Prism

The media has—regarding the Israeli–Palestinian conflict—been distorting reality for a long time.

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to live in a world where the media were institutionally free. And where there wasn’t constant and tragic societal damage occurring as a result of the corporate media’s distortions. The consequences of the corporate media’s institutional structure are most horrifying when it comes to the climate crisis—in that case, we might literally lose everything because of the media’s bias. But US foreign policy is another domain where the corporate media has done huge damage.

Massive and Systematic

Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky write in the 2002 version of their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: this “book centers in what we call a ‘propaganda model,’ an analytical framework that attempts to explain the performance of the U.S. media in terms of the basic institutional structures and relationships within which they operate”; it’s “our view that, among their other functions, the media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them”; structural “factors are those such as ownership and control, dependence on other major funding sources (notably, advertisers), and mutual interests and relationships between the media and those who make the news and have the power to define it and explain what it means”; the “raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print”; regarding these filters, they “fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amount to propaganda campaigns”; “a propaganda approach to media coverage suggests a systematic and highly political dichotomization in news coverage based on serviceability to important domestic power interests”; this “should be observable in dichotomized choices of story and in the volume and quality of coverage”; “we will see that such dichotomization in the mass media is massive and systematic”; and “not only are choices for publicity and suppression comprehensible in terms of system advantage, but the modes of handling favored and inconvenient materials (placement, tone, context, fullness of treatment) differ in ways that serve political ends”.

A “propaganda system will consistently portray people abused in enemy states as worthy victims, whereas those treated with equal or greater severity by its own government or clients will be unworthy”; the “evidence of worth may be read from the extent and character of attention and indignation”; “the U.S. mass media’s practical definitions of worth are political in the extreme and fit well the expectations of a propaganda model”; while “this differential treatment occurs on a large scale, the media, intellectuals, and public are able to remain unconscious of the fact and maintain a high moral and self-righteous tone”; and this “is evidence of an extremely effective propaganda system”.

The Media and the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict

I think that the media distortion is extraordinary and disturbing when it comes to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict—an institutionally free media would cover the conflict very differently. Regarding the conflict, there are facts that people who restrict themselves to corporate media simply don’t know. And regarding the conflict, there are attitudes that wouldn’t be so prominent if the media weren’t distorting things systematically.

Chomsky says in a 12 May 2021 Truthout interview: there was a “decision 50 years ago, by both major political groupings” in Israel, “to choose expansion over security and diplomatic settlement—anticipating (and receiving) crucial U.S. material and diplomatic support all the way”; the Israeli victory in the 1967 Arab–Israeli War “was a great gift to the U.S. government”; a “proxy war had been underway between radical Islam (based in Saudi Arabia) and secular nationalism (Nasser’s Egypt)”; like “Britain before it, the U.S. tended to prefer radical Islam, which it considered less threatening to U.S. imperial domination”; “Israel smashed Arab secular nationalism”; US–Israeli relations “had been generally warm but ambiguous” before 1967; after “the war they reached unprecedented heights of support for a client state”; “Israel’s military prowess had already impressed the U.S. military command in 1948, and the ’67 victory made it very clear that a militarized Israeli state could be a solid base for U.S. power in the region—also providing important secondary services in support of U.S. imperial goals beyond”; “U.S. regional dominance came to rest on three pillars”—“Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran (then under the Shah)”; technically, “they were all at war, but in reality the alliance was very close, particularly between Israel and the murderous Iranian tyranny”; and within “that international framework, Israel was free to pursue the policies that persist today, always with massive U.S. support despite occasional clucks of discontent”.

