Hat tip: Karol Sheinen at Alarming News.
The Guardian just ran a piece by Rachel Shabi on the way in which certain players in the Middle East manipulate the news to their advantage; the author describes reporters reacting with disgust at having been manipulated. Pallywood revealed at last? No such luck. No, it’s the PCPer’s (in Shabi’s case, apparently a PCP2er) favorite target: those nasty soldiers in the IDF. Because the piece is so riddled with the very flaws that created Pallywood, I will offer a blow-by-blow analysis.

In any media review of 2005, Israel’s disengagement from the Gaza strip features prominently. Few can forget those powerful images of tearful, anguished Israeli settlers barricading themselves into synagogues, standing on rooftops hurling abuse, flour and paint at soldiers, or being reluctantly wrenched from their homes, accompanied by bewildered toddlers and screaming teenagers. The events in Gaza took over the international media in August. Since then, it has been cited as a bold move in the Israel/Palestine conflict, transforming the image of Ariel Sharon from a hawk to a brave man of peace.

That many of the evacuated settlers were genuinely devastated, or that the disengagement was a historic moment, is not in dispute. But were we witnessing, through the media coverage of the time, a spontaneously unfolding narrative or a pre-orchestrated piece of theatre?

Let’s begin with a false dichotomy: either it’s spontaneous or its pre-orchestrated. So if we find signs of organization (who in their right minds wouldn’t try and organize so explosive a procedure?) then it must be a “piece of theatre.”

“It was a masterpiece,” says one picture editor of a large news agency. “Afterwards, we all felt we played a game and that we had been used, bought with great pictures.” This editor is not alone in such sentiments. Other journalists involved refer to “a tremendous amount of manipulation” and “the biggest ever publicity stunt”, or claim that the event was “definitely stage-managed.”

Ah, would that the media would say such things about their manipulation not by soldiers projecting an image of peacefulness, but by the malevolent cameraman Talal abu Rahma and his “definitely stage-managed” blood libel of Muhammed al Durah. That one cost many lives, and the toll (for those who realize the al Durah Affair’s role in mainstreaming suicide terrorism) is still rising.

The biggest gripe is that the scenes recorded by the media were not entirely real. “There was a very clear sense that, despite all the anguish and seeming chaos on the ground, the evacuation went like clockwork,” says Hazel Ward, a reporter for AFP.

A reporter from Agence France-Presse, one of the major players in the cover-up of the al-Durah Affair had a “very clear sense” that the scenes were “not entirely real.” Here are the Israelis, afraid to even mention al Durah without a smoking gun to prove their case because reporters have so much resistance to even the suggestion that they were “had,” and agencies like AFP and reporters like Shabi will be down their throats with accusations of “blaming the victim,” ready to go on record with a “sense” that things were “not entirely real.” By that standard the case for al Durah as a fake is a slam dunk.

The top line was of settler resistance in the face of inevitable evacuation by a strong but sympathetic army. Yet some reporters say this story was pre-negotiated.

David Ratner, a reporter for Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, describes such an arrangement in Homesh, a former settlement in the northern West Bank. “They held meetings where the settlers would say, ‘Let’s keep to the agreement, we don’t beat up the soldiers, we will lie on the ground holding hands’, and the soldiers were saying, ‘We will break you apart, in small squads of four soldiers but not using excessive force, and you are not allowed to kick at the military.’ This is what one of the officers told me.”

He adds that the showdown was agreed right down to the details of what the settlers could throw at the soldiers and police: flour was OK, acid was not OK. “An officer told me they agreed the settlers could throw any food they wanted, tomatoes, hummus, pickles – as long as the pickles had been removed from the cans.”

Ratner says that in most settlements he visited, events were not spontaneous but “completely under control”. A photojournalist confirms this. “Remember the reports from Gush Katif [the largest Gaza settlement], against the backdrop of a huge bonfire built by settlers, so that it looked like a report from Saigon? It was a done deal, the settlers had told the soldiers they would not resist too much if they could build the fire.”

Nobody knows to what extent these negotiations took place or how far in advance. A spokesperson for the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) says, “The IDF does not discuss or elaborate the details of meetings that are held behind closed doors.”

This is quite fascinating. Because the Israelis carried out successful negotiations for avoiding bloodshed and for permitting a maximal degree of protest for those genuinely outraged at what was happening to them amongst them no matter how great the divide — and many Israelis did fear there would be violence — they therefore staged it.

Although settlers are largely hostile to journalists (and demonstrate that by trashing media equipment and slashing car tyres), the Gaza and West Bank evacuees grasped the media opportunity of disengagement. There are numerous reports of hysterics and tears that appeared to be staged for the cameras.

“There are numerous reports…?” From? About?

Although journalists speedily point out that there was genuine settler grief, some say it soon became apparent that some was of the “rented wailing woman” (as one Israeli reporter puts it) variety.

You mean, like this?

“I’m not saying people weren’t heartbroken,” says Ward. “But when you realise people are putting on a show for you and that you are lapping it up and peddling it out to the world, it casts a really unpleasant light.”

Soooo, when are you going to stop peddling Pallywood?

