by John Lyons
In the first five minutes, Ms Gough praised Israel. ‘I want to thank them,’ she said, referring to their cooperation with UNICEF. Then she ordered that filming stop.
With the cameras off, UNICEF began to tell the real story. One official said the ill-treatment of Palestinian children was ‘widespread, systematic and institutionalised’; another told how children were sometimes told they would be raped or killed if they did not confess. Another said there was ‘a systemic pattern of abuse and torture’. For the next 90 minutes UNICEF painted a picture of widespread abuse.
I’d never experienced such a schizophrenic press conference. I found it appalling that UNICEF was trying to use us to create a false impression. I sat there wondering how to report such an event. I decided to write both what Ms Gough said in the first five minutes and then what the UNICEF officials said in the next 90 minutes – readers could make up their own minds.
It confirmed for me how cleverly the Israel image-makers play the media. Had UNICEF officials said on camera what was in their report, the story would have echoed around the world. The Israelis had effectively killed any television coverage. And UNICEF had played along.
I discovered that to soften any criticism of Israel, rather than use the word ‘torture’ the UNICEF report had substituted the word ‘duress’. The report admitted that the evidence examined included about 200 documented cases from Defence for Children International (DCI). The DCI cases included a boy who had had his hands tied behind his back for 19 hours; a boy whose handcuffs were so tight that flesh came off; a boy who said he was hit in his testicles; and a boy whose head was slammed against a wall. But these were not in the final UNICEF report. Jean Gough conceded that UNICEF ‘took advice from Israeli lawyers’. I asked if those Israeli lawyers saw the final draft. ‘Of course,’ Ms Gough said. ‘We had discussions on it. That is about ensuring we have a dialogue.’
For me, the final twist came when I emailed Yigal Palmor, the spokesman for Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, asking for a response. Palmor replied: ‘This year Israel has joined the UNICEF board and our working relations and collaboration with the organisation are appreciated by the international community.’ How extraordinary – and, from Israel’s point of view, brilliant. They had joined a board that should be holding them to account over their treatment of children. No other country has as many children under military occupation as Israel: in the West Bank, hundreds of thousands, and that number is growing. Being on the board means Israel can be forewarned of any UNICEF criticisms.
Why do the supporters of Israel want to prevent stories like this one from spreading overseas?
When we arrived in Israel we did not realise the prize that it coveted. It was only by living among Israelis, mixing with them at the local sports club or over a Shabbat dinner, that we came to understand the endgame: formalising the occupation into official annexation and achieving Greater Israel. Scores of foreign journalists, diplomats and businesspeople who have lived in Israel long enough have come to this same conclusion.
For Israel, the prize of Greater Israel far outweighs any criticism it receives. To take this path, the Israeli public have had to convince themselves that ‘the world hates us anyway’ and would criticise anything Israel did. That is, the world is becoming increasingly anti-Semitic.
For Israel to continue pursuing its endgame – annexing the West Bank – it cannot allow the international community to form the view that the occupation is unacceptable. Israel tries to minimise reports of its brutality in the West Bank so that international opinion does not turn against it.
As long as Israel insists on maintaining an occupation there will be tensions between journalists reflecting the values of their host countries and Israelis who want to maintain the occupation. To maintain the course towards Greater Israel, Israel needs to be seen to want a peace agreement. Israel’s problem is that the media sometimes reports the reality: that it is relentlessly growing settlements, encouraged by financial incentives and a free security service, the IDF.
The only way for Israel to manage this is to attack the media. As long as the media is seen as biased, anti-Israel or anti-Semitic, then Israel is not at fault.
There are three battles in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict: the military battle, the settlements battle and the public relations battle. Clearly, Israel has already won the military battle. While it regards Hezbollah in Lebanon as a formidable enemy – backed by the power of Iran’s funding and military assistance – Israel can crush Hamas in Gaza with little effort. Israel has also won the settlements battle. As discussed, settlements and the military bases that go with them are liberally located across the West Bank, strategically placed to prevent a viable Palestinian State.
