Analysing Trends in Mainstream Media Bias: RTE’s Coverage of the 2015 Quasi-Intifada – Part Two

This article provides an analysis of two RTE television news reports, during the Autumn 2015 period, when a sharp rise in Arab-Palestinian attacks against Israeli civilians, and security personnel, occurred. Broad issues of normative journalistic practice are also discussed. The preceding part of this series analyses, more broadly, a relatively large number of other RTE reports broadcast during the same period. RTE Player links of the principle daily television news programmes (Lunchtime News, 6.1 (6 O’clock) News, and 9 O’clock News) are only made available by the broadcaster for a limited period of time.

Carole Coleman reports

An 14th October Lunchtime News report by Carole Coleman, appears to have partly or indirectly justified the Intifada-esque conditions in Israel and the disputed territories of the Judea and Samaria/West Bank, as well as the Gaza Strip, by laying undue blame with the authorities opposing the then-resurgent bout of violence. Appendix One features an excerpted transcript of the news-report.

RTE-Player screen-grab, revolving news text,
RTE News Now channel, 14-October-2015

Israel’s security measures are described prejudicially in the report. In the introduction, the news presenter claims the security measures will “seal off” Arab neighbourhoods, while Coleman describes the measures as “blockades”, which misleadingly evokes the actions applied to Gaza. The revolving screen-text on the RTE ‘News Now’ channel also stated: “Israeli police to seal off Arab parts of Jerusalem”. However, the security measures were not remotely as draconian. Roadblocks and ‘stop and search’ measures were put into place. Residents were not being prevented from travelling outside of their communities, nor were people being prevented from travelling into the relevant neighbourhoods.

Coleman’s report features quotes from two individuals: an Arab resident who was hostile to Israel, and a representative of an anti-Israel NGO. Coleman did not quote an alternate perspective for the report.

An Arab man, identified as ‘Khader Ishkirat’, a resident of Jabel Mukaber, provided his views on the new security restrictions. He described these measures as “collective punishment”, and presented the restrictions as somehow contravening the pursuit of a two-state peace solution. However, Coleman’s report failed to note that the Jabel Mukaber neighbourhood is an Arab-Palestinian village in the environs of Jerusalem, which has earned notoriety, both as a flashpoint of violence, and due to a number of its residents having engaged in particularly vicious acts of terrorism, which include what was the then-current violent upsurge. Jewish residents have experienced substantive violence, due to their proximity to the village.

RTE-Player screen-grab, RTE Lunchtime News, 14-October-2015, Carol Coleman
 report, featuring Sari Bashi, of the NGOs Gisha & Human Rights Watch

Sari Bashi, identified as a representative of Human Rights Watch, also offered highly critical views on the security measures. Bashi however is better known as the co-founder and Executive Director of anti-Israel NGO Gisha.

Bashi does not have a reputation for presenting balanced critiques on the Israeli-Jewish/Arab-Islamic conflict. She defended the reputation of notorious terrorist Shawan Jabarin. Moreover, Gisha’s critiques erased the context of Israeli military actions as constituting reactions to Hamas’ rocket bombardments from Gaza. The NGO also baselessly charged that Israel was violating the rights of students from Gaza.

Misrepresenting the root causes of the conflict

The most problematic aspect of Carole Coleman’s report is the overt attempt to lead its audience into a simplified understanding of a protracted conflict, which stands in contravention with basic established fact, when choosing to blame the current spate of violence principally on settlements and the failure of peace talks, whilst ignoring the most pernicious religious sectarianism that has pervaded this conflict, which existed long before Israel became a reality. The report finds Israel blameworthy, despite the attacks being aimed indiscriminately at Jewish civilians, as well as soldiers and the security services.

This quasi-Intifada erupted following Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas’ intensive incitement, featuring false claims of an intent by the Israeli authorities to change the status-quo of the Temple Mount, and harm the al-Aqsa Mosque. The claims were echoed by the PA itself, for example, to quote a near-concurrent PA broadcast:

“The story of the Temple is nothing but a collection of legends and myths for political reasons. They [Jews] have set Palestine and Jerusalem as their goal, and have used the myths in the service of their declared goals of occupation and imperialism. In the spirit of the delusions and legends, they try to get rid of the Al-Aqsa [Mosque] and establish their so-called ‘Temple’ — the greatest crime and forgery in history.”

Mahmoud Abbas set the stage for the violence in his speeches, which were notably supportive of the increasing violence at the Mount. To cite a speech from the 16th of September:

‘His honor [Abbas] saluted the Murabitin (those carrying out Ribat, religious conflict/war to protect land claimed to be Islamic) and stated: ‘Every drop of blood that has been spilled in Jerusalem is holy blood as long as it was for Allah. Every Martyr (Shahid) will reach Paradise, and everyone wounded will be rewarded, Allah willing.’ … and stated: ‘The Al-Aqsa [Mosque] is ours, and they have no right to defile it with their filthy feet.”’

Furthermore, the modus-operandi of stabbing terror attacks had been widely linked to several speeches by leading Muslim-Arabs.

