Updates

Update from AIJAC

December 11, 2014
Number 12/14 #04

This Update features a major new article from a veteran journalist, Matti Friedman –  who worked for more than five years for the Jerusalem bureau of the Associated Press – on the sources of media mistakes and incomplete or slanted reporting on Israeli-Palestinian issues. Following up on an earlier piece on the biases and prejudices he witnessed there, he paints a larger picture of an international press corps in Israel which forms a distinct subculture “a certain uniformity of attitude, behavior, and even dress” and this subculture insists the Israel story is “a story of Jewish moral failure” and nothing should be published which detracts from this view. He also notes that there is very close collaborations and unity of purpose between most Israel-based journalists and the international agencies and NGOs which “have largely assumed a role of advocacy on behalf of the Palestinians and against Israel” He even claims that AP specifically banned any interviews or quotes from NGO Monitor – an Israeli NGO which critiques the claims of international agencies and NGOs on Israel –  or its head, Dr. Gerald Steinberg in their reporting, the only such ban the AP office enforced. For this essential reading for anyone seeking to understand where media misreporting on Israel comes from, written by someone who witnessed the problems from the inside, CLICK HERE.  Some additional comment on Friedman’s revelation of an alleged ban on NGO Monitor comes from American law professor David Bernstein.

Next up is an Israeli report on how young Palestinian activists are using the sort of internet radicalisation techniques pioneered by ISIS to help fuel the recent spate of murderous attacks in Israel. Using social media, activists, many of them working for Hamas or other terror groups, developed “popular campaigns designed to sow hatred and convey the sense that the Al-Aqsa Mosque is under threat” to try and prompt lone wolf attacks, and this article from Yediot Ahronot newspaper discusses several concrete examples. It also goes on to discuss some efforts by right-wing fringe groups in Israel to make internet inroads using some ugly slogans. For this article in full, CLICK HERE. More on how Hamas is taking a leaf out of ISIS’s book in propaganda tactics from counter-terrorism expert Jonathan D. Halevi. 

Finally, this Update includes some analysis of the tragic death yesterday of Palestinian Minister Ziad Abu Ein following a scuffle with Israeli soldiers during a demonstration. Avi Issacharoff, Arab affairs reporter for the Times of Israel, stresses that while the Palestinians are claiming they are cutting off security cooperation with Israel in response, they are not actually doing so at this point, but a major escalation in hostilities will likely follow if they do. Issacharoff points outs that the facts at the moment suggest Abu Ein may simply have had a heart attack after being shoved by Israeli soldiers during the clash but the facts will not matter much now that the Palestinian Authority has decided to declare him a martyr and use his death as part of the current push to internationalise the conflict. For his full analysis, CLICK HERE.

Readers may also be interested in:

• More essential reading on the death of Ziad Abu Ein includes this eyewitness account from Israeli reporter Roy Sharon – who disputes claims Abu Ein was beaten or struck by a tear gas canister –  and this report that Palestinians prevented an Israeli medic from trying to help him after he collapsed.
  
• A good report on Hamas’ search for a new strategy, plus, an analysis of Egyptian President Sisi’s political war on Hamas.
• Both Elhannan Miller of the Times of Israel and strategic analyst Jonathan D. Halevi offer analysis which says PA President Mahmoud Abbas’ recent actions mean he has effectively closed the door on renewing peace talks with Israel, possibly permanently.
• In a major development in Israel’s election campaign, outgoing Justice Minister and former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni is joining forces with the Labor party led by Yitzhak Herzog, with an agreement to rotate the PM’s job if they win. Meanwhile, here’s another good profile of former Communications Minister and political wildcard Moshe Kahlon, who has just formed a new Party named “Kulanu” (meaning “all of us”).
  
• A good explanation of Israel’s alleged military strikes in Syria earlier this week from top security journalist Ron Ben Yishai.
• A good piece on Israel’s successful “pivot to Asia” and its blossoming relationships with both China and India.
• International Law expert Peter Berkowitz takes on a series of myths about Israel and the recent Gaza war. Plus, Israel launches eight criminal probes relating to incidents during that war following preliminary investigations. Finally, an Israeli thinktank’s detailed research on the casualty lists from that war now indicates that, contrary to widespread media claims, a majority of those killed on the Palestinian side were combatants, not civilians.
• How the Jewish exodus from Arab and other Middle Eastern countries, which Israel commemorated last month, may be key to Israeli-Arabn reconciliation.
• Some advice on foreign policy for the next US President from Bren Carlill, an analyst who previously worked both for AIJAC and the Department of Foreign Affairs.
• The US Centre for Disease Control strongly recommends circumcision for medical reasons. It even suggests that uncircumcised teens should be urged to consider having the procedure.
• Important allegations that the US has caught Iran cheating on its commitments under the interim nuclear agreement signed last year, but is not going public about these findings.
• Some examples from the many stories and comments now appearing at AIJAC’s daily “Fresh AIR” blog:
  • Lots of video of public and media appearances by recent AIJAC guest Dr. Jonathan Spyer. 
  • Sharyn Mittelman on evidence that Hamas is benefiting from the aid being sent to rebuild Gaza.
  • An AIJAC letter to the Fairfax papers on Israel’s reintroduction of home demolitions of terrorists as a deterrent.
  • Colin Rubenstein in the Adelaide Advertiser on the unfortunate state of nuclear negotiations with Iran.

