On Thursday morning, March 19, Israelis woke to find a story on the front pages of two leading daily newspapers that either rattled their self-image as citizens of a decent, ethical, Jewish state—or gave aid and comfort to the state’s enemies, depending on your point of view. The story was about a group of combat soldiers who, at a gathering a month earlier, had described Israeli army abuses during the just-ended Gaza incursion. Israel had been fighting nonstop accusations of atrocities in Gaza since the shooting ceased January 19. The publication of the soldiers’ accounts promised to be a huge embarrassment.
Because the story was so radioactive from Israel’s point of view, examining its progress as it made its way into the international media can serve as a sort of case study—it shows in real time how America’s media differ from other countries’ in their portrayal of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And it helps illuminate the frequent charge that the American press is biased in Israel’s favor. Or against it, again, depending on your point of view.
The soldiers had told their stories during a February 13 visit to the Yitzhak Rabin Pre-Military Academy, one of seventeen army-certified institutes that offer students a gap year for study, community service, and early military training before their mandatory military service. The visitors, all Rabin alumni, had been asked to talk with students about their experiences. In the course of a freewheeling presentation, according to the news accounts, one soldier after another began to relate painful memories from the Gaza combat.
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" During the eight-day Israeli incursion into a crowded refugee camp, Palestinian officials issued widely quoted reports of deaths numbering in the hundreds, perhaps thousands. The Israeli army said it was in the dozens."
Actually, an Israeli general initially claimed the death toll was about 200, which seemed to lend credence to the claims that hundreds had died. And as for what the investigation found and the Israeli army being "right", Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International both found that about 50 had died, roughly half of them civilian and some of them as a result of deliberate Israeli brutality.
So the truth was that there was no massacre of hundreds, but neither were the Israelis innocent of war crimes. Jenin was, in fact, a fairly typical example of Israeli brutality, but not the extremely large massacre initially claimed.
Posted by Donald Johnson on Tue 19 May 2009 at 02:23 PM
It is not merely a matter of trust, it also a matter of how reasonable and plausible the charges are. Take for example Donald Johnson comment, trying to rejuvenate the false charges regarding Jenin. For the Israeli army to kill hundreds of civilians (which it didn’t) in those nightmarish urban conditions, it did not have to be brutal. The density of structure and population there, the bobby-traps hidden behind every corner; all these and more made a high death of civilians there a near unavoided outcome. But it was avoided, the fact about 26 civilians where killed, less then 1% of the 4,000 Palestinian civilians trapped there, could have only been achieved by the IDF going to an excruciatingly difficult effort to avoid killing civilians; one that cost the lives of over 20 soldiers, not forgetting the hundreds of Israeli civilians slain by terrorist coming from that camp, before the opporation.
Posted by Dvar Dea on Wed 20 May 2009 at 02:35 AM
The caution and thoroughness of Bronner, the NY Times correspondent, is also due to experience-- it's his third posting to Jerusalem--and to access. He also has a definite deadline advantage over the British reporters because of geography. What's more, the former foreign editor of the Times is married to an Israeli, and that could account for his measured evaluation.
Most of the reporters for the British press covered the aftermath of the war inside Gaza and had witnessed the result of revised Israeli rules of engagement. IDF Soldiers were forbidden to speak with reporters...although some reserve officers risked ignoring that order.
Television reports are brief and don't go into much depth. Best to contrast the various print articles.
This week, by the way, the UN Committee Against Torture in Geneva concluded that the IDF "took insufficient measures to protect the civilian population of Gaza from harm" see http://www.unog.ch/80256EDD006B9C2E/(httpNewsByYear_en)/D75EB369ED4A3CADC12575B7004C4761?OpenDocument
Posted by Juana Suarez on Wed 20 May 2009 at 05:47 AM
The IDF is the most humane army in the world and defends the Israeli people daily from Arab terrorists and genocide bombers who are commited to the destruction of the Jewish state. Donald Johnson repeats false allegations about Jenin, quoting an unnamed Israeli general about a so-called massacre in Jenin. Independent sources have verified all these allegations to be completely false. The real truth is the relatively untold story of daily bombings of innocent civilians by terrorists on Sderot and neighboring communities. Go and visit these communities and see for yourself.
Posted by Lou Wise on Wed 20 May 2009 at 10:18 AM
This analysis is skewed because it assumes that the British media is taking a semi-neutral position. Given the unfounded nature of the allegations, and the seriousness of them, the prudent journalist would have presented them as allegations in conext, just as Bronner did. The European coverage is simply another example of the shrill anti-Israel bias in the UK press, which has been documented elsewhere at length. (And documented in a quantified way, such as the preponderance of pro-Palestinian photographs, the wording of headlines, the subject of editorials, etc.)