Arab members of the Israeli Knesset also led incitement drives, claiming Jewish people have no right of worship on the Temple Mount.

Likewise, a survey of concurrent Arab-Palestinian opinion demonstrated that most oppose the two-state solution, based on the principle of two-states-for-two-peoples. Only 30% supported a one-state solution where Arabs and Israelis possess equal rights. No less than 58% were against the recognition of Israel as a nation for Jewish people, that carried a mutual recognition of Palestine as a nation for Arab-Palestinian people.

Palestinian leaders rejected a two-state solution, and peace with Israel, in 2000, 2001 and 2008, the latter of which afforded near 100% of all Palestinian Authority territorial demands with mutually agreed land-swaps. If Arab-Palestinians were truly despairing due to a lost quest for their independence, they would instead punish their own leaders for repeatedly undermining that process.

The report ignores a phenomenon that led to a century of anti-Jewish Arab-Palestinian incitement at all levels of society. It led to pogromic episodes that began circa 1920 in Jerusalem, some 47 years before the Six-Day war. Likewise, the Second Intifada erupted following PA incitement over false claims of Jewish designs on the al-Aqsa Mosque. At the time Arafat believed a bizarre conspiracy, where Israel would engineer an earthquake to destroy the Mosque.

RTE-Player screen-grab, RTE Lunchtime News, 14-October-2015, Carol Coleman report,
captioned: "Palestinians also cite increased encroachment on the al-Aqsa..."

Reiterating sectarian propaganda

Most surprisingly, Coleman appears to endorse the Arab-Palestinian conspiracy that Jews are somehow undermining the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif, when she stated “Palestinians also cite increased encroachment on the al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem’s Old City…” She did not state that this is a disputed claim. Netanyahu has repeatedly asserted that there is no attempt to change the ‘status quo’, nor does there appear to have been any notable increase of visits to the Temple Mount. The prior year’s figures show only a marginal number of Jewish people being allowed access to the Temple Mount. Israel has done nothing to provoke such fears. The conspiracy is also supremely unlikely, since prior fears over the site were unfounded.

Coleman claims the al-Aqsa Mosque, and its environs on the Temple Mount, is holy to both Muslims and Jews. The Temple Mount is an extremely large site, which is of course holy to the Jewish faith, but the actual structure of the Mosque, and its environs (the al-Aqsa compound), is no more holy to the Jewish faith than that of any other holy structure to an unaffiliated religion. The al-Aqsa Mosque sits on the Mount to the far-south. It is of less relevance to the Jewish faith than the Dome of the Rock, (located in the middle of the Mount), since it was built in the area where the Jewish Temple once stood.

Orla Guerin, a former RTE journalist, also inaccurately claimed, at the BBC, that the Mosque itself is also holy to Jews. Such assertions may be borne of a lack of knowledge, but both journalists are noted for possessing strong anti-Israel viewpoints. This stance reinforces one aspect of the Arab-Palestinian conspiratorial narrative, namely that Jewish people supposedly desire to take over the al-Aqsa Mosque.

The Arab-Palestinian narrative on the issue is wholly implausible, with for example the BBC’s Nawal Assad fancifully asserting that the al-Aqsa Mosque effectively sits on the whole of the Temple Mount, and so the supposed desire to rebuild the Temple necessitates the destruction of the al-Aqsa Mosque.

Despite often invoking the notion of the Temple Mount ‘status quo’, RTE has failed to explain to its audiences what the term meaningfully constitutes. The ‘status quo’ is the denial of religious rights for the Jewish faithful on their holiest site, whilst ceding control of the Mount to the Islamic Waqf. To explain the conflict as substantively constituting one religious groupings resistance to another religious grouping’s assertion of their most basic of religious freedoms, would greatly undermine the claims of Coleman, Guerin, and so many others in the mainstream media, that the upsurge in violence was stoked by a desire for independence. This choice can be understood as an intentional manoeuvre, because it neatly fits RTE’s complete failure to report that the upsurge coincided with wide-ranging Islamic conspiracism, stoked by Abbas and other leaders.

Opposition to basic rights infers that the violence is motivated by Israel’s existence as a predominately Jewish nation situated in the historic House of Islam (Dar al-Islam). Such violence was a feature of Israel’s existence before it took possession of Judea and Samaria, in a defensive war against Jordan and other neighbouring Arab-Islamic states. The violence that concurrently emanated from Gaza cannot justifiably be deemed to be a direct consequence of living under a claimed occupation.

Pro-Israel bias?

Raymond Deane, a leading founder-member of the Irish Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, publicly stated on his Facebook page that he complained to RTÉ about the radio-equivalent of the same programme. He accuses Coleman of having a pro-Israel bias, and asserts that the report presented a racist attitude toward Arab-Palestinians:

“On today’s News at One on RTÉ Radio 1 (14th October), your reporter Carole Coleman asserted that while “7 Israelis have been brutally murdered,” 30 Palestinians merely “died in the ensuing violence.”

