NGO Monitor and the JCPA have published The Goldstone Report “Reconsidered” – A Critical Analysis, a collection of essays on theReport and its impact on international law and principles of universal human rights, in particular in the context of asymmetric warfare.Reconsidered is the essential volume for analyzing the origins and background of Goldstone’s “fact-finding mission”, its activities and failures, and the wider implications.  

In my previous post I fisked Ali Younes’ complaint that the media – even the Arab media – had been sucked into the Israeli PR machine, and point out the mindset that lay behind his complaint. Here I try and interpret why perceptions are so wildly divergent between the Israeli and the Palestinians that both feel wronged, misrepresented, and offended by the same media coverage.

Obviously (for those who go no further), the fact that “both sides” object confirms the oft-uttered tropes of moral equivalence.

The MSNM often congratulates itself on its balanced coverage – what one analyst called the “he-said-she-said” narrative - by claiming that “we get criticized by both sides,” and then concluding, “so we must be doing something right.” I’m sure it’s tempting for them to view the presence of unhappiness “on both sides” – eg, me and Younes – as a good sign.

I’d suggest a different dynamic (obviously, but not necessarily incorrectly). Israelis are so self-critical that you have to get really nasty before they start to complain. (Granted, over the last decade, many Zionists have become more vocal in their complaints, I’d argue justifiably.) Criticism fine, demonization, not. And there’s a huge and legitimate debate on where to draw the line(s). But it has to be something pretty huge to get a loud complaint – like, say, making (or strongly suggesting) a moral equivalence between the plight of unrepentant mass-murderers of children and a soldier who was manning a hostile border taken hostage in a raid. 

I ran across this comment from an Arab-American Kuwaiti-born journalist based in DC on the blog of comedian, activist, dialoguer Ray Hanania. In preparing a post at the Telegraph in which I cite it, I analyze it here.

09-01-09 Gilad Shalit in the Arab media
By Ali Younes –

Every time I read and watch how Arab media outlets cover the story of prisoner’s exchange of the Israeli solider Gilad Shalit and hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, I come to think how Arab media have fallen victims to Israeli PR machine (propaganda).

This is pretty interesting for me, since I just posted something to the exact opposite effect at the Telegraph (and, in longer form, here). Each side feels betrayed by the MSNM; each side bemoans the superiority of the PR machine of the other side. It seems like two parallel universes that do not intersect. Let me try to explain both these responses within the same universe.

There are several issues at play here when covering this story. Note that Gilad Shalit is always mentioned by name, I know his name, you do, and maybe my grandmother knows his name too!

So before we go to details, Younes lets us in on an emotional issue. It really bothers him that his grandmother knows Shalit’s name. Why will become clear if we read the rest (the substantive material) with this initial confession in mind.

Why, because the Israeli government has made sure that the whole world, and even my grandmother knows this soldier name. Every effort to release him ( note its always about him ) was made specifically for him, the Egyptians, the Germans, the Americans, even some Palestinians care more about him than their own.

Now we know two further things. 1) Younes sees the immense and sympathetic attention that Shalit, his central place in the narrative of that prisoner exchange, as a victory for the Israelis. 2) If the Zionists succeeded, it must be because of the (immensely effective) PR machine.

How many Palestinian prisoners’ names do we know? We know that there are 12000 of them in captivity. I might know Marwan Barghouthi, whose only image I know is him in chains and handcuffs waving them off. Maybe few others and that’s about it. The rest I just see them without actually see them in Israeli busses or cages, or jail cells. Or, we might see a crying wife, a saddened son, or an ailing mother clinging to a picture of her imprisoned son. But I don’t know who he is, or how, when and why did the Israeli army arrest him. We don’t even know if those prisoners have children or if they are married even.

In other words, why is Gilad Shalit humanized and not the Palestinians. Younes here confesses, perhaps unconsciously, to his sheer ignorance about the details of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In Israel, many of these prisoners are widely known, some, like the two in prison for the Ramallah lynching on October 12, 2000, to the sociopathic icon Ahlam Tammimi, who specifically chose the target of Sbarro Pizza because it was full of religious kids, and broke into a beaming smile when she found out she and her human weapon had killed eight, not three, children.

This piece appeared in a shorter form in the Daily Telegraph.

The Hostage-Prisoner Exchange and the world of imaginative sympathy

One of the supreme ironies among the European moral stances has to do with their discourse on the “death penalty.” It’s a standard trope of European contempt for the USA that it still has a death penalty, a sign of its cowboy nature and its retardation in the moral progress of nations. At least when it comes to the death penalty, America is still in the 20^th century. “Moral Europe,” on the other hand, stands at the vanguard of the global community of nations and its appreciation of the value of human life undergirds its horror at the execution of criminals, no matter what their deeds.

