One of the clichés in the Jewish world is that for every two Jews you get three opinions, four synagogues, and five political parties.  And yet in speaking around the country, I can tell you that there’s one subject on which every American Jew actually agrees, and that is a feeling that the media is biased against Israel.  We had a textbook case of this exactly a year ago during the Lebanon war, and I wouldn’t want you necessarily to take my word for it.  Marvin Kalb, the senior fellow at Harvard’s Center for Press and Politics, wrote a report called, “The Israeli-Hezbollah War of 2006: The Media as a Weapon in Asymmetrical Conflict.”  He wrote that “no Hezbollah secrets were disclosed during that war, but in Israel secrets were leaked and rumors spread like wildfire. Leaders felt obliged to issue hortatory appeals, often based on incomplete knowledge, and journalists were driven by the fire of competition to broadcast and publish unsubstantiated information.” [see full report: http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP07-012/$File/rwp_07_012_kalb.pdf]

          Kalb noted that Hezbollah was “able to control the dissemination of knowledge and how it was portrayed to the world and could depict itself as a selfless movement that was touched by God and blessed by religious fervor, and determined to resist the enemy, the infidel, and ultimately to achieve a ‘divine victory,’ no matter what the cost.”  There was little or no mention of the fact that they were dependent on Iran and Syria for their support.  You heard throughout the conflict last summer about Israel indiscriminately attacking targets in Lebanon.  Yet Israel’s response, that Hezbollah was using civilians as shields, was largely neglected, even though, as Kalb notes, there was plenty of evidence even before the war that this was the case.  Kalb quotes Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, who said before the war that Hezbollah fighters “live in their [civilians’] houses, in their schools, in their churches, in their fields, in their farms and in their factories.”

          The war started when Hezbollah launched an unprovoked attack across the border into Israel, attacked and killed three Israeli soldiers and kidnapped two soldiers, who remain kidnapped hostages to this day, a year later.  The BBC ran 117 stories on the war; 38 percent blamed Israel as the aggressor compared to only 4 percent that blamed Hezbollah.  Most stories said they were equally to blame.  Israel was depicted as the aggressor nearly twice as often in the Washington Post and the New York Times headlines, but three times as often in photographs.  Access to stories was tightly controlled by Hezbollah in Lebanon and in this they really took a page out of the playbook that the Palestine Liberation Organization wrote during the 1970’s and 1980’s, and the 1980 war, in being able to control what correspondents could see or do, and by threatening and harassing them to ensure that coverage would be favorable.

In the Hezbollah case, according to Kalb, “foreign correspondents were warned upon entry for their tour [of a southern Beirut suburb], that they could not wander off on their own or ask questions of any residents.  They could only take pictures of sites approved by their Hezbollah minders.  Violations, they were told, would be dealt with harshly.  Cameras would be confiscated; film or tape destroyed, and offending reporters never again allowed access to Hezbollah officials or Hezbollah controlled areas.”

          The Palestinians, the Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Arabs in general have learned to be very clever in manipulating the media. They have taken one page also out of the playbook of Joseph Goebbels and the Nazis, which they’ve used to great effect, and that is the big lie.  The big lie they tell the most often is to cry massacre whenever Jews or Israel seems to be in the neighborhood.  In 2002 there was a famous case where Israel went into the town of Jenin to root out the terrorists which had been using the refugee camp there as a base for suicide attacks against Israel for many months.  The Palestinian Authority went on TV saying that Israel had massacred 500 Palestinians, that thousands of innocent women and children were missing, and that the Israelis had created mass graveyards to hide their crimes.  It turned out in fact that even the Palestinians themselves when they investigated and the UN and other agencies investigated, discovered the total that died was actually only 56 and 34 of them had been terrorists who were involved in attacks. 

In the course of that attack Israel lost 29 soldiers, one of the bloodiest battles that they fought.  They lost them because those refugee camps were booby-trapped.  They faced extremely hostile conditions, and rather than doing what the United States probably would have done, which is to drop a bomb and flatten the entire refugee camp, in order to protect civilians the Israelis went in for hand-to-hand combat and suffered the consequences. 