Need we remember the phony alleged "Jenin massacre" and the phony "bombing of the UN school"? Allegations made against Israel, even from within, deserve balance and perspective. The British papers exhibit no restraint in their prejudice and condemnation of Israel at every opportunity.
Posted by Jeff Donovan on Wed 20 May 2009 at 10:29 AM
Knowing ahead of time what UN views are based on, the UN Committee Against Torture in Geneva has NO CREDIBILITY WHAT SO EVER. This organization has it's roots in countries that were not just very negative about ANY Israel action to begin with, but which were directly guilty of neglecting and supporting Nazi's Holocaust.
Their views and resolutions mean NOTHING. Anyone understanding the conditions of mass Palestinian sabotage on everyday basis, regardless of their gender or age (women and children MY ASS!) that Israel is facing daily that is tightly mixed with genuine desire to kill as many Jewish solders (and civilians!) as possible, would have absolutely no doubts that for Israel PROTECTING IT'S OWN PEOPLE - SOLDERS IN THE FIELD - SHOULD BE THEIR SOLE PRIORITY EVEN IF IT INVOLVES FEW MORE casualties from "the most educated, productive and friendly" population in the region. I painfully remember the 9-11 footage of mothers and their kids all over Ramallah, West Bank and Lebanon. I can still see them jumping around in joy. Scammy Pa-le-stinian Arabs which never existed. This population deserves NOTHING! . .
. . . and no land will ever flourish under their feet, everyone should know it by now! . .
It is major shame Arafat's 30+ year old agenda to undermine Israel from with in has a credibility and support in the minds of many and stock to UN agenda so heavily . . .
Same technique is used to undermine Europe and tried in North America, with Canada bending over quicker than ever.
It is all Islam, and IT IS NOT THE RELIGION - IT IS IDEOLOGY TO CONQUER!
Posted by Alex Dintsin on Wed 20 May 2009 at 10:49 AM
Another reason for the caution evinced by the American press is that they've been burned before. The Winter Soldier projects by VVAW and IVAW both generated dozens of 'soldiers'' accounts of atrocities that turned out to be pure fabrications, in many cases related by persons who were never in the military at all, or never present in the war zone. The New Republic has been savaged for its gullible printing of fanciful atrocity tales by Pvt. Thomas Beauchamp.
Accordingly, the more respectable media outlets in the US have been less eager to take such claims at face value without confirmation.
Posted by Bohemond on Wed 20 May 2009 at 10:56 AM
It is undeniable that coverage of the Israeli-Arab issue is disproportionate. Consider just the current Sri-Lanka business as proof although there are dozens of other examples. This disproportionate coverage is mostly hostile to Israel with European, especially British media leading the way.
I recently asked people to say the next word that comes to mind after “Jenin” and invariably was told, “massacre.” (Journalism needs to take responsibility for the impressions it leaves.) It was particularly obvious at the time how the EU and the UN wanted to pin this label on Israel and they demonstrated their fetish again with Lebanon 2006 and Gaza this year. This should be the real news.
Another key “psyche-building” event in this conflict was the 2000 shooting of Mohammed al-Dura in his father’s arms. This turned out to be false and was probably a hoax. (The issue has been before the French courts.) Particularly telling were the actions of the originating organization, France2 in covering up and even saying that if a lie, it still reflected the truth. This was pure demonization and all media that rebroadcast it are party to this; almost none reported the aftermath.
As much as journalists are products of their society, they also create its beliefs. This is a serious responsibility and one I believe the profession has sloughed off.
BradB Ottawa, Canada
Posted by Brad Brzezinski on Wed 20 May 2009 at 10:58 AM
This article seems to suggest that the difference in coverage between the US and English papers is all due to Jewish pressure, not on trying to get the facts correct. The European press, particularly England, seems to have less interest in the facts and more interest in presenting the side that they favor. By saying the US press acts as it does because of Jewish pressure, this article just furthers the canard that the Jews control the presses for their own selfish and devious reasons.
Posted by Naomi Senser on Wed 20 May 2009 at 12:24 PM
It is interesting to find that many of the stories of alleged Israeli atrocities originate from the Israeli press. In judging Israel, we need to be aware that it is the very openness of Israeli society that makes thes stories available to the world's media. By tightly controlling the media within their territories, The Arab nations, Hamas, and the Palestinian Authority manage to present the Palestinians as innocent victims of Israeli oppression. Like any nation, Israel has its faults, but unlike its neighbors, the only democracy in the middle east has its flaws exposed for all the world to see.
