Misery shared is not better

Both the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon have been having their problems of late.

Sharon, having faced down a rebellion in his own party, seems to be winning the public opinion war about his "unilateral disengagement" from Gaza. The center-left parties seem to have thrown in with him despite the ethical shortcomings of the plan, which, as I've argued before, essentially dumps a million-plus people living with a shattered economy into what amounts to a huge gulag. The hope appears to be that against all odds, this actually is a step toward a settlement.

There is still opposition, of course. Somewhere in the vicinity of 150,000 protestors

formed a human chain Sunday evening that stretched 90 kilometers [about 56 miles] from the Gaza Strip settlement of Nisanit to the Western Wall in Jerusalem to protest the government's disengagement plan,

which must have been a very impressive, very moving demonstration. But there is also pressure from the other direction. In May, an even larger rally took place in Tel Aviv under the slogan "Leave Gaza, Start Talking." For the moment, Sharon, who seems determined to leave Gaza and equally determined to not start talking, is getting at least the beginning of his withdrawal plan through.

Yassir Arafat's problems were more serious, with his own prime minister, Ahmed Qureia, repeatedly offering his resignation amid charges against Arafat of corruption and broken promises of reform, even as militant groups threaten to turn Gaza into a civil war zone. For the moment, he seems to have dodged one of those bullets.

With a kiss on the cheek and smiles all around, [the Toronto Star reported on Wednesday,] Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat yesterday ended his latest political crisis, winning back the fealty of Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia with a renewed promise of long-awaited reforms. ...

The agreement calls for Qureia to assume command of the Palestinian Authority's internal security apparatus, while Arafat will retain control of the intelligence services and armed forces, Palestinian sources said.

The power-sharing formula also calls for Arafat to act on allegations of internal corruption, with a promise that the Palestinian attorney-general will launch investigations. ...

But coming in the wake of multiple earlier promises for reform, it was unclear if the latest plan will amount to anything more than symbolic damage control against 10 days of fractious infighting. ...

Jawad Abu Saleh, a parliamentary dissident and longstanding critic of Arafat, condemned the negotiations as a sideshow wholly divorced from the real needs of Palestinians.

"Unfortunately Arafat will not drink from the glass of change. He will say what he must when he feels the pressure, but as soon as the pressure is off he will return to dictatorship," he said.

Personally, I rather doubt that. One reason is that I think "dictatorship" is hyperbole. Another is that charges of corruption may upon investigation prove to be true but not so damning as some expect (and, it must be said, hope): In the course of describing the horrendous state of the Palestinian economy at a conference earlier this month, Markus Kostner, country coordinator for the West Bank and Gaza department at the World Bank,

credited the PA [Palestinian Authority] with having "a clearer bill of health vis-a-vis financial management" than most countries in the region,

said the Daily Star (Lebanon). But the real point is that Arafat has kept himself in office by an uncanny sense of knowing just how far he can push before he has to back off. This time he backed off faster and further than I think he would have in the past. He knows his position is actually rather tenuous, the more so because an earlier policy shift toward offering concessions to Israel in hopes of a settlement have gained the Palestinians precisely nothing. And they are angry and hurting.

A Western diplomatic source in Ramallah described a mood of utter despair among everyday Palestinians.

"This Palestinian leadership generally has no strategy to deal with the Israelis. It is a huge weakness, and it leaves the Palestinians like abused children. They just keep on taking it, even after they've been beaten to pieces," the diplomat said.

"The only real change we can see is that a red line has been crossed in the past 10 days, with gunmen in Gaza attacking other Palestinian factions," he said.

"Internal violence really has not been a part of Palestinian society until now."

Arafat's remaining influence lies in his position as a symbol, not in the personal power he can bring to bear. Yes, he has a militia but he is outgunned by Israel and very likely by splinter groups among his own people. And besides, just pointing to the size of his militia just makes him one militant leader among many, which undermines his political authority rather than enhances it. So while I'm sure there will be reluctance and resistance, I'm also pretty confident that this time there will some real change if only because Arafat knows he can't afford not to.

Meanwhile, the eruption of "internal violence" on Gaza also points up something else, albeit indirectly: distorted western media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In this case, the generally-accepted view put forth by the Israeli government that the violence is all the fault of the Palestinians in general and Arafat in particular, the implication - and sometimes the outright assertion - being that if he just raised his hand and said "stop," all attacks on Israelis would cease. The fact that he has not stopped all attacks, goes the logic, thus proves that they are his responsibility. Logically, the "internal violence" should put a end to that argument. Even if it were to be claimed that the violence is that of Arafat's forces struggling to quell an uprising, it still shows that Arafat can't simply order an end to attacks.

The notion that he can is a perhaps more sophisticated example of the basically unbalanced coverage of the conflict, which repeated media studies have demonstrated.

