Gaza: the casualties of propaganda

If you were to rely on the Western media you would think that Israel's recent military attacks on the Gaza strip had been "precision strikes" on "militants". The importance of the corrective that can be offered by taking a glance at the non-western media is striking. In this powerful and vitally important report, Al Jazeera makes the simple point, ignored in the west, that it is impossible to launch "precision strikes" on one of the most densely populated areas on earth. Civilians - women and children - will inevitably be maimed or killed, and those ordering the strikes do so in the full knowledge that this will happen.

You might also think, if you were relying on the Western media, that Israel was simply "responding" to Palestinian terrorism, the standard portrayal of the conflict. Tim Llewellyn, BBC Middle East correspondent for 10 years, is clear in his view of the coverage:

"In my judgment as a journalist and Middle East specialist, the broadcasters' language favours the occupying soldiers over the occupied Arabs, depicting the latter, essentially, as alien tribes threatening the survival of Israel, rather than vice versa. The struggle between Israel and the Palestinians is shown, most especially on mainstream bulletins, as a battle between two 'forces', possessed equally of right and wrong and responsibility. It is the tyranny of spurious equivalence.

That 37 years of military occupation, the violation of the Palestinians' human, political and civil rights and the continuing theft of their land might have triggered this crisis is a concept either lost or underplayed. Nor are we told much about how Israel was created, the epochal dilemma of the refugees, the roots of the disaster."

Llewellyn cites "hard evidence to support these views, gathered by Greg Philo and his Glasgow University Media Group, who have monitored and analysed four separate periods of BBC and ITN coverage between late 2000 and the spring of 2002. [They make] the scientifically based case that the main news and current affairs programmes - with the rare exception, usually on Channel 4 - are failing to tell us the real story and the reasons behind it. They use a distorted lens.

The result is that the Israelis have identity, existence, a story the viewer understands. The Palestinians are anonymous, alien, their personalities and their views buried under their burden of plight and the vernacular of 'terror'."

I'm going to quote this at length because its crucial to our understanding of what's happening now in Gaza.

"Cause and effect, the Philo team finds, are misreported. Why does the 'cycle of violence' start, for example? In October 2002, the BBC repeatedly referred to the killing of the Israeli tourist minister as the reason for Israeli army reprisals against Palestinian towns and villages. It did not mention the fact that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine had killed the minister in reprisal for the Israeli assassination of its leader.

As Philo shows, the cycle is always shown as Palestinian attack and Israeli reprisal. Broadcasters consistently fail to suggest that it might be the military occupation that engenders armed resistance, or that Israeli actions may be such as to provoke Palestinian violence. The study finds that the daily despairing and degrading consequences of living under military occupation are rarely reported.

And while there is constant reference to Israeli security and Israel's right to exist, there is little mention of Palestinians' security or their right to exist.

A former news agency bureau chief, based in Jerusalem, sums it up: '[British TV] cover the day-to-day action but not the human inequities, the essential imbalances of the occupation, the humiliations of the Palestinians.' He also quotes a BBC journalist, who tells him TV centre does not want 'explainers... it's all bang-bang stuff'"

The results are predictable:

"...of groups of British students interviewed in 2001 and 2002 only about 10 per cent knew it was Israel that occupied Palestine - most believed the Palestinians were the settlers and it was they who occupied Israel. In 2002, only 35 per cent of the British students questioned knew that the Palestinians had suffered far greater casualties than the Israelis.

This ignorance among people who rely on TV for their information about the world is not surprising: Bad News reveals that between 28 September and 16 October 2000 BBC1 and ITN devoted 3,500 lines of text to the crisis in Israel/Palestine - 17 of which were devoted to the history of the conflict."

We collectively ‘forget’, therefore, that it is Israel that is the aggressor, and that the root of the conflict is Israeli theft of Palestinian land, Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and Israel's serial and extensive abuse of the Palestinian civilian population as a whole. Instead the story is reversed. Israel's ambassador to Britain, Ron Prosor, is able to say with a straight face that Israel is a "democracy under attack", even as his government starves the people of Gaza (women, children, everyone) as punishment for voting the wrong way in an election.

As long as this distorted picture holds sway, and the British media effectively aids the Israeli propaganda effort, Britain can continue to provide military, diplomatic and political support for Israel's brutal crushing of innocent people - support that I do not believe could be provided if people in this country understood the reality of the situation. The costs of the misinformation is paid, not by us, but by the people of Gaza. In September 2006, just 9 months into the blockade, the Independent reported that Palestinian mothers had been reduced to scouring rubbish dumps to find enough food to feed their children just once a day. Can we begin to imagine what has been endured by those families - families like ours - in the 16 months that have passed since then? The extent to which they continue to suffer and die under Israel's boot will largely be determined by the extent to which the media continues effectively aid the Israeli propaganda effort, and misinform western publics about the reality of what we are responsible for.