The Israeli government was much better equipped than the Palestinian Authority to fight the media war. When I saw how the Israeli government handled PR disasters, I understood how that difference fed through to the reporting.
Every now and then, images of Palestinian women and children who’d been killed by Israeli bullets popped up. These portrayed the essence of the conflict, according to the Palestinians: The problem is the occupation, and look at the brute violence that the Israeli army uses against innocent Palestinian civilians to maintain the occupation.
However, instead of waiting until the storm of bad publicity blew over (as the Palestinian Authority often did), the Israeli government would launch a counterattack. Prominent and sincere-looking Israelis immediately would appear on Western television channels and in opinion pages to declare that they were ashamed of their country, and that this stain on the Jewish state had to be investigated in depth. PR officials would express their regret, and emphasize that Israel never meant to kill innocent children, women, or senior citizens—what would the Jewish state gain from that? Often, the same spokespeople would go on to question whether the victims had really died from Israeli bullets ... This would be investigated most carefully, and that would take some time. Next, the same people would explain how murky such “violent occurrences” in the “disputed territories” were, and how tiny the areas were in which this kind of “tragedy” took place. “Terrorists” deliberately hid in residential areas in the hope that Israel would accidentally kill Palestinian civilians, and so with all this attention to this tragedy we in the media were unintentionally playing into the terrorists’ hands.
This was how the Israeli government tried to minimize the damage: leaving the occupation out of it, distancing themselves from the events, isolating them as rare incidents, sowing doubt on the facts, and shifting the blame . .. I had to see this a few times before I understood how poorly the Palestinians had handled the PR fallout from the lynching. Imagine if they’d had a professional PR machine like Israel’s, with Palestinian politicians who were popular in the West, human rights activists or writers who’d instantly express their horror and their sympathy for the relatives on CNN or in American opinion pages. Spokespersons could have explained immediately what only came out three days later—that the day before the lynching, the mutilated body of a young Palestinian had been found in a nearby Jewish settlement. This “victim of the Israeli occupation” had just been carried by large crowds to his final resting place (hence the cameras being in Ramallah) when a rumor went round that two Israeli commandos had forced their way into the city for a new “massacre.” People were already violently incensed because in previous weeks Israel had killed more than fifty civilians. The spokespersons would have emphasized that nothing could explain away this atrocity—what had the Palestinian Authority to gain from such a lynching? The Palestinians wanted nothing more than what they were entitled to according to the UN and international law: Their own state, and an end to more than three decades of Israeli occupation.
Israeli governments would have handled it this way, but the Palestinian Authority didn’t tackle it like this at all. What they did do afterwards was to immediately confiscate all images of the lynching—something that all the Arabic camera teams complied with. An Italian reporter did get his footage out, and was pestered and threatened for weeks by the Authority.
Before I went to the Holy Land, I had heard of the “Israel Lobby.” I understood that the Israeli government could afford the most expensive lawyers and PR agencies in Europe and America, and could count on thousands of extremely well-educated sympathizers, lobbying groups, local branches of Likud and the Labor Party, the World Zionist Organization, and smaller Zionist associations. There were active synagogues and a battery of Christian fundamentalist movements with great influence on the conservative media in America.
Despite this, I hadn’t realized how advanced Israeli media policy was. Israeli ambassadors and lobbyists also visited leading editors and producers at television networks, cable news television, and the main daily and weekly newspapers in many Western countries. Pro-Israeli Jewish and Christian fundamentalist clubs in America invited “good” correspondents and commentators to give lectures, for attractively high fees. In the same country, former Mossad employees set up a media center that scoured Palestinian and Arabic press for anti-Semitic, anti-American, and anti-Western propaganda. Their reports would turn up verbatim in the press back home quite regularly—in columns, articles, and parliamentary questions, often without any mention of the source.
A soft drinks manufacturer once told me he’d carried out a “gap analysis” in Israel. This was a marketing method to measure the gap between a product’s worth in general and your brand in particular. Number one: Do you like soft drinks? Number two: Do you like Pepsi? Whoever answered yes to the first question and then no to the second would be sensitive to an advertising campaign. The businessman told me that the market-research company’s client list included a customer who was mean to remain anonymous. After insisting, he’d learned who it was: The Israeli PR apparatus had commissioned its own gap-analysis research among certain defined groups in the West. The questions were, What do you think of the State of Israel? What do you think of this particular government? The findings were used for campaigns—for example, to invite specially selected members of parliament, editors-in-chief, columnists, commentators, trade unionists, or student leaders on visits to Israel.
That was how it worked, and the investment paid off. Wafa, the Palestinian news agency—or whatever went by that name—once announced that Israeli planes were air-dropping poisoned sweets. They presented no proof, and the Israeli PR machine went into motion with astonishing speed. Not just correspondents, but also Dutch members of parliament, columnists, and editors were sent “Black Books” showing that this kind of propaganda was far from uncommon. There had been official Palestinian “warnings” that the Israeli army was using “depleted uranium, poison gas, and radioactive material”; Palestinian television had broadcast sermons in which Jews were compared to “monkeys and pigs”; and Palestinian schoolbooks contained anti-Israeli passages.
