The most powerful weapons

Pascale Ghazaleh gazes through bulletproof glass
Advocates of Palestinian rights may be feeling a little queasy these days, as if the rug has been pulled out from under them. What, exactly, is going on? First there was the BBC Panorama programme The Accused, about the Sabra and Shatila massacres and Ariel Sharon's role therein. Then angry crowds booed Ariel Sharon on his official visit to France. Last month, too, came the news of an attempt to prosecute Sharon as a war criminal. And the 17 June issue of The Observer carried an article about Western journalists being harassed -- at the hands of the Israelis. Although it played on that element of surprise, beginning with the account of a journalist's detention by PA security officials, the story was explicit: "A new front is opening in the intifada," it ran. "Faced with increasing international criticism of its handling of the Palestinian uprising, the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon and its allies in the powerful and influential pro-Israeli lobby, have stepped up their efforts against international media reporting the current crisis. News organisations that fall foul of Israel are accused of being pro- Palestinian at best, and at worst anti-Semitic." Even the US has been uncharacteristically outspoken in condemning Israel's demolition of Palestinian homes.
Is the West finally getting the message? Recent developments in media coverage, at least, would seem to indicate that it is. When Arab media consumers -- especially those with access to the English-language international press -- complain of media bias, one part of the anger is the feeling that not everything is being said. Of course information is suppressed: Israel, like any occupying power, routinely covers up what its occupation forces (whether official, as embodied in the IDF, or simply supported by the government, as in the case of the "settlers") are doing to the Palestinians. Besides the structural problems plaguing coverage of events in Palestine (almost all reporting is done from within Israel and based on information from Israeli sources), the Israeli authorities and their lobbies, especially in the US but also in Europe, ruthlessly harass public figures and media professionals who are not virulently pro- Israeli. To give just two recent examples: Robert Falk, a professor of international law at Princeton University, had to be placed under police protection after receiving threatening phone calls because he had asserted on the Panorama programme that "there is absolutely no question in my mind that [Sharon] is indictable for the knowledge he had or should have had [of the Sabra and Shatila massacres]." Guardian correspondent Suzanne Goldenberg has been threatened with having her accreditation removed, "abused in the Jewish media as... a 'self-hating Jew'," and "bombarded daily with hundreds of complaints about her coverage."
This propaganda effort clearly affects the way people perceive the conflict. Especially in the US, it has resulted in the internalisation of many taboos regarding Israel, and has made it possible for public figures to refer to the Palestinians in terms that, if applied to any other group, would be condemned as the most blatant racism. Still, it does not entirely explain an apathy that remains almost all pervasive; for, while some details may be hidden (by the Israelis from the media, or by the media from sensitive consumers), it is always possible to know what is happening. The information is out there, the litany is always more or less the same. Perhaps the order varies, but we know that the Israelis are killing, maiming, torturing, burning property, bulldozing houses, burning orchards and olive groves -- in short, engaging in all the activities that an army besieging a civilian population, and more or less intent on eradicating it, commonly undertakes.
Even those not living at "ground zero," to use the expression of photojournalist and activist Nigel Parry, surely do not need "impartial observers" to tell them that the Reuters or AP pictures of children shot in the head, posted on the Web in the first weeks of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, are "real." The point here is that, even if only a fraction of the whole story is getting out, that fraction should be more than enough to trigger an international outcry. This is not a question of what is palatable or fit for public consumption, because none of it is.
Why, then, has this information had so little impact on international attitudes toward Israel? To answer this question, we must stop assuming, first of all, that the battle lines separate "the West" (read: the US administration and, to a lesser extent, the European Union, as Israel's unconditional supporters) from "us," the Arabs. We must also stop assuming that Westerners somehow do not know about Israel's acts of violence and brutality -- or that, while seeing even a few of them (a very reduced, sanitised portion), they still fail to realise that their targets are human beings. To believe that Israelis must dehumanise Palestinians to treat them as they do, and that others can only accept that reality by dehumanising the Palestinians in turn, is to avoid a much harsher truth: many people, inside and outside the region, realise that the Palestinians are human beings and simply do not care. Taking this line of thought one step further: this is a war, and the two sides cannot agree on anything at all. They see entirely different versions of reality. They are simply not talking about the same thing.