But the third battle the Israelis have still not won, and in fact are losing: the battle for international public opinion. The challenge for Israel, through its embassies and lobby groups, is how to make sure that foreign journalists do not stop the creeping annexation of the West Bank from continuing. Israel needs to portray itself as the vulnerable one, even though it has the most powerful military in the Middle East, with an arsenal that includes at least 220 nuclear warheads.
We live at a time when more people are trying to shape reality than report it. The collapse of the traditional newspaper model means there are more people in public relations than journalism, and Israel operates one of the most effective public relations machines in the world. There’s a Hebrew word for it: hasbara, or ‘propaganda’. Hasbara is even the name of a government unit. Because Israel so brilliantly manages its reality, many people – tourists, diplomats and journalists (me included) – are shocked when they come to Israel and see the occupation up close. Philippe Agret, the former Jerusalem bureau chief of Agence France Press, arrived in the Middle East ‘with a completely free mind’. ‘I bought, to a certain extent, this story of “plucky Israel” fighting against a hostile world. I had some admiration for the building of the State of Israel, what they’d done since 1948. I was 50–50.’ But the reality Agret encountered was very different.
Britain’s Sky News correspondent Dominic Waghorn said that in managing their message the Israelis are ‘peerless’. Yet despite its massive spending on hasbara, Israel has failed to convince the world to accept its settlements.
Philippe Agret said: ‘At the end it doesn’t work, it cannot work, because the cause is wrong. When I mean the “cause” I mean occupation, colonisation, discrimination. You might have the best hasbara in the world, the best propaganda machine in the world, but you still have the root of the problem: occupation. The injustice is there and you cannot fight a fact of injustice even with the best propaganda machine. Look what happened to the Americans in Vietnam. It’s a bit similar – they lost the propaganda war because the cause was wrong.’
Agret said he was shocked by what he found in Israel. ‘For me the best example is the one you see the first time and which you see every day – it is young Israeli soldiers, new migrants, “Boris and Galina” coming from, say, Russia and Ukraine, checking, body searching and taking the identity cards of Khaled and Ahmed who have been farming in Nablus for many generations. This is the basic proof, the daily evidence that there is something wrong. Why are Galina and Boris checking, pestering and humiliating Ahmed and Khaled whose fathers and grandfathers have been in this place for centuries? There is something wrong.’
Reuters’ Crispian Balmer agreed: ‘However much PR you throw at it, you’re never going to make this thing look good. The occupation is an absolute fucking disaster for this country. I see it as a growth on the State of Israel that they have to remove but they can’t bring themselves to remove it and it might well be too late to remove it.’
Balmer added: ‘For Israel, which has done and achieved astonishing things in its [70] years, there’s no denying it – if you look at where this country has come from, there can be few others that have achieved as much – it’s morally corrosive and politically and diplomatically devastating to be cling
ing on to huge swathes of territory. If they were saying “We will annex it all and everybody will be a citizen with equal rights, equal access to airports, everything,” that’s a different thing. But they’re not saying that. You cannot justify subjugating a people indefinitely.’
New technologies are worsening the situation for Israel. Smartphones mean that more people than ever can capture images of brutality committed by the occupier. The mobile phone has been damaging for Israel’s reputation. Crispian Balmer said: ‘Incidents that stick in my mind include when the soldier rammed his gun into a guy’s face. There was a bike protest and they were trying to cycle one way [in the West Bank] and this guy for no reason just smacked him in the face. Without that image that incident wouldn’t have been an incident. The mobile phone has the potential to turn these incidents into global stories because they’re everywhere.’
Balmer’s four years in Israel coincided with the rise of social media: ‘When I came here I didn’t really know what Twitter was about. I saw some people who used it but I had no real concept, I didn’t have it myself. That has opened up a whole new direct front in the dialogue.’
Perhaps the biggest threat to the occupation is the internet. Anyone can visit the website of Haaretz and read the material that many supporters of Israel want to keep from foreigners.
