As the clashes that began on 28 September 2000 continued to result in a high loss of life and level of injuries among the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, I wrote to CNN from London, on 22 October 2000, to point out that CNN has become a byword for bad coverage, and to make a suggestion about the use of language in reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.
Dear CNN,
I've been meaning to write you an e-mail for some while but I've been snowed under. However, the e-mail that follows mine caught my eye as it was being forwarded around the Internet today, and so I'm sending it to you.
"I've been noticing recently that CNN has finally become *the* byword among Middle Eastern professionals and activists for biased coverage. " |
I've been noticing recently that CNN has finally become *the* byword among Middle Eastern professionals and activists for biased coverage. Whatever reasons could be argued either way - this is the reality of the situation. This is sad, and was one of the reasons why I wrote a series of letters at the beginning of this current round of violence, attempting to share my perspective on CNN coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.
The sad thing is that in my recent wanderings around CNN's site, it is evident that CNN is TRYING to cover the Middle East well. There was that recent 'Portrait of a stone-thrower,' for example, available on the site as Real Video, which might as well have been a personal request.
But there's something missing, even from that report. What this is, is something that I only figured out recently. Although it seems almost too obvious to say, it's the source of a lot of the discomfort I feel -- as someone who has lived in the West Bank -- when I watch your reports.
For me, the most pertinant fact about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that it is the direct consequence of one thing - the Israeli military occupation.
This is just not apparent in coverage. Not just in CNN, of course.
I mean nobody really had a problem working out black and white in South Africa, where the dumb Africaans had such severe press restricitions that networks were obliged to say so, and every report carried several references to Apartheid, which was a pretty easy-to-understand concept.
The fact is that things are never presented in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in their true context - the Israeli military occupation.
"God knows that there's not a single day where the continuing military occupation isn't a feature of daily life at some level in the West Bank and Gaza. It never really fades into the background. If you're not getting treated like meat at a checkpoint on the way to university, someone somewhere is having their house demolished in Jerusalem, some settlers have bulldozed a Palestinian farmer's orchard in Nablus, or someone from the US State Department is on TV calling you 'terrorists'. It's not easy being a Palestinian. " |
God knows that there's not a single day where the continuing military occupation isn't a feature of daily life at some level in the West Bank and Gaza. It never really fades into the background. If you're not getting treated like meat at a checkpoint on the way to university, someone somewhere is having their house demolished in Jerusalem, some settlers have bulldozed a Palestinian farmer's orchard in Nablus, or someone from the US State Department is on TV calling you 'terrorists'.
It's not easy being a Palestinian.
These kinds of daily events are verbally shared on a daily basis via the extremely effective grapevine that the 95 percent of the Palestinians who are urban dwellers operate in.
It isn't that sharing this information is 'training their children to hate' or any of the other classic 'Palestinians as perpetrators of the conflict' myths that aren't real to any degree that the media overfocus on them suggests, it's just that the realities of occupation are the primary lens though which Palestinians view the conflict.
Yet Israeli soldiers, despite the occupation being internationally officially acknowledged as such, are never described as such. Even when going about their daily business of occupying the West Bank and Gaza, shooting children as if there were no tomorrow, they are the "Israeli Defence Forces", "Israeli troops", the "Israeli army", or just "Israel".
Let's pick a random article, this latest one will do fine:
"More Middle East killings as Arab nations confer on crisis"
October 21, 2000, Web posted at: 7:35 p.m. EDT (2335 GMT)
at http://www.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/meast/10/21/mideast.01/index.html
Here it is, paragraphs 2-4 (for brevity & relevance, as the first paragraph is about the Arab League summit):
"Palestinian protesters fought with *Israeli soldiers* in Gaza and the West Bank on Saturday, leaving four Palestinians dead -- one in Jenin, one in Hebron, one in Ramallah, all in the West Bank, and one in Gaza according to Palestinian hospital sources. Meanwhile, in the West Bank town of Nablus, tens of thousands joined a funeral march for Palestinians killed in Friday's clashes.
*Israeli Defense Forces* denies that Israelis killed the Palestinian in Hebron. *Israel* said he had been shot to death with live ammunition and its forces were not using live ammunition in Hebron.
