AP photo by Nasser Ishtayeh: A Palestinian demonstrator stands in front of Israeli army soldiers during a protest against the construction of Israel’s separation barrier in the West Bank village of Qarawat Bani Hassan, near Nablus, Tuesday, Aug. 2, 2005. Palestinian and foreign peace activists protested against the barrier which, they claim, divides Palestinian agricultural land.

The first thing we see as we travel around the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind.
— Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques

I received a strange batch of emails over the last few days, distant reminders of an old life that now seems done with. I was going to begin this post with a dissection of the cutline seen under the photo at top (sounds scintillating, I know), but we’ll get back to that. First, an update from The Olympian, that daily rag in Olympia, Wash., where I spent five years and a few months slagging copy onto the page for a living.

From an editor at the 0:

Subject: Holy shit
Date: August 3, 2005 12:35:13 PM ADT
The Olympian is being sold to Knight Ridder.

Long owned by the Gannett, a company that tends to take a McDonalds Happy Meal approach to the news business, I fond news of The Olympian changing masters interesting. I formed a lot of my ideas about how the media presented issues, such as the one here in Palestine, while working at there.

Gannett’s is cookie-cutter method of making newspapers. The company tends to operate under the idea that what works in Florida will work in Washington State, Hawaii, Guam, or anywhere. Instead of directing papers to simply appeal to their local readers, number crunchers in Virginia enact vapid campaign strategies with names like “News 2000″ and “Real News, Real People” with the aim of boosting circulation without all the bother of putting much thought into why fewer people could be reading their publications in the first place. Each of these campaigns concluded that some demographic segment of society was the lucrative missing link that would bring in the cash. Baby boomers wanted more news about SUVs. Soccer moms wanted whole pages dedicated to how to pick the right back-to-school backpack for their kids. Everyone wants to see more stories on barbecue cooking. In short: utter crap that didn’t treat the people they wanted to reach as actual readers. Obviously it wasn’t selling in Olympia, so the the world’s largest newspaper corporation slithered out of town.

Here’s the news from PRNewswire-FirstCall:

Gannett today announced an exchange of assets involving four of their
newspapers and cash consideration. In the exchange, Knight Ridder will receive from Gannett The (Boise) Idaho Statesman, and two newspapers in the state of Washington, The (Olympia) Olympian, and The Bellingham Herald. In return, Gannett will receive the Tallahassee (Fla.) Democrat and an undisclosed cash consideration. The transaction is subject to regulatory review and will close once that process is completed, probably the first week in September.

From that same coworker at the O:

It’s as close to celebratory as a bunch of cynical journalists can be.

What Walker Lundy, a former editor at the Tallahassee Democrat had to say:

I’m shocked and saddened at this turn of events. Once you have worked for a newspaper, you always love it even years later. This feels like one of my early loves has gone off and married an accountant.

Will Knight Ridder run a better paper for the town? Maybe. I hope so. But to tie this tangent to the photo above, here’s this: One of the things that won’t change at the Daily O is how wire photo captions and stories are edited to be — oh, how to put it — more accurate. This has always been a strong point for The Olympian.

I know this by knowing the specific people who edit them. Photo captions and news coverage from Associated Press, Reuters, Gannett, LA Times, Washington Post, etc., are typically dripping with biases easily determined by examining what is omitted and what word choices are made. Often, in the case of photo captions, this is not the fault of the photojournalist. Captions are written and rewritten far from the scene. To a lesser extent, bureau reporters aren’t to blame. At least not entirely (especially when they actually report from the scene and not from the American Colony Hotel bar). Most of their stories are massaged after they no longer have control of them, by editors far from the scene who lack insight into what actually happened or why. But it’s tough to edit the encoded bias out of all this text when you’re also not at the scene.

Whether Gannett or Knight Ridder is running the show is irrelevant. So long as the individuals editing wire coverage are involved at the 0, readers will get a slightly better view of international events. Slightly, because sometimes the bias and lack of insight runs too deep. No matter the editing, would an accurate portrayal of the image above ever emerge?