This is not merely an unprofessional formulation, but a formulation so outrageously biased as to border on racism. To begin with, it omits context: the ongoing, daily violence of the Israeli state against the illegally occupied, colonised and besieged Palestinian people. Secondly, it decontextualises “the ensuing violence”, as though it just happened out of the blue without anybody being responsible. Thirdly, it fails to itemise the acts of “ensuing violence”, most of which constituted “brutal murder” by the Israeli security forces and by armed colonial settlers, whose presence in the West Bank and occupied/annexed East Jerusalem is illegal under international humanitarian law.

It is clear that Carole Coleman views the deaths of Israelis (which I do not condone) as a matter of far greater significance than the deaths of those oppressed, persecuted, dispossessed and colonised by the Israeli state – hence my sense that her formulation is inherently racist.”

However, Coleman’s formulation was largely accurate. The Israelis murdered were civilians who were going peaceably about their business. They were murdered solely for having an identity that their attackers disapproved of. As Associated Press reported on the 16th of October:

“Over the past month, eight Israelis were killed in Palestinian attacks, most of them stabbings. In that time, 31 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire, including 14 labeled by Israel as attackers, and the rest in clashes with Israeli troops.”

These clashes are often described in the mainstream media as ‘protests’. However, such events are in fact violent confrontations with troops and security personnel.

It would be prejudicial to conflate the unprovoked murder of one grouping, with the fatalities of another grouping that voluntarily chose to aggress, and by extension the associated deaths of the latter grouping, typically leading from protracted episodes of violent confrontation and riot. Interestingly, Coleman’s description strayed from the norm at RTE, for example, an October 20th Lunchtime News report features the sort of conflationist language that may meet with Deane’s approval:

“UN Secrteary General, Ban Ki-moon, is meeting Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas today, in an effort to calm tensions which have seen at least 42 Palestinians and 8 Israelis killed.”

Deane charged that the description of Israeli and Arab-Palestinian deaths ‘decontextualises “the ensuing violence”’, before making the charge of occupation, whilst invalidly claiming that Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, contravene International Law. However, Deane takes the remarks on the death toll out of context. Coleman’s report does cite those very issues as causal factors, when she stated that the quasi-Intifada has been enacted: “…by Arabs upset by Israeli occupation”, adding that “The causes of the turmoil include settlements and the failure to achieve a Palestinian state.”

Deane claimed that he is not justifying the death of Jewish civilians, but his efforts to explain Arab-Palestinian violence as a result of the very worst of supposed Israeli actions, namely as reactions by the “oppressed, persecuted, dispossessed and colonised”, is a distinct apologia for terrorism, as might be expected given the extremism of many of his prior expressions of support for the Arab-Palestinian cause.

Deane’s criticism is without foundation. A significant amount of criticism of the media from anti-Israel voices, originates with a desire to see the Jewish State demonised to a greater intensity in the media, since such criticism is often directed at media sources that are explicitly pro-Palestinian, for example, the Guardian, and the New York Times, with activists creating fake bias apology editorials.

November’s peaks and troughs

RTE’s TV coverage of the conflict became more infrequent during the month of November. The rate of the ongoing attacks had declined significantly, but still occurred at an atypically elevated level, with 326 recorded attacks, of which 249 utilised firebombs. Reports were brief other than that of the 12th of November. Israeli undercover agents raided the Al Ahli Hospital Hebron, in the PA administered zone of the city, to retrieve Azzam Shalaldeh, a Hamas operative who had stabbed a Jewish resident two weeks earlier.

The event was the second featured story in morning bulletins. Revolving screen text for the ‘News Now’ channel stated: “Israeli agents shoot man in hospital”. The raid became the headlining story for the Lunchtime News show, and subsequent afternoon news bulletins, which featured a report by Brian O’Donovan. News-presenter Aengus McGreanna stated “Undercover Israeli soldiers raid a hospital in the West Bank and kill a Palestinian man” in the opening headline for the Lunchtime show. The 6.1 News also highlighted a very similar report.

The report included numerous comments, and fact-based claims, by Arab-Palestinian individuals, but did not feature speakers presenting an alternate Israeli position. Despite a detailed report of the event itself, O’Donovan merely stated “There’s been a wave of violence in Israel, Jerusalem, and the West Bank, since the start of last month” as context for the concurrent wave of terrorist attacks and rioting.

O’Donovan’s report features footage of the detained Arab-Palestinian man’s brother, claiming that his relative, Abdullah, was shot dead for merely looking at the Israeli agents, after having been told to stay in his part of Azzam Shalaldeh’s hospital room. This assertion diverges with the claim by the Israeli authorities, that the relative was shot dead for attacking the operatives. The viewer is presumably supposed to believe the former claim, since similar reports on the 9 o’clock News programme, and the 11 PM news bulletin, excluded all mention of the Israeli assertion, whilst affording the brother’s account absolute credibility. O’Donovan stated:

“During today’s operation, the suspect’s cousin was shot dead, and his brother witnessed it all.”

The late exclusion of one perspective was made despite available reports that the Shalaldeh family had partially retracted the claim that Abdullah had not attacked the Israeli agents.