Last summer we had a similar example when on August 7 news outlets repeated Lebanese Prime Minister’s Fouad Siniora’s claim that Israel had committed “a massacre” by killing 40 people in an air raid in a village called Hula.  Later it was learned that one person had died in that attack [the prime minister admitted to the revised number].  Nic Robertson at CNN was one of the worst offenders during the war.  He gave a number of reports from Beirut where he basically repeated whatever he was told by his minders at Hezbollah.  He came under a great deal of criticism for that.  Even his colleague Anderson Cooper admitted how Hezbollah controlled the access and what reporters could tell their audiences.  He gave a great example of how when he was in Beirut, Hezbollah had lined up ambulances and then one of the Hezbollah fellows gave a signal and they all turned on their sirens and went racing off to what reporters were told was to pick up the victims of some Israeli atrocity.  Cooper said basically it was just all a show for their effect. [http://newsbusters.org/taxonomy/term/530]

Probably the most outrageous statement last year was from the Washington Post’s Thomas Ricks, who made the charge that Israel was intentionally allowing Hezbollah to keep its rocket launchers and wasn’t attacking them so more Israeli civilians would die and that would help them in their PR effort [to gain sympathy for the death of civilians].  The Post took the almost unprecedented step of condemning their own reporter and forcing him to apologize. [http://www.camera.org/index.asp]

Cameramen, we know, like to get the most dramatic pictures.  This is one way that the Palestinians have also been very successful in manipulating the press because they know that a good picture will always tell more than 1,000 words.  So a Palestinian holding a rock in front of an Israeli tank is always going to make the front page of the newspaper, no matter how Israelis may try to explain why the tank is there and why that kid may be there.  In the case of Hezbollah, “the rarest picture of all during the entire war,” according to Marvin Kalb, “was that of a Hezbollah guerrilla.  It was as if the war on the Hezbollah side was being fought by ghosts.” The Herald-Sun of Australia published photos showing Hezbollah preparing to fire rockets from civilian neighborhoods.  It was one of the few outlets to show any such pictures.  But if they had been widely disseminated, it’s very likely that the kinds of reports that were being put out by groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International claiming that Israel was indiscriminately attacking targets would have easily been discredited.

The discovery of doctored photos was another issue that revealed the way the media could be manipulated and sometimes was actually doing the manipulating.  There was the famous case of the Reuters photographer who used PhotoShop to be able to change some of the photos that he took to make them look more dramatic, to make Israel look worse. [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5254838.stm] The New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief even went to the unusual length of criticizing his own newspaper when they showed a satellite photo of southern Beirut which had been cropped in such a way that it looked like Israel had destroyed all of Beirut.  And he said that if he showed the entire photograph, you could see that actually the area that Israel had bombed was a very tiny area.  This again hearkens back to what happened in Jenin, where if you looked at the satellite photo of the entire area of Jenin, you could see that Israel’s attack had been pinpointed to a very small area, but it had been blown out of proportion in the media to suggest that Israel had essentially destroyed the entire refugee camp.

One of the more dramatic instances of manipulation also is the way certain photographs will be staged.  I recommend you go to a web site called Pallywood, which shows some very vivid images that were taken by Palestinians in order to try to influence the press, and they would show in the most dramatic example the case of Palestinians at a funeral, where they were carrying a body on a stretcher to the cemetery.  Then something happened and stretcher-bearers dropped the stretcher and the dead body got up and ran away.  There are a number of these kinds of examples of how they were staging things specifically for the benefit of the cameras.

In the case of Lebanon again there were a great series of photos discovered where there would be a picture in the background of this tremendous destruction which allegedly had come from an Israeli bombing attack, and then in the foreground would be this terribly heart-wrenching picture of something like a child’s toy or a teddy bear.  But if you looked and analyzed it, you would realize immediately how could it be that this teddy bear looked to be in pristine condition?  There wasn’t a speck of dust on it, and yet all around it was this tremendous trail of destruction.  So it was clear that it had been manipulated.

Now as I say, we in the pro-Israel community take it for granted that the media is biased.  And it’s a little perverse, I suppose, to say this but I’m actually happy that the media has a bias against Israel because the reason that Israel is at a disadvantage in the media is in part because it’s a democracy and because Israel is such a vibrant democracy with, I believe, more correspondents per capita based there than just about any other country in the world, it’s going to get more coverage and because coverage in general is negative, it’s going to get more negative coverage than any other country.