For example, a number of examinations by Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) have noted biases in the way the issue is framed. For example, a press release from last August 22 said that

[w]hen the two Palestinian suicide bombers each killed an Israeli civilian along with themselves on August 12, U.S. news outlets immediately depicted the attacks as an apparent resurgence in Mideast violence. "Summer truce shattered in Israel," announced CBS (8/12/03), while NBC (8/12/03) reported that "the attacks broke more than a month of relative silence." The Los Angeles Times (8/13/03) wrote that the bombings "broke a six-week stretch during which the people of this war-weary land had enjoyed relative quiet."

During this six-week period of "relative quiet," however, some 17 Palestinians were killed and at least 59 injured by Israeli occupation soldiers and settlers, according to the Palestine Red Crescent Society. The dead included Mahmoud Kabaha, a four-year-old boy, who was sitting in the back seat of a jeep with his family at a checkpoint when an Israeli soldier shot him dead - in a spray of bullets that the army simply called an "accidental burst of gunfire" (Associated Press, 7/25/03). Virtually none of the major U.S. news reports on the August 12 bombings alluded to the Palestinian death toll in this period....

[T]he Washington Post and New York Times both put the bombings on their August 13 front pages, each declaring the violence a break from weeks of "relative calm," and each including a front-page photo of the victims' relatives in mourning. USA Today also put grieving relatives on the front page, along with the headline, "Two Suicide Attacks End a Six-Week Lull in Conflict." ...

On CNN, the August 12 bombings were a major story, with eight separate segments mentioning the attacks in a three-hour period. Anchor Wolf Blitzer declared a "grim return to the battle days in Israel and the Palestinian territories."

On the other hand, FAIR noted, when, just four days earlier, five people, four of them Palestinian, were killed in an Israeli raid, it was described by CNN anchor Carol Costello as a "smudge, a bump if you will, on that road map to peace."

That kind of unbalanced description has genuine consequences in public understanding, not only in the US but in the UK as well.

Television news is the main source of information on the Israel-Palestine conflict for about 80% of the population. Yet the quality of what they see and hear is so confused and partial that it is impossible to have a sensible public debate about the reasons for the conflict or how it might be resolved.

So said Greg Philo, one of the authors of a large-scale research study by the Glasgow University Media Group, writing in the Guardian (UK) on July 14. The researchers interviewed 800 people and analyzed coverage of the conflict on around 200 news programs over about 20 months (September 2000 - April 2002). The results show that "there is almost nothing on the news about the history or origins of the conflict and viewers are extraordinarily confused."

In fact, Tom Fenton, senior European correspondent for CBS News, writing about the study on July 19, says that the people, who included US college students studying journalism and media, were asked

"Who is occupying the occupied territories, and what nationality are the settlers?" Fairly simple questions, but only 29 percent knew the correct answers.

Philo went on to say:

[N]ews reports tend to focus on day to day events and, in reporting these, there is a strong emphasis on Israeli perspectives. The research found that Israelis were interviewed or reported more than twice as much as Palestinians. There were also a large number of statements from US politicians who tend to support Israel. They were interviewed twice as much as politicians from Britain.

The language of the "war on terror" is frequently featured and journalists sometimes endorse it in their own speech, as in this example: "That attack [by a Palestinian] only reinforced Israeli determination to drive further into the towns and camps where Palestinians live - ripping up roads around Bethlehem as part of the ongoing fight against terror". (ITV, early evening news in March 2002). This report also illustrates a familiar theme in news coverage whereby the Palestinians are seen to initiate trouble and the Israelis are then presented as "responding".

There are very distinct and different perspectives on this conflict which should be represented on the news. The Israeli authorities and much of the Israeli population see the issue in terms of their security and the survival of the state in the face of threats from terrorists and hostile neighbours. They present their own actions as a retaliation to attacks. The Palestinians see themselves as resisting a brutal military occupation by people who have taken their land, water and homes and who are denying them the possibility of their own state.

The analysis of news content suggests that the first of these perspectives tends to dominate news reporting. Between October and December 2001, for example, on BBC1 and ITV news, Israelis were said to be responding to what had been done to them about six times as often as the Palestinians. ...

There were also differences in the language used for the casualties of both sides. Words such as "mass murder", "atrocity", and "brutal murder", were used to describe the deaths of Israelis, but not Palestinians. The emphasis on the deaths of Israelis was very marked in the coverage. In March 2002, when the BBC noted that the Palestinians had suffered the highest number of casualties in any single week since the beginning of the intifada, there was actually more coverage on the news of Israeli deaths. This again apparently had a strong influence on the understanding of viewers and only a minority questioned knew that Palestinians had substantially higher casualties.

Fenton lists a few specifics. The researchers

point to the way Israeli and Palestinian combatants are labelled in television reports. Palestinians are "activists," "militants," "extremists," "assailants," "gunmen," "bombers," "terrorists," "killers," "assassins," "fundamentalist groups," "attackers," "self-styled Palestinian martyrs" and "fanatics."

Israelis are "soldiers" or "troops," and even when an Israeli group tried to bomb a Palestinian school, they were not "terrorists" but "vigilantes."

