The superb young Dutch journalist Joris Luyendijk was in for some big surprises when he left Egypt after several years and started covering Israel during the second intifada. His reports from the Arab world had not prompted much of a response from readers and viewers. But his new assignment was different. “If I made a factual error about Israel, five letters would arrive saying, ‘Your correspondent is anti-Semitic.’”
The second half of his valuable new book, People Like Us: Misrepresenting the Middle East, is an inside look at how the Israeli government and the Israel lobby try and manipulate news coverage overseas. He is astonished at his first visit to a plush Israeli government press center, set up in a 5-star hotel in Jerusalem: “Young Israeli men and women walked around in olive-green army uniforms handing out sheets of great quotes. In efficient, friendly, and fluent English, they told us about the forthcoming press conference and the briefing later that day to be given by a defense specialist.”
Everything was ready to help the pack of harried international journalists who show up in a crisis. “The world’s media were given everything they needed with practiced skill, and more,” he explains. “Rights-free archive material of Israeli soldiers giving first aid to Palestinians; the phone numbers of spokesmen who could explain the government’s perspective in any major language and in the required number of words. . .”
Luyendijk cannot hide his amazement: “A complete alphabet of ‘optimistic stories’ had been cooked up for the correspondents: Jewish, Christian, and Islamic children together in one school; olive branches from Israelis and Palestinians; joint musical performances. You had only to telephone the Palestinian or Israeli organizers of these hopeful projects. . . and the great quotes, checkable information, and striking visual details would be served to you on a plate.”
He exposes another Israeli news management tactic. “After enduring an attack that caused a high civilian death toll, the Israeli government would wait a standard twenty-four hours before retaliating. The world’s press was given time to pause and reflect on Israeli suffering because, as soon as Israel took revenge, that would dominate the headlines.”
He also watches the international Israel lobby in action. A Jewish-American businessman boasts in the Israeli media that “he’d managed to get rid of the critical correspondent of the Miami Herald by threatening to withdraw advertisements from it.” He goes on: “Israeli ambassadors and lobbyists also visited leading editors and producers at television networks, cable news television, and the main daily and weekly newspapers in many Western countries. Pro-Israeli Jewish and Christian fundamentalist clubs in America invited ‘good’ correspondents and commentators to give lectures, for attractively high fees.”
The Israeli government collects damaging facts for use at the right time: Palestinian television sermons in which Jews are compared to “monkeys and pigs,” for instance, or anti-Israel passages in Palestinian textbooks. But, he says, “the inverse didn’t happen.”
The world does not learn, for example, that: “Quite a few Israeli schoolbooks avoid mentioning the fact that Palestinians were living there before the foundation of Israel. Some rabbis want to burn down the Aqsa mosque; Israeli generals have called Palestine ‘a cancerous growth’; and the ultra-Orthodox Jewish party has pleaded for the ‘extermination of Arabs.’”
Luyendijk dissects the twisted language that has become so much a part of Mideast discourse that we all too often take it for granted. “Hamas is ‘anti-Israeli’; Jewish settlers are not ‘anti-Palestinian,’” he explains. “Palestinians who use violence against Israeli citizens are ‘terrorists’; Israelis who use violence against Palestinian citizens are ‘hawks’ or ‘hard-liners.’ Israeli politicians who seek a peaceful resolution are ‘doves’; their Palestinian equivalents are ‘moderates’ – implying that deep down all Palestinians are fanatics.”
He sums up, “You could see the double standards more clearly if you turned things around: ‘Moderate Jew Shimon Peres’s anti-Islamic speech has caused great unrest amongst Palestinian doves.’”
If the Israel propaganda effort could be reduced to a single line, Luyendijk says it would be, “They are killing innocent Jews.” He explains: “‘They’ means ‘All Palestinians are guilty’; ‘innocent’ means ‘The motive is hatred’; and ‘Jews’ means ‘It’s not about Israelis or Zionism; this is just one more slaughter of the Jews.’”
(Why were the Palestinian spokesmen who should have been responding so dull and inept? Luyendijk partly blames Yasser Arafat – for picking loyal cronies instead of the smart, articulate Palestinians who might have used their new prominence to challenge his own power.)
In Luyendijk's final year, he went to live in East Jerusalem, where he came to understand the Israeli occupation for the first time. He emphasizes that “the occupation itself was never news, but each new [Palestinian] attack was.” The occupation was particularly hard to show on television: “it didn’t get any further than shots of tanks, soldiers checking papers, and long queues of civilians. How could correspondents portray the misery, repression, and injustice behind such scenes?”
He reminds us: “The Palestinian Authority had to continually explain whether it was ‘doing enough against terrorism.’ Israeli politicians never had to explain if they were ‘doing enough against the occupation.’”
Luyendijk’s tour of duty in the Mideast ended right after he covered the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, and was thoroughly disgusted by most of the other reports. “If the Western mass media had done their job during the war,” he writes, “viewers would have sat in front of their television sets crying and vomiting.” He channeled his anger into this book, which to his great surprise became a bestseller in Holland. He has added a useful afterword for the American translation, which includes some specific suggestions, (including an endorsement of independent websites).
As he summarizes, “Much of the glamour and posturing that war correspondents revel in suddenly become pretty ridiculous when you enlarge the frame and reveal how they really operate.”
“Palestinians who use violence against Israeli citizens are ‘terrorists’; Israelis who use violence against Palestinian citizens are ‘hawks’ or ‘hard-liners.’ Israeli politicians who seek a peaceful resolution are ‘doves’; their Palestinian equivalents are ‘moderates’ – implying that deep down all Palestinians are fanatics.”
He sums up, “You could see the double standards more clearly if you turned things around: ‘Moderate Jew Shimon Peres’s anti-Islamic speech has caused great unrest amongst Palestinian doves.’”