By reducing the conflict to news-bites and photo-ops, the media offer a stark caricature of this basic division. On one side of the looking glass, advocates of Palestinian rights feel that there is a clear bias towards Israel in the international press (which usually conflates "Israel" with "the Jews" and "Palestinians" with "the Arabs," thereby drawing on a whole range of prejudices built up over decades if not centuries). This bias ranges from the crude -- "Arab children are taught that their holiest mission is to die while killing Jews," according to a 29 June op-ed piece in the Washington Times -- to the fairly subtle: news bulletins refer to the number of dead in the Intifada, tagging on a vague "most of them Palestinians;" Palestinians are "killed [in the passive voice] at road blocks" or by "exploding public telephone booths," neatly bypassing the fact that Israeli soldiers are the ones pulling the triggers and planting the bombs. On the other, supporters of Israel believe that even the mainstream Western media are shamefully biased toward the Palestinians. Many viewers of The Accused wrote in, outraged, not to ask why war criminals were walking free but to demand why the show had been aired at this particular time --19 years after Sabra and Shatila, during a particularly difficult phase in Israeli-Palestinian relations. Why not let sleeping dogs lie? seemed to be the thrust of such comments.
So we cannot attribute the essential division between pro- Palestinians and pro-Israelis to the fact that they have access to different kinds of information, or that one of the two groups is somehow being kept in the dark. This much is clear from a sample letter of complaint sent out to subscribers of HonestReporting.com, a web-site that seeks to combat "anti-Israeli bias" in the Western media. The letter was prompted by advance publicity for the Panorama show -- which had not yet been aired when the complaints started rolling in. It was therefore intended as a pre-emptive strike, protesting "the BBC's campaign to accuse Israel's Prime Minister Sharon;" it had potential signatories "respectfully" suggesting that instead, Panorama should focus its cameras on "the contemporary criminal Yasir Arafat," and hold him responsible for "the turmoil in Lebanon in 1982 that led to Israel's attack at terrorist bases."
These statements may beggar belief (was Rothschild responsible for the turmoil in Germany in 1936 that led to the Reich's attack on "subversive elements"? and why should Arafat's crimes wipe Sharon's slate clean?), but nevertheless seem perfectly legitimate to many people who are not necessarily brainwashed or blind. They even seem to contain a grain of credibility that appeals to "objectivity" -- Sharon, after all, was not torturing and raping Palestinian refugee children himself; he just let the Phalangists do that, and went calmly to bed. The Kahan Commission, an Israeli inquiry set up to investigate the Sabra and Shatila massacres (and whose findings, incidentally, were taken at face value only because Israel has sold itself successfully in the West as "a tiny oasis of democracy" in a sea of barbarous Arabs), did not state explicitly that he was directly guilty; it merely indicated that he may have been indirectly responsible. Most importantly, such statements have nothing to do with reality: they are based on a moral decision, a conscious and unconditional bias in favour of Israel, which is equated with Sharon, who is equated with "the Jews."
Information, therefore, is just one element in a war where the dividing line between the two sides seems impossible to cross. This barbed border runs through the very words we use, making a mockery of objectivity. It is impossible to remain detached; there is no room for objectivity. One side's black is the other's white, one side's terrorist the other's freedom fighter. This is true wherever you stand: Jeff Halper, coordinator of the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions and editor of News from Within, has "despaired of ever convincing my own people that a just peace is the way." He adds: "Israelis may passively accept dictates from outside, but a just peace will not come from within Israeli society... Israel is a self- contained bubble with a self-contained and exclusively Jewish narrative." On the ground and in the news, part of the schizophrenic nature of the situation has to do with the fact that, because it is so morally charged, each of its poles exerts an irresistible pull.
Nor is history free from this force field. History is part of the problem, and part of the combat zone, because it is never written once and for all. Memory and morality intersect on several points. One is the holocaust, singled out for special attention, and perceived as unique in an absolute sense, in a way no other historical event is or ever has been: so unique that it puts up a literally impenetrable barrier between its survivors (thrice chosen: as Jews, as victims, as repositories of an eternal secret) and the rest of humanity, both at the time of its occurrence and forever. Elias Sanbar, editor of the Review of Palestinian Studies, elaborates on this theme: "Because they perceive Israel as an absolute good, since it was founded in response, as a reply, to absolute evil -- the persecution of the Jews that culminated in Nazi barbarity --, the Israelis cannot conceive that their state was born of the injustice done to another people. They understand any recognition of this injustice as suicidal. To recognise what they have done to the Palestinians would be equivalent, in the long term, to the disappearance of their state."