And it's not as though there are no Israelis deserving of harsher descriptions. This from the Israeli daily Maariv for July 25:

"Blowing up the Dome of the Rock is a worthy act", Yehuda Etzion, one of the leaders of the Movement of the Temple Mount Loyalists and a former convicted member of the "Jewish underground", has told Army Radio this (Sunday) morning.

(The paper then described Etzion as an "activist." What do you think would have been the term used if a Palestinian had called destroying, say, the Wailing Wall "a worthy act?")

His words "stirred uproar among members of the Knesset," with a member of the dovish Yahad party calling for all Jews to be barred from the Temple Mount to prevent violence and a Likud member urging that "if there are such people who try to undermine the government and wish to carry out such actions, I suggest they be placed under administrative detention."

The article quotes a police official as saying

there have been "quite a few statements made by Jewish extremists as of late regarding a possibility of an attack on the Temple Mount in an attempt to derail the disengagement".

The idea being, as I expect is clear, that such an attack would cause such a violent reaction among Palestinians - not to mention Muslims worldwide - as to break down all possibilities of a negotiated peace, an end the fanatics desire because such a peace would of necessity involve ceding land that they claim rightly belongs to Israel. Some of them are content with demanding all of Judea and Samaria, which they equate with the West Bank - while there are those who insist that God has given to them the right to possess all of what constituted the United Monarchy of David and Solomon, an area that traditionally would include not only all of present-day Israel and the West Bank, but part of the Sinai and serious hunks of present-day Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. (The slogan of the Likud coalition was at least at one time "Both Sides of the Jordan.") I say "traditionally" because the extent of that kingdom has been challenged by modern archaeology, not that it would matter to the nutcases claiming such a right.

The threats of such as Etzion are taken seriously by Israeli authorities. Haaretz said last Sunday that

[t]he Shin Bet security service and the police are preparing for a number of possible terror attack scenarios at the sacred Old City site, Israeli security sources said last night.

Speaking on the Channel Two "Meet the Press" program yesterday, Public Security Minister Tzachi Hanegbi confirmed that the security establishment had identified rising intent among right-wing extremists to carry out a Temple Mount attack.

"There is no information about specific individuals.... But there are troubling indications of purposeful thinking, and not detached philosophy."

Security sources last night said possible actions included an attempt to crash a drone packed with explosives on the Temple Mount, or a manned suicide attack with a light aircraft during mass Muslim worship on the Mount. Other possibilities include an attempt by right-wing extremists to assassinate a prominent Temple Mount Muslim leader, perhaps from the Waqf Islamic trust.

Equally if not more troubling to the security services the belief that, as the Toronto Star reported last week,

Jewish assassins are out there on the religious fringe, preparing a bullet for Ariel Sharon.

It was his second such warning in as many weeks, but this time Shin Bet Director Avi Dichter got specific, telling the government's foreign affairs and defence committee the radical threat includes an almost impenetrable core of as many as 200 militant settlers who will stop at nothing to scuttle Sharon's planned withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

Even if it means killing the prime minister.

"Incitement is bubbling. It is already here," Dichter told the committee, citing the extremist pockets of so-called "hilltop youth" who have aggressively resisted Israeli army efforts to dismantle illegal settlement outposts in the West Bank during periodic clashes over the past two years. ...

That a serious threat exists is not in question, according to interviews this week with a wide range of Israelis from across the political spectrum. The acrimonious climate of incitement that preceded the [Yitzhak] Rabin assassination [in 1995] is eerily familiar today in the increasingly fiery pronouncements for and against Sharon's disengagement plan.

Israeli analyst and writer Yossi Klein Halevi, an associate fellow at the Shalem Centre, a Jerusalem think tank, argues that

the single most important difference between the eras of Rabin and Sharon is that a new Israeli consensus is emerging against the settlement movement as a whole.

Halevi's position is borne out by most public opinion polls, including one released yesterday in the Hebrew daily Maariv indicating 61 per cent of Israelis describing themselves as centre-right Likud supporters now agree with Sharon's disengagement plan. Among the general public, 65 per cent favour the plan, versus 29 per cent opposing it.

"There's an old rabbinical expression, 'Don't judge your friend at the moment of his hardship.' And I think that's what most Israelis feel about the settlers right now," said Halevi.

"They are facing the breakdown of everything they based their lives on. Their vision is being repudiated by the majority of Israelis because the price of that dream is too high. In fact, it is unpayable. There is a deep and necessary cruelty in that. We are going to uproot Jews because the alternatives are even worse."

And that makes for a very dangerous and volatile situation under exactly the kinds of emotional conditions that can and do drive people to irrational violence.

These are dangerous times. I hope in the near future I can flesh out some of my own thoughts on the course to take - recognizing up front that no course is without danger, without risk, and no just settlement will be achieved without pain. That is simply the reality in which we find ourselves. But recognizing also that courage can limit the pain and that the pain of continuing injustice will be longer, harsher, and deadlier.