 

---

 

What the Media Gets Wrong About Israel

Matti Friedman

The Atlantic, Nov 30 2014, 11:18 AM ET

 

During the Gaza war this summer, it became clear that one of the most important aspects of the media-saturated conflict between Jews and Arabs is also the least covered: the press itself. The Western press has become less an observer of this conflict than an actor in it, a role with consequences for the millions of people trying to comprehend current events, including policymakers who depend on journalistic accounts to understand a region where they consistently seek, and fail, to productively intervene.

An essay I wrote for Tablet on this topic in the aftermath of the war sparked intense interest. In the article, based on my experiences between 2006 and 2011 as a reporter and editor in the Jerusalem bureau of the Associated Press, one of the world’s largest news organizations, I pointed out the existence of a problem and discussed it in broad terms. Using staffing numbers, I illustrated the disproportionate media attention devoted to this conflict relative to other stories, and gave examples of editorial decisions that appeared to be driven by ideological considerations rather than journalistic ones. I suggested that the cumulative effect has been to create a grossly oversimplified story—a kind of modern morality play in which the Jews of Israel are displayed more than any other people on earth as examples of moral failure. This is a thought pattern with deep roots in Western civilization.

But how precisely does this thought pattern manifest itself in the day-to-day functioning, or malfunctioning, of the press corps? To answer this question, I want to explore the way Western press coverage is shaped by unique circumstances here in Israel and also by flaws affecting the media beyond the confines of this conflict. In doing so, I will draw on my own experiences and those of colleagues. These are obviously limited and yet, I believe, representative.

A rally in support of Islamic Jihad at Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem, in November 2013 (Courtesy of Matti Friedman)

I’ll begin with a simple illustration. The above photograph is of a student rally held last November at Al-Quds University, a mainstream Palestinian institution in East Jerusalem. The rally, in support of the armed fundamentalist group Islamic Jihad, featured actors playing dead Israeli soldiers and a row of masked men whose stiff-armed salute was returned by some of the hundreds of students in attendance. Similar rallies have been held periodically at the school.

I am not using this photograph to make the case that Palestinians are Nazis. Palestinians are not Nazis. They are, like Israelis, human beings dealing with a difficult present and past in ways that are occasionally ugly. I cite it now for a different reason.

Such an event at an institution like Al-Quds University, headed at the time by a well-known moderate professor, and with ties to sister institutions in America, indicates something about the winds now blowing in Palestinian society and across the Arab world. The rally is interesting for the visual connection it makes between radical Islam here and elsewhere in the region; a picture like this could help explain why many perfectly rational Israelis fear withdrawing their military from East Jerusalem or the West Bank, even if they loathe the occupation and wish to live in peace with their Palestinian neighbors. The images from the demonstration were, as photo editors like to say, “strong.” The rally had, in other words, all the necessary elements of a powerful news story.

The event took place a short drive from the homes and offices of the hundreds of international journalists who are based in Jerusalem. Journalists were aware of it: The sizable Jerusalem bureau of the Associated Press, for example, which can produce several stories on an average day, was in possession of photos of the event, including the one above, a day later. (The photographs were taken by someone I know who was on campus that day, and I sent them to the bureau myself.) Jerusalem editors decided that the images, and the rally, were not newsworthy, and the demonstration was only mentioned by the AP weeks later when the organization’s Boston bureau reported that Brandeis University had cut ties with Al-Quds over the incident. On the day that the AP decided to ignore the rally, November 6, 2013, the same bureau published a report about a pledge from the U.S. State Department to provide a minor funding increase for the Palestinian Authority; that was newsworthy. This is standard. To offer another illustration, the construction of 100 apartments in a Jewish settlement is always news; the smuggling of 100 rockets into Gaza by Hamas is, with rare exceptions, not news at all.

The pipeline of information from Israel is not just rusty and leaking, but intentionally plugged.

I mention these instances to demonstrate the kind of decisions made regularly in the bureaus of the foreign press covering Israel and the Palestinian territories, and to show the way in which the pipeline of information from this place is not just rusty and leaking, which is the usual state of affairs in the media, but intentionally plugged.

There are banal explanations for problems with coverage—reporters are in a hurry, editors are overloaded and distracted. These are realities, and can explain small errors and mishaps like ill-conceived headlines, which is why such details don’t typically strike me as important or worth much analysis. Some say inflations and omissions are the inevitable results of an honest attempt to cover events in a challenging and occasionally dangerous reporting environment, which is what I initially believed myself. A few years on the job changed my mind. Such excuses can’t explain why the same inflations and omissions recur again and again, why they are common to so many news outlets, and why the simple “Israel story” of the international media is so foreign to people aware of the historical and regional context of events in this place. The explanation lies elsewhere.