The “Israeli government’s immediate policy goal is to construct a ‘Greater Israel,’ including” (A) “a vastly expanded ‘Jerusalem’ encompassing surrounding Arab villages”, (B) the Jordan Valley, which is “a large part of the West Bank with much of its arable land”, and (C) “major towns deep inside the West Bank, along with Jews-only infrastructure projects integrating them into Israel”; the “project bypasses Palestinian population concentrations, like Nablus, so as to fend off what Israeli leaders describe as the dread ‘demographic problem’”; “Palestinians within ‘Greater Israel’ are confined to 165 enclaves, separated from their lands and olive groves by a hostile military, subjected to constant attack by violent Jewish gangs (‘hilltop youths’) protected by the Israeli army”; meanwhile “Israel settled and annexed the Golan Heights in violation of UN Security Council orders (as it did in Jerusalem)”; the “Gaza horror story is too complex to recount here”; it “is one of the worst of contemporary crimes, shrouded in a dense network of deceit and apologetics for atrocities”; “Trump went beyond his predecessors in providing free rein for Israeli crimes”; so “far, Biden has taken over these programs”; Biden “has rescinded the gratuitous brutality of Trumpism, such as withdrawing the fragile lifeline for Gaza because, as Trump explained, Palestinians had not been grateful enough for his demolition of their just aspirations”; and otherwise the Trump–Kushner “criminal edifice remains intact, though some specialists on the region think it might totter with repeated Israeli attacks on Palestinian worshippers in the al-Aqsa mosque and other exercises of Israel’s effective monopoly of violence”.

I would imagine—regarding the Israeli–Palestinian conflict—that the media has failed to spotlight the human-rights violations that people need to know about. An institutionally free media would—in covering this conflict—be spotlighting these human-rights violations all the time in order to provide people with crucial context. People can read about these human-rights violations in the 12 January 2021 B’Tselem paper “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid”. And also in the 27 April 2021 Human Rights Watch report “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution”.

I would also imagine that the media doesn’t spotlight the point that US policy toward Israel conflicts with the Leahy Law—this is a really important point. Chomsky says in a 2014 interview: “one important action that the United States could take is to live up to its own laws”; one “of them is what’s called the Leahy Law”; “Patrick Leahy, Senator Leahy, introduced legislation called the Leahy Law, which bars sending weapons to any military units which are involved in consistent human rights violations”; there “isn’t the slightest doubt that the Israeli army is involved in massive human rights violations, which means that all dispatch of U.S. arms to Israel is in violation of U.S. law”; “I think that’s significant”; and the “U.S. should be called upon by its own citizens”—and by others—“to adhere to U.S. law, which also happens to conform to international law in this case”.

I think that it’s disturbing when the media fails to provide the context that would allow people to understand (A) the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in general and (B) the horrific and terroristic violence that’s directed against Israeli civilians. Regarding Israeli policy, Israel is involved in a brutal and vicious military occupation—to what extent does the media help people to understand this context? And regarding Israeli policy, Israel is involved in human-rights violations—to what extent does the media help people to understand this context? A 13 October 2023 FAIR piece says: the “New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post combined ran seven editorials on Israel/Palestine between October 7–9”; these “three days of coverage begin the day that Hamas fighters broke out of the besieged Gaza Strip to kill and take captive hundreds of Israeli soldiers and civilians, after which Israel launched yet another massive bombing campaign against the Strip, killing hundreds of Palestinian militants and civilians”; at “no point do these analyses provide readers with the information necessary to comprehend what is happening and why, and they consistently mislead readers about key facts”; the US’s top editorial boards “declined to offer any of the broader historical context that’s urgently necessary to understand the causes—and therefore paths to resolution—of the current violence in Israel/Palestine”; observers “who are serious about wanting an end to violence against civilians would consider its causes”; and the “Times, Journal and Post have shown that they are not up to the task”.