The report featured the director of the hospital, Dr. Jihad Shawar, stating (by translation) “This is a clear breach of international laws and ethics. It is well known that hospitals are a safe place for everyone.” The claim that it is against international law to detain any individual while at a hospital is an unusual assertion, but the claim was not challenged. The Third Geneva Convention ‘relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War’, is the most widely cited international statute on the matter of the fair treatment of prisoner combatants. However, the Convention, does not apply to illegitimate combatants, principally defined as individuals who do not follow the normative rules of engagement. It does not apply to those who engage in terrorist attacks, such as the intentional targeting of civilians uninvolved in a conflict. Moreover, Azzam Shalaldeh was not being held in custody by the Israeli authorities while in hospital.

The story was newsworthy, but it is difficult to account for such intensive media focus on what was otherwise a busy day for domestic news stories, when the same news editors had largely ignored the insurgent Arab-Palestinian violence for several weeks. The video footage of disguised Israeli agents might be newsworthy, and indeed O’Donovan introduces the report with the words: “A dramatic armed raid captured on CCTV”. Yet visually dramatic Arab-Palestinian attacks on Israeli security personnel were also caught on video during the same period, but they did not garner attention at RTE. The broadcaster’s interest in the hospital-raid story was so significant that two suicide bombings in Beiruit, which at the time were known to have killed in excess of 37 people, and wounded hundreds more, played second-fiddle in the later news programmes.

The BAI ‘Code of Fairness, Objectivity and Impartiality in News and Current Affairs — Guidance Notes’, July 2013 (pages 8 – 9), note that news material should be accurate, unbiased, and lack prejudgement. Unfortunately, both RTE reports featured have breached these principles to a very substantive extent.

Appendix

An excerpted transcript of the 14th October Lunchtime News report by Carole Coleman:

Presenter Sharon Toban [RTE studio]: “Israel’s cabinet has authorised police to seal off Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem and soldiers have been deployed in response to a worsening spate of violence. Seven Israelis and thirty Palestinians have been killed in the past two weeks.”

Carole Coleman [narration and associated video footage]: “Israeli border police erecting road blocks in Arab East Jerusalem. They are stopping Palestinians for inspection — checking cars for anything that might be used to cause mayhem. The blockades sanctioned by Israel’s cabinet have been prompted by a wave of violence, stabbings and car rammings carried out by Arabs upset by Israeli occupation.”

“Many residents disagree with sealing off Palestinian areas.”

Khader Ishkirat, a resident Jabel Mukaber: “The collective punishment will not achieve the goals of the Israeli government. The only way to achieve the goals of a peaceful way of living between the Israelis and the Palestinians is to establish the two-state solution.”

Coleman continues: “Human Rights Watch fears the blockade will make things worse.”

Sari Bashi, Human Rights Watch: “Given the history of abuse and neglect by Israeli authorities in East Jerusalem, it’s only going to exacerbate tensions between residents and police. It’s exactly what we don’t need.”

Coleman continues: “Seven Israelis have been brutally murdered in the past two weeks. Thirty Palestinians have died in the ensuing violence.”

“The causes of the turmoil include settlements and the failure to achieve a Palestinian state. But Palestinians also cite increased encroachment on the al Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem’s Old City, an area holy to both Muslims and Jews.” […]

Published at Crethi Plethi.

The Shapes of Casual Western Anti-Zionism

Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, Chief of staff Yitzhak Rabin, Gen. Rehavam Zeevi (R), Gen. Narkis, in Old Jerusalem
(ILAN BRUNER 7/6/67, GPO; shared under the CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

Those that criticise Israel particularly harshly over the Jewish State’s handling of the conflict, often argue that ‘Jews should know better’ or words to the same effect. This stance appeals to a protracted history of persecution and genocide in Europe, which reached a peak with the Holocaust.

This seemingly reflexive bias can find expression in some unexpected places. Godfrey Graham, a seasoned cameraman who worked in current-affairs programming at RTE, since the early period of the Broadcaster’s transmission service, described several filming engagements in Israel for his memoir ‘Forty Years Behind the Lens at RTE’, published by Ashfield Press (Dublin).

This relatively detailed article focuses on a number of paragraphs in Graham’s memoir — a book that was clearly not intended to be an exposition of the conflict. There does not appear to be a substantive animus held by the author toward Israel, for he describes his general experiences in quite positive terms. Yet the relevant paragraphs present a clear narrative, which forcefully asserts that the Jewish people of Israel are morally blameworthy, while the Arabs of the region are not. Thus, it represents a good example of the commonplace casually anti-Zionist views often expressed in the West today.

What Israeli-Jews ought to do

Of a visit to Israel in the early 1980s, Graham described (pages 142–144) a pleasant meeting with Chaim Herzog (President of Israel between 1983 and 1993), who was born in Belfast and had strong links with Dublin which were discussed in a convivial atmosphere. However, Graham’s tone darkened when it came to the matter of the conflict:

“We visited refugee camps, where Arabs had been moved to temporary camps in 1944. There is a picture of a very dignified gentleman living in appalling conditions, who made wooden farm instruments and had a philosophical approach to being in the camp but hoped that one day he would have his home and his land back.