* * *

To make sense of most international journalism from Israel, it is important first to understand that the news tells us far less about Israel than about the people writing the news. Journalistic decisions are made by people who exist in a particular social milieu, one which, like most social groups, involves a certain uniformity of attitude, behavior, and even dress (the fashion these days, for those interested, is less vests with unnecessary pockets than shirts with unnecessary buttons). These people know each other, meet regularly, exchange information, and closely watch one another’s work. This helps explain why a reader looking at articles written by the half-dozen biggest news providers in the region on a particular day will find that though the pieces are composed and edited by completely different people and organizations, they tend to tell the same story.

The best insight into one of the key phenomena at play here comes not from a local reporter but from the journalist and author Philip Gourevitch. In Rwanda and elsewhere in Africa, Gourevitch wrote in 2010, he was struck by the ethical gray zone of ties between reporters and NGOs. “Too often the press represents humanitarians with unquestioning admiration,” he observed in The New Yorker. “Why not seek to keep them honest? Why should our coverage of them look so much like their own self-representation in fund-raising appeals? Why should we (as many photojournalists and print reporters do) work for humanitarian agencies between journalism jobs, helping them with their official reports and institutional appeals, in a way that we would never consider doing for corporations, political parties, or government agencies?”

This confusion is very much present in Israel and the Palestinian territories, where foreign activists are a notable feature of the landscape, and where international NGOs and numerous arms of the United Nations are among the most powerful players, wielding billions of dollars and employing many thousands of foreign and local employees. Their SUVs dominate sections of East Jerusalem and their expense accounts keep Ramallah afloat. They provide reporters with social circles, romantic partners, and alternative employment—a fact that is more important to reporters now than it has ever been, given the disintegration of many newspapers and the shoestring nature of their Internet successors.

In my time in the press corps, I learned that our relationship with these groups was not journalistic. My colleagues and I did not, that is, seek to analyze or criticize them. For many foreign journalists, these were not targets but sources and friends—fellow members, in a sense, of an informal alliance. This alliance consists of activists and international staffers from the UN and the NGOs; the Western diplomatic corps, particularly in East Jerusalem; and foreign reporters. (There is also a local component, consisting of a small number of Israeli human-rights activists who are themselves largely funded by European governments, and Palestinian staffers from the Palestinian Authority, the NGOs, and the UN.) Mingling occurs at places like the lovely Oriental courtyard of the American Colony hotel in East Jerusalem, or at parties held at the British Consulate’s rooftop pool. The dominant characteristic of nearly all of these people is their transience. They arrive from somewhere, spend a while living in a peculiar subculture of expatriates, and then move on.

The uglier aspects of Palestinian society are untouchable because they would disrupt the “Israel story,” which is a story of Jewish moral failure.

In these circles, in my experience, a distaste for Israel has come to be something between an acceptable prejudice and a prerequisite for entry. I don’t mean a critical approach to Israeli policies or to the ham-fisted government currently in charge in this country, but a belief that to some extent the Jews of Israel are a symbol of the world’s ills, particularly those connected to nationalism, militarism, colonialism, and racism—an idea quickly becoming one of the central elements of the “progressive” Western zeitgeist, spreading from the European left to American college campuses and intellectuals, including journalists. In this social group, this sentiment is translated into editorial decisions made by individual reporters and editors covering Israel, and this, in turn, gives such thinking the means of mass self-replication.  

* * *

Anyone who has traveled abroad understands that arriving in a new country is daunting, and it is far more so when you are expected to show immediate expertise. I experienced this myself in 2008, when the AP sent me to cover the Russian invasion of Georgia and I found myself 24 hours later riding in a convoy of Russian military vehicles. I had to admit that not only did I not know Georgian, Russian, or any of the relevant history, but I did not know which way was north, and generally had no business being there. For a reporter in a situation like the one I just described, the solution is to stay close to more knowledgeable colleagues and hew to the common wisdom.

Many freshly arrived reporters in Israel, similarly adrift in a new country, undergo a rapid socialization in the circles I mentioned. This provides them not only with sources and friendships but with a ready-made framework for their reporting—the tools to distill and warp complex events into a simple narrative in which there is a bad guy who doesn’t want peace and a good guy who does. This is the “Israel story,” and it has the advantage of being an easy story to report. Everyone here answers their cell phone, and everyone knows what to say. You can put your kids in good schools and dine at good restaurants. It’s fine if you’re gay. Your chances of being beheaded on YouTube are slim. Nearly all of the information you need—that is, in most cases, information critical of Israel—is not only easily accessible but has already been reported for you by Israeli journalists or compiled by NGOs. You can claim to be speaking truth to power, having selected the only “power” in the area that poses no threat to your safety.

