When Alison Weir established the anti-propaganda site, If Americans Knew, several years ago, its purpose was to inform and educate the American public on issues pertaining to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict of major significance that are unreported, underreported, or misreported in the American media.
Indeed, Weir’s studies of mainstream American media show that it harbors an extreme bias toward Israel and typically underreports and distorts incidents in which Palestinians are killed or wounded by Israel armed forces in the Occupied Palestinian territories. Indeed, from these reports, one gets the impression that the media consider the military occupation and colonization of Palestinian land in the West Bank and Gaza a normal, justified situation, of late being involved in routing out the “terrorist infrastructure,” as Ariel Sharon liked to put it. Resistance to occupation is now viewed as the product of evil, Palestinian terrorists.
Although the documentary, Peace, Propaganda, & The Promised Land (Part I here and Part II here), which was seen by over a million viewers on Google Video (now in the two parts cited above on YouTube) did an excellent job unveiling Israeli propaganda for what it is, Americans are still besieged by falsehoods as to the nature of the conflict.
Notable quotes from this documentary attest what most average Americans believe:
Rabbi Michael Lerner, Founder & Executive Director, Tikkun Magazine: “When you have a population that is being occupied, when their fundamental human rights are systematically being denied, when they are not allowed to move from city to city and place to place, without a huge amount of harassment, when they are being subject to torture, when people are essentially in desperate conditions, it is not a surprise that they are going to be very, very angry. There is no understand by the public media, or the American media, what creates this circumstance. Israel occupies, people strike at Israel against that occupation. They use means I think are wrong means, namely, the terror, and then Israel imposes punishment on the entire people, which creates a climate which makes it easier to recruit.”
Major Stav Adivi, reserves, Israeli Defense Forces, Israel: “we have to understand that these (suicide bombings) are the effects of the occupation.”
Robert Jensen, Professor of Journalism, University of Texas-Austin: “In contrast to the international press, in American media, there is a reversal of cause and effect in that the occupation is framed as a response to the suicide bombings. All of the Palestinian actions are attacks and Israel actions retaliation, is meaningful. Retaliation suggests a defensive stance against violence initiated by someone else. It places a responsibility for the violence on the party provoking the retaliation. In other words, Palestinian violence like suicide bombings is seen as cause and the origin of the conflict. Since the September 11 attack on the US, Israel’s PR strategy has been to frame all Palestinian actions, violent or not, as terrorism. To the extent that they can do that they have repackaged the illegal occupation as part of the war on terrorism.”
News headlines: “This is Israel’s war on terrorism. F16s hit a Palestinian in the Gaza Strip this morning….The case the Israelis are trying to make: this is no different than what the US is doing in Afganistan (air attacks in the West Bank)…Prime Minister Ariel Sharon declared on television tonight, that he was determined to root out what he called `the terrorist infrastructure.'”
So the myth of the Palestinian terrorist, who just happens to be fighting a long and incessant military occupation that the UN has called illegal, remains in the minds of Americans. But the myth is cracking as more and more of us learn the truth.
In February 2008, a new book on biased reporting in the American media about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is set to come out, documenting the continuation of these media biases, distortion, and propaganda favorable to Israel, that completely hides the true nature of Israel’s occupation and its colonial intentions, though now limited to the West Bank or what is known in Israel as Judea and Samaria.
Pens and Swords, which was written by Marda Dunsky of Depaul University, subtitled: How the American Mainstream Media Report the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, will soon be released.
Marda Dunsky is a former Arab affairs reporter for the Jerusalem Post and editor on the national/foreign desk of the Chicago Tribune. She has developed and taught a unique media literacy course on American mainstream reporting of the Arab and Muslim worlds at Northwestern University and DePaul University.
A Summary
Most Americans understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict via the news media, which tend to focus primarily on the story’s continual, inter-communal bloodshed and stop-and-start efforts at diplomacy. With such a limited range of media discourse, it is no wonder that many Americans believe that peace is unobtainable. Beginning with the failed Camp David summit of July 2000 and ending with the waning of the second Palestinian uprising in the summer of 2004, Marda Dunsky takes a close look at how more than two dozen major American print and broadcast outlets have reported the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She finds that they omit two key contextual elements: the significant impact that U.S. policy has had and continues to have on the trajectory of the conflict, and the way international law and consensus have addressed the key issues of Israeli settlement and annexation policies and Palestinian refugees. She explores how reporting of the conflict routinely takes on the contours of American policy and rarely challenges the premises of this “Washington consensus.” In addition, she examines the media’s responses to allegations of biased coverage and gauges the effect that mainstream news reporting on the conflict has on public opinion and U.S. foreign policy. She includes the perspectives of more than a dozen correspondents who have reported the story from the field for major American media outlets.
Preliminary Reviews
“Pens and Swords doesn’t just decry systematic distortion but explains why it happens again and again. Dunsky makes use of theory to illuminate rather than obscure, bringing academic rigor to a topic so politicized that many avoid it out of fear. Thanks to Dunsky for this brave and timely book.” –Robert Jensen, University of Texas at Austin
“This is an important book. There have been several treatments that have addressed the topic, but this work provides a systematic, fairly comprehensive, and up to date analysis of the U.S. media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is a vital contribution to the scholarship on this issue. The empirical evidence that the author has so diligently provided for her arguments constitutes the book’s greatest strength. ” –Karim H. Karim, director of Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication in Ottawa
“Dunsky has done us a great service by showing that there is a decidedly pro-Israel bias in the American media’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which makes it almost impossible to have intelligent debates about that dispute and its effects on U.S. Middle East policy. Anyone concerned about why the United States is in so much trouble in the Arab and Islamic world should read Pens and Swords.” –John J. Mearsheimer, R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science, the University of Chicago
“Written by a journalist and scholar who has reported from the region, this book is a perceptive, careful, and factual assessment of why the American mainstream media does such an exceedingly poor job of conveying the realities of the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, perpetuating stereotypes, and echoing the conceits of policymakers in Washington. ” –Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies, Middle East Institute, Columbia University
This book will be available soon through Columbia Press in paperback at a reasonable price.