And yet when that same moral entity turns its gaze on the Middle East, the country they have the most contempt for is the only country in the entire region to reject capital punishment, and they have the most admiration for a country that among a widespread political culture that extensively uses torture and execution for the maintenance of public order, shows perhaps the most contempt for the lives of its own peoples and its enemies.

Normally, this would not be even worth mentioning. Most people would just roll their eyes while others complain about Zionist imperialists trying to divert attention from their oppression of the Palestinians. But if you want to understand the “hostage-for-prisoner-exchange” that just took place in Israel and the Western media’s coverage of the event, then you need to pay attention to the issue.

Israel first outlawed the death in 1954, thus reversing the Mandate Law, which, in most other instances, Israel took over from the British. They based themselves both on rabbinic precedent (concerns for both respecting the image of God in man and the unattainable burden of proof) and modern liberal sentiment (Robespierre initially opposed the death penalty). In doing so, they became the first modern Western democracy after Germany (1949) to ban the death penalty, followed a decade later by Britain (1965), Sweden (1972), Canada (1976) and France (1981).

Note that Israel passed this law five years after the creation of a polity dedicated to equality before the law for all its citizens, a move that earned them the ferocious hostility of their neighbors in the Arab Muslim world. Normally, when countries attempt these egalitarian revolutions and find themselves surrounded by hostile enemies, they have, by year five, descended into mass executions of their own citizens (French Revolution in their fourth year, Russians, Chinese, Cambodians, almost immediately). Israel, on the other hand, outlawed the death penalty even for Arab terrorists who were captured while killing Israeli civilians. Israel has only executed one person, Adolph Eichmann, held responsible for the extermination of millions of Jews during the Holocaust.

If the Israelis had hundreds of terrorists in their prisons, in some cases serving multiple life sentences, available to trade for Gilad Shalit, a soldier kidnapped from Israeli soil by Hamas combatants five years ago, it’s because of this attitude towards human life, both their own and those of the Palestinians. And that attitude was on full display throughout this exchange, with people agonizing over endangering future Israelis from releasing these men, and the profound commitment to getting Gilad Shalit back. Some Arabs recognized the unflattering light this shed on their own culture, while others reveled in it.

The Palestinians, on the other hand, represent almost the polar opposite. This is a culture in which killing daughters and wives and homosexuals for shaming the family with (even suspected and loosely interpreted) inappropriate sexual behavior is a regular feature of society, where “collaborators” are summarily executed, where official statistics for executions put the PA at a rate of formal, legal execution that cedes only to China, Iran, N. Korea, Yemen and Libya.

Recently a number of articles by photojournalists who turned their cameras on their fellow photojournalists have reinforced an argument I first made in 2005 with my first documentary short, Pallywood. They revealed the extent to which journalists, with their pack mentality and their eagerness to get pictures of the victimization of the Palestinian David by the Israeli Goliath, may influence, even make the “news” they record about the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The Ritual from Andrew Lampard on Vimeo.

Photojournalism Behind the Scenes [ITA-ENG subs] from Ruben Salvadori on Vimeo.

Obviously such charges runs the risk of undermining the narrative that the MSNM so relentlessly record for their audiences, a narrative that has had an enormous impact on images of Israel in the West. In response Lisa Goldman, a blogger at 972, has come to the defense of this kind of news. Her piece illustrates from many angles just what’s wrong with people who think they’re “journalists” when they’re really advocates.

The questions people don’t ask about ’staged photojournalism’

A few years ago, a far-right commentator on Israel-Palestine coined the term “Pallywood” to describe video clips and photographs which were allegedly staged or manipulated to score public relations points against Israel.

Lisa defines what she means by “far-right” later in this essay: those who call the occupied territories the ‘administered territories’ and insist that Israel must keep its settlements in the West Bank. There are two major points to be made here.

1) This is a pretty weak definition of “far-right.” I would have imagined something more along the lines of forceful transfer of population from both Israel and the territories for the sake of an Arab-free greater Israel. That would, after all, be a fairly neat parallel to an apartheid position that has its mirror opposite among so many Palestinians. But what Goldman’s trying to do here is to label anything that isn’t close to her position “far-right.” Presumably, she’d have no problem labeling “far-right” anyone who referred to them as “disputed territories” or felt that some of the settlements should, indeed remain part of Israel.