You can write and say whatever you want when you’re based in Israel, and if you want to read the most harsh criticism of Israel, all you have to do is pick up any Israeli newspaper any day of the week.  Read El Haaretz. It’s now in English online. You can read all the criticism you want of Israel.  By contrast, journalists aren’t free to report in the Arab world, in the Middle East.  How often have you seen an anchor paper for one of the major networks reporting live from Cairo, Egypt, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Damascus, Syria?  It rarely if ever happens.  You’re not free to report from any of those countries.

And in the Palestinian Authority in particular, there’s no freedom of press whatsoever, even if you’re a Palestinian reporter.  Read what Palestinian journalists say about how they’re treated.  We have the outrageous example just in the last few weeks since the Hamas took over Gaza, where women reporters who appeared on television without wearing head covers were threatened to have their heads cut off by Hamas.  There are constant threats and harassment against journalists, where they’ve been shot, arrested, and otherwise harassed for trying to do even a remotely honest job, never mind outsiders and what they might try to do. 

The Palestinian media in general is a horror show of incitement against Israel.  Again, you have this recent example in the last two months of a TV show where Hamas had put together a children’s program with a Mickey Mouse-like character which was exhorting children to become martyrs and to kill Jews.  After it had attracted international attention and criticism, the character, the Mickey Mouse character they had arrested by the Israelis and essentially killed by Israelis in jail.  This is the kind of thing that’s regularly seen on Palestinian TV.  All sorts of dramatic examples of inciting even the youngest of children to hate Jews and to engage in terrorism.

One of the big problems in media coverage in general is just the ignorance of many of the reporters who cover the region.  I think one of the great examples just a week or so ago was, again, the bureau chief of the New York Times, Steve Erlanger, wrote a very long piece about the situation in Gaza, and the very first sentence in the piece said how Palestinians had never done the kinds of things they’re doing today to each other in Gaza. This is an example of how journalists tend to think that all of history begins with their arrival in the place.  All you would need to do is look at Palestinian history over the last 100 years to see the kinds of things that Palestinians are doing to each other in Gaza has been going on for the last 100 years.  You don’t even have to go back that far.  If he had been around for the first intifada in the 1980’s, he would know that by the end of the intifada more Palestinians were killing each other than were being killed in conflict with Israel.

In addition to that, very few American reporters speak Arabic.  So if they want to get reports from the Palestinian territories or other parts of the Arab world frequently they rely on stringers, who more often than not have their own agendas and are not interested in any kind of objective reporting.  Journalists will typically say that the media is awful in covering the Palestinian or the Arab side of the story as well.  So they’ll say, we get complaints from the Arabs, we get complaints from the Jews, therefore we must be doing it right.  Well, it doesn’t follow.  In fact, they’re doing it wrong, and they may in many cases do injustice to the coverage of the Arabs and the Palestinians as well, but it certainly doesn’t make their coverage of Israel any more accurate.

The more interesting question to me is really, does it matter?  I could tell you that the great fear among supporters of Israel is that if this media bias continues and gets worse that this will lead to a change in US policy, that American public opinion will turn on Israel and that the US government will turn on Israel.  I would argue that objectively that hasn’t happened and isn’t likely to happen.  First of all, most people I think agree that there was sort of a golden age of US-Israel relations immediately after the Six-Day War, when Israel was seen as David having defeated the Goliath of all of the surrounding Arab countries.  Today that’s reversed.  Now Israel is often portrayed as the Goliath, but in 1967 they were little David that had defeated the mighty Goliath in just six days.  There was this great outpouring of support for Israel.

If you look at the Gallup poll in 1967 and asked, who do you sympathize with more, Israel or the Arabs, the answer was 55 percent said Israel, and I think it was about 4 percent said the Arabs.  Now it’s been 40 years.  We just celebrated the 40th anniversary of that war.  Forty years of what most people in the pro-Israel community would say was terrible anti-Israel bias in the media; an objectively difficult situation when Shamir was the prime minister, Begin was the prime minister, the issues of settlements, the intifada one and intifada two.  All sorts of very difficult things have happened that one would think might lead Americans to turn on Israel. 