I think that it’s sad, disturbing, and frightening what the media has done—over such a long period of time—regarding the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Chomsky says in his 1989 book Necessary Illusions: the “task of ‘historical engineering’ has been accomplished with singular efficiency in the case of the Arab–Israeli conflict, arguably the most hazardous issue in world affairs, with a constant threat of devastating regional war and superpower conflict”; the “task has been to present the United States and Israel as ‘yearning for peace’ and pursuing a ‘peace process,’ while in reality they have led the rejectionist camp and have been blocking peace initiatives that have broad international and regional support”; “U.S. efforts to derail a political settlement can be traced to 1971, when the administration opted for Kissinger’s policy of ‘stalemate’ and backed Israel’s rejection of a full-scale peace proposal by President Sadat of Egypt that was framed in terms of the international consensus and official U.S. policy”; from “the late 1960s there has been a substantial consensus in favor of a political settlement on the internationally recognized (pre-June 1967) borders, with perhaps minor modifications”; in “the early stages, the terms of this broad consensus were restricted to the rights of existing states, and were, in fact, very much along the general lines of official U.S. policy”; by “the mid-1970s the terms of the consensus shifted to include the concept of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with recognized borders, security guarantees, and other arrangements to safeguard the rights of all states in the region”; at this point, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) “and most Arab states approached or joined the international consensus”; prior “to this, the consensus was strictly rejectionist, denying the right of self-determination to one of the two contending parties, the indigenous population of the former Palestine”; the “United States has been opposed to all of the arrangements of the international consensus, both the earlier plan that conformed to official U.S. policy and offered nothing to the Palestinians, and the later nonrejectionist alternative”; the “media have had the task of presenting extreme rejectionism as accommodation and the soul of moderation”; the media have also had the task of “suppressing the efforts of the Arab states and the PLO to advance a nonrejectionist settlement”; the media’s “services to Israel have gone well beyond praising the ‘benign’ occupation while Palestinians were being subjected to torture, daily humiliation, and collective punishment”; and the media’s “self-censorship over many years has enabled the United States and Israel to block what has long been a possible political settlement of one of the world’s most explosive and threatening issues”.

I want to spotlight the damage that the media has done and the pain that the media has caused. I think that the media’s behavior has—regarding the Israeli–Palestinian conflict—been absolutely sickening given that the media’s “self-censorship over many years has enabled the United States and Israel to block what has long been a possible political settlement of one of the world’s most explosive and threatening issues”. And given that the media has prevented people from understanding the occupation’s horrifying nature.

Norman Finkelstein says in a 2011 book: the “international community, apart from Israel and the United States, has consistently supported a settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict that calls for two states based on a full Israeli withdrawal to its June 1967 borders, and a ‘just resolution’ of the refugee question based on the right of return and compensation”; the “United Nations General Assembly annually votes on a resolution titled ‘Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine’”; regarding the extent to which countries voted in favor of the resolution from 1997 to 2009, the annual vote tallies were 155, 154, 149, 149, 131, 160, 160, 161, 156, 157, 161, 164, 164; regarding the extent to which countries voted against the resolution from 1997 to 2009, the annual vote tallies were 2, 2, 3, 2, 6, 4, 6, 7, 6, 7, 7, 7, 7; Israel and the United States cast—in 1997, 1998, and 2000—the only two negative votes; in 1999, the only three negative votes came from Israel, the United States, and the Marshall Islands; regarding 2006 and 2007 and 2008 and 2009, there were four years in a row where the same seven countries cast the only seven negative votes; these seven countries were Israel, the United States, Australia, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, and Palau; in “2002 Israel started building a physical barrier that encroached deeply into the West Bank and took a sinuous path incorporating the large settlement blocks”; the “U.N. General Assembly requested that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) clarify the ‘legal consequences arising from the construction of the wall being built by Israel’”; and in “2004 the ICJ rendered its landmark advisory opinion, which, in the course of ruling the wall illegal, also reiterated the juridical framework for resolving the conflict”.