2) Nowhere can Lisa, who knows me personally because I invited her to participate in a conference at the IDC in 2006, find in my fairly copious writings, anything resembling these positions. I personally find even the “right-wing” label inaccurate, much less “far-right,” but that’s probably because I don’t skew the political spectrum heavily to the left in order to define anything that disagrees with me “right-wing.” On the contrary, I think that, when speaking of the Arab-Israeli conflict we need to have a spectrum that can accommodate both Palestinian and Israeli politics. That way we can avoid such foolish generalizations as, on the one hand, calling Abbas a “moderate” when, by my definition, he and his fellow PA officials are “far-right,” in favor of ethnic cleansing of a Palestinian state and keeping the refugees in camps, and on the other, avoid calling Netanyahu a “hardliner” when, in comparison, he’s far more accommodating than Abbas.

So we learn from Lisa Goldman’s first sentence of her post that: a) she is a poor journalist who doesn’t even care to research her claims, b) she’s into smearing people who get in the way of her narrative, and c) she defines matters with a heavy skew to the PCP (2) as normative, rather than one-sided.

All three of these observations will continue to hold true throughout an examination of her piece.

This post just went up at the Telegraph, where they gave it a sensationalist title to attract readers. As the editor said, “Now let the s*** storm begin.” Sort of like Max and The Wild Things… not (check the comments – wow!)

Israel has rarely been so isolated.

• Bordered north and south by Jihadi entities – Hizbullah and Hamas – that have armed with missiles, itching for the moment when, behind their own civilian populations, it can rain down death upon Israeli civilians, forcing Israeli retaliation that inevitably causes Palestinian civilian casualties.
• An Arab Spring that has unleashed waves of anti-Zionism and empowered the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the first and most constant enemies of the Zionists.
• Its closest “allies” in the Muslim world now turned or turning against it – Turkey, Egypt following in the lead of Turkey: the closing of the Israeli embassy in Ankara, followed soon after by the takeover of the embassy in Cairo, illustrating how both bottom-up and top-down forces in the Muslim world militate for confrontation.
• The Muslim world filled with hatred of Israel thanks to its own predilections and a newly empowered media that spreads lethal narratives at lightening speed around the globe.
• The “progressive” West, especially the global tribe of the “Left,” and the “human rights” NGOs saturated with anti-Zionist diatribes, about to hold Durban III, commemorating one of the ugliest incidents in its depressing, demopathic career of betraying the very humanitarian causes they were created to protect.
• A news media and academia, enamored of post-modern, post-colonial paradigms that present Israel as the Goliath victimizing the Palestinians, Israel the paragon of an imperial and racist colonialism for which the West is trying to repent, and with whose sacrifice it might atone.
• A diplomatic elite that has long preferred to side with the oil-rich Arabs over a tiny, troublesome state.
• And now, a internationally weak American president who, for reasons ideological, psychological, and practical, considers making friends with the Muslim world a far greater priority than protecting Israel.
• And now, in a few days, a Palestinian authority about to use the UN – currently a bastion of anti-Zionism – as a means to further isolate Israel diplomatically and legally.

Rumors are, that it’s so bad, that that stiff-necked right-wing Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu is under heavy pressure to be more placating, to calm the storm.

Of course, in so doing, Israel would be playing the role of sacrificial offering on the altar of Jihadi warfare. Contrary to the exceptionally naïve expectations of the proponents of such a conciliatory stance, a reasonable, apologetic, concessionary Israel will not appease Muslim hatred, nor calm the roiling waters of Arab anger. On the contrary, it will play directly into the hands of the Jihadis who aim at the, to us, ludicrous, goal of world domination.

And any Western country that thinks sacrificing Israel in this manner will improve the situation, rather than weakening itself profoundly in a global battle it should be winning hands down, is deluding itself. Instead of pouring water on the fires of religious war – something virtually every thoughtful Westerner considers the most dangerous and destructive of forces – they would be pouring oil on the Jihadi apocalyptic forest fire that grows with every passing year. If you’re worried about global climate warming, shouldn’t you also be worried about global Jihad warming?

Drawing by Ellen Horowitz, 2006

Israel, paradoxically, is also in a particularly strong position. Few alliances last long in this part of the world, and no sooner are reconciliations announced than they begin to fray. The very countries that, in their move to Islamism, have turned against her, have, at the same time, gutted their armies of their military professionals. Even as they strut on the international stage, making threats and demanding abject apologies, their military ability to confront Israel wanes. And of course, the Israel he’d meet would not be the wounded, defensive one with which he shadow-boxes daily. Israelis have always had more heart for fighting real wars than for constant low-grade battles with terrorists who hide behind civilians in order to gain a propaganda victory.