The unchallenged abscess in the Middle East: Netanyahu popularity soars
The Media’s Pro-Israel Bias: Why Does TV News Look Like a Netanyahu Ad?
CBS’s Bob Schieffer: A notorious media prostitute, over the years covered with “professional awards.”
[H]ere are a few questions you won’t hear asked of the parade of Israeli officials crossing US television screens during the current crisis in Gaza:
- What would you do if a foreign country was occupying your land?
- What does it mean that Israeli cabinet ministers deny Palestine’s right to exist?
- What should we make of a prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, who as opposition leader in the 1990s was found addressing rallies under a banner reading “Death to Arabs”?
These are contentious questions, to be sure, and with complicated answers. But they are relevant to understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today. They also parallel the issues routinely raised by American journalists with Palestinian officials, pressing to consider how the US would react if it were under rocket fire from Mexico, to explain why Hamas won’t recognise Israel and to repudiate Palestinian anti-Semitism.
But it’s a feature of much mainstream journalism in the US, not just an issue of coverage during the last three weeks of the Gaza crisis, that while one set of questions gets asked all the time, the other is heard hardly at all.
In years of reporting from and about Israel, I’ve followed the frequently robust debate in its press about whether Netanyahu really wants a peace deal, about the growing power of right-wing members inside the Israeli cabinet opposed to a Palestinian state, about the creeping air of permanence to the occupation.
So it has been all the more striking to discover a far narrower discourse in Washington and the notoriously pro-Israel mainstream media in the US at a time when difficult questions are more important than ever. John Kerry, the US secretary of state, and a crop of foreign leaders have ratcheted up warnings that the door for the two-state solution is closing, in no small part because of Israel’s actions. But still the difficult questions go unasked.
Take Netanyahu’s appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. The host, Bob Schieffer, permitted the Israeli leader to make a lengthy case for his military’s ground attack, guiding him along with one sympathetic question after another. Finally, after describing Netanyahu’s position as “very understandable”, Schieffer asked about dead Palestinian civilians – but only to wonder if they presented a public relations problem in “the battle for world opinion”.
As if Schieffer’s position wasn’t already blindingly clear, he went on to quote former prime minister Golda Meir’s line that Israelis can never forgive Arabs “for forcing us to kill their children”.
As way of balance, CBS followed with a short clip of an interview by Charlie Rose with the Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, who was pressed on his willingness to recognise Israel.
There has been fine reporting from on the ground in Gaza by courageous American journalists who have laid bare the price being paid by ordinary Palestinians. That, in turn, has prompted some stiff questioning in American TV studios of Israeli officials about the scale of civilian deaths and shelling of schools and hospitals. Some pro-Israel American pundits admit to have becoming “less pro-Israel”.
But the broader framework of how the conflict is presented in the US is more troubling.
Former MSNBC contributor Rula Jebreal drew widespread attention to the media divide when she condemned NBC News on air, on MSNBC, for pulling its only Arab-American correspondent, Ayman Mohyeldin, out of Gaza, only to reinstate him because of the backlash. “We are disgustingly biased on this issue,” she said.
She has a point.
An analysis by Punditfact of CNN coverage during the first two weeks of the latest Gaza crisis showed that appearances by Israeli officials outnumbered Palestinian officials by more than four-to-one. There were substantially more interviews with what Punditfact called Palestinian “laymen”, but they included the relatives of a Palestinian-American beaten by Israeli soldiers that offered little insight into the bigger picture.
All appearances by Palestinian officials were outnumbered by interviews with a single man: Israel’s former ambassador to the US, Michael Oren,whom CNN hired as a Middle East analyst earlier this year. The network presents Oren as a kind of neutral interpreter, when just a few months ago he was vigorously defending Israel on behalf of Netanyahu’s government. His limited value as an analyst was swiftly exposed by his assertion that Hamas was trying to get Israel to kill as many Palestinian children as possible as part of a media strategy.