Many foreign journalists have come to see themselves as part of this world of international organizations, and specifically as the media arm of this world. They have decided not just to describe and explain, which is hard enough, and important enough, but to “help.” And that’s where reporters get into trouble, because “helping” is always a murky, subjective, and political enterprise, made more difficult if you are unfamiliar with the relevant languages and history.

Confusion over the role of the press explains one of the strangest aspects of coverage here—namely, that while international organizations are among the most powerful actors in the Israel story, they are almost never reported on. Are they bloated, ineffective, or corrupt? Are they helping, or hurting? We don’t know, because these groups are to be quoted, not covered. Journalists cross from places like the BBC to organizations like Oxfam and back. The current spokesman at the UN agency for Palestinian refugees in Gaza, for example, is a former BBC man. A Palestinian woman who participated in protests against Israel and tweeted furiously about Israel a few years ago served at the same time as a spokesperson for a UN office, and was close friends with a few reporters I know. And so forth.

International organizations in the Palestinian territories have largely assumed a role of advocacy on behalf of the Palestinians and against Israel, and much of the press has allowed this political role to supplant its journalistic function. This dynamic explains the thinking behind editorial choices that are otherwise difficult to grasp, like the example I gave in my first essay about the suppression by the AP’s Jerusalem bureau of a report about an Israeli peace offer to the Palestinians in 2008, or the decision to ignore the rally at Al-Quds University, or the idea that Hamas’s development of extensive armament works in Gaza in recent years was not worth serious coverage despite objectively being one of the most important storylines demanding reporters’ attention.

As usual, Orwell got there first. Here is his description from 1946 of writers of communist and “fellow-traveler” journalism: “The argument that to tell the truth would be ‘inopportune’ or would ‘play into the hands of’ somebody or other is felt to be unanswerable, and few people are bothered by the prospect that the lies which they condone will get out of the newspapers and into the history books.” The stories I mentioned would be “inopportune” for the Palestinians, and would “play into the hands” of the Israelis. And so, in the judgment of the press corps, they generally aren’t news.

In the aftermath of the three-week Gaza war of 2008-2009, not yet quite understanding the way things work, I spent a week or so writing a story about NGOs like Human Rights Watch, whose work on Israel had just been subject to an unusual public lashing in The New York Times by its own founder, Robert Bernstein. (The Middle East, he wrote, “is populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records. Yet in recent years Human Rights Watch has written far more condemnations of Israel for violations of international law than of any other country in the region.”) My article was gentle, all things considered, beginning like this:

JERUSALEM (AP) _ The prickly relationship between Israel and its critics in human rights organizations has escalated into an unprecedented war of words as the fallout from Israel’s Gaza offensive persists ten months after the fighting ended.

Editors killed the story.

Around this time, a Jerusalem-based group called NGO Monitor was battling the international organizations condemning Israel after the Gaza conflict, and though the group was very much a pro-Israel outfit and by no means an objective observer, it could have offered some partisan counterpoint in our articles to charges by NGOs that Israel had committed “war crimes.” But the bureau’s explicit orders to reporters were to never quote the group or its director, an American-raised professor named Gerald Steinberg.* In my time as an AP writer moving through the local conflict, with its myriad lunatics, bigots, and killers, the only person I ever saw subjected to an interview ban was this professor.

When the UN released its controversial Goldstone report on the Gaza fighting, we at the bureau trumpeted its findings in dozens of articles, though there was discussion even at the time of the report’s failure to prove its central charge: that Israel had killed civilians on purpose. (The director of Israel’s premier human-rights group, B’Tselem, who was critical of the Israeli operation, told me at the time that this claim was “a reach given the facts,” an evaluation that was eventually seconded by the report’s author. “If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document,” Richard Goldstone wrote in The Washington Post in April 2011.) We understood that our job was not to look critically at the UN report, or any such document, but to publicize it.

Decisions like these are hard to fathom if you believe the foreign press corps’ role is to explain a complicated story to people far away. But they make sense if you understand that journalists covering Israel and the Palestinian territories often don’t see their role that way. The radio and print journalist Mark Lavie, who has reported from the region since 1972, was a colleague of mine at the AP, where he was an editor in the Jerusalem bureau and then in Cairo until his retirement last year. (It was Lavie who first learned of the Israeli peace offer of late 2008, and was ordered by his superiors to ignore the story.) An Indiana-born Israeli of moderate politics, he had a long run in journalism that included several wars and the first Palestinian intifada, and found little reason to complain about the functioning of the media.

But things changed in earnest in 2000, with the collapse of peace efforts and the outbreak of the Second Intifada. Israel accepted President Bill Clinton’s peace framework that fall and the Palestinians rejected it, as Clinton made clear. Nevertheless, Lavie recently told me, the bureau’s editorial line was still that the conflict was Israel’s fault, and the Palestinians and the Arab world were blameless. By the end of Lavie’s career, he was editing Israel copy on the AP’s Middle East regional desk in Cairo, trying to restore balance and context to stories he thought had little connection to reality. In his words, he had gone from seeing himself as a proud member of the international press corps to “the Jew-boy with his finger in the dike.” He wrote a book, Broken Spring, about his front-row view of the Middle East’s descent into chaos, and retired disillusioned and angry.