Well said.
Even more gems in this article:
“If the Western mass media had done their job during the war,” he writes, “viewers would have sat in front of their television sets crying and vomiting.”
GREAT post, James North. Thank you. I’m ordering his book today.
Done. I get it Thursday. (Press manipulation is my favorite topic. ” My body gets weak without truth.” — Andrei Platonov, 1930)
Thanks, James N. As someone who knows the “scene”, from up close, I can vouch for the fact that it is as incredible as Luyvendijk makes it sound. It’s all so easy, everything at your fingertips, and your editor doesn’t want you to stick your neck out anyway. Don’t blame poor Mr. Bronner; he’s just one of the boys.
OT. Shmuel, speaking of ordering books. Remember that book your recommended? I can’t even remember the name but it was by two authors. I ordered it months ago, and they still can’t get it in.
Lords of the Land: The War for Israel’s Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007 , by Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar. Bet Dersh buys them up as fast as they come off the presses ;-)
You’re probably right. Maybe I should try a used book place. Books that do not put Israel in a good light 30 years ago are being re-edited by Abe Foxman and the old versions stripped from libraries. One example is The Transfer Agreement.
Well, thanks for that, Shmuel, because NOW Amazon has new and used versions (not sold by Amazon) for $2.99 and $.96. So I got it.
Even this story about suppression is suppressed.
This is powerful stuff! Anything I could add would be superfluous.
James, did he mention certain websites, or did he just say it generally?
Rooting for the home team, MRW? We already got an endorsement from Naomi Klein today :-)
That’s because Naomi Klein is kind and smart. ;
MRW: No specific websites, although I’m sure he would have included Mondoweiss.
I can see two angles
- the press is being played by Israel and ends up with an Israeli narrative
- even without manipulation and pressure, the press is structurally handicapped: some things are news, other things are impossible to squeeze into the news format, even with the best intentions.
About the difficulty of reporting on the occupation. Jeff Halper has gone into detail about the mechanics of the occupation (the matrix of control) and there’s a large component of dry and boring bureaucracy. You can’t get across what it means in the framework of the news. When in Jerusalem people started making amok in bulldozers, you can bring a television fragment on the scene of the crime, but how to bring the background of the incident even if you understand it? Of course, usually it’s not even understood by journalists. The only explanation my newspaper came up with was ‘a possible family relation with hamas’.
The textbook issue is an important one, seeing as many of the accusations have been shown to be false. On the other hand, Israeli textbooks deliberately give the impression that the Palestinians are ‘foreigners’ and the Palestinians amongst other things, are described as ‘vagrant highway robbers’ and ‘bastards, thirsty for Jewish blood’.
To say nothing of the fact that Palestinians haven’t even been allowed by Israel to have their own textbooks until relatively recently (within the last decade, right?).
great post, thanks james.
“If the Western mass media had done their job during the war,” he writes, “viewers would have sat in front of their television sets crying and vomiting.”
I tend to do more of the latter, especially when I learn of the thousands of unmarked, mass gravesites, covered in garbage, with human bones sticking out here and there all throughout Iraq. Then when I see the birth defects plaguing newborn babies in Fallujah, I am reminded of the civility of the civilized world that which the US and its allies seek to preserve under the constant threat of the uncivilized evil doers who hate us for our freedoms.
I guess the shorthand for this is – “Propaganda.” Did anyone think new from the MSM was anything else? Excellent post Mr. North.
“…We gotta work to make the facts fit the false charges
Pull the wool over the eyes of the filthy masses
Stab the people in the back for the corporate choice
Roll the propaganda out using The People’s Voice
We don’t want to talk about it…
The press scribble scribble every half-truth spoke
Then shoot it round the country like an April Fools joke
Hype the nation for a Desert Storm love affair
Wave the stars and stripes like you just don’t care!
They talk it up all day, they talk it up all night
They talk until their face turns blue – Red white and blue!
But when the truth escapes the night and crawls into the day
We find the picture still askew
They don’t want to… talk talk talk talk talk about it
They wanna tiptoe, walk around it
Wave the flag and mindlessly salute
They don’t want to talk about it
They wanna tiptoe, walk around it
Wave the flag and cowardly salute
And on the TV screen…
…Diversion and aversion is the flavor of the day
Was it WMDs? Or Democracy?
Blame it on MI-6 or the CIA
The White House Press Corpse only has one thing to say…
“We don’t want to talk about it!”
The White House boils over, “Al Jazeera got it wrong!”
The Press Corpse jumps onboard singing the White House song
While over in Iraq thousands are dead because of lies
The spineless war drumming-press corpse have taken lives
They talk it up all day, they talk it up all night
They talk until their face turns blue – Red white and blue!
But when the truth escapes the night and crawls into the day
We find the picture still askew
They don’t want to… talk talk talk talk talk about it
They wanna tiptoe, walk around it
Wave the flag and mindlessly salute
They don’t want to talk about it
They wanna tiptoe, walk around it
Wave the flag and cowardly salute
Fires fueled on endless lies
Black shrouds coat desert skies
A nation’s viewpoint blurred and led
As embeds report what they’re fed
We don’t want to talk about it…
We don’t want to talk about it…
We don’t want to talk about it…
We don’t want to talk about it…
(We don’t want to talk about it…)
We don’t, don’t want to, we don’t wanna talk about it
(We don’t want to…)
We don’t, don’t want to, we don’t wanna talk
They don’t want to… talk talk talk talk talk about it
They wanna tiptoe, walk around it
Wave the flag and cowardly salute
They don’t want to talk about it
They wanna tiptoe, walk around it
Wave the flag and cowardly salute.”
THE PRESS CORPSE
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