Participants include:
Bryan Atinsky's Speech:
Hello everyone, I wanted to thank the sponsors of this conference for inviting me to be here, and I must say it is an honor to be on a panel with such respected journalists as these.
And, understanding that the organization and journal I work for are probably less well known than the others on this panel, I thought that first I would explain a little about who we are and what we do. The Alternative Information Center was founded in 1984, and it is one of the few truly joint Palestinian/Israeli organizations, with offices in West Jerusalem, and Beit Sahour in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Our organization believes that it is illegitimate for any country to set legal divisions along religious or ethnic lines. We believe that there must be both legal and substantial equality, of rights and privileges, between all peoples in Palestine/Israel, regardless of whether they are Jewish, Muslim, Christian, or non-religious.
If there is to be a long-term solution to this conflict between these two communities, there must be a just end to occupation, land confiscation, segregation, and state violence.
The journal, News from Within, which I co-edit with Palestinian Journalist Nassar Ibrahim, (who the Israeli government denies the privilege of being able to leave his own country to speak at conferences such as this), reflects this radical democratic approach. The diverse articles are written by Palestinians, Israelis and some internationals, dealing with important issues and viewpoints that are often neglected by the dominant media.
This political position that we take in the AIC, and do not hide in News from Within, reflects our role as an alternative to the droll, newsbytes of TV, radio and the patently biased and inadequate mainstream press.
And, after 20 years, it could be asked, why do we still feel a need to continue to exist, to provide this alternative news source? After all, there are more international journalists permanently based in Palestine/Israel then in almost any other part of the world?
Well, it is at times such as we are entering, when the media (both local and international) begins focusing on the so called ‘Palestinian/Israeli peace process,’ and the announced Israeli military redeployment and removal of settlements from Gaza, when there begins to be a euphoria of hope over substance. We all know that the media in the past has, as in the case during the Oslo period, and will in the present, cease to focus on the daily plight of the Palestinian people and daily manifestations of the occupation, the building of the Segregation Wall, the enlargement of settlements in the West Bank and the continued confiscation of Palestinian land. (And I want to mention that I use the term ‘military redeployment’ here and not ‘end to the occupation of the Gaza Strip,’ because…let’s be clear about it…this is not going to be an end to the occupation, but merely the redeployment of the Israeli military forces to the edge of Palestinian populated areas—with tight Israeli control over the importation and exportation of goods, Israeli control over land and sea borders, Israeli control over the airspace, etc.—while there will be an expectation that the PA will act as a proxy occupation force for the Israelis).
Moreover, one of the most central issues right now, which is having a huge impact on the lives of the Palestinian people and on the future possibilities for peace, is Israel’s continued building of the separation Wall, against the ruling of the International court of justice.
And, if there does exist some sort of quasi-objective arbiter in the international system, it is the decisions of the ICJ. Moreover, if the ICJ had ruled on Saddam Hussein, North Korea or the actions of Serbia, one could suspect that a constant flow of articles would at least mention said country’s lack of compliance to the ICJ ruling, but this is not true in the case of the ruling on the Separation Wall. I made a cursory check on LexisNexis…and found that in the past two months, in all the major English language world newspapers, there were 24 mentions of the ICJ ruling in regard to the Separation Wall. And for instance, in the NY Times, of 10 mentions of the “Separation Barrier” the ICJ ruling was only named twice. And both followed the same pattern. I quote:
“Israel has also faced sharp international criticism. The International Court of Justice in The Hague, in an advisory ruling last July, said parts of the barrier inside the West Bank violated international law and should be torn down. Sharon’s government rejected the ruling. The government revised the route as its response to a ruling last year by Israel’s High Court of Justice.”