Reporters have decided not just to describe and explain, but to “help.” And that’s where they get into trouble.

I have tended to see the specific failings that we both encountered at the AP as symptoms of a general thought pattern in the press, but Lavie takes a more forceful position, viewing the influential American news organization as one of the primary authors of this thought pattern. (In a statement, AP spokesman Paul Colford dismissed my criticism as “distortions, half-truths and inaccuracies,” and denied that AP coverage is biased against Israel.) This is not just because many thousands of media outlets use AP material directly, but also because when journalists arrive in their offices in the morning, the first thing many of them do is check the AP wire (or, these days, scroll through it in their Twitter feed). The AP is like Ringo Starr, thumping away at the back of the stage: there might be flashier performers in front, and you might not always notice him, but when Ringo’s off, everyone’s off.

Lavie believes that in the last years of his career, the AP’s Israel operation drifted from its traditional role of careful explanation toward a kind of political activism that both contributed to and fed off growing hostility to Israel worldwide. “The AP is extremely important, and when the AP turned, it turned a lot of the world with it,” Lavie said. “That’s when it became harder for any professional journalist to work here, Jewish or not. I reject the idea that my dissatisfaction had to do with being Jewish or Israeli. It had to do with being a journalist.”

* * *

In describing the realities of combat in the Second World War, the American critic Paul Fussell wrote, the press was censored and censored itself to such an extent that “for almost six years a large slice of actuality—perhaps one-quarter to one-half of it—was declared off-limits, and the sanitized and euphemized remainder was presented as the whole.” During the same war, American journalists (chiefly from Henry Luce’s magazines) were engaged in what Fussell called the “Great China Hoax”—years of skewed reporting designed to portray the venal regime of Chiang Kai-shek as an admirable Western ally against Japan. Chiang was featured six times on the cover of Time, and his government’s corruption and dysfunction were carefully ignored. One Marine stationed in China was so disillusioned by the chasm between what he saw and what he read that upon his discharge, he said, “I switched to Newsweek.”

Journalistic hallucinations, in other words, have a precedent. They tend to occur, as in the case of the Great China Hoax, when reporters are not granted the freedom to write what they see but are rather expected to maintain a “story” that follows predictable lines. For the international press, the uglier characteristics of Palestinian politics and society are mostly untouchable because they would disrupt the Israel story, which is a story of Jewish moral failure.

Most consumers of the Israel story don’t understand how the story is manufactured. But Hamas does. Since assuming power in Gaza in 2007, the Islamic Resistance Movement has come to understand that many reporters are committed to a narrative wherein Israelis are oppressors and Palestinians passive victims with reasonable goals, and are uninterested in contradictory information. Recognizing this, certain Hamas spokesmen have taken to confiding to Western journalists, including some I know personally, that the group is in fact a secretly pragmatic outfit with bellicose rhetoric, and journalists—eager to believe the confession, and sometimes unwilling to credit locals with the smarts necessary to deceive them—have taken it as a scoop instead of as spin.

During my time at the AP, we helped Hamas get this point across with a school of reporting that might be classified as “Surprising Signs of Moderation” (a direct precursor to the “Muslim Brotherhood Is Actually Liberal” school that enjoyed a brief vogue in Egypt). In one of my favorite stories, “More Tolerant Hamas” (December 11, 2011), reporters quoted a Hamas spokesman informing readers that the movement’s policy was that “we are not going to dictate anything to anyone,” and another Hamas leader saying the movement had “learned it needs to be more tolerant of others.” Around the same time, I was informed by the bureau’s senior editors that our Palestinian reporter in Gaza couldn’t possibly provide critical coverage of Hamas because doing so would put him in danger.

Hamas is aided in its manipulation of the media by the old reportorial belief, a kind of reflex, according to which reporters shouldn’t mention the existence of reporters. In a conflict like ours, this ends up requiring considerable exertions: So many photographers cover protests in Israel and the Palestinian territories, for example, that one of the challenges for anyone taking pictures is keeping colleagues out of the frame. That the other photographers are as important to the story as Palestinian protesters or Israeli soldiers—this does not seem to be considered.

In Gaza, this goes from being a curious detail of press psychology to a major deficiency. Hamas’s strategy is to provoke a response from Israel by attacking from behind the cover of Palestinian civilians, thus drawing Israeli strikes that kill those civilians, and then to have the casualties filmed by one of the world’s largest press contingents, with the understanding that the resulting outrage abroad will blunt Israel’s response. This is a ruthless strategy, and an effective one. It is predicated on the cooperation of journalists. One of the reasons it works is because of the reflex I mentioned. If you report that Hamas has a strategy based on co-opting the media, this raises several difficult questions, like, What exactly is the relationship between the media and Hamas? And has this relationship corrupted the media? It is easier just to leave the other photographers out of the frame and let the picture tell the story: Here are dead people, and Israel killed them.