Posted by Helen W. Wilson on Wed 20 May 2009 at 01:27 PM
To Juana Juarez, 20/05/2009:
To use as "sacred text" what a comitee of the UN said, after the Iran president Ahmadinejad was the central speaker in the "Durban-II" UN Committee Against Torture meeting in Geneva is, at least, ridiculous.
The UN has a very bad record of actions against Israel and in no way can it be trusted. Specialy consider that the now so heralded "Two State Solution" was proposed by the UN in 1947, the Jewish comunity accepted it, but all the Arab countries rejected it and launched war against Israel (in May,1948) and the UN did nothing. Thanks G-od Israel won then. And, with G-od Help will win forever.
Posted by Enrique Graciano on Wed 20 May 2009 at 02:15 PM
What this story, and indeed, most coverage of Israel misses, is exactly that. Where is similar coverage of events such as this around the world? That is what makes the coverage essentially biased. One only has to look at the recent fighting in Sri Lanka to compare.
Because of the anti semitic hysteria attached to Israel, atrocities are regularly reported, and only later vetted.
What this article fails to note, is that even the director of the institute, in his report, wrote that these events, in fact, NEVER HAPPENED. That they were,ineffect, urban legends.
Moreover, the coverage of the allegations were FRONT PAGE stories. The issuance of the army's denial was issued as exactly that. Not as if the reporters investgated it but rather simply a statement from the army. AND that coverage was buried deep within the paper.
Even more, when the dust cleared, and the stories had been proven false by all involved, as had the allegations of the UN School shelling, the "news" was printed deep within the papers.
THe initial hysteria, as in all coverage of Israel, gets splashy, tabloid like healdlines, and the truth, that the IDF continues to be the most moral military in the world, ends up as a footnote.
Even the discussion of the falsified "Jenin Massacre" in this retelling is falsified. In fact, the NY Times, had cropped a photo taken by a wire service reporter to show that there was NO massacre, to satisfy the headline grabbing allegation of a Massacre, by focusing on a few bulidings that were flattened, rather than the context of the photo showing much of the city, and those buildings as the few that were actually flattened.
The UN, perhaps the most frighteningly anit Israel organziation in the world, COMPLETELY supported the IDF's claims about Jenin. That in itself is revolutionary and indicative of the level of falsification.
Not surprisingly, the same has occurred with Gaza coverage.
Again, though, the article here fails to recognize that it is the simple coverage of these events, in direct contrast to local, or regional conflicts in the rest of the world, that is indicative of the bias involved.
Posted by Stephen Luftschein on Wed 20 May 2009 at 02:35 PM
Regarding Jenin, the first person to use the term massacre was Shimon Peres who was concerned about the world's reaction to the event. How many people actually were killed there is unknown because foreign journalists were barred from the area and the UN was not permitted to conduct an independent investigation, much like what happened in Gaza where foreign AND Israeii press were also barred,making Israel's complaints about foreign press coverage slightly disingenuous. As for the myth of the IDF's "purity of arms" and it has never been anything else but a myth, like "a land without people" in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Israel's armed forces had killed over 17,000 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians BEFORE the massacre at Sabra and Shatila, in which the IDF allowed the Falange to enter the camps, provided food for the killers, flares so they could keep up the killing after dark, while prohibiting Palestinians from escaping from the camps over a 2 1/2 day period. Unfortunately, the memory of Sabra and Shatila has been used by the Israelis to cover up their own atrocities committed in that war. A year later I had my own experience with the IDF's "purity of arms" while working there as a photojournalist. While taking a photo of a bridge toll booth with the Israeli and Lebanese flags linked together with a Mobil Oil sign an Israeli soldier fired a shot from his US provided M-16 which creased my hair. In a demonstration of "collective punishment, " in which they are the past master, he Israelis had closed the bridge to all soutbound traffic including food supplies for four days in revenge for Hezbollah having blown up their intelligence headquarters in Sour (Tyre) an event, I should note, that was privately applauded by members of the non-US Western press who had already seen more than enough of the IDF's bullying and were rooting for the resistance. As was I.
Posted by Jeffrey Blankfort on Wed 20 May 2009 at 02:43 PM
Thanks for making your bias plain, Jeffrey. It helps explain the limited command of facts displayed in your comment. As you failed to contradict (or even challenge) any of the points raised above regarding anti-Israel media bias, the only way you added to the discussion was by providing an example of exactly this kind of prejudice. Thanks for that.
