he had seen one of the militants, whom he identified as Abu Khaled Abu Asker, in the area of the school right before the attack.
Ibrahim said he saw the militant after he answered calls for volunteers to pile sand around the camp “to help protect the resistance fighters.” Ibrahim went to pile sand near the school with his brother, Iyad, 20, who was then injured by the Israeli mortar fire.
Still I expect that most of the time most reporters would ignore the detail that the NYT included.)
For the most part I expect that the media would make itself useful to UN officials and Hamas officials and question everything that Israel did. So I see no great loss with the lack of media coverage. Nor, given what they’ve failed to report do they have any moral right to question Israel’s position.
Treppenwitz puts it very well:
You have demonstrated that you have no contextual or historical background for covering this conflict. You have also made it clear you have no desire to acquire either. You will inevitably send in ‘journalists’ who don’t know the geography, language, culture or history of either side in this conflict, forcing them to rely on unreliable (and biased) local sources and ‘fixers’ to supply the meat of their stories. There are already Palestinian journalists inside Gaza. Your stories are going to end up echoing their propaganda, so why not just take their feed?
UPDATE: More from Noah Pollak:
Journalists who abjure reporting the vital details of this story should be called what they are — activists masquerading as reporters.
UPDATE II: Yaacov Lozowick:
The non-antisemitic media however, say, the New York Times, will also never really tell the story, because it contradicts one of the meta-explanations with which most people in this generation understand reality: the cycle of violence myth. According to this canard, hatred begets hatred, violence begets violence, and the only conceivable way to put an end to them is to desist one-sidedly and be nice, so as to start the opposite cycle of brotherly love or some such bunk. Using reverse engineering, this means that if the Palestinians hate the Israelis that badly, it must be the result of things the Israelis did in previous stages of the cycle: Blockades, retreating from Gaza without coordination with Hamas, putting down two intifadas, settlements, coming to Palestine in the first place, snubbing Mohammad, killing Jesus, eating that apple…. whatever. And since the Israelis have such an awful record of being nasty to the Palestinians, even if the Palestinians also played the cycle-of-violence game (remember, it’s the NYT, not the Guardian), the Palestinians can’t snap out of it; moreover, putting more pressure on them, using more violence against them, can only have one result. It will reinforce the hatred and add fuel to the cycle.
This is what the non-antisemitic media really believes, as does most of their public. Finding evidence that the Israeli violence is giving the Palestinian populace pause, that it could shake them out of their fantasies and put them on the road to rationality so as to figure out a better way of life – this can’t be said, because it can’t be true, because it would destroy an entire Weltanschauung in which most people have invested.
That’s what too many of them are and that’s why the ban is correct.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