Let’s look at it.

Composition wise, the photo is utterly poetic. The crop, angle and imagery are spot on. If some photos are worth a thousand words, this one might be worth just about 70 years of conflict. As a story telling device, though, the photo is failed entirely by the text attempting to describe the situation.

Lets start with the factual problems. There certainly was a demonstration of the “separation barrier” when and where the cutline said there was. Hundreds of Palestinians joined in as well as some foreigners. But what of the anonymous “Palestinian demonstrator” framed at center by the two hulking soldiers? That’s actually Caroline, an Italian woman form Tuscany with Palestinian ancestry originating from a village that was wiped off the map and claimed by Israel after the war of 1948.

Possibly a bit too long of a back story for a single cutline, but it changes the context of the photo. When not studying new medicinal therapies for HIV in a laboratory in England, she makes the occasional sojourn to check out her roots in Palestine, and on this trip, as the cutline says, to stand in front of soldiers and protest the annexation of land that’s being carried out by Israel’s construction of this wall. That doesn’t fit in with the popular narrative we’re used to hearing when it comes to demonstrators. We don’t expect scientists because it hasn’t been adequately illustrated that a good number of people who make the trek to the Middle East to oppose the occupation might be getting their incomes from sources outside Pell grants or college scholarships.

While Palestinian demonstrators are generally referred to without any sort of specifics — because how could one possibly differ from another — foreign activists tend to be lumped into the disgruntled college student crowd. This is hardly the case. There is no shortage of people who use their vacation time, or take leaves without pay, to get into this place for a few weeks of nonviolent resistance holiday. In the case of the International Solidarity Movement, the median age for participants is 35. Caroline, as a foreigner with a direct Palestinian connection fits neither popular story line floated in most coverage: that of a nameless local, or an outside agitator.

Now let’s delve into the murkier areas of misinformation. Other posts on this blog will deal with the term “separation barrier,” and what it implies. Right now, consider this bit: “… which, they claim, divides Palestinian agricultural land.”

We’re left wondering (we, being casual readers with no maps of the Middle East, and no firsthand knowledge of what things look like) whether the wall does divide agricultural land or not. This is something that can be, and has been, easily verified. Where a physical thing exists is not a matter of opinion.

Maps, satellite images, photos and miles worth of video footage show that farmland is definitely being divided. So are towns, neighborhoods, families and an entire people. It is not a matter of speculation. You can stand in Jenin, Bil’in, Mas-ha, Qaqilia, in villages bordering Jerusalem and all over the West Bank and see the wall cut across farmland and more. Kudos to the high school debate team member who can successfully argue that 30-foot high concrete slabs book-ended by massive sniper turrets really don’t exist where they’ve been built.

(the wall)

Israel’s Wall is not being built anywhere near its internationally recognized borders, which you can sound smart about by referring to as the “1967 Green Line.” This is the border that was established after Israel topped Jordan’s occupation of Palestine with one of its own. With the wall going up where it is, according to the Stop The Wall Campaign, “the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, including almost 1.5 million refugees, will be living on only 12% of historic Palestine.” This, of course, doesn’t take into account the Palestinians living inside Israel as internal refugees, or those still in refugee camps in neighboring countries.

If you’re weary of statistics — let’s suppose you don’t trust the data — here’s another way to find out what land Israel is annexing with its huge wall project: Come on over to Palestine. Maintain your notions that where the wall’s presence is a matter of subjective debate as you stand on a farmer’s olive tree grove in Mas-ha. Test it out. Walk from one end of this farmer’s field to the other. If your opinion allows you to get to the other end of his field without smacking into a huge, very real barrier, well, you’ve got quite a gift there. Put that David Copperfield guy in his place.