Posted by du yisa on Wed 20 May 2009 at 05:27 PM
To get a balanced view of the situation one
should consider the number of civilians killed
on both sides. Israeli's and their supporters
seem not unlike US citizens who don't consider
100,000 or maybe far more Iraqi civilian
casualities no big deal vs some 3000 killed in the twin towers. The majority always seem ready
to vastly discount the value of "their" lives vs
our own casualties.
The US military also always has quickly denied
and tried to bury accounts where they have bombed wedding parties and claimed all casualities were enemy combatants. It's hardly
being anti-semitic to point out that everywhere
the military tries to control information and
deny any wrongdoing regardless of the facts.
WRT IDF views of civilians in the war zone i
recomment the 5/14/2009 ny review of books article By Avishai Margalit, Michael Walzer discussing a certain moral view influencial in
the IDF described briefly as follows:
"Kasher and Yadlin are simply assuming that the war against the enemy is a just war. Their claim, crudely put, is that in such a war the safety of "our" soldiers takes precedence over the safety of "their" civilians.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22664
Posted by Steve Schmandt on Wed 20 May 2009 at 09:39 PM
The problem with this article is the same problem with the reports it analyzes, and for that matter, with most of the comments: it ignores the facts, and treats third hand comments as a substitute for fact. As long as people believe whatever they read without corroboration or provenance, then there will be no shortage of sources to prove whatever it is they want to believe.
No one has really determined whether 1) any soldiers who had fought in Gaza in fact stated what they were reported to have stated, and 2) whether they had witnessed those events themselves, or were merely telling stories.
The same goes for reports of US "massacres" of civilian wedding parties in Afghanistan. There are just reports of reports.
Posted by Rhubarb Rex on Thu 21 May 2009 at 12:51 AM
We've watched Palestinians and Hezbollah terrorists inflate the numbers of civilian deaths & hide their own fighter's deaths many times. It's a tactic that always backfires on them. If you read articles that surfaced after the 2006 war, there were many mentions of the 500+ dead Hezbollah fighters, although there was no mention of this by the NY Times during the war. They claimed that the majority of deaths were civilian, and this was not true.
Gaza War:
Palestinian claim: 1417 dead (491 fighters)
IDF claim: 1166 dead (709 fighters)
Jenin 2002:
IDF: 53 killed; 48 fighters and 5 civilians.
Human Rights Watch claims 22 were civilians and 27 were fighters
Israel lost 23 soldiers. The Palestinians claimed that HUNDREDS (500+) or thousands were killed. This was a blantant lie as were many others that were printed in the media during April. Palestinians even held a phony funeral that was captured on videotape!
The NY Times has never recovered fully from the 2002 boycott, because many continue to boycott buying the paper or ever giving them money.
Posted by ABC on Thu 21 May 2009 at 02:25 AM
Gaza number below from Israeli authors ny review
article i provided link above. I would have
no way of verifying how many of the 1400 Gazans
killed were actually civilians, but no matter
what number you claim, i posit it's impossible
to kill that number with only 13 of your own
killed (some by friendly fire) unless you are
pretty indiscriminate in where you are placing
superior firepower. Also surgical airstrikes
cannot kill mostly fighters in urban areas, that
just defies any common sense. And you get a
very clear idea of IDF idea of proportionality
in how massively Lebanon was destroyed.
Again, unfortunately every nation is willing to
kill any number of 'them' without bothering to
count or care. That is the nature of war, that
is what armies are trained to do. Same as US
in Falluja, the military dropped pamphlets saying 'all civilians leave', then even when the
civilians had no way to get out, by military
logic, we told them to leave therefore anybody
left is a combatant. That is military logic and
military counting which does not stand up to
common sense as we see over and over from
eyewitness accounts of these conflicts when
available, the military accounts may be true
sometimes but unless you have a very simplistic
model of the world you know more often that not,
the military have every reason to lie especially
when they exclude all press access. When they
totally exclude any press access it's common
sense that when their lips are moving you know
they are going to be lying by law of military
political nature.
"Thirteen Israelis died in the Gaza fighting, some of them from friendly fire; between 1,200 and 1,400 Gazans were killed, half or more of them civilians" see source link in my earlier
post, this is an israeli source.
Posted by Steve Schmandt on Thu 21 May 2009 at 03:43 AM
The reason for the discrepancy in Israeli deaths, both civilian and military, is that Israel takes measures to protect its civilians and its soldiers; Hamas does neither. Every bomb shelter in Gaza was a bunker for Hamas leadership and their youngsters were sent out to die fighting and their civilians were abandoned. Numbers alone don't tell the truth and your disingenious or naive numbers game is intellectually dishonest.