However, in the last Gallup poll, when they asked, who do you sympathize with more, Israel or Palestinians, it was now 58 percent supported Israel.  So objectively, support for Israel has grown, and at the same time support for the Arabs or the Palestinians has marginally moved.  And why is that?  In part, and this may be something that my colleague will want to talk about, it has to do with the image of Arabs in this country.  There are negative stereotypes which I think feed into the low esteem that the general public has toward Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular.  And while there will be a terrorist attack and it may get coverage in the newspaper the way a typical pro-Israel person will look at the newspaper will be, how did they cover this terrorist attack?  Did they blame the terrorists sufficiently?  Every once in a while there will be a report about a terrorist incident and they will talk about the poor terrorist’s mother, for example.  And pro-Israel people would say how outrageous this is!  Why are they talking about the terrorist’s mother instead of all of these victims of that terrorist?  And I would argue that most people don’t look at it this way.  Most people will look at the story and say, look at what these terrorists have done again, and it reinforces negative stereotypes about the Arabs.  So public opinion [about Israel] has remained stable and has actually gone up over the years despite whatever media bias people may detect.

The bigger issue, of course, is US government policy.  Will US government policy turn on Israel if it continues to see these kinds of negative portrayals of the image of Israel in the press?  I would say objectively, if you look at the situation, it’s been overwhelmingly in Israel’s favor, despite the media.

A few examples.  Again, if you go back to that time of the Jenin case, that was during an operation in Israel called Operation Defensive Shield, where they sent in their troops to the West Bank in an effort to root out the terrorist infrastructure that had been built up in the West Bank.  And nothing had really been said critical of the operation until one day something happened, and President Bush came out of the White House and shook his finger at the camera and said, ‘Israel must withdraw immediately.’

What had happened?  At that point there were a group of Palestinian terrorists who had holed up in the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem and Israel had it surrounded.  And the president was very upset that the Church of the Nativity was under siege, and that was the first criticism that he really made, and for about a week Israel refused to withdraw from around the church and there was a daily drumbeat of criticism that Israel was defying the president of the United States.

Now given that coverage, especially given the president’s attitude, you would expect that if there was going to be any turning of US policy, that would be the time.  So what happened?  Well, the US Congress voted to give Israel $200 million more in economic and military aid, and at the same time voted to place greater restrictions on the Palestinians. 

I think if you look at these last 40 years, during a time when most pro-Israel people would argue the bias in the media has gotten worse and worse, US policy toward Israel has gotten closer and closer.  That golden age in 1967 was actually a time when the United States had an embargo against arms to Israel during the Six Day War.  We had the period of the first George Bush, who was widely regarded as the most anti-Israel president in history, but he was followed by Bill Clinton, who was regarded as perhaps the most pro-Israel.  And today George W. Bush, for all of his faults at least in terms of his policy toward Israel, is seen as at least as sympathetic to Israel as Bill Clinton, if not more so.  And we had the instance just this week of the announcement that Israel is going to be getting $30 billion more in military aid over the next 10 years.  So clearly I think you can see by any objective measure, US policy toward Israel has only gotten stronger and stronger.

What’s important to recognize is that coverage of the Middle East is often very much shaped by the US State Department.  The State Department is the key player in the Middle East.  They’re the key leaker to journalists about what they think should be done.  They are overwhelmingly biased toward the Arab world, for good reason, because if they want a job, the language you learn is Arabic, not Hebrew because there are 21 jobs you can get in the Arab world and there’s only one you can get if you speak Hebrew.  So there’s an overwhelming number of Arabists in the State Department whose view is that US policy should be more inclined toward a sympathetic treatment of the Arab states.  And you see that at the same time Israel is getting $30 billion promised in military aid.  Egypt was promised a huge aid package as well, even though they have no need whatsoever for military arms because no one is threatening them.  Sudan isn’t a threat to them.  Nobody else is a threat to them. 

The Saudis are being offered a huge arms package, even though they have no army to speak of, and easily could be overrun in a minute.  And certainly the weapons they’re being offered are no threat to Iran if it has nuclear weapons.  And the same for the even smaller Gulf states.  But because the State Department believes that there has to be this balancing act and that in order to maintain friendship with the Arab world we have to pay them off essentially with arms, this is what the government is doing.

But again, the State Department’s basic policy and basic opinion is if we’re too close to Israel that will hurt our relations with the Arabs.  And in fact, just the opposite has happened. As our relations with the Arab world have gotten better and better over the course of the years the relations have gotten stronger and stronger with Israel.

So it’s not difficult to make the case from my perspective that the media’s biased against Israel, but I would suggest that even though it is, and even though we need to be very diligent about holding the media to account in correcting the mistakes when they make them, the bigger issue is the ultimate impact it has on policy, and to date and I believe for the foreseeable future, US policy toward Israel will remain strong and a close alliance.  Thank you very much.