The fact that Jerusalem has a strong Arab quarter and that all the great religions are represented there with some important shrines, seems to point to the fact that, ultimately, it must be a capital city that represents all the great religious traditions and not just the city for one dominant tradition. This would seem to me the only fair way forward. Just as the Jewish people longed for a homeland, they should be the first to see the need Palestinians have for a homeland, too.”

In what sense did Graham deem Judaism to be the “dominant” religious tradition of Jerusalem? Clearly he views Judaism’s apparent dominance to have been instituted illegitimately under Israeli rule, rather than being as a consequence of Judaism’s greater ties with the city than that of any other faith, where, for example, the Torah mentions Jerusalem hundreds of times, while it is not named at all in the Koran. Graham’s stance naturally leads to the conclusion that Israel is trying to “Judaise Jerusalem” as many anti-Israel activists allege.

The Jewish populace of East Jerusalem (including the famous Jewish Quarter of the old city) was ethnically cleansed in 1948 by Jordan. The Christian populace of East Jerusalem declined dramatically in the following decades, choosing to emigrate to other parts of Jordan and abroad. We can see that a “dominant” Islamic “tradition” can abuse its power, but, after the Six Day war the Arab populace of Jerusalem has grown at double the percentile rate of the Jewish populace (155% Jewish and 314% Arab) between the years 1967 and 2010. The Christian populace has only grown marginally, and in view of the rapid growth of the Arab-Islamic populace now just represents 2% of Jerusalem, but the dramatic decline under Jordanian rule has been reversed.

While Graham was active in the media, he would have surely been aware that Old (East) Jerusalem was off-limits to the regional Jewish populace because Jordan, which occupied the territory until 1967, prevented Jewish people accessing religious sites (including the Wailing Wall, which is one of the last structural remnants of the Temple Mount compound), in contravention with the Armistice Agreement of 1949 between the two nations. Under Jordanian rule, many Jewish religious sites were repeatedly desecrated and destroyed in violation of Article 8 the agreement, as repeatedly brought to the attention of the United Nations.

After East Jerusalem’s recapture, Levi Eshkol, the Israeli prime-minister of the time, promptly declared that the holy sites of all faiths in Jerusalem would be protected, as would their freedom to worship at such sites. Moshe Dayan famously ceded control of the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif to the Islamic Wafq, and established the precedent of giving Muslims exclusive rights of worship on the Temple Mount Compound. This is a matter of the utmost sensitivity to the Islamic faith — hence the rioting when Ariel Sharon visited the site, a visit that was used as an excuse by Arafat for the commencement of the Second Intifada, which was still a major news story at the time of the publication of the memoir.

Therefore, under the rule of the Jewish State there is a seemingly unique situation where the leaders of the “dominant tradition” actually repress their own religious rights to placate another religious grouping, which has a longstanding hostility toward the “dominant tradition”. This Islamo-supremacist denial of the most basic of Jewish religious rights also extends to attempts to claim the Wailing Wall for the Muslim faith, an effort that began in the 1920s to the present. Historically, related Islamic conspiracism surrounding the Temple Mount has led to acts of genocide (1929), and the continued incitement thereof. Yet the accusations that Israel is an “apartheid” nation continue unabated with the anti-Israel movement.

It is difficult to see how Graham can suggest that the Jewish people of Israel have not attempted to facilitate an Arab-Palestinian homeland. This stance would necessitate ignoring such well-established facts as Arafat walking out of the Camp David talks (2000), the Taba talks of 2001, etc., which offered all of Gaza, almost all of Judea and Samaria, and a large swathe of East Jerusalem with substantive control over the Temple Mount. It should be noted that Jordan/Transjordan already constitutes more than three-quarters of what was originally envisaged to be the “Jewish National Home” and as such represents the established nation for the Arabs of the region. When speaking of a “homeland” for Arab-Palestinians, Yasser Arafat’s assertion, when he spoke to reporter Arianna Palazzi in 1970, is relevant:

‘From the Arab standpoint, we mustn’t talk about borders. Palestine is nothing but a drop in an enormous ocean. Our nation is the Arabic nation that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea and beyond it… The P.L.O. is fighting Israel in the name of Pan-Arabism. What you call “Jordan” is nothing more than Palestine.”’

Criticism of Jewish-Israeli morality

When visiting Israel to film a Gate Theatre production of iconic Irish play ‘Juno and the Paycock’, Graham decided to again focus on supposed Jewish-Israeli immorality in relation to the plight of the Arab-Palestinians (page 226):

“While in Israel, our team got an opportunity to visit the profoundly moving sculpture depicting the Holocaust. That image will remain with me forever. We visited a refugee camp where Arabs had been told way back in 1948 they were going for a temporary period. The tragedy of the displacement of the Arab people is something the Israelis should understand, given the Jewish experience and their long journey to find their homeland. We met one man (his picture is presented on previous page) who had spent most of his life in this ‘temporary’ refugee camp. He had tremendous dignity and lived in just two very small, bear rooms but, despite his horrible experience, retained a gentleness of spirit that inspired all of us who met him. I often wonder whether he is still alive.”