Posted by Sarah Williams on Thu 21 May 2009 at 11:13 AM
The writer of this article attributes the "soft" coverage of Israel by the American press to pressure by the Jewish community there and to the more "rigorous" coverage in Britain to the smaller Jewish influence there. He builds a straw man and then pummels it. It's a little like asking whether you have stopped beating your sister. How about asking other questions? Why the lack of extensive coverage of Palestinian atrocities toward Palestinians? Because of Muslim pressure? Sympathy toward the plight of the Palestinians? Why not emphasize the acknowledgment by UN authorities that the UN school was not shelled (ref: later reports by John Ging, UNRWA's operations director in Gaza that contradicted his earlier statements), that many UNRWA employees were Hamas affiliated, that armaments were stored in mosques, homes and hospitals? This article is supposedly about trust. But it seems to me that Mr Goldberg’s mind was made up about whom to trust before writing what ostensibly was a reporting piece, not an editorial. Is that good journalism?
Posted by Robert Nechin on Thu 21 May 2009 at 12:56 PM
Yes, I believe it is possible to awake from the
nightterror of history with due respect to Yosef
as a youngman. It cannot be the case then right
and left are merely cycled through one's time.
Continuous & discontinuous time(s)may be seen
with ever greater clarity when one posits Truth.
Muslims will submit and Christians confess error
when past and future are more widely understood.
Posted by Moshebaer ben Yoseflevi on Thu 21 May 2009 at 02:29 PM
The notion that the question if media coverage is biased should be decided on a basis of "trust" is entirely inappropriate. It's not a matter of trust, but of context. As soon as I read the Haaretz report – very shortly after it was published, I knew there was something fishy, because obviously the allegations were raised in a situation where soldiers were encouraged to tell what troubled them – and the peer pressure was clearly: the more "troubled" you were, the more moral and admirable you were. That does not mean that the stories should be automatically dismissed, but there was absolutely no justification to present them not just as allegations, but as something that had definitely happened.
So the piece by Bronner in the NYT was clearly far superior to anything the Guardian or the BBC produced – indeed, for both organizations a "war crime" is being committed whenever the IDF moves. Moreover, Goldberg makes much out of the fact that the IDF's rules of engagement were changed – fine, and what about the rules of engagement of Americans/British fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan? How do they compare? The fact of the matter is that when it comes to the ratio of civilians/combatants killed, the IDF usually comes out looking far better than the US/British armies or Nato. Wouldn't that be worth mentioning?
Posted by Petra Marquardt-bigman on Fri 22 May 2009 at 06:22 PM
This analysis is flawed because Israel has never committed any attrocities and has never killed any civilians. It's never demolished a Palestinian home. It did not attack Gaza--rather, Gaza was hit by solar flares. Israelis just want to live in peace--in homes and on land borrowed from the same Palestinians who don't have the hospitality and courtesy to allow for a colonial project on their land.
In summary, Israel is always innocent, because God chose them to be special, and the Palestinians are mere vermin to be exterminated. I'm glad the preponderance of the commenters mostly concur with my assessment. It tells me the Hasbara Brigades are in full force.
Posted by abaham on Sun 24 May 2009 at 11:20 AM
Abaham, you forgot about the genocidal threat emanating from the Palestinian women's wombs. otherwise known as the "demographic bomb", hence the need for Israel to burn their babies alive and to starve them and to saturate the rubble of their homes with depleted uranium. The sheer evil of the Palestinian cockroaches, these lice, these beasts walking on two legs, is reflected in the demented way they demand human and legal rights, as though they had not forfeited these rights merely by owning what God promised to His Chosen People! How dare anybody criticize the "most moral army in the world" for penning them in like the animals they are, for bombing their schools, their homes, their mosques and their ambulances! Anybody who does not passionately defend the Right of the Jewish State to expand into their territories -- by whatever means necessary -- is by definition an antisemite who does not share our brilliant Judeo-Christian values and should be punished accordingly, preferably the same way as "Pancake Sally" aka Rachel Corrie was. Or Thomas Hurndall. Or James Miller. Or those other Nazis in the ISM and so-called "human rights activists" like Tove Johansson, who got her jaw smashed (she deserved a lot more) for trying to protect cowardly Palestinian schoolchildren from being attacked by brave, highly-civilized adult Jewish settlers.
Ach, the hypocrisy of those smug, Western do-gooders! Don't they know how much we zionists suffer when they force us to kill them?
Posted by Ines on Thu 28 May 2009 at 04:17 AM