This is one of the longest military occupations in history, with 2017 marking its 50th year. It is one of the few left. The world today does not like occupations, and few are able to endure.
In Europe in particular, opinion is increasingly hostile. Up until the occupation began, countries such as France considered Israel a close friend. Those friendships have steadily crumbled as the European public finds it increasingly difficult to condone the occupation.
So deeply has Israel alienated Europe that even in Germany – which has been reluctant to criticise Israel since the Second World War – attitudes are changing. Gil Yaron, correspondent for Germany’s influential Die Welt newspaper, said Chancellor Angela Merkel ‘hates’ Netanyahu, as do many Germans. ‘They feel lied to and have no understanding of his policy of settlement constructions.’ Yaron said Netanyahu could be ‘mesmerising’ when he assures German politicians he wants peace. ‘I think they are exasperated with his talk about peace, they just do not believe him.’ Yaron said criticism in Germany of Israel’s settlements is ‘still muted but I’m not sure they are going to remain that way. People who are 15 to 20 years will have completely different commitments to Israel than those who are in power now.’
Things are very different in the US. Dominic Waghorn said television networks there had ‘caved in’. Reuters’ Crispian Balmer concurred: ‘I think most criticism [of the media] would come from America, most of it from pro-Netanyahu Zionist organisations.’
During my years in the Middle East, Judi Rudoren held what is, without doubt, the most sensitive position in international journalism: Jerusalem Bureau Chief of the New York Times. The US is Israel’s most important ally, and this is the newspaper that matters to the American elite. The job has left incumbent after incumbent battered, bruised and sometimes bitter.
Veteran New York Times Jerusalem correspondent Clyde Haberman – himself Jewish, like Rudoren – has said every NYT correspondent has been subjected to ‘non-stop assault’ and therefore few on the paper want the job. ‘We’ve had decades of correspondents that, no matter how different they’ve been one from the other, no matter how talented they are or how many Pulitzer Prizes they have to their name, always end up being accused of being either anti-Semites or self-hating Jews. At some point, this seeps into the DNA of the newspaper. This is what you can expect if you go there – to have your integrity hurled back in your face every single day.’ But, said Haberman dryly, he finally discovered how to placate Israeli hardliners: ‘If I didn’t want to be accused of hating Israel, I should start every story with: “50 years after 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, Israel yesterday did one thing or the other.”’2
Jodi Rudoren has taken hits from all sides. Rudoren and I became friends by spending time on the road together, including two assignments in Gaza. ‘Americans by and large accept that Israel is a different type of place,’ she says. ‘They don’t apply their standards, they buy this idea of Israel as a Jewish State created out of the worst moment of history and that it may be an anomalous ethnocracy that they are willing to accept, even though they don’t think ethnocracies are a great idea, but to be an ethnocracy that has fairness and justice and whatever. They simply buy this Jewish–Israeli consensus notion of a Jewish and democratic State.’
Ultimately, though, there is pressure on all foreign journalists to sugar-coat their reporting. As Gil Yaron said: ‘There are two societies at war and you cannot expect either one to be comfortable with equal reporting, because when you are at war you are looking for allies, you are not looking for a judge.’
Jodi Rudoren admitted to ‘defensive writing’ about Israel; Die Welt requires as a condition of employment that its journalists ‘support the vital rights of the people of Israel’; Reuters has a special rule book for what wording must be used.
The Guardian’s Chris McGreal agreed that some journalists provided a flattering portrayal of Israel because they did not want to have to defend tougher reporting. ‘I think there are newspapers which steer clear of controversy on Israel. I think that has less to do with the reporters on the ground who see the situation for themselves than senior editors trying to avoid controversy. It’s evidence that the harassment can work if not resisted.’