In previous rounds of Gaza fighting, Hamas learned that international coverage from the territory could be molded to its needs, a lesson it would implement in this summer’s war. Most of the press work in Gaza is done by local fixers, translators, and reporters, people who would understandably not dare cross Hamas, making it only rarely necessary for the group to threaten a Westerner. The organization’s armed forces could be made to disappear. The press could be trusted to play its role in the Hamas script, instead of reporting that there was such a script. Hamas strategy did not exist, according to Hamas—or, as reporters would say, was “not the story.” There was no Hamas charter blaming Jews for centuries of perfidy, or calling for their murder; this was not the story. The rockets falling on Israeli cities were quite harmless; they were not the story either.

It’s easier to leave the other photographers out of the frame and let the picture tell the story: Here are dead people, and Israel killed them.

Hamas understood that journalists would not only accept as fact the Hamas-reported civilian death toll—relayed through the UN or through something called the “Gaza Health Ministry,” an office controlled by Hamas—but would make those numbers the center of coverage. Hamas understood that reporters could be intimidated when necessary and that they would not report the intimidation; Western news organizations tend to see no ethical imperative to inform readers of the restrictions shaping their coverage in repressive states or other dangerous areas. In the war’s aftermath, the NGO-UN-media alliance could be depended upon to unleash the organs of the international community on Israel, and to leave the jihadist group alone.

When Hamas’s leaders surveyed their assets before this summer’s round of fighting, they knew that among those assets was the international press. The AP staff in Gaza City would witness a rocket launch right beside their office, endangering reporters and other civilians nearby—and the AP wouldn’t report it, not even in AP articles about Israeli claims that Hamas was launching rockets from residential areas. (This happened.) Hamas fighters would burst into the AP’s Gaza bureau and threaten the staff—and the AP wouldn’t report it. (This also happened.) Cameramen waiting outside Shifa Hospital in Gaza City would film the arrival of civilian casualties and then, at a signal from an official, turn off their cameras when wounded and dead fighters came in, helping Hamas maintain the illusion that only civilians were dying. (This too happened; the information comes from multiple sources with firsthand knowledge of these incidents.)

Colford, the AP spokesman, confirmed that armed militants entered the AP’s Gaza office in the early days of the war to complain about a photo showing the location of a rocket launch, though he said that Hamas claimed that the men “did not represent the group.” The AP “does not report many interactions with militias, armies, thugs or governments,” he wrote. “These incidents are part of the challenge of getting out the news—and not themselves news.”

This summer, with Yazidis, Christians, and Kurds falling back before the forces of radical Islam not far away from here, this ideology’s local franchise launched its latest war against the last thriving minority in the Middle East. The Western press corps showed up en masse to cover it. This conflict included rocket barrages across Israel and was deliberately fought from behind Palestinian civilians, many of whom died as a result. Dulled by years of the “Israel story” and inured to its routine omissions, confused about the role they are meant to play, and co-opted by Hamas, reporters described this war as an Israeli onslaught against innocent people. By doing so, this group of intelligent and generally well-meaning professionals ceased to be reliable observers and became instead an amplifier for the propaganda of one of the most intolerant and aggressive forces on earth. And that, as they say, is the story.

Matti Friedman is an Israeli-Canadian reporter based in Jerusalem and the author of The Aleppo Codex.

Back to Top
————————————————————————

Palestinian terrorists have gone online

With little oversight, Palestinian extremists are recruiting online and publishing unfettered propaganda; the effects are already been felt on the ground in the form of a spate of recent ‘lone wolf’ terror attacks.

Nevo Ziv

Yediot Ahronot, 12.04.14

Everyone’s looking for the third intifada out on the streets, but it’s not only there; it has active and threatening offshoots on the Internet too.

The younger generation of Palestinians has learned well from Islamic State’s staggering success when it comes to sowing the seeds of fear, and has moved the focus of its resistance to the social networks. The blogger has joined forces with the muezzin; the talkbackers are in cahoots with the stone-throwers; and the “share” buttons are working alongside the incitement leaflets.

The social network is the new mosque, and there’s no need to remove one’s shoes when entering; there are Border Police and there’s no tear gas; and the police don’t impose an age restriction on worshipers.

In recent months, this protected expanse has allowed the Palestinians to establish a new terrorist infrastructure. Instead of recruiting activists on the ground and worrying about them getting picked up on the radar of the Shin Bet security service, they’ve moved over to online recruitment via popular campaigns designed to sow hatred and covey the sense that the Al-Aqsa Mosque is under threat – in the hope of prompting a terror mission carried out by a lone attacker, one who is not affiliated with any terrorist organization.