And that is the end of the discussion…a sort of ‘he said, she said’…objectivity as a quote from one side and then a quote from the other….yet, what we have here is not objectivity at all…at most it is an attempt at neutrality and at worst it is pure laziness which actually creates a bias towards one side by creating the appearance of an even playing field out of what is, in truth, a greatly skewed power structure…
As the Bishop Desmond Tutu once pointed out: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”
And, as the historian Thomas Haskell stated in his well-known article “Objectivity is Not Neutrality”: “The powerful argument is the highest fruit of the kind of thinking I would call objective, and in it neutrality plays no part. Authentic objectivity has simply nothing to do with the television newscaster’s mechanical gesture of allocating the same number of seconds to both sides of a question, or editorially splitting the difference between them, irrespective of their perceived merits” (Haskell, History and Theory, 29 (no. 2), 1990, 129-157).
Now, going back to the formation of this “New Wall route”…though it was done in response to both long-term international grassroots pressure and the ICJ ruling (which says something about the possible effectivity of a sustained and organized critical movement), one still has to ask how much this new route actually changes the situation on the ground for the Palestinian people.
In answer to this, as Prof. Tanya Reinhart of Tel Aviv University recently pointed out….NOT MUCH…she writes that: “The new line of the barrier as approved by the Israeli cabinet in February reduces the size of Palestinian land to be annexed by the barrier by 2.5 percent, mainly in the Southern Hebron area […] as a result, the Palestinian population in this area will no longer be located in a completely closed area, but rather on the West Bank side of the Barrier. This will reduce the overall Palestinian population completely isolated from the West Bank by about 340 persons.” (“Behind The Smoke Screen Of The Gaza Pullout” By Tanya Reinhart, 15 April, 2005, Yediot Aharonot)
Nevertheless, we have much media coverage that speaks of the bold and dangerous steps that Ariel Sharon is making towards peace.
And, this gap between the promises of the Israeli government and its actions on the ground becomes more understandable when one listens to the government officials’ own contextualization of their plans for a Gaza pullout. In an extremely candid interview with Ha’aretz (which they sadly don’t seem to have incorporated into their analysis of the Gaza pullout), Dov Weisglass, senior advisor to Sharon (and who happened to be with Sharon at the latest summit at Bush’s Crawford Ranch) stated that the Israeli government’s plan for disengagement from the Gaza Strip is not intended as one step along the road towards peace with the Palestinians. On the contrary, he makes clear that it is simply a slight of hand through which to freeze the ‘peace process’ in a seemingly “legitimate manner.”
Weisglass, in his interview states plainly that: “The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process […] And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress” (Ha’aretz, 10 October 2004, “The Big Freeze,” By Ari Shavit, ).
And we have more proof of this with Israel’s Ambassador to the United States Danny Ayalon, when he stated that President Bush unequivocally supports Israel’s stance that major West Bank settlement blocs are to be part of the Jewish state under a future peace treaty.
Moreover, The Bush Administration has been equivocal at best in its criticism of Israel’s building plans. While the US has publicly called for no settlement “expansion,” in the OPT, and their was much made in the commercial media about the disagreements between Bush and Sharon at the latest summit, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stated on Israel Radio that “no one should say there’s no agreement between our two governments. […] there is; it was reached on April 14 last year [2004] and it’s clear […] the ‘existing major Israeli population centers’ will have to be taken in account in any final status negotiations.” And, moreover, as reported, “Rice […] made it clear that the term ‘Israeli population centers’ refers directly to the ‘large settlement blocs.’”
Yet, when looking at the news analysis on the latest Summit in Crawford, coming out of a significant portion of the major Israeli and American newspapers…instead of focusing on the substantial and overwhelming agreement between Sharon and Bush on almost every topic (be it settlements, the PA, and even Iran), the media portrayed the meeting as full of disagreement and contention.
One instance of this can be seen in the headline of a report by By Aluf Benn of Ha’aretz
Titled: “Analysis: Instead of friendship—disagreements”
And the NY Times on the 12th of April, 2005:
“Bush Supports Plan by Sharon for Withdrawal From Gaza: But Criticized Expansion of West Bank Settlement”
The article begins:
“President Bush and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel differed openly on Monday over Israel’s intention to expand a settlement in the West Bank, but Mr. Bush gave the Israeli leader robust backing for his plan to withdraw from Gaza this summer” (New York Times, April 11, 2005, by Richard W. Stevenson).
Yet, the fact of the matter is, as was emphasized by Rice, there IS substantial agreement not only on withdrawal from Gaza, but also on settlements.