This is why the memory of that genocide justifies the negation of Palestinian memory, and indeed of any competing memory -- a process most clearly apparent in the fact that what is the Nakba to the Palestinians is Israel's "Independence Day." History, according to postmodern thought, is made up of as many potential truth-narratives as there are actors and observers. Israeli history, and the Israeli present, is made up of only one. All others must be eliminated.
In an interview with the Belgian publication Défis-Sud, Israel-born filmmaker Eyal Sivan suggests that the way out of this paradox is to emphasise "political debate over a moral debate that is already biased. If we place matters on a moral ground, we fall into endless polemics, we ask questions like: 'Who is more of a victim?'... Accepting the right of return is a political, a juridical notion, and we can discuss morality as much as we want to, but the Palestinian right of return cannot be covered up... It's not enough to recognise having done wrong -- then we must speak of the law."
Memory, as he says, is a real weapon; for without memory, what evidence is there that a crime has been committed?
This is a less abstract question than one might think, especially when every word and every number is a terrain to be fought over. Never mind that the West Bank and Gaza to some are Judaea and Samaria to others; these discrepancies, no matter how stark, can be ascribed to ideology. Of course "cease- fire" means one thing to Sharon (and, possibly, to Arafat: the total suppression of the Palestinian resistance), and another to the authors of the Mitchell report (the cessation of Israeli attacks on Palestinian civilians -- or so one would suppose). By acting on the present, words can be manipulated to change the past as well: the Kahan Commission established that the Israeli troops surrounding the camps knew that the Phalange were torturing, raping and slaughtering the refugees inside. In a 19 June article about the possible war crimes trial, however, The Independent noted: "Yesterday, we stated that an Israeli inquiry into the 1982 massacre of Palestinian civilians in Lebanon held Ariel Sharon responsible. We have been asked to point out that the inquiry found Mr Sharon to be 'indirectly' responsible."
If Sharon is only "indirectly" responsible, of course, the blame can be placed elsewhere: on the militias, and specifically on Phalange chief Elie Hobeika. Speaking of the devil, and just as a hint of how surreal the whole memory/morality mess can become, Hobeika, according to his former bodyguard's memoirs, was actually a Syrian agent. The evidence? The Sabra and Shatila massacres could not have benefited Israel in any way. The idea here, crucially, is not Hobeika's guilt: it is that, in this landscape of absolute good and absolute evil, Hobeika's guilt means Sharon's innocence. QED.
So even apparently straightforward facts and figures can be morally charged; facts and figures, after all, are not necessarily solid tangible things, and the disparities here are so great as to make one positively nauseous. Forget the oil-slick terrain of terminology, where it is impossible to obtain a purchase; even the numbers don't add up. Since the Sabra and Shatila massacres are in the news, they will serve to illustrate this point: the Jewish Virtual Library, an on-line encylopaedia self-described as a division of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, estimates that the number of dead ranged "from 460 according to the Lebanese police, to 700-800 calculated by Israeli intelligence." Robert Fisk, writing in The Independent (6 February), places the figure at "up to 2,000." David Usborne, writing in the same publication (24 June), places it at 800. The International Committee of the Red Cross estimated it at 3,000. According to Fisk, a million Israelis demonstrated against Sharon in Tel Aviv in 1982, after news of the massacres broke; according to the Jewish Virtual Library, there were only 300,000 protesters.
But why does that matter? Given the imbalance of power prevailing in Palestine, the "reality on the ground," why quibble over words? Surely the important point here is that Sharon has never been prosecuted; nor has Hobeika. One is prime minister; the other was made Lebanese minister for refugees after the war, and is living quietly today as a successful businessman in Beirut. So are we merely witnessing the victors' attempt to rewrite history in their favour?
There is more to it than that. Numbers, as survivors of any holocaust know, are not innocuous, although there is really no difference between five million and six -- what matters is the horror (and the fact that it is not unimaginable at all). And so we find ourselves back on familiar, slippery moral ground, where numbers are piled up on either side like the dead they are meant to represent. Who suffered more? On one side: six million, a figure it is now a crime to question in some countries. On the other: a few hundred, a few thousand, a few hundred thousand. Absolute evil vs absolute insignificance: while numbers and words do not matter, every zero and every letter count.
To avoid drawing the necessary parallels between the suffering of the Jews -- whose legitimate heirs they style themselves -- and the affliction that successive Israeli governments have visited on the Palestinians, the producers of official Israeli discourse must make such comparisons unthinkable. One way of doing this is to posit Palestine implicitly as the diametrical opposite of the holocaust; therefore, since the Jews were the quintessential victims, the Palestinians must be the quintessential aggressors. Crucially, this must be done while always dissimulating the ultimate reference point, in order to continue eliminating the possibility of comparison.