I’d also like to pick apart the contention that this is just about a dispute over some agricultural land. It’s not. It’s about the ability to live in an environment not entirely prison-like. By stressing that demonstrators contend the wall divides farmland, coverage tends to make Israel’s wall seem a little less about people.

(farmland)

Construction of the wall has and will continue to not only mean the loss of land, but also the decline of commerce and livelihoods, even more severe limits on travel and the isolation of entire communities.

(people)

Location after location, when the wall project gets under way in a village there has has emerged lively protests, public demonstrations and appeals to the world at large for assistance. After the wall has been completed in these communities, there has been a severe psychological impact. In the village of Bil’in right now, demonstrators have reached a celebrity status in the region. Israelis take the tricky, circuitous path form Tel Aviv to join in.

These actions in Bil’in are clever and attract wide media attention. When local community leaders and members of the Popular Committee Against the Wall in Bil’in are thrown in prison for taking the Ghandi approach, it gets protested from all corners.

But the wall still goes up.

I am not looking forward to seeing picturesque little Bil’in tossed into a prison. Obviously neither are the residents there. But looking at Bethlehem, Qaqillia and Mas-ha, places where the wall’s been built, and the difference is plain: They have lost a thing that you and I cannot fathom. At least not until a huge structure is built around our neighborhoods and foreign soldiers are stationed at the one exit which opens for an hour, at 5 a.m., unless the guards are late, but in any case you don’t have the right ID to get out anyway, so best try tomorrow. Live with that for a while and see what happens.

The routine closure and curfew imposed on the Palestinian residents by the Israel occupation forces only add to this isolation, which breeds frustration, anger and insecurity. The “institutional ghetto” or segregation of Palestinians has left people thinking not too highly of themselves and thus these people are unable to advance socially and psychologically. With low self-esteem, people feel humiliated and unworthy, which brings inner conflict and psychologically threatening symptoms like depression, suicide and disassociation.
— The Psychological Implications of Israel’s Separation Wall on Palestinians, a report by the Palestinian Counseling Center

Will Bil’in’s community leaders, folks like Abdullah Abu Rahme and Muhammed Al Khatib still get up early to demonstrate against the wall each Friday afternoon once it stops being a cleared path cutting through Bil’in and is instead a physical, imposing structure, flooding the town during rainy seasons due to lack of runoff and blocking any view of the outside world? Anyone getting to know these people can’t help but be infused that such a spirit they now display will thrive no matter. Realistically, after witnessing what has become of the places now enclosed by concrete, it’s easy to see how entrapment breeds hopelessness.

So long as the wall is seen as a matter of perspective, though, such truths will remain obscured from the American people, the leading underwriters of the whole construction project. Until the wall can be first properly objectified in media coverage as to a description of its physical mass and parameters, then put in a humanistic context — how will the wall effect the people around it — and finally in legal terms, as to what are the long-standing rules regarding an occupation government seizing land, expanding settlements and building permanent structures, there will be no chance of any sort of shift in pubic consciousness, at least not in a meaningful way that can alter official policy as it did with the Apartheid government of South Africa.

Until these facts are made clear in the most blunt fashion, there can be no shift in in perception. Be as cynical as you like, public discontent can promote change. Outcry over conflicts diamonds only happened after the photos were published of slave children toiling in mines. It was the grotesque photos sent back from Vietnam that, to a great extent, helped turn public perception. Was it wrong to show the brutal realities and inherent inequity of these situations? Why should it be wrong to do so in Palestine?

Photo courtesy of Operation Dove
These guys stopped by At-Tuwani in the Southern Hebron Hills to tell this shepherd that his flock wasn’t welcome on what they then and there decided was a “closed military area.”

More people should simply come to Palestine and see it for themselves. A significant number of people, for very rational and obvious reasons, will not make the trip. Failure to sufficiently describe the situation here does a disservice to those people. Failure to accurately describe the wall as an illegal project, which it can be objectively classified, is like glossing over a car-jacking by somehow making the illogical leap to suggest the thief needed that sedan for security reasons.