The *Israeli army* said on Saturday that soldiers had killed at least one Arab in a firefight on the Israel-Lebanon border, during the night."
I mean, this kind of thing doesn't help viewers realise that these people simply shouldn't be in the West Bank, which they should be realising if they want to understand what is going on there.
In addition, the Palestinians are "fighting" with them. The Israelis are cited in the article (usually killing people in the less painful passive tense) as using live ammunition, missiles, and attack helicopters. What weapons are the Palestinians using? There is a danger in reading this kind of description (not so much in this report where there is a veritable Vietnam going on, but in others from this period) that one might be tempted to conclude that it was a fair "fight", perhaps even a "fight" between equals, instead of the desperate stones, molotovs, and rifles of a besieged and occupied people struggling against the most powerful army in the Middle East.
| "CNN may feel that to reverse the habits (I am presuming there was a time when it was so) and to start terming Israeli troops as "Israeli occupation troops" might attract a little heat -- and you would be correct -- but isn't the CNN status quo having the effect of normalising the Israeli occupation for viewers, of concealing it?" |
Sure, as things stand right now, CNN may feel that to reverse the habits (I am presuming there was a time when it was so) and to start terming Israeli troops as "Israeli occupation troops" might attract a little heat -- and you would be correct -- but isn't the CNN status quo having the effect of normalising the Israeli occupation for viewers, of concealing it?
Sure, you might say that 'actions are louder than words' and we report the deaths on both sides, the weapons, etc., but the fact is that Israel's public relations repertoire relies strongly on the idea that if their very presence in the West Bank isn't questioned, they can portray these mostly civilian attempts to drive out their occupation as "attacks" on them.
The reality of course is that the Palestinians are the ones who are being attacked, having their land eased away from them while we are distracted by the latest Clinton-Barak-Arafat soirée. It's a reversal of reality.
The Occupation, needless to say, has carried on during the "peace process" as if nothing changed. Personally -- which should be clear from this and other letters -- I think the evidence is in that it has been consciously and deliberately carried on under cover of the "peace process".
Overnight, in September 1993, the phrase "occupied territories" or "Israeli occupation" seemed to fade from the media phrasebook or, at best, be de-emphasised by the repeated use of the phrase "peace process".
Seven years on, I'm still waiting for signs of anything on the ground that could be said to be a true Israeli gesture of peace.
The most obvious, and most often cited by Israel -- the handback of West Bank and Gazan towns to Palestinians -- doesn't really seem to count as a goodwill gesture when you consider that 95% of the West Bank population live in these population centers. Representing just 5% of the land, and land that Israel actively de-developed for 30 years, it was more obviously a handover of Israel's crowd control problems.
And if there was any doubt, the first year of post-Redeployment bliss saw one-and-a-half months of lost university academic calendar at Birzeit alone. This problem resulted from the sealing of nearby Ramallah, where most students and staff lived.
| "Overnight, in September 1993, the phrase 'occupied territories' or 'Israeli occupation' seemed to fade from the media phrasebook or, at best, be de-emphasised by the repeated use of the phrase 'peace process'. " |
It was a containment issue, and the reason for closure of this road -- which house respectively (from Ramallah to Birzeit) one tiny village, a chicken farm, a home for mentally retarded children, and another tiny village -- was clearly punitive, following bus bombings that had nothing to do with any locally-based perpetrators.
So "peace" is a very loaded word. And the "peace process" has been anything but. It has covered a multitude of sins.
This major point -- the occupation/lack of peace for the 7 years in which we have used the word -- I think it would be true to say is absent from CNN's reporting.
This is perhaps one of the central reasons why professionals who work on the Middle East, pro-Palestinian activists, and Palestinians who live there, sigh at the mention of CNN.
People write letters, endless letters, and it doesn't seem to really make any difference, to them. As I said above, looking at your site this last week, it is obvious you are trying to improve coverage by focussing resources on it, offering a variety of interesting little reports and other features on your excellent website, but it's not filtering at all through to the comments I hear in the circles I move in, both here in the UK, and online everywhere. Why is that?
Palestinians freaked out at the use of those images of those Israeli soldiers being torn apart by a crowd. Not out of any sense that realities like that should be hidden from the world, but rather because there is no balancing history of sympathetic coverage.