This paragraph begins with a rather detached image evoking the subject of the Holocaust, which is contrasted with another image of an Arab-Palestinian refugee, before expounding on the latter subject. Graham seems to be intentionally reinforcing his point with this juxtaposition — that there is a lacking in the substance in the national morality of the Jewish-Israeli populace, since they, of-all-people, should understand the suffering of another group, given the way in which Jewish people were persecuted.

Graham fails to explain why “Arabs had been told way back in 1948 they were going for a temporary period” to a refugee camp, He appears to refer to the many Arab-Egyptian and Arab-Palestinian people who left a newly independent Israel at the instruction of Arab invaders so the Jewish State could be more easily destroyed, with the promise that they could soon return (within a few weeks) once the deed was done. Others left out of fear of reprisals once the Arab forces began to fail in their objective. This is a crucial point that goes to the very heart of pan-Arab aggression and existential rejectionism. Graham’s assertion may be indicative of perceptive bias, where vital facts are disposed because they do not comply with a certain narrative, or the omission may be more intentional, because it would greatly undermine attempts to hold Israeli-Jews responsible.

Graham described an Arab-Palestinian refugee in understandably sympathetic terms but this man, and his contemporaries, suffered because the Arab-Islamic world refused to accept Israel’s existence, and instead chose to wage a war of aggression. It is their misfortunate that the sole Jewish State in existence was not destroyed, and that the Jewish people did not face genocide — a very real threat made by Azzam Pasha in 1947. The so-called “Nabka” (Catastrophe), where between 472,000 and 650,000 Arab-Palestinians were displaced, could have been avoided if the Arab world recognised the right of Jewish independence with UN Resolution 181, in what constituted just a small portion their ancient ancestral homeland, in a rather small fraction of the original British Palestine Mandate, instead of waging an unofficial sectarian war from 1947 to 1948, and invading one day after Israel declared its independence in 1948, with a coalition of seven armies.

The Arab states refused Arab/Arab-Palestinian refugees citizenship, and curbed their basic rights. Israel feared they would become a fifth column in the absence of peace, but still offered to take back 100,000 at the Lausanne talks of 1949, to which the Arab nations refused. Nevertheless, 50,000 refugees did return under a family reunification programme, as well as a further 75,000 displaced by the Six Day War. Israel also absorbed vast numbers of Jewish people fleeing persecution in Arab lands. Thus, if Graham wants Jewish people to accept the notion of an Arab-Palestinian homeland (which they have), then that request must be justly conditional upon Arab-Palestinian society accepting Jewish self-determination in Israel. Otherwise, strife is merely continued, albeit at a higher intensity a la the defacto nation of Gaza.

Graham only mentions Arab-Palestinian terrorism in passing, when relating Chaim Herzog’s humorous remark that the SAM rockets fired by “Palestinian factions” (pages 143 – 144) were in range of his Tel Aviv home: “He said that a SAM could make a huge mess of your fruit trees if you were not careful.”

Paradoxically, Graham criticises the now-independent Jewish-Israelis who have a homeland, for not understanding the displacement of the Arab-Palestinians from the 1948-49 War of Independence. Yet it has long been a key demand of Yasser Arafat’s PLO to push for a so-called “right of return” to nullify Israel’s existence as a principally Jewish State. The two conditions are mutually exclusive so it seems Graham is indirectly criticising Israeli-Jews for not seeking a loss of their own homeland, their own self-determination, and religious freedom, free of the persecution visited upon them by the Islamic world for over a millennia, which peaked with their oppression, genocide and expulsion from the Arab-Islamic world between the 1920s and 1970.

An authentic homeland?

Graham appears to doubt the strength of the historic links between Israel and the Jewish People, since he describes the re-establishment of Israel as their “long journey to find their homeland”. In an earlier paragraph Graham talks of “the Jewish people” having “longed for a homeland” [emphasis added].

Graham may have in mind Theodore Herzl’s early flirtation with the idea of establishing a Jewish safe-haven in South America, because it was further away from the locus of the imperialist ambitions of the Western powers, which saw opportunities to carve up the territories of the ailing Ottoman Empire, and also avoided Palestine’s geographical proximity to the Russian Empire which had brutally oppressed its quite large Jewish populace. However, the defacto Zionist movement’s return to Palestine preceded Herzl. It seems the secular-minded Herzl may not have fully appreciated the scale of the importance of Palestine to the Jewish people — an importance that led to migration back to the homeland hundreds of years earlier, long before the Zionism movement was devised, and so Herzl’s idea was abandoned.

