The Other War

The Other War: Israelis, Palestinians and the Struggle for Media Supremacy by Stephanie Gutmann, Encounter Books, 2005. 

Optics

While Israel has won military wars against its Arab neighbors, it has lost in the court of international public opinion. 

Lazy Western Journalists

In general, Western journalists stationed in Israel are perhaps a bit on the lazy side. Western journalists in Jerusalem hang out with each other at the American Colony Hotel, and generally know few Israelis. A better place to meet Israelis is the Jerusalem Hilton Hotel (now called the David Citadel Hotel). Because they have not bothered to learn Arabic, Western journalists who visit the West Bank Palestinian areas need to have a Arab assistant with them for translation. Consequently, who the reporter talks to and what they hear is influenced by their Arab assistant. Additionally, due to their ignorance of Arabic, Western journalists generally ignore the Arab-language press. 

European Press

Most of the European press is anti-Israel. European journalists generally portray Palestinians as victims, not as actors. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have excluded journalists to protect the journalists from crossfire, and to prevent journalists from interfering with Israeli operations, but journalists often attribute a different motivation, namely that of hiding Israeli atrocities. 

Lack of Context

Bret Stephens criticizes the media for leaving out history, for omitting important facts, and for being unclear on the order of events, in order to slant reports to demonstrate a moral equivalence between the IDF and the Palestinian terrorists. Violence is often reported with a lack of context. For example, whether it was self-defense, or aggression.

Passive Voice

Gutmann criticizes journalists who use the passive voice when describing the victims of Palestinian terrorists for the purpose of avoiding naming the Palestinian terrorists as the perpetrators. This increases the probability that readers will blame the IDF. 

Fatah

When Fatah returned to the West Bank in 1994, it started threatening, beating and jailing reporters that were not loyal to Fatah, the PLO and Arafat. This has helped hide the fact that many Palestinians saw Arafat and the PLO/PA as a Mafia-like organization.

Photojournalism

Western journalists often have their videotapes stolen and their cameras smashed by Palestinian Arabs if the journalists photograph Palestinian fighters holding or firing rifles. Western journalists have even been threatened with guns to their heads if they release videos of Palestinians firing their rifles. The terrorists often restrict their gunshots to the nighttime, to avoid being photographed. The world has gained the mistaken impression that the Palestinians are armed only with rocks.

Khaled Abu Toameh

The best reporting on the West Bank comes from Khaled Abu Toameh, who is Palestinian affairs correspondent for the Jerusalem Post. Khaled is a Muslim Arab with Israeli citizenship, and is fluent in Arabic, Hebrew and English.

Tuvia Grossman

The Western press misidentified a bleeding man in a caption to a 2000 photo that was widely distributed in the West. The man was mistakenly identified as a Palestinian Arab beaten by Israeli police. But the man was actually Tuvia Grossman, a visiting American Jew, and he was actually beaten by a mob of Palestinian Arabs. The Israeli policeman in the photograph was not beating him, but rather was protecting him from the Arab mob. Western newspapers were slow to correct their error.

Lynching

On October 12, 2000 in Ramallah, two men in the IDF reserve, Vadim Nurzhitz and Yossi Avrahami, were lynched by an angry mob of Palestinians who thought they were spies. Photojournalists were obstructed from photographing the murders, and their cameras and film were seized by Palestinians. However, a photojournalist working the Italian TV station RTI (Reti Televisive Italiane), did manage to film one of the Israelis being thrown out of the window of the Palestinian police station. He then smuggled the footage out of the West Bank.

Mohammed al-Dura

The killing of the boy Mohammed al-Dura in the Gaza Strip on September 30, 2000 was blamed on the Israelis, but the evidence supporting this assertion is weak. Only part of the six-minute-long France-2  videotape was released by the French press. This omission made it difficult to understand the sequence of events. The AP wire service described the event as if they had witnessed it first hand, but actually all their information came from the France-2 videotape, which they did not credit. Talal Abu Rahme, the photographer, received several awards for his work. In 2002, the German reporter Esther Schapira made a documentary about this incident, which cast doubt on the theory that it was the Israelis who shot the boy. No autopsy was performed on the boy. Analysis of the bullet holes in the wall showed they could not have been fired by the IDF. Also, the geometry of the situation shows that the boy was shielded from rifle fire from the IDF location by a concrete drum with two-inch-thick walls. More likely than being a victim of the IDF, the boy was the accidental victim of Arab bullets. There are also questions about the identity of the boy, and whether the boy who died at the Al-Shifa Hospital was the same as the boy in the film footage. The incident is important, because it was later used as a justification for Arab acts of terrorism. The boy is seen in the Arab world as a martyr, and his father is now feted as the father of a martyr.

The Jenin Massacre that Never Happened

The author discusses the Jenin massacre that never actually happened. The purpose of Operation Defensive Shield of March 2002 was to clean out a nest of Palestinian suicide bombers in Jenin, and also other terrorists, located in Ramallah, Nablus and Hebron. The IDF went house to house on the ground in order to avoid the international criticism they would have received had they used air strikes. Gutmann praises Time magazine for its objective reporting on the battle of Jenin. The UN and Amnesty International investigations of the alleged massacre of Arab civilians in Jenin found the IDF innocent. Muhammed Bakri made a film called Jenin, Jenin that was slanted against the IDF. After numerous criticisms of factual errors, Bakri said that the film was “subjective truth”.