The result, some journalists fear, is that settler and government objectives dovetailed into a common purpose of making the Gaza evacuation appear difficult (and therefore unrepeatable).

So in other words, reporters do think about the way their coverage effects events. And here, if their coverage has the impact of making further evacuations difficult, then they’ve done a disservice… to whom? To their PCP public who believe that if only the Israelis would withdraw to the ’67 borders, then there’d be peace?

If the media coverage made disengagement look like Sharon’s “painful concession”, it made the IDF look like heroes. Prior to it, the IDF typically featured in the world press as a brutal force, harassing Palestinians at checkpoints, demolishing homes, shooting kids and making bloody incursions into Gaza and the West Bank. Now, here they were, conducting settlement evacuations with calm and dignity, often in the face of verbal assault. “They were given a prime opportunity, on a plate, to present themselves as caring, strong, brave, tender, you name it,” says Ward.

Put slightly differently, the IDF had previously been portrayed the way Pallywood would have it. We can’t have them appear contrary to the way we’ve cast them. We can’t allow the public to see the IDF as a humane fighting force. What would that do to our journalistic credibility. So let’s admit we made a mistake. Not the mistake of believing Pallywood, but the mistake of covering the Disengagement sympathetically.

According to Amelia Thomas, a correspondent for the Middle East Times and Christian Science Monitor, this felt pre-meditated, too. “Those accounts and images of the soldiers looked compassionate, but when you saw it take place, it didn’t seem genuine but more like, ‘Oh God, now I’ve got to hug another settler.’” One photographer is similarly cynical, describing it as “Woodstock Gaza, 2005″.

So someone please explain to me, with all this cynicism and detection of staging in our MSM, why is Pallywood so effective? Why do I show this to heavy-hitters in the MSM and they respond, “well, we could argue about every frame”? Is this another form of affirmative action? Demand perfection from the Israelis and nothing from the Palestinians?

Around 8,000 settlers were living in the areas to be evacuated. Roughly half of them had left without a fuss before the forced evacuation began. Many of those depicted in the final showdowns were outside supporters and not actual residents. An estimated 24,000 settlers remain, illegally, in the occupied West Bank. Crucially, Sharon’s government approved settlement expansion in the West Bank, currently being executed at a breathtaking pace.

Why does this feel like it’s a dispatch from the PA news agency, or from Ramsey Clark?

Many journalists, especially print journalists, hold that this fact was reflected in the disengagement reports. Others fear that these nuances were lost in the overall drama. “The problem is that, when we get good images like these, it rocks, and it becomes really difficult to see beyond that,” says one picture editor.

By “this fact” we are apparently supposed to understand the “Sharon” strategy of leaving Gaza and taking over the West Bank. That must be why Sharon left Likud and formed an alliance with Shimon Peres. With “facts” like this, no wonder the MSM has trouble understanding the difference between news reporting and editorializing. But then, the European press has always had difficulty with that. Maybe I’m holding the Guardian to too high standards.

Media preparations were under way months in advance and were based on disengagement being a lengthy, combative affair. In the event, it took six days and nobody was seriously injured. Massive media budgets were doubtless involved and, as one journalist has speculated, ensuing coverage may have reflected the need to “make good the money spent”.

To read behind these lines, the media was there to get great pictures of Jews shedding Jewish blood. After all Palestinians shed Palestinian blood every day. So let’s be even-handed and show the Israelis at it. And when the gladitorial match didn’t bring on the expected blood, well… we had to make the best of it.

David Ratner of Haaretz suggests that, if foreign media overestimated the level of violence likely to erupt during disengagement, it is because they did not fully comprehend the cohesion that exists within Jewish Israeli society. “If the settlers really wanted to open fire, it would have been a piece of cake,” he says. “But 99.9% would never cross that line.”

And therein lies the difference between a culture that can sustain democracy under the most trying circumstances (let’s see how well the Europeans do when suicide terrorism becomes a daily threat), and a culture that cannot sustain a democracy no matter how much outside support (diplomatic, financial, media, solidarity movements) because they cannot stop killing each other. Would Shabi let you know that? I doubt it.

One reporter witnessed a rabbi ask teenage settler protesters if they intended to put up a struggle for a day or a week, to which they replied: a day, because any longer would make the army look weak. Indeed, the settlers lost all credibility among the Israeli public when some were pictured verbally assaulting soldiers, describing them as Nazis.

Ah, would that Hamas or the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade would lose all credibility with the Palestinian public when they abuse mentally challenged kids and send them to suicide terror missions against Israeli civilians, or when they summarily execute Palestinian mothers as collaborators and leave their bodies in public.

So was the media coverage myopic and manipulated? No definitive conclusions can be drawn here since, for that to happen, hundreds of journalists would have to be questioned and their comments tallied with an exhaustive overview of disengagement reporting. But if a media postmortem has not taken place, it may be because journalists were simply worn out.

Interesting. Wouldn’t you also want to interview the people whom you are accusing of “faking it?” Wouldn’t you want to explore just how angry the uprooted are about what happened? Or is it only reporters who have something to say on whether they were had?

If you wish to read the rest of this piece, by all means, go ahead.