Is such a shift in reporting on this issue possible in the United States?

I don’t think there needs to be a call to shift the press to be pro-Palestinian, but rather pro-human, which seems to be a fairly safe bias, all things considered. For example, if news agencies did nothing more than offer equal weight to every Palestinian killed, injured or somehow effected by the conflict that they afford to every Israeli, there would be the potential for a massive shift in public perception about the conflict. And no one could be blamed of being somehow partisan to one side or another. When one civilian death is as important as another, the scales immediately tip in Palestine’s favor.

Somehow, this doesn’t happen. Somehow, someone or some people are not checking things out.

There is a fundamental saying in journalism that we’ve all heard. ‘If your mother says she loves you, check it out.’
— Ray Hanania, in a presentation to the Atlanta Press Club in February of 2003

Ray Hanania is a syndicated columnist on Mideast issues who moonlights as a stand-up comic. He’s also a Palestinian-American. “What that means is that journalists must be skeptical. That’s our job. Don’t trust those who claim to tell us the truth. Verify, double check and confirm. So why don’t we do that with the Middle East conflict? Why do we accept some notions and ignore others?”

Hanania conducted a search of key words used by the Dow Jones list of top 50 newspapers published between January 2002 and February 2003. In a conflict where Palestinian civilian deaths are close to tripling the number of Israeli deaths, where Palestinian homes are destroyed in the tens of thousands, here’s an index of how U.S. newspapers have covered things:

“Palestinian terrorism”: 894
“Israeli terrorism”: 102

“Palestinian terrorist”: 1,007
“Israeli terrorist”: 31

“Israeli retaliation”: 492
“Palestinian retaliation”: 28

“Israeli civilians killed”: 81
“Palestinian civilians killed”: 49

“Israeli soldiers shot and killed a Palestinian”: 113
“Palestinians shot and killed an Israeli”: 100

Every Israeli death warrants nearly two and and a half times more coverage than each Palestinian death. And during that time, when home demolitions in the West Bank and Gaza were at a fever pitch, the term “home demolition” appeared in those leading 50 newspapers just nine times. Each paper carried, on average, one story on the conflict per day. Nine times in almost 400 days of constant coverage when neighborhoods were being flattened nearly every one of those days.

Hanania, a Palestinian, says he sees “the issue of unfair media coverage differently than many other Arab Americans. They believe the media is biased and pro-Israel. I believe the media is imbalanced and favors Israel. That’s a difference. I also believe American society is also pro-Israel, not based on facts but on emotion and familiarity that comes from the bigger media, not just the news media.”

Far from the “conspiracy theorist” label that supporters of the occupation of Palestinian territories usually try to smack its critics with, that they all think the media is controlled by some secret Zionist cabal, Hanania lays the blame on cultural bias first, then the conflict-of-interest between making a quick buck and serving the public good that journalism suffers from when it is carried out as a form of business.

“That bottom line is often not professional journalism, but the dollar. Journalism is a business and lately, it hasn’t been doing well. over the years, many in journalism have turned toward pandering to public perceptions — an alliteration in the greatest sense of the word — by giving the public what it thinks it wants.” Bias, Hanania said, is something the public can develop after receiving large doses of imbalance over an extended period of time.

So if distance and distortion leads to an unrealistic view of things, maybe what’s called for is getting readers into the thick of it. Getting them closer. Familiar.

If hanging out in Palestinian villages makes someone “biased” toward that particular narrative, sitting in offices in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv eagerly awaiting faxes, text message alerts and phone calls from Israeli or Palestinian Authority PR flacks is indicative of something just as skewed, if not more so. At the center of the conflict is an occupation. The occupation affects regular people. Government officials, bureaucrats and military leaders are not held up at checkpoints, abducted by soldiers at night or forced to languish in prison cells without knowledge of the charges against them. It’s not government system vs. government system, but rather what a government system, a military occupation in this case, is doing to a people. so why not talk to a few of them?

