Media Too Friendly To Israel During Nakba?
One of my regular jobs is to analyze how well the mainstream media "gets" religion news. You may have noticed that the media struggles with reporting on religion news in the same way it struggles with reporting on science or statistics. These are not areas of reporter expertise, usually -- and it shows.
I came across this essay by attorney Dalia Hashad at a USC web site devoted to similar analysis of religion reporting. Hashad first explains the protests in the Middle East in the past few days. Protests over, she says, "the forced seizure and occupation of Palestinian land."
Her first bit of media criticism is her view that Western journalists describe Nakba as "Palestinian reaction to the creation of the state of Israel, recasting the observance as an attack against Israel rather than a reaction to a violent act of ethnic cleansing." Here's the next bit:
This past weekend, some of the protesters at the Israeli frontiers with Syria, Lebanon and Gaza crossed border fences, whereupon Israel troops opened fire. Twelve people were killed and hundreds injured, all of them Palestinians. And yet, almost universally, news media described the Nakba-related events in terms that suggest the Israeli response was proportional to the Palestinian threat. From CNN, the New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor to the San Francisco Chronicle and Salon.com, outlets depicted the events as "clashes." By contrast, when the Syrian government used overwhelming force to suppress dissent, the most common descriptor employed was "crack-down." Journalists, of all people, should know that words matter. Thus they should acknowledge that this difference in word-choice makes a difference.
Her last bit of criticism is that these Palestinian clashes aren't included as part of the Arab Spring. She praises those journalists, including some at NBC and the Christian Science Monitor, who are framing this year's Nakba events as part of the Arab Spring.
The web site on which this essay appears is well regarded by journalists. I'm curious what you think about the criticisms and what you thought about media coverage of Nakba.
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Re: Media Too Friendly To Israel During Nakba?
Mollie, here's a different take from the British journalist Melanie Phillips. She explains that Nakba Day is an annual expression of collective Arab outrage that the state of Israel was not snuffed out at birth. Hashad clearly shares that outrage. Her decorous indignation, for all its high tone, precisely coincides with the thinking of Hamas.
Edited on May 17, 2011 at 8:22amMay '10
Re: Media Too Friendly To Israel During Nakba?
Even the NY Post, the Nation's Newspaper of Record, ran the headline "Israel Opens Fire on Palestinian Protesters". This was their description of a Syrian led border incursion.
Um, no, the coverage was not pro-Israel, to the shame of the press.
Feb '11
Re: Media Too Friendly To Israel During Nakba?
Keeping up with all this media rubbish is exhausting. Helps understand what everyone calls the incompetence of the Israeli hasbara.
(Another exhausting thing is that Ricichet asks me to sign in several times a day, even though it is almost always open.)
Re: Media Too Friendly To Israel During Nakba?
Hashad's piece is strikingly disingenuous. She says self-righteously that "Journalists, of all people, should know that words matter," then twists words to suit her purposes. She says 12 people died on Nakba Day, but doesn't mention that some of them were killed by the Lebanese Army. She draws a ridiculous analogy between the Syrian regime's wholesale slaughter of its own civilians with Israel's almost absurdly restrained response to a multi-front invasion by a hostile enemy, then has the temerity to castigate those who find the analogy problematic.
She demands that the world see Nakba Day as the Palestinians' entrance into the Arab Spring, but completely ignores the violently suppressed attempts by the Palestinians of Gaza to really enter the Arab Spring by protesting Hamas's catastrophic leadership. She says "the common elements of a people seeking dignity, human rights and freedom from oppression should tie the Palestinian cause to similar popular uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and elsewhere." Fair enough -- but if she really cared about the Palestinians, her ire would be roused against their real oppressors. Her cause is not their suffering. It's the offensiveness of the existence of the Jewish state.
Re: Media Too Friendly To Israel During Nakba?
The establishment of the state of Israel was less an example of ethnic cleansing than an example of the prevention of ethnic cleansing. My heart goes out to the Arabs who fled when the fighting began and even more to those who were deliberately driven out. They really did suffer a catastrophe. But the fighting began when the Arab states attacked the new-born state of Israel with ethnic cleansing in mind. The foundation of Israel may have been the occasion on which the Arab-speaking people of the region suffered a catastrophe, but that catastrophe was, in fact, inflicted on them by the governments that purported to be looking after their interests.
Jul '10
Re: Media Too Friendly To Israel During Nakba?
Oct '10
Re: Media Too Friendly To Israel During Nakba?
Is anyone ever struck by how similar anti-Semitism and anti-Armenian sentiment is? The idea that Palestinian terrorists have legitimate grounds to act like children and be excused for their actions so many decades after a bilateral ethnic cleansing event is absurd.
I swear, the Western elite is so gullible to the victim/oppressor framework. The victims can oppress and exploit each others to their heart's content, so long as the oppressors get whats coming to them (this happens to blacks too).
It is an inherently imperialistic attitude, that historical wrongs forever dehumanizes people down through the generations; and that the true humans must excuse the actions of the child-like inferior peoples.
Edited on May 17, 2011 at 3:00pmMar '11
Re: Media Too Friendly To Israel During Nakba?
No one speaks of the resettlement of a similar number of Jews from Muslim countries as a “catastrophe” because it wasn’t. They were taken in and are well-assimilated by their Ashkenazi-Israeli cousins. In some cases, as with many Ethiopian Jews, their freedom had to be bought and paid for with ransom money.
The “catastrophe” for the Palestinians is that 63 years later so many remain refugees instead of well-assimilated citizens of neighboring countries. Palestinians want the West Bank and Gaza Judenfrei while Palestinians citizens of Israel constitute one-fifth of the population, hold government office and are afforded the rights of citizenship consistent with Israel’s obvious security needs.
There are catastrophes aplenty in the Middle East, but the reclamation of a sliver of the Jewish homeland by an ancient and still endangered people is not one of them.
Edited on May 17, 2011 at 3:29pm