A passing knowledge of Jewish culture and history demonstrates that the Israeli State is located on part of the ancient homeland of the Jews. They constitute an indigenous people, which numerousobjective genetic studies have demonstrated. It explains the fact that Jerusalem features so strongly in the Torah, in prayer and in sayings, and, as such, are morally entitled to live in a region from which their ancestors were displaced, by successive pagan, Christian and Islamic empires. This is rather more than merely “a” homeland, that the Jewish people journeyed to “find” after fleeing the Christian West.




Published at Crethi Plethi.

Obsession, Exclusion and Double Standards – the points of prejudice in the Coverage of an emergent Third Intifada

Screen-grab of RTE lunchtime news and sports bulletin, 6th July 2014

RTE’s obsession and exclusion

On July 6th 2014, Ireland’s public service broadcaster, RTÉ, broadcast a Sunday lunchtime news programme (repeated cyclically on the RTE News Channel) featuring a report on the alleged beating of an Arab-Palestinian teenager, Tariq Khdeir, who possesses US nationality.

At two minutes, the length of the report was unusual because the entire Sunday lunchtime news and sports bulletin lasts only five minutes by convention. Indeed, the story of the beating came after the 45 second opening report on an exclusive interview with Richard Bruton, an Irish government minister. The story of the alleged beating was then followed by a 15 to 20 second slot on the murder of twenty-nine Kenyans in two terrorist incidents, and a shorter mention of a major parachuting accident in Poland that led to eleven deaths! The bizarre length of the feature represents a not-uncommon media obsessiveness with negative stories coming out of Israel, which trump far more significant stories from other parts of the globe, both near and far.

In RTE’s favour, the news report did acknowledge that Hamas neither confirmed nor denied that they were responsible for the kidnapping of three Jewish Israeli teens on June 12th 2014, after the state broadcaster had falsely stated in the previous reports that Hamas denied any involvement in the kidnapping.

However, RTE failed to include any response from Israel, after featuring a lengthy comment from the son’s mother. Whilst displaying the video of the beating, it failed to give anything but passing reference to the days of violence visited by masked “protesters”, upon Israeli citizens, of which Tariq Khdeir was likely one such rioter.

RTE consistently favours Arab-Palestinian narratives in its news reports. Regrettably, there seems little prospect of improvement.

Masked Arab-Palestinian rioters with catapult

Double standards

With RTE, and other news outlets, there has been a very notable trend in featuring almost generic reports of Arab rioting, since it gathered pace with the killing of Muhammad Abu Khdeir on July 2nd.

The conflict is presented, by the media, as constituting “running battles” between Israeli security forces and Arab rioters. Absent is any proper mention of Israeli civilian casualties, further attempted Jewish kidnappings, and attacks on numerous religious sites. Even the United Nations has not escaped the ire of rioters, despite its long-standing support for Palestinianism.

Remarkably, the murder of Arab-Palestinian youth, Mohammed Abu Khdeir, has been baselessly blamed on the Israeli state by some elements in the mainstream media. It perhaps stands as an implicit justification for the missile attacks from Gaza, and remorseless rioting directed against the Israeli security services.

The mainstream media has comprehensively ignored mass Arab-Palestinian support for the kidnapping of the three Jewish teens: Eyal Yifrach, Gil-ad Shaar and Naftali Fraenkel. The overt racial motifs of Palestinian Authority support was also ignored. Likewise, the media minimised Hamas’ praise of the abduction, after falsely reporting that Hamas had denied involvement in the kidnapping.

Further subtle justification could be found in the not infrequent media claims that the kidnap victims were all settlers when in fact only one lived in a Jewish settlement.

As news emerges of the arrest of six Jewish youths for the murder of Abu Khdeir, news has simultaneously surfaced that an Arab-Palestinian taxi driver has confessed to the murder of a 19 year old woman, Jewish Israeli national Shelly Dadon, for what is believed to be nationalistic reasons. This confession has received little or no coverage outside of Israel itself.

Similarly, there has been no noticeable mainstream media coverage of the murder of a 60 year old Jewish woman. Her body was found in a parking lot in Pisgat Ze’ev, a Jerusalem neighbourhood, after a violent Arab riot occurred in the area, where chants of “kill the Jews” were reported.

With friends like these…

Unfortunately, Israel’s ally, the United States has also contributed to this double standard. When reports of the alleged beating of US national Tariq Khdeir emerged, US State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki stated:

“We are profoundly troubled by reports that he was severely beaten while in police custody and strongly condemn any excessive use of force. We are calling for a speedy, transparent and credible investigation and full accountability for any excessive use of force.”

The statement stands in rather stark contrast to the United States’ oddly weak response to the kidnapping one of the three Israeli’ teens, Naftali Frenkel, who also happened to be a US citizen. Rather than speak up clearly and loudly for this victim, who faced a considerably graver circumstance than Tariq Khdeir, US State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki instead chose to call for “restraint” on both sides:

“We recognize this is an incredibly sensitive and difficult circumstance on the ground, and we feel all sides should exercise restraint”

Such commentary echoes the attempts by news outlets, such as the New York Times, to place blame on Israel for attempting to rescue the kidnapped teens, since efforts to do so might destabilise relations with the Palestinian Authority and worsen conflict with Hamas.