The number of guests booked or sources quoted has never been balanced on this issue in the mainstream American press, but more important is the nature of interviews and the broader coverage when Israel and Palestine are not thrust into the news by a fresh surge in violence.
At one extreme is Fox News, where last week Sean Hannity shouted down a Palestinian guest, Yousef Munayyer, because he would not condemn Hamas as a terrorist organisation, then proceeded to terminate the interview.
Munayyer, director of the Jerusalem Fund in Washington, has appeared repeatedly on CNN where he is treated more respectfully. But he told me he is frequently brought on to answer accusations from the Israeli side, rather than explain the Palestinian perspective in the way that Israeli officials and commentators are allowed to lay out their case.
“Most of the time I go on it is to be put on the defensive, in response to a conversation that’s framed around Israel’s security concerns first and foremost,” Munayyer said.
Palestinians should face difficult questions about recognition of Israel, about Hamas’s policies and actions, about how peace would work in practice.
But on the other side, I’ve rarely seen a major channel match that kind of routine close questioning of Israeli officials about the position of a government packed with ministers hostile to a Palestinian state, who advocate annexation of much of the occupied territories and who propose second-class citizenship for Arabs.
Israel’s preferred representatives in the US media – Oren, plus the Israeli ambassador to the UN, Ron Prosor, and Netanyahu’s spokesman, Mark Regev – all project the country as a liberal democracy, an unwilling occupier that is thirsting for peace.
But that does not fit with the views of leading politicians back in Israel. Naftali Bennett, the economy minister and leader of the most powerful political party on the right, has said: “I will do everything in my power to make sure [the Palestinians] never get a state.”
Danny Danon, the increasingly powerful chairman of the central committee of Netanyahu’s Likud party, openly opposes a Palestinian state and has said the prime minister doesn’t believe in it either. “I want the majority of the land with the minimum amount of Palestinians,” Danon, whom Netanyahu just fired as deputy defense minister for being critical of opposition to a ceasefire, told me last year.
And Israel’s ultranationalist foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, wants a good chunk of Israel’s Arab population stripped of citizenship.
Perhaps none of these men will get what they want. But they hold important levers of power, and good journalism would seem to demand that probing questions get asked about where Israel is headed under such leadership.
That kind of piercing American journalism can be found, mostly in foreign-policy journals and long magazine articles, such as David Remnick’s insightful report in the New Yorker last year on the rising political power of Jewish settlers. But much of the press demonstrates a frightening lack of inquiry, and if the mainstream media won’t do it, others are increasingly willing to do it for them.
It’s no secret that younger Americans do not rely on the nightly news, cable networks or printed newspapers for information in the way many older people do. The internet has opened access to foreign news media, which often has a different take in Israel, and has opened up a stream of links to to first-hand accounts as well as writing by analysts and activists who offer insights and information wilfully ignored by the Bob Schieffers and Sean Hannitys of the world.
There is evidence of a shift in public opinion, mostly generational: a Pew poll this month showed falling support for Israel among younger Americans. Over 65s backed the Jewish state by 60% to just 9% support for the Palestinians. Among young adults, aged 18-29, just 44% were behind Israel with backing for the Palestinians rising to 22%.
As opinion shifts, it will be harder to go on presenting just one side of the story.
APPENDIX SOURCE: THE WASHINGTON POST
Israelis support Netanyahu and Gaza war, despite rising deaths on both sides
In a survey this week by the University of Haifa, 85 percent of Jewish Israelis said they are “very satisfied” or “satisfied” with the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (Gil Cohen Magen/AFP/Getty Images)
That strong domestic support, along with a lack of pressure to end the hostilities, suggests that the war could drag on even as international mediators scramble to negotiate a truce amenable to both Israel and Hamas, the militant movement that rules Gaza.
“Israel has never been this hard-line, maybe not since the 1967 war” against Egypt and other Arab states, said Amotz Asa-El, a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Jewish think tank in Jerusalem. “A sweeping majority of Israelis want a protracted, systemic, thorough uprooting of Hamas and its military capabilities.”