The “December 2008 invasion of Gaza would prove to be another public-relations fiasco for Israel, on the order of its disastrous Lebanon invasions of 1982 and 2006”; the “civilian casualties and destruction of civilian infrastructure were so massive and evident that criticism of the assault crept even into the mainstream media”; recognizing “that images of dead civilians and massive destruction in Gaza had flooded the world media during the invasion, Israel and its defenders set out to win the spin wars”; “apart from adverse media coverage Israel had to cope with a mountain of human rights reports condemning its crimes in Gaza”; “the scope of the massacre was so appalling that no amount of propaganda could disguise it”; public “outrage at the Gaza invasion did not come out of the blue but rather marked the nadir of a curve plotting a steady decline in support for Israel”; as “polling data of Americans and Europeans, both Gentiles and Jews, suggest, the public has become increasingly critical of Israeli policy over the past decade”; the “horrific images of death and destruction broadcast around the world during and after the invasion accelerated this development”; “the carnage set off an unprecedented wave of popular outrage throughout the world”; whether “it was because the assault came on the heels of the devastation Israel wrought in Lebanon, or because of Israel’s relentless persecution of the people of Gaza, or because of the sheer cowardice of the assault, the Gaza invasion appeared to mark a turning point in public opinion reminiscent of the international reaction to the 1960 Sharpeville massacre in apartheid South Africa”; the “era of the ‘beautiful’ Israel has passed, it seems irrevocably, and the disfigured Israel that in recent years has replaced it in the public consciousness is a growing embarrassment”; it “is not so much that Israel’s behavior is worse than it was before, but rather that the record of that behavior has, finally, caught up with it”; the “truth can no longer be denied or dismissed”; the “documentation of the Arab-Israeli conflict set out by respected historians fundamentally conflicts with the version” that’s been popularized; the “evidence of Israeli human rights violations compiled by respected mainstream organizations cannot be reconciled with its vaunted commitment to ‘purity of arms’”; and the “deliberations of respected judicial and political bodies cast severe doubt on Israel’s avowed commitment to a peaceful resolution of the conflict”.

The “Gaza invasion accelerated the dissolution of blanket Jewish support for Israel”; because “this reflexive Jewish support has historically blocked the path to peace, the prospects for a just and lasting resolution of the conflict are better now than ever before”; the “foundations for such a settlement are the universal, consensual, legal principles ratified in annual U.N. General Assembly resolutions, the 2004 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice, and the standards of respected human rights organizations”; were “Israel to abide by these principles a resolution of the conflict would be immediately within reach”; “what Israel has done to the Palestinians is wrong and indefensible”; and “Israel’s refusal, backed by the U.S., to respect international law and the considered opinion of humankind is the sole obstacle to putting an end, finally, to their suffering”.

Chomsky says in the 2014 interview: “the media are somewhat shifting from uniform support for virtually everything that Israel does”; opinion “in the United States is shifting, not as fast as in most of the world, not as fast as in Europe”; opinion “is changing, mostly among younger people, and changing substantially”; until “pretty recently, when I gave talks on these topics, as I’ve been doing for 40 years, I literally had to have police protection, even at my own university, MIT”; police “would insist on walking me back to my car because of threats they had picked up”; meetings “were broken up, and so on”; “a couple of days ago I had a talk on these topics at MIT”; the meeting was not broken up; there wasn’t any police protection; maybe “500 or 600 students were there, all enthusiastic, engaged, committed, concerned, wanting to do something about it”; that’s “happening all over the country”; all “over the country, Palestinian solidarity is one of the biggest issues on campus—enormous change in the last few years”; that’s “the way things tend to change”; it “often starts with younger people”; and gradually “it gets to the rest of the population”.

And he says in a 15 July 2022 Truthout interview: it “may seem strange to say this, in the light of the colossal and unprecedented U.S. support for Israel since its demonstration of its military strength in 1967, but Palestinian hopes may lie in the United States”; there “are cracks in the formerly solid support for Israeli actions”; liberal “opinion has shifted toward support for Palestinian rights, even among the Jewish community”; the “increasingly brutal torture of the 2 million inhabitants of Gaza’s open-air prison has had particularly dramatic effects”; these “shifts have not yet influenced policy, but they are likely to become more pronounced as Israel continues its drift to the right and the almost daily crimes become harder to conceal or explain away”; if “Palestinians can overcome their sharp internal divisions and effective solidarity movements develop in the U.S., changes can come, both at the people-to-people level and in government policy”; and changing “U.S. government policy, if significant, cannot fail to influence the array of policy options for Israel”.