From what I have been able to work out since the events, this mob was comprised to a large part of people who were attending the nearby funeral of Palestinian Issam Judeh1, who was abducted by settlers and basically tortured to death with what appeared to be a clothes iron, various tools you would find in a shed, and set on fire. In that light, the mob is a very different creature, and even though it doesn't make what happened any less unacceptable, it does make it more understandable.
But because of the way image-driven television news works, the lack of a cameraman while Issam Judeh screamed his final pointless screams only 4 days before the two soldiers were killed, has meant that we got a disproportionate focus.
The mob-murdered Jews would for sure end up in Life magazine's next 50 Years book (if the mag was still around) but for sure the mob-murdered Arab wouldn't even get his 15 minutes of fame. It's not hard to work out why. No one filmed his killers and no one is going to be broadcasting these photos:
http://www.addameer.org/september2000/focus/issam.html
Yet Palestinians are and have always been very aware of their dead and the circumstances in which they died, and this footage-driven lack of balance just looks like bias to them.
No one made the torture and slaying of Issam Judeh headline news around the world for days. And no one spent the following days talking about the "brutality" of Jews, or making any sweeping statements about their future capacity to be peaceful neighbours on the basis of that one incident, like much of the media did.
Yet the reality of the last 24 days is that Palestinians have been mown down in their thousands by mostly live ammunition fired on them by occupiers of their land.
I don't mean killed, when I say "mown down". Put aside for a moment the 118/119/120 statistic of those killed at this point, 40% of whom are children by the best estimates.
"There are well over 4,000 who have been injured by live ammunition, and many of these have been blinded, maimed, crippled, or paralysed by soldiers of the Israeli occupation army. That's inconceivable when expanded to a comparible population. There are about 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and about 270 million Americans in the United States. That would be the equivilent of one-third of a million wounded, 360,000, in just over three weeks." |
There are well over 4,000 who have been injured by live ammunition, and many of these have been blinded, maimed, crippled, or paralysed by soldiers of the Israeli occupation army. That's inconceivable when expanded to a comparible population.
There are about 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and about 270 million Americans in the United States. That would be the equivilent of one-third of a million wounded, 360,000, in just over three weeks.
The Palestinians, young and old, are just doing their jobs. Throwing stones at these cccupying soldiers is their right under the Fourth Geneva Convention. And the occupation troops are doing what occupation troops do all over the world. They are killing them for it.
Outrage happens only when we get a particularly photogenic-looking Palestinian child 'caught in crossfire' for 45 minutes. Even the scenes of rockets firing (some going astray) at targets Ramallah didn't generate nearly as much interest as they did fear on the ground.
Me, I was on the phone to someone who was 300 meters away from the police station on one side, and 600 meters away from the Muqata on the other side (both getting rocketed), trying to give them advice on the best place to take shelter in their house, inquiring about the nature of its construction materials, whether stone or concrete. But that kind of sense of the experience for the normal people living in Ramallah was not communicated anywhere. Instead we got Marwan Barghoutti.
Yet the numbers of this last 24 days should speak for themselves. The scale of injuries with live ammunition should leave no one in any doubt that we are dealing with an army with only contempt for the human beings there. The Israeli 'Defense' Forces are only defending the right of one ethnic group to scorch the earth of another.
To conclude, there is an Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Let it be reported as such. What is going on over there is no different than happened in France during the Second World War. It is resistance.
The following e-mail relating to CNN coverage, in my mind, is fair comment. The titling maybe a little lurid, the author maybe somewhat polemic at points, and not all that appears necessarily applies to actual examples of CNN coverage, but the truth is that the points that Ma'ad makes below are both fair and recognisable.
It's not so much about depth of coverage as it is about perspective and language.
I don't think you should be offended by the attached e-mail, as irreverent as it is. More importantly - it should give you a huge clue about some of the ways in which the realities of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict could be articulated in a way that would be acceptable to those at the wrong end of it.
My personal favourites are the definitions for "seige", "clash", "headline", and "footnotes".
With best wishes,
Nigel Parry
My world view has revolved around Aristotelian logic - that A is A, and that words and principles are accurate representations of the real world.