The pressures on a journalist, said Crispian Balmer, meant that reporting could become ‘unbelievably dull, a ping-pong of “he said, she said”. Every fact is disputed and there is a binary narrative like train tracks that never meet. There is no simple story that you can write in a fluid and fluent fashion because every other line is “But the other side says no.” There’s a danger that people working here do stick to certain formula[e] because they know it’s gone through before and they know they can defend it.’
I also noticed a pattern where Israel would delay any confirmation of serious allegations until the media lost interest. If it is reported without official confirmation, only those who are staunchly anti-Israel will believe it. One case I became aware of was in Gaza during the 2009 war. Doctors there were saying, ‘People are coming into our hospitals and we believe that they have been exposed to white phosphorus.’ White phosphorus can be used in the desert to highlight army targets but also burns the skin, and it is considered a war crime to drop it onto a populated area. I rang the IDF’s spokeswoman Avital Leibovich to get her response to that and she said, ‘How dare you accuse us of doing something like that! It’s offensive and outrageous that you would buy that sort of propaganda.’ Several months later, the army quietly admitted that it had used ‘limited’ white phosphorus. By then, though, no one wanted to follow it up.
Uffe Taudal from Berlingske, a conservative Danish newspaper supportive of Israel, said every word in Israel was politicised, ‘so if you write Jerusalem [as the capital] it means you accept the annexation, if you write “Israelis think” then 20 per cent of the population – Palestinians living in Israel as Israeli citizens – are excluded from the political life.’
Most correspondents I knew in Israel said that pressure came from self-appointed pro-Israel groups rather than the Israeli Government. I believe the government effectively ‘outsources’ that pressure, which allows it to maintain workable relations with correspondents on the spot while the pressure is applied on the journalist’s editors. This was certainly what I found with the Australian pro-Israel lobby.
Journalists based in Israel often faced a backlash back home. ‘I did not get many complaints from the Israeli Government, very few actually, but a fair lot from pressure groups outside Israel,’ says Philippe Agret, who believes the aim was partly to exhaust journalists.
‘The biggest message you’ll get from me,’ said Jodi Rudoren, ‘is that all of this noise and activism is
based on a very strange set of criteria that have nothing to do with how we actually operate …
I really have come to see that it’s not a tiny number of people but it’s a finite number of people mostly talking to each other and it’s really not journalistic in its understanding, its assessments, its goals. It’s political and you just have to try as hard as you can to turn back to people who share your values, who ask journalistic questions about the story and what you’ve written and who you can trust as to whether you’re tilting in one direction or another … anybody who knows anything about journalism or politics or the situation knows that articles aren’t critical of Israel or somebody else. Most articles are probably both, most sentences are probably both and most of it probably depends who’s reading it, how they view something … Good for the Jews, bad for the Jews – that’s not how I’m writing. Most things that happen here are not that simple.
Often Western countries argue that the status quo is preferable to a further deterioration in the situation. Taudal says: ‘There are 600,000 settlers and more all the time … The idea of status quo is another smokescreen.’
According to Jodi Rudoren, the fact that the occupation has gone on for so long has meant it has started to look ‘a lot like apartheid’. And it is not just the reality of Palestinians in the West Bank which looks like apartheid, said Rudoren, but for those in Israel also. ‘I actually think the issue of apartheid is more relevant to how Arab Israelis are treated within the framework of the country,’ she said.
Yet Crispian Balmer said: ‘I suspect that the public around the world by and large sees what it wants to see because it’s such a polarised story.’
For Taudal, the gap between the reality and the international perception means a media failure: ‘In many ways we in the media have collectively failed in our reporting of Israel. There was a Danish TV journalist who came here, he was not used to being here, and he did a story about Israeli settlers in Hebron spitting at Palestinians and it made a huge fuss in Denmark but that’s an everyday occurrence. But [when] he put it on TV it was like “Is this going on?” Nobody in the West believes what’s going on here unless they see it with their own eyes because there are so many people back home saying it’s not true.’ Because the reality of what Israel is doing is only occasionally glimpsed, when violence breaks out many people around the world assume this is just the reaction of Palestinians who will never accept Israel’s existence.