Moreover, considering my emphasis on text journalism here, one thing we need to keep in mind when trying to understand coverage, at least in the context of Israeli society (and I am sure the trend is the same in the US), is that the Israeli public watch television news broadcasts much more than they read the newspapers, and when they do read the paper, it is most likely only the weekend newspaper. We also need to realize that, while Ha’aretz is probably the most internationally well known of the Israeli newspapers, it actually has by far the smallest readership of the three major dailies.
And, further, though it well deserves consideration as the highest quality of the major Israeli dailies, and contains some essential coverage coming from critical-journalists such as Amira Hass and Gideon Levy, Meron Benvenisti and Yulie Khromchenko, it is important to look at how and where these articles are placed in the newspaper’s overall structure. Almost invariably, the articles which are most critical of Israeli policies and actions are either part of the opinion page, culture gallery, or, as Gideon Levy’s weekly article is, part of the weekend magazine. Moreover, wide use of terms such as “Illegal settlement outposts” and acceptance of the use of the Israeli Defense Forces are problematic. By force of the illogical logic created by this use of these terms, if the outposts are ‘illegal’ this must mean that the other settlements are ‘legal.’ More accurate terminology would be “unauthorized settlements” and instead of IDF, merely “the Israeli Military.”
Yet, to get a proper understanding of the media coverage in Israel, we do need to look at coverage in television news broadcasts… and Prof. Ilan Pappe of Haifa University actually writes in his latest column in News from Within about this very subject, so I will quote him here:
“The Israelis are news addicts and the news broadcasts on primetime television are eagerly watched by millions. It is there each night that one can find the images conveyed about Palestinian society in a nutshell, repeated over and over on the TV screen. The ‘painters of these images,’ so to speak, are a very distinct group of people. They are called ‘our correspondents for Arab affairs’: a senior correspondent for the Arab world at large, and a junior one for the Occupied Palestinian Territories. There are three news channels […] So, in total, there are six to seven Arab affairs correspondents. […] Ideologically, they do not differ from one another, and the pictures they draw are not only similar, they are identical. For most Jews in Israel, this is their sole source of information about Palestinian society: its politics, culture and identity. In the daily reports in the Israeli electronic media, the Palestinians are described as being governed by a group of gangsters. Narrow minded politicians—with only personal interest at heart, violent in nature and easily bribed or incited as the case may be—directing, at their whim, a primitive, traditional and underdeveloped society. You can search in vain in these reports for the existence of a national sentiment on the Palestinians’ side, nor can you find any historical context for Palestinian individual or collective actions. There is no physical hardship under occupation, there is no accumulative suffering under the economic strangulation and heavy oppression, and there are no human beings who react—by any standard with a lot of patience—in the face of one of the world’s cruelest occupations in modern times. There is only unexplained and barbaric hatred that has to be contained within walls, fences and military bases”(Ilan Pappe, “Our Correspondents for Arab Affairs” in News from Within,” Vol. XXI, No. 2, February/March 2005).
It is a common viewpoint that the conflict in Palestine/Israel would have ended a long time ago if people around the world realized just how bad the situation actually is. Instead, people around the world are confused, and misunderstand the nature of the occupation; indeed, many people don’t even realize who is occupying who (as a Glasgow University poll recently revealed in the UK, 71 percent did not know who occupied the West Bank and Gaza, nine percent knew it was Israel, and 11 percent thought that the Palestinians were the occupiers and the settlers)! Often, people will tend to put this conflict down to a case of ‘both as bad as each other,’…a kind of ethnic conflict between bad neighbors, or, since 9/11, simply the defense of Israel against Islamic terrorists etc.
So, in closing, I will say that, though we may wish that the dominant media would begin to truly engage with the overwhelming multitude of facts on the ground that easily point to who holds the lion’s share of blame in this conflict and what the elements of a just solution to the situation are, we believe the mainstream, commercial media around the globe helps to perpetuate this problem of misunderstanding, and thus see our role as an essential one: we are a critical voice within a foggy sea of confusion and misrepresentation.
Thank you very much…
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