In an interview with the magazine Editor & Publisher David Corn, Washington editor of The Nation, suggests Washington D.C. journalists’ true bias is often neither to the right or left of the political spectrum, but rather “it is a “bias towards officialdom. … It includes the White House, Congress and people in the cabinets.”

I would suggest that such a bias is not limited to those on the Capitol Hill beat. It’s everywhere, and especially here, in Israel and Palestine. These people are taken at their word, while the common person is relegated to the occasional human interest feature, but seldom quoted in so-called “hard news stories.”

NPR’s self-congratulatory assessment of its own 2003 media coverage is illustrative of what most newspapers and TV newsrooms would probably find if they bothered keeping track. “Throughout the yearlong review, NPR provided balanced coverage by offering a full range of competing voices, opinions, ideas and perspectives for the 22 million weekly listeners who depend on NPR as a primary news source,” the analysis starts. Paradoxically, it later states that between October and December of 2003, “Israeli voices were heard 66 times and voices of Arabs (including Palestinians) were heard 81 times,” while 70 pieces quoted Israelis and 54 “quoted Arabs (including Palestinians).” That’s out of 24 stories with an “Israeli focus” 25 stories with a “Palestinian focus” and 26 stories that were “equally focused.”

While we can make the obvious conclusion that sometime the coverage bothered “including Palestinians,” who owned the vocal chords behind most of these voices transmitted to 22 million listeners? “Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was again the most frequently quoted source, heard in 28 reports, making him the most quoted source in the 514 Middle East reports in 2003 (a total of 119 times). Other Israelis who were quoted more than once during the fourth quarter of 2003 were Deputy Prime Minister Olmert (6 times), I military Chief of Staff Yaalon (4 times). and Defense Minister Mofaz and Sharon Adviser Gold (twice each). From the Palestinian side, Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia was quoted or appeared on tape 15 times, followed by President Yasir Arafat (10 times), Cabinet members Erekat (9 times), Khatib (3 times) and Faris (3 times), and Palestinian Authority official Najjar (3 times).” The NPR analysis goes on to say it took strides to quote non-official sources, citing soundbytes from a former Israeli official, a former navy official, a former intelligence official and a university professor.

These are not people stopped at checkpoints, kept in poverty, shot at, kept under curfew, or really affected by the occupation in any of the most tangible ways.

So that was in 2003. What about right here and now in ‘05, on the edge of apparently massive Israeli policy shifts, known as “disengagement” in Gaza, and a rapid increase in human rights violations, settlement increases and annexation wall building in the West Bank. With these sudden, potentially traumatic shifts teetering on the cusp of becoming realities, can there be any change in the presentation of those with the most to lose?

Today I got to hang out with Abdullah abu Rahme. I’d prefer an interview with this guy to anyone leading an armed faction, political group or White House. I interviewed him in order to help him write an editorial in English with the hopes of getting a West Bank villager’s perspective about Gaza disengagement in western media during the coming week. Neither of us clutched any illusions that the editorial would actually get published in mainstream media, but you know, it’s always worth a shot.

He provided the fodder, I helped with the English.

In his village, one could argue Abdullah is a bit of a big-wig. In the grand scheme of things, not so much. He is one of the local leaders in Bil’in’s Popular Committee Against The Wall. Almost every village that has Israel’s annexation wall running through it seems to have one of these committees. It may seem that in this blog that I focus on Bil’in quite a bit. Part of that reason is that the village is near here. The other part is that what Abdullah and others there are doing is so effective, gets noticed, but goes entirely unanalyzed or studied, except by the Israeli military, which is trying to put a stop to it.

Every Friday after the local mosque’s afternoon prayer, a bus full of Israelis show up from Tel Aviv to join villagers and any International Solidarity Movement activists who might be on hand to stage theatric, well-planned demonstrations. No one deludes themselves into fancy thoughts that this act alone will halt completion of the wall through this village, but they do get the public relations aspect of what they’re doing, and that’s why Abdullah has been so vehemently targeted by the Israeli military.