Politics in the Jewish state can be boisterous and fractured, but these days Netanyahu’s rivals on both ends of the political spectrum are supporting him, despite the international condemnation being heaped on Israel for civilian deaths in Gaza. Gaza Health Ministry officials said 128 Palestinians were killed Tuesday and early Wednesday, when Israel carried out some of the most intense bombardments since the operation began July 8.
“Netanyahu has always been the leader of the right wing,” Asa-El said. “But now he is leading the consensus.”
Netanyahu has brushed off pressure from the international community and from Obama, who told the Israeli prime minister on Sunday that he wanted to see a quick cease-fire to stem civilian deaths.
Obama and Secretary of State John F. Kerry have been careful to temper their impatience with the surging civilian deaths in Gaza by stressing that Israel has a right to defend itself from Hamas rocket fire and tunnel incursions. Israelis, though, slammed Kerry’s cease-fire proposal, delivered Friday night, which they saw as too soft on Hamas — a group considered a terrorist organization by the United States, Israel and the European Union.
“There is a national consensus on this effort and this operation, especially eradicating the tunnels” that Hamas has built to try to infiltrate Israel, said Isaac Herzog, leader of the left-leaning Labor Party, the main opposition party in the Israeli parliament.
Analysts say the current Gaza offensive is more popular than past major military campaigns — in 2008-2009 and in 2012 — because more Israelis are now under the threat of more powerful rocket fire from Gaza. During this round of hostilities, rockets have reached father into Israel than ever before, putting more than 5 million Israelis at risk, according to the military.
But the Israeli military’s discovery of more than 30 tunnels, built and used by Palestinian militants to enter Israel and attack soldiers, has particularly shocked the Israeli public and galvanized support for the war. In 2006, Hamas used a tunnel to kidnap an Israeli soldier, whom they held captive until they traded him for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in 2011.
This time, Israelis have been deeply disturbed by images of handcuffs and tranquilizers confiscated in the tunnels, and by grainy military videos showing Gaza militants popping out of holes in Israeli soil and running toward nearby kibbutz farms. Israel cited the tunnels as the reason for launching a ground operation in Gaza.
“I am usually a peaceful person. I am not into fighting or killing on any side. But the threat of the tunnels is very worrying,” said Sigal Ariely, a mother of three and a resident of the southern city of Ashkelon, where sirens warning of incoming rockets sound regularly. Of the tunnels, she said, “I think we have to continue to demolish them in Gaza, and only then we will be safe again.”
Demonstrations by Jewish Israelis against the Gaza war have been muted and sparsely attended. One on Saturday night in Tel Aviv drew about 3,000 people, according to local media reports. Even some of the veteran activists in what is known as Israel’s “peace camp” have declined to speak out against the prime minister or the war.
In an interview, Tzipi Livni, the Israeli justice minister, a former peace negotiator and one of the most dovish members of the Netanyahu coalition government, said: “Hamas is a terrorist organization and is not willing to stop. They are fighting not for the establishment of a Palestinian state but because they are a terror organization.”
Most of the little criticism being aimed at Netanyahu has come from right-wing members of his party and coalition government. They want him to order the Israeli army to push deeper into Gaza and obliterate Hamas — not just restore peace and quiet to the Israeli south, the government’s stated objective.
Monday night, Netanyahu, Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon and the chief of staff of the Israel military warned the country that the Gaza fight would continue.
“We will not finish the mission, we will not finish the operation, without neutralizing the tunnels,” Netanyahu said.
Economy Minister Naftali Bennett, a former special-forces commander and advocate for Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank, said Netanyahu needs to unleash the army to “destroy Hamas.” He said the military must be given clear orders to achieve the complete demilitarization of the Gaza Strip.
“No rockets, no tunnels,” Bennett said in a statement. “Hit Hamas without mercy. Day and night. On weekdays and holidays. Without respite and without rest. Until they are defeated.”