The Israeli government had to have collected this material beforehand and to have waited for a good time to use it. Wafa’s statement about poisoned sweets was perfect; it gave journalists, columnists, and MPs a basis from which to mention not just this one instance of incitement, but to extrapolate from it—see how Palestinians are being taught to hate Israel.
It was a professional piece of work, and very effective because the inverse didn’t happen. Quite a few Israeli schoolbooks avoid mentioning the fact that Palestinians were living there before the foundation of Israel. Some rabbis want to burn down the Aqsa mosque; Israeli generals have called Palestine “a cancerous growth”; and the ultra-Orthodox Jewish party has pleaded for the “extermination of Arabs.” There was enough material for a long-term campaign in which such inciting remarks could be linked to questions such as, “Is this why their soldiers shoot so many Palestinians?” and “Does Israel really want peace?”
But the Palestinian Authority didn’t release any Black Books. Correspondents might occasionally report on Israeli propaganda, but such reports remained marginal. Media war is about marketing. The frequency with which you manage to get your message to the target group is just as important as what the message is.
The Israeli government was simply much better at playing the game. During the second intifadah, “violence” alternated with stand offs. A few times, Hamas literally blew up the ceasefire, but other times there were weeks of ceasefire until Israel suddenly liquidated a Palestinian bigwig. A murder like this would be rapidly followed up by a stream of press releases about “increased vigilance” and “extra security measures.” It worked quite often; the news mentioned “Israel’s fear after liquidation,” instead of “Israeli assassination ends ceasefire.”
Sometimes the popular Shimon Peres went on a media tour. He wouldn’t meet the eleven
Dutch correspondents in Israel, but would come to Holland. The interviews were done by domestic editors, who didn’t know enough to ask him difficult questions. Intensely critical follow-up questions were impossible anyway because he only gave ten minutes to each medium.
At the beginning of the second intifadah, the Israeli army often turned their guns on stone-throwers, and aimed above the waist. Dozens of children were killed; hundreds were wounded. An Israeli PR operation managed to redirect the question from “What right does Israel have to use such violence on adolescent stone-throwers protesting against the occupation?” to “Why on earth do Palestinian parents expose their children to such danger?” The answer was in the Black Book: They hate us—look at how they are being incited.
Palestinians often complained about the Western media, and I came to understand why. But I saw a different reason for the distortion than they did. Many Palestinians suspected a Jewish conspiracy—sinister forces controlling the media behind the scenes. We’d get into heated discussions, and I didn’t always manage to take the sting out of it with a joke—for example, by looking at my watch and saying, “Can I just make a call? My secret boss in Israel is going to dictate tomorrow’s article to me.”
I couldn’t see any conspiracy; it was more like a number of trump cards that the Israeli government played. Not only did they have more resources, but the Israeli government also profited from the fact that the average Westerner, whatever his or her political leanings, had more sympathy for Israel. This was not so much because the country is Jewish, but because it is Western. Israel produces Western literature and films, has famous classical musicians, competes in the football Champions League, and joins in the Eurovision Song Contest. Indigenous Europeans look more like Israelis than Palestinians, and that’s why Israeli suffering is easier to understand. The New York Times’s Opinion page often features articles from Jewish settlers about living in the shadow of terrorism. “Everyone’s on a diet here because our weight is the only thing we can control,” one settler wrote. An allusion like this is recognizable to Western readers who also diet from time to time.
Palestinians showed their suffering in other ways. One Gaza aid organization asked Palestinians and Western expats to select photographs that symbolized the intifadah for them. The Westerners chose morning mothers, crying children, and devastated properties; the Palestinians came up with marching men and clenched fists. I’ve often been to Palestinian demonstrations, and in Western PR terms they were disasters: A father shouting angrily, “Is this justice? Is this justice? My daughter was eleven! Is this justice?”—the body being carried aloft, the shots in the air, the chanting ...
Jewish Israelis usually bury their dead with calm ceremony, to the accompaniment of sobbing attendants and the composed words of a family member. Westerners understand these images. But how can correspondents show the sorrow hiding behind the hysterical chaos into which Palestinian burials often degenerate? Vulnerability is not shown: Arabs mourn at home, away from the cameras.
Israel had another trump card, and I noticed it every time I was back home discussing the situation with colleagues. If I ever wanted to defend Israel during such conversations, one phrase was sufficient: The Holocaust. Most people understood immediately, and if not I added a couple of sentences of explanation, “For more than two thousand years, Jews have been discriminated against, persecuted, and massacred by non-Jews, culminating in the gas chambers. Obviously the Jewish people can only be safe when they have their own country, and what is more logical than the place which was a Jewish nation two thousand years ago, according to the Old Testament?”
Then I’d try to put the Palestinian perspective across, and ten sentences were never enough. Central to them was not the Holocaust, but centuries-long Western interference in their area. This began with the crusades, was advanced by colonialism, and was completed by the establishment, at the heart of the Arab world and at the cost of the people who had been living there, of a strange, Western country—Israel.