After most every Friday protest, Abdullah could expect a visit from Israeli intelligence officials. After his arrest in the midst of a typical Friday demonstration on July 15, he got his fill of these guys.

When he was arrested, he was tied inside a large prop constructed to look like a bridge along with Israeli and foreign peace activists that carried a banner which read “peace needs bridges not walls.”

“When one of the soldiers had told us we had ten minutes to vacate, I said ‘I’m not leaving, this is my village. I live here. You go home,’” Abdullah told me. “The soldiers charged at us.” Several people were arrested. The Israelis and foreign activists were released within hours. Abdullah and his brother Rateb were taken to a prison at Ofer Military Base. His brother was released after a few days. Abdullah, an organizer, was held there until Aug. 1.

Once the video footage was shown, Abdullah was cleared of charges that the military had tried to get him with. But if militants and Israeli security are the central reasons why soldiers have to run around Palestinian territory, why is a guy who binds himself inside homemade props seen as such a threat? Why should he should be thrown in military prisons throughout the duration of his court proceedings?

I believe it is because a growing number of Palestinians are forming new ways of effective, peaceful resistance and the army knows no way of dealing with it. They feel threatened by this. They are being embarrassed and humiliated as the violence they use against people simply walking in unison down a road in Bil’in is being depicted more and more often in the press, exposing what happens here and showing who the true aggressor actually is.
— Abdullah

Why are soldiers shooting at unarmed, grassroots demonstrators? Why is that not a question worth exploring?

When a teenaged Israeli settler boarded a bus in a Palestinian village and used his army-issued gun to kill four people and injure a dozen others a few days ago, the incident received no small amount of press. Israeli officials were allowed to expound on how this sort of thing isn’t tolerated. Apparently when an Apache helicopter fires a missile into an apartment complex full of civilians in Jenin to kill one suspected militant it’s a different sort of deal, but that’s neither here nor there.

What stories didn’t mention was that no Israeli settlements were locked down, that there were no checks of Israeli settlers, that there was no attempt to disarm Israeli settlers.

You don’t have traffic problems. This is what traffic problems look like.

Yesterday, some al-Aqsa Brigade thuggies shot at cars driving along an Israeli-only road near Ramallah and managed to wound a 10-year-old boy from the Ateret settlement along with the driver of the car in which he was riding. The story was covered in Israeli and Arab media and lightly by the foreign press. However, aside from Arab media, there was no coverage regarding the massive closures that stopped traffic in and out of Ramallah for nearly four hours as random searches took place. As the boy lay in stable condition at a hospital, Red Crescent ambulances attempting to take ailing Palestinians to hospitals were stuck under the hot afternoon sun at a checkpoint in Atara.

There’s a guy sitting in a Nablus hospital with a shattered jaw and minus many teeth because s soldier aimed a tear gas canister straight at his head and fired from distance of about 10 feet.

Just because the Israeli military disregards the rights of an entire people, there’s no reason the media has to.

What if it starts today?

Ten Palestinians were injured this morning when soldiers opened fire in Liban Al-Gharbi, south of Qalqilya. A group of settlers and soldiers last week brought heavy machinery into the village claiming to be on an archeological dig. Each day since, villagers visited the area to talk to the settlers and remind them that they don’t really have legal rights to dig up someone else’s land. The situation escalated into a stone throwing fight this morning between settlers and villagers when Israeli soldiers then opened fire on the villagers, but not the settlers, with rubber coated metal bullets. Seven of the injured were taken to Ramallah Hospital. Two are in critical condition.

Get out of that comfy Jerusalem news bureau for a spell.

Come on over to Ramallah.

Visit Palestine.

Note: I again cribbed from myself on occasion here, specifically writings from my last West Bank excursion in 2003. But it’s not like you’ve already read any of this stuff before anyhow, so it seemed like new. — The Management

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