Now, I am watching white and being told it is black. I see innocence and am told it is guilt. I see evil and am told it is heroic.
I see a terrified young child captured on camera in the throws of death be denigrated by a hostile media that calls him a "troublemaker" before his body had even gotten cold. I see assassins sent to execute members of a funeral procession be glorified as heroes and "family men".
Meanwhile, over a hundred Zionists protest in San Francisco on Tuesday that CNN was biased against THEM.
I need order in my life! So, with that in mind, I have written a (much) Abridged Dictionary of ZNN Lexicon. It seems that ZNN (Zionist News Network) has invented a new language that has stolen many words from English but has altered their meanings. This is my humble attempt to decipher this new language.
"Siege (n.) You are "under seige" when you blockade a civilian population and bombard them with anti-tank missiles. In order to be truly under seige, your own population must be virtually isolated from any violence and must continue to work and play as normal while the population that is beseiging you must be cut off from all phones, electricity, gas and other amenities and have their population picked off one by one by snipers (the snipers thereby being "under seige")." |
Siege (n.) You are "under seige" when you blockade a civilian population and bombard them with anti-tank missiles. In order to be truly under seige, your own population must be virtually isolated from any violence and must continue to work and play as normal while the population that is beseiging you must be cut off from all phones, electricity, gas and other amenities and have their population picked off one by one by snipers (the snipers thereby being "under seige").
Reservist (n.) A person who is paid to infiltrate civilian populations and execute individuals in cold blood...as long as he is not dressed in fatigues.
Opposition Leader (n.) War criminal.
Secretary of State (n.) War criminal in a skirt.
Cross-fire (n.) 45 minutes worth of bullets fired by a sniper at a cowering, defenseless child.
Britt Hume (n.) Rabid.
Arab Governments (n.) Chicken feed.
U.S. Media (n.) Material considered too hawkish for Israeli media.
Gunman (n.) a 10 year old boy walking to school.
Settler (n.) a person who steals land, kills its occupants and burns their olive trees...all in the name of God.
Clash (v.) an encounter in which snipers shoot at children who retaliate by attacking the bullets with their bodies.
Middle East Expert (n.) Israeli who can speak English without an accent.
Israeli Right (n.) Israelis who want all Arabs to fly away.
Israeli Left (n.) Israelis who want Arabs to stay and do the dishes.
Headline (n.) Anything uttered by an Israeli official, e.g. Three Lost Israeli Reservists Lynched by Palestinian Mob
Footnote (n.) Anything stated by eyewitnesses, usually appearing in the last paragraph of a long article, e.g. "...Palestinians claim that the reservists were actually part of a death squad and claim that it would be impossible for a person to end up in the middle of Ramallah by accident since that would require crossing an Israeli checkpoint, a Palestinian checkpoint, and traversing about 20 cross streets."
Honest Broker (n.) A country that provides $4.5 billion in aid to one side, and admits to having a "special relationship" with that side.
Hey, what else can you do when your tears have run dry and your vocal chords have become raw from protest (not that anyone was listening anyway).
When will this Orwellian nightmare end...
by Maad Abu-Ghazalah
Note: This letter was edited for web publication, meaning that a few typos and grammatical errors were cleared up.
1 - The following correction to the point about Issam Judeh was sent shortly after this letter.
Dear CNN,
When I was further checking this, I discovered that the funeral of Issam Jalah took place the day before -- not on the same day -- as the mob killing in Ramallah.
However, Palestinian friends in Ramallah did stress that the knowledge of what happened to Judeh four days earlier was very much in the minds of all Ramallan residents at this time, so the thrust of what I was saying remains the same.
There would have been no one present at Ramallah Police Station that was not acutely aware of, and enraged by, the killing of Judeh.
Nigel Parry
Editor's Note: Interestingly it later transpired that Issam Judeh most likely died as the result of a car crash, according to Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), although again that made little difference to the fact that people in Ramallah thought he was killed by settlers at the time. According to the PHR report, he was last seen with a Israeli jeep in pursuit of his vehicle, a 1979 Subaru. It would therefore seem that he crashed during this chase. The Israeli soldiers appear not to have reported this, as his body and the car were not found for another 18 hours, at which point an Israeli jeep 'coincidently' turned up to watch his body being taken away.