 

Such was the case with the recent terror attacks in Jerusalem; and such was the case, too, with the death of the construction worker in Petah Tikva in September. We’re no longer dealing with a wave of religious suicide attackers who are waiting to be received by 72 virgins. The new martyrs fall on the network, and get flooded with Likes.

Orit Perlov, a social media analyst at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) who monitors and analyzes the discourse on the social networks in Arab states, says that the Palestinian Internet is currently running a number of incitement campaigns at the same time.

“One of the leading campaigns calls for running down Jews with vehicles,” Perlov says. “It uses the word, ‘Idaas,’ which is ‘run down’ in Arabic, alongside a picture of a car running down ultra-Orthodox Jews. Immediately after the shooting of Yehuda Glick, the networks began a more focused campaign that called for running down Knesset members who have encouraged pilgrimages to the Temple Mount.

“And there’s also the popular ‘Atan’ campaign, which simply gives the instruction, ‘Stab;’ and there’s the ‘Atbah’ – ‘Slaughter’ – campaign, in which you see a masked Palestinian youth beheading someone. And there are Palestinians who are replacing their Twitter profile picture with a picture of an ax. This doesn’t mean that these people are going to go out tomorrow and take action, but that they identify with the notion and promote it.”

Who posts this kind of material? Who’s behind it?

“Individuals in the West Bank and East Jerusalem who understand the psychology of the Net, who know what works.”

Gilad Shiloach, a network analyst who works at the American news website, Vocativ, which monitors social network activity, says that Palestinian Web users respond quickly to developments on the ground. Such was the case, for example, in the affair of the dead Egged bus driver, Yusuf al-Ramouni, who Israel determined had committed suicide, whereas his family claims he was murdered.

“Shortly after he was found hanged, activists from East Jerusalem sent out a Tweet with the heading, ‘Yusuf was strangled,'” Shiloach relates. “Within a few hours, we were seeing it in the thousands. Graphic designers used Photoshop to prepare a beautiful design of Yusuf on the backdrop of the Temple Mount, with slogans like ‘The Jews are sullying Al-Aqsa.’ This is how a blood libel spreads on the social networks; and this happened two days before the terror attack at the synagogue in Har Nof.”

Prof. Yair Amichai-Hamburger, the director of the Research Center for Internet Psychology at the Interdisciplinary Center’s School of Communication in Herzliya, explains that the discourse on the Internet functions as a breeding ground for extremists.

“The Internet group is actually feeding your mind with its messages all the time, and then there’s a kind of escalation,” he says. “The group becomes a hotbed for an idea of a certain nature, and the individuals take it to the extreme in order to play a significant part in it. For the next terrorist, the Internet creates a media ghetto of sorts. He sees what is happening on the social networks, and it becomes his reality.”

What does he experience there?

“The propaganda is absolute. We are perceived there as Satan’s earthly representatives, who can take on the form of a Border Policeman, a 25-year-old woman or a baby of a few months. For him, every Jew represents a part of the threatening mechanism.

“Once the message has seeped in, the sense of solidarity becomes absolute, and the attacker’s personal existence becomes meaningless. He turns into the long arm of Islam. This gives rise to a new profile of a terrorist, one who perhaps just a few days earlier had no intentions of driving his car into a group of soldiers or people at a train station, but ends up saying to hell with the world.”

 

With its pants down

For many in Israel, up until a month or so ago, Yehuda Glick was an unknown figure; but he’s been a target on the Facebook pages of Palestinian activists for the past two years. “You’ll be dead soon,” said the caption alongside his picture on pages that dealt with visits by Jews to the Temple Mount. 

Glick complained, but nothing was done; and one Internet surfer who internalized the message eventually shot him. Today, the social networks are carrying calls for another attempt on the life of the right-wing activist.

Glick now has bodyguards, and the same goes for others associated with efforts to visit the Temple Mount and who also star on the social networks; but the big question is can the Shin Bet foil the plans of the next terrorist – a terrorist who doesn’t yet know he is one.

“The defense establishment has been caught unawares by the new kind of attacker that has emerged; it’s been caught with its pants down,” says Prof. Amichai-Hamburger. “The thought that a regular man with a family and children might suddenly carry out an attack doesn’t fit its profile.”

The Palestinian masses aren’t the only ones taking advantage of this security vacuum; the terror organizations, too, are entering the fray. “These organizations are using the networks to try in fact to find those who do not necessarily fit the classic profile – the introverted attacker, an individual on the margins of society,” Prof. Amichai-Hamburger continues. “And it could be just about anyone from among this very large group. That’s the scary thing.”

Daniel Cohen, an expert in cyber terrorism at the INSS, names Hamas as one of these organizations. “The organization is trying to join the masses and to encourage the lone perpetrator by means of incitement campaigns,” Cohen says.

“We’re talking about popular terror attacks of sorts, ones for which the organization doesn’t have to claim responsibility and have less chance of being thwarted. Once you used to be able to monitor the phone calls of activists and try to identify the individual who would be going out to perpetrate an attack; now, however, the activity has moved to the Net and is directed at the masses, and you have no way of knowing which one it will be.”