What makes such feats possible is the notion of cultural specificity: after all, this is the Middle East, where anything goes. To make impossible the application to the Palestinian case of universal norms (norms like inalienable human rights, generated in part precisely by the horror of World War II) it is necessary to present it as just that: "a case" -- in other words, as exceptional, and therefore as governed by a special set of rules.
The notion of regional exceptionalism serves to justify a whole host of horrors. Interviewed on The Accused, Emmanuel Rosen, a journalist for the Israeli Defence Forces in 1982, remembers. "When I understood that these were the Phalange, the first reaction [was] these people are killers. They're really the worst people I've ever met. For me immediately you know you go back to pictures from the holocaust." Fergal Keane is more specific, referring to the Lebanese "culture of murder" and wondering why, when Ariel Sharon spoke of the Lebanese as murderers, he allowed the Phalange into the refugee camps. To which Ranaan Gissen, the Israeli prime minister's spokesman, replies calmly: "Well you know, we live in the Middle East so we do not always have the choice of choosing our allies or our enemies. We have to take them as they come." In the Observer, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is quoted as saying: "This is a charged political environment. Everyone wants to own you, and if they can't own you they want to destroy you. That applies just as much to the Arab world as it does to Israel. There is no middle ground. There is no time and no place that someone will put their arm around you and say, 'Gosh, I really appreciate your fair and balanced reporting'." And giving the "Middle East uniqueness" argument a slightly different twist, Robert Fisk, writing in The Independent on 6 June, remarks bitterly: "I'm talking about the blind, cruel, vindictive Muslim regimes of the Middle East; because I'm beginning to ask myself if there isn't something uniquely terrible about the way they treat their people, the way they kill their people, the way they abuse them and flog them and string them up."
In an overview of media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, updated and posted on ElectronicIntifada.net (which includes a very complete section on media bias) last November, Nigel Parry makes some remarks that are quite pertinent to these statements: "The oft-cited 'complexity' of the... conflict is in reality a re-articulation of decades of pro-Israel lobby assertions that the conflict is a 'unique' situation that requires a 'special' international approach." He adds: "In reality, the conflict follows a standard historical pattern of military occupation, the colonial appropriation of indigenous land and natural resources, and repression of dissent."
It is the belief in the region's distinctiveness that allows us to forget one important point, that has nothing to do with good or evil: only one side to this "conflict" has a functional state and a powerful army, equipped with weapons it can and does use against a captive and defenceless population. This essential inequality, which screams its name in every aspect of every Palestinian's life under occupation, is most obvious in the armed attacks on civilians and the physical repression of resistance, but it also lurks in the very words we use, and the fact that somehow, in reporting on the "conflict," the fact that it is actually an occupation or a siege is most often obscured.
In the media spin given to Israeli brutality, however, it is the singularity of the region that justifies the means employed; this time around, it is not the exclusivity of the victims (who, after all, do not exist in this case) that accounts for both the special quality of their suffering and their intrinsic right to restitution.
To create a space in which a Palestinian narrative of resistance can exist, it is therefore not sufficient for hundreds or thousands more Palestinian teenagers to die on camera. These images must also make sense. In other words, it is necessary to overcome several apparently insuperable obstacles: the simple suppression of information; a long habit of dehumanisation; the use of implicit moral comparisons in stripping facts and figures related to the Palestinians of any real significance; finally, the factor that gives all these force: the virtually unanimous consensus that, in the Middle East, different rules apply.
How can this be done? Examples like Vietnam, South Africa, and the civil and women's rights movements in the US should offer a measure of inspiration, no matter how much conditions have changed since those battles were waged (whether or not they were won remains debatable). In all these cases, the struggle against oppression played a crucial role in liberation -- both by imposing a new reality and by creating a critical mass of opposition among those who would otherwise have remained bystanders. In all these cases, the invisible succeeded first in imposing sight on those whom the dominant view of the world had rendered sightless. Perhaps, though, this can only take place when the balance has already shifted, and the losers have begun to win -- or at least to enforce acceptance of their right to a fighting chance.
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For further reading:
The Electronic Intifada - Features - Media on Media - Journalists' Commentaries
Bullied into silence on Israel
Conrad Black's sinister agenda
Robert Fisk: I am being vilified for telling the truth about Palestinians
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