Endemic racism

The mother of one of the prime suspects, in the kidnapping and murder of the three Jewish teens, denied her son was involved, but nonetheless expressed pride should he have committed the act:

“If he did the kidnapping I’ll be proud of him,” she said. “I raised my children on the knees of the (Islamic) religion, they are religious guys, honest and clean-handed, and their goal is to bring the victory of Islam”

Her statement is redolent of the praise lavished upon the Nazi SS — cleanliness, obedience and duty. It stands as further evidence that the Arab-Israel conflict concerns religion rather than the supposed deprivation of land, constituting the reason Yasser Arafat walked out of the Camp David talks. A peace plan including shared sovereignty of Haram al Sharif/Temple Mount with the Jewish State could not be tolerated, despite the favourable concessions to almost all Arab-Palestinian territorial demands.

Ultimately, the stark dichotomy, whereby Arab-Palestinians celebrate the kidnap and murder of three Jewish teenagers, whilst using the tragic murder of an Arab-Palestinian youth as an excuse to initiate a Third Intifada, demonstrates starkly the abiding racism of Arab-Palestinian society.

Humanity is by definition a universal concept, but to Arab-Palestinian society that humanity would seem to exclude the Jewish people. Many within Jewish-Israeli society rightly protested the probable revenge killing of Muhammad Abu Khdeir whilst Mohammad Zoabi, an Arab-Israeli teen, one of the few to express solidarity with the kidnap victims, was gravely threatened by his adult relatives, and mother. Meanwhile, his relative, Knesset member of parliament Hanin Zoabi, sympathised with the kidnappers, and Hamas.

Regrettably, prejudicial diplomacy, and wholly biased media coverage, continues to reinforce this appalling double-standard. It fuels an ancient genocidal hatred, rather than helping to confront it.

Published at Crethi Pleth.

Basic untruths and omissions in the mainstream media aid Palestinianism

A new video by Israel's Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Danny Ayalon, called "Israel Palestinian Conflict: The Truth About the West Bank" makes a number of good points about the basic divergence between simple well established facts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and how they are reported. This issue has a profound impact on the debate.

The clip alludes to the point that the mainstream media continually forwards certain basic fabrications of the historical record. It is clear these fabrications lend a great deal of legitimacy to Palestinianism.

Worth mentioning as well is the media’s twisted account of the history of the conflict found in virtually every news article on the subject of Jerusalem. Revealingly, the coverage by Associated Press, the BBC, and other mainstream news outlets, commonly include a paragraph on past conflict over Jerusalem. For some reason the failure to even briefly mention Jerusalem’s status before the 1967 Six Day War, when Israel took over the eastern side of the City from Jordan, is consistent. One example is

Israel seized east Jerusalem in the 1967 Six Day War, annexed the ancient city, and established the nation's capital there. The international community, however, does not recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital, and embassies in the country have based themselves in Tel Aviv.

After the British Mandate had ended in 1948, Jordan occupied what is now commonly called "Arab East Jerusalem" in the 1948-49 War. This occurred at a time when Jerusalem had in fact been a Jewish majority city for a long time, due in part to its importance to the Jewish faith. The Jordanians expelled the Jewish populace and handed their land and much of their property over to the Palestinians. Furthermore Israel in actual fact "seized" the city in a defensive war that they fought on three fronts (Syria, Egypt and Jordan). It cannot be a coincidence that the mainstream media in its many reports on Jerusalem fail to mention any of these points in Israel’s favour.

Danny Ayalon adds that the so-called "occupied territory" or "OPT" of the West Bank is in fact a disputed territory similar to other territories like Western Sahara and Kashmir. The West Bank cannot truly be considered occupied, in part because the League of Nations ruling on the area allows Jewish habitation throughout Palestine, and partly because it was not previously under the domain of a legitimate sovereign. Jordan’s annexation of the territory in 1950 was only accepted by two other nations and the State renounced any claim over the area in 1987.

Another interesting point is the fact that the Arab parties in the conflict insisted that the 1949 Armistice line would have no political significance. In effect it does not have the status of being an international border. It is worthwhile to add that today many countries, for example numerous states in South America, affirm recognition of a Palestinian state on those very borders. However, UN Resolution 242 (1967) recognises the present Israeli borders until such time as a peace deal is achieved. It does not call for full withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders despite repeated claims to the contrary. As Eugene Rostow pointed out the wording refers to withdrawal not from "all territories" but unspecified territories whilst ensuring Israeli security.

It is odd that many are hopelessly uninformed about the conflict despite the fact that it features heavily (perhaps excessively) in the media today. Clearly a two-state solution is the desired outcome of a peace process where the Palestinians get the vast majority of the West Bank and all of Gaza, with some land swaps as were agreed by both parties during the previously attempted peace solutions. However, the impact of the all too common propagandistic distortions of the basic historic record by the mainstream media is damaging. It feeds world-wide pro-Palestinianism and Arab/Palestinian militancy. It makes the limited opportunities of securing a just and lasting peace considerably harder.