According to social media analyst Perlov, “Today, all the security mechanisms have software that monitors content on the Net, so you can see if there is a mass of activity and how many people support the campaign. But there is still no computer program that can analyze sentiment – in other words, the intentions of a specific person. Furthermore, the two terrorists at the synagogue, for example, were not key figures who were active on the Net. People like that won’t make an impression on the security mechanism’s that are monitoring the Internet activity; they’re small fry.”

Despite the fact that the defense establishment has little chance of laying its hands on the lone terrorist, it still sees value in monitoring the social media sites – digging through the Facebook statuses and Twitter messages can at least offer an understanding of the mood among the Palestinians in the territories.

“There’s something called ‘public intelligence’ – intelligence that is gathered with the purpose of studying the public,” explains an Israel Defense Forces intelligence officer. “The bottom line is that we want to have our finger on the pulse of the Palestinian public; and in the age of the social media networks, you can’t not add this piece of the puzzle to the picture. 

“It has great value because it shows which way the wind is blowing among the public and allows you to know what pains it. ‘How is the issue reflected on the Palestinian social media sites’ is a question that will always be asked in the relevant forums. Sometimes, by the way, it’ll be the first question.”

While the IDF merely monitors the Palestinian social media sites without actually taking any action against the incitement campaigns and the like, the Palestinian Authority adopts a more active approach, shutting down Facebook pages and conducting arrests when efforts are made to organize and affect change on the ground.

 “During Operation Protective Edge, for example, one of the campaigns that went viral called for the assassination of Mahmoud Abbas,” Perlov says. “He was dubbed “the Zionists’ dog,’ ‘a traitor’ and ‘a collaborator.'”

With attorney approval

Just in case you were wondering, Israelis are no saints either. “Only live ammunition saves lives,” “Jews, revenge,” “Arabs are murdering you,” “Enemies aren’t given jobs” – these are just a few examples from numerous incitement campaigns that have appeared in recent months on the social network sites in Israel.

The Jewish public has not sat by idly and has also reached the Internet boiling point. It happened this week with regard to the deliberations on the proposed Nationality Law, after the attacks in Jerusalem, during the 50 days of Protective Edge, and at the time of the search for the three teenagers who were abducted in Gush Etzion.

And while the Israeli public isn’t swept along to the same extent as the Palestinian public, we are seeing racist and provocative campaigns on the part of right-wing groups, threats against the left, and the undermining of fundamental values of a democratic state. It turns out that this open expanse is actually closing the most mouths.

“If radical right-wing groups were once on the margins of the margins of the Israeli public, hidden deep on the Net, the opinions of such organizations today have become legitimate,” Shiloach says.

“Their presence on the social networks has grown at least four to fivefold in relation to the period prior to the abduction of the boys. It was very noticeable during the war; we saw the emergence of groups such as ‘I’m also in favor of death to terrorists’ or ‘I also support killing the Arabs of Israel.'”

 

One of the major sources of the fire that has spread through the Israeli social media networks is the extreme right organization, Lehava. Its principal agenda is to prevent marriages between Jewish women and Arabs; but in the wake of the recent terror attacks, it has embarked on a new campaign against the employment of Arabs. “Don’t hire enemies,” Benzi Gopstein, head of the organization, corrects me. “Saying ‘Arabs’ is racism; there are Arabs who aren’t enemies and they can be employed.”

In the framework of the campaign, Lehava posted an announcement with pictures from terror attacks under the slogan, “Fire tomorrow’s terrorist today,” and the organization has also distributed stickers bearing the slogan, “Firing the enemies.”

Gopstein says they block left-wingers who curse them. “So most of the comments are positive, and some things get 80-90 thousand views,” he says. “Many stores are firing their workers thanks to this. Sometimes they want us to publicize them, but not on Facebook, so as not to face legal action, so it gets around on WhatsApp. I have 60 WhatsApp groups. And there’s Instagram too.” 

Facebook has shut down a number of your pages because of content you have posted.

“We had 40,000 members on the Lehava page; we’re now at 23,000 and I assume this page will also be closed down in the next week or two,” Gopstein says. “We’ll open a new one. The more they torture us, the bigger we will grow.

“There are many people who sit on our page and complain about a specific picture and then Facebook takes us down. I’ve only been questioned about one of my posts: There was a story about Naftali Bennett saying he was in favor of bringing Arab into the hi-tech world, and I wrote that I’m in favor of sending them into the next world. But it was all in humor.”

Humor?

“Like you see on comedy shows. That’s what I was questioned about. I’m at the police once a week or two; we have talks; but the only connection to Facebook was about the Bennett post. I’d prefer to see them entering the world to come – not that I would put them there. Freedom of expression is very infuriating, but sometimes stands on our side. We are very careful, and every post I put up is checked by a lawyer.”

Back to Top
————————————————————————

After top official’s death, PA meeting will determine how bad things get

Back to Top