The handicap for the Palestinians is that the crusades and colonization are less prominent in the Western collective consciousness than the Holocaust, and I learned that I could only convey the Palestinian perspective by turning things around. Imagine a lunatic becoming president of America, and rounding up and slaughtering everyone with a Friesian grandfather. [Friesia is a semi-autonomous province in the Netherlands, with its own language.] It turns into a massacre of unimaginable proportions; then, when the anti-Friesian regime finally falls, it’s clear that the surviving Friesians don’t want to live in America anymore. A plan is devised in which the Friesians will get their own country, and where more logical than the place that according to old documents used to be Friesian. Despite Dutch resistance, the UN votes the plan through, and people from all over the world with a Friesian grandfather arrive in the new Friesian nation, generously subsidized by America. The remaining Dutch people protest that they’ve never had a problem with the Friesians; but, in international public opinion, sympathy for the Friesians holds sway. A proposal is made: Half of the country will become Friesia, and the Dutch can live in the other half.
The Dutch don’t accept this; there’s a war, which the Friesians win with American help, and an even larger part of the Netherlands falls into Friesian hands. Hundreds of thousands of non-Friesian refugees flood into the major Dutch cities, and tensions rise, particularly because small groups of Dutch people have instigated guerrilla warfare against the Friesians. Friesian spokespeople cry “terrorism” on CNN and that “They are killing innocent Friesians!”
Meanwhile, the Dutch people are beginning to wonder what kind of leaders they have. A military coup follows, and when the Netherlands tries to get weapons from abroad, the young Friesian state takes over the rest of the Netherlands, as well as parts of Germany and Belgium, in a “preventative attack.” Droves of non-Friesian Dutch people flee over the borders into Germany and Belgium, where coups follow: “We’ve got to prevent the Friesians from getting us.” In the interim, the Friesian army governs the occupied Dutch provinces with a heavy hand, strangles the economy, and confiscates the most beautiful areas for settlements and special roads from the settlements to Friesia. A peace process follows, and the Netherlands is offered three out of the twelve Dutch provinces: Limburg, a piece of Brabant, and one of the Zeeland islands. These fragments cannot be called the Netherlands, the Netherlands is not allowed an army, and all the borders are to be guarded by Friesian troops.
One of the pitfalls of a correspondent’s post in the Holy Land is becoming cynical, so in an article about the Palestinian view of the conflict I deleted the sentence: “In PR terms, the Holocaust is gold for Israel.” You can’t put it like that in the paper, because you run the risk of one of the survivors of the Jewish persecution reading it and taking it the wrong way. Nevertheless, the historical connection with the West gave Israel a starting point for its campaigns, and every week there I saw an example of this. Every now and then, an Arab country would buy missiles from China or Russia, and press conferences and briefings would be convened immediately in Israel. “These missiles could reach Tel Aviv!”—the implication being that there was a threat of a new Holocaust. In the meantime, Israel received billions of dollars of “military assistance” from America, giving it countless times more destructive power than all of its neighbors put together. There weren’t any briefings about that.
But references to the anti-Semitism of the past could also present Israel as the underdog, as a vulnerable country that wants peace but is surrounded by “masses of Arabs” who “want to drive all the Jews into the sea.” In these representations, Palestinians and Arabs were driven by the same hatred as the Nazis. All Israel wants is “a place in the sun,” and the neighbors need to prove that they no longer hate the Jews. That’s what makes “They are killing innocent Jews” such a brilliant quote. “They” means “All Palestinians are guilty”; “Innocent” means “The motive is hatred”; and “Jews” means “It’s not about Israelis or
Zionism; this is just one more slaughter of the Jews.”
It was an incredibly strong message, and in many reports in the Western media one could hear the echoes of Israel as the peace-loving underdog. The record shows that Jewish groups committed bloody terrorist attacks during the British colonial occupation, in the 1948 war, and afterwards. They murdered a UN envoy, tried to blow up the British foreign minister, and chased Palestinians from their villages on a large scale, sometimes with accompanying violence. Yet Western media mostly describe these groups as “the Jewish underground.” In 1956, 1967, and 1982, Israel attacked one of its neighbors, but these invasions are often labeled “preventive attacks.” The occupation of South Lebanon created a “security zone” in which Israeli Defense Forces were “present.” This army doesn’t “attack” but “acts,” “enters,” or “intervenes.” “Security forces” perform “operations” in which “elements” are “eliminated.” Assassinations are “preventive military strikes,” and civilian casualties are “blunders.”
There was a lot of grumbling amongst journalists about the Israeli government’s use of the Holocaust, but how can you ask Israel to ignore the greatest catastrophe in the history of the Jewish people? Imagine, you’ve got a trump card that enables you to present yourself as a vulnerable underdog in a sound bite of around ten seconds, and with which you can write off the critics who see this differently as the worst kind of scoundrels. Of course you’re going to use such a trump card—especially if you think you’re caught up in a life-or-death conflict.
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