Pens and Swords: new book on Israeli-US propaganda

Posted by shergald | Nov 11, 2007 | 10 |

When Alison Weir established the anti-propaganda site, If Americans Knew, several years ago, its purpose was to inform and educate the American public on issues pertaining to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict of major significance that are unreported, underreported, or misreported in the American media.

Indeed, Weir’s studies of mainstream American media show that it harbors an extreme bias toward Israel and typically underreports and distorts incidents in which Palestinians are killed or wounded by Israel armed forces in the Occupied Palestinian territories. Indeed, from these reports, one gets the impression that the media consider the military occupation and colonization of Palestinian land in the West Bank and Gaza a normal, justified situation, of late being involved in routing out the “terrorist infrastructure,” as Ariel Sharon liked to put it. Resistance to occupation is now viewed as the product of evil, Palestinian terrorists.

Although the documentary, Peace, Propaganda, & The Promised Land (Part I here and Part II here), which was seen by over a million viewers on Google Video (now in the two parts cited above on YouTube) did an excellent job unveiling Israeli propaganda for what it is, Americans are still besieged by falsehoods as to the nature of the conflict.
Notable quotes from this documentary attest what most average Americans believe:

Rabbi Michael Lerner, Founder & Executive Director, Tikkun Magazine: “When you have a population that is being occupied, when their fundamental human rights are systematically being denied, when they are not allowed to move from city to city and place to place, without a huge amount of harassment, when they are being subject to torture, when people are essentially in desperate conditions, it is not a surprise that they are going to be very, very angry. There is no understand by the public media, or the American media, what creates this circumstance. Israel occupies, people strike at Israel against that occupation. They use means I think are wrong means, namely, the terror, and then Israel imposes punishment on the entire people, which creates a climate which makes it easier to recruit.”

Major Stav Adivi, reserves, Israeli Defense Forces, Israel: “we have to understand that these (suicide bombings) are the effects of the occupation.”

Robert Jensen, Professor of Journalism, University of Texas-Austin: “In contrast to the international press, in American media, there is a reversal of cause and effect in that the occupation is framed as a response to the suicide bombings. All of the Palestinian actions are attacks and Israel actions retaliation, is meaningful. Retaliation suggests a defensive stance against violence initiated by someone else. It places a responsibility for the violence on the party provoking the retaliation. In other words, Palestinian violence like suicide bombings is seen as cause and the origin of the conflict. Since the September 11 attack on the US, Israel’s PR strategy has been to frame all Palestinian actions, violent or not, as terrorism. To the extent that they can do that they have repackaged the illegal occupation as part of the war on terrorism.”

News headlines: “This is Israel’s war on terrorism. F16s hit a Palestinian in the Gaza Strip this morning….The case the Israelis are trying to make: this is no different than what the US is doing in Afganistan (air attacks in the West Bank)…Prime Minister Ariel Sharon declared on television tonight, that he was determined to root out what he called `the terrorist infrastructure.'”

So the myth of the Palestinian terrorist, who just happens to be fighting a long and incessant military occupation that the UN has called illegal, remains in the minds of Americans. But the myth is cracking as more and more of us learn the truth.

In February 2008, a new book on biased reporting in the American media about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is set to come out, documenting the continuation of these media biases, distortion, and propaganda favorable to Israel, that completely hides the true nature of Israel’s occupation and its colonial intentions, though now limited to the West Bank or what is known in Israel as Judea and Samaria.

Pens and Swords, which was written by Marda Dunsky of Depaul University, subtitled: How the American Mainstream Media Report the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, will soon be released.

Marda Dunsky is a former Arab affairs reporter for the Jerusalem Post and editor on the national/foreign desk of the Chicago Tribune. She has developed and taught a unique media literacy course on American mainstream reporting of the Arab and Muslim worlds at Northwestern University and DePaul University.

A Summary

Most Americans understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict via the news media, which tend to focus primarily on the story’s continual, inter-communal bloodshed and stop-and-start efforts at diplomacy. With such a limited range of media discourse, it is no wonder that many Americans believe that peace is unobtainable. Beginning with the failed Camp David summit of July 2000 and ending with the waning of the second Palestinian uprising in the summer of 2004, Marda Dunsky takes a close look at how more than two dozen major American print and broadcast outlets have reported the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She finds that they omit two key contextual elements: the significant impact that U.S. policy has had and continues to have on the trajectory of the conflict, and the way international law and consensus have addressed the key issues of Israeli settlement and annexation policies and Palestinian refugees. She explores how reporting of the conflict routinely takes on the contours of American policy and rarely challenges the premises of this “Washington consensus.” In addition, she examines the media’s responses to allegations of biased coverage and gauges the effect that mainstream news reporting on the conflict has on public opinion and U.S. foreign policy. She includes the perspectives of more than a dozen correspondents who have reported the story from the field for major American media outlets.

Preliminary Reviews

“Pens and Swords doesn’t just decry systematic distortion but explains why it happens again and again. Dunsky makes use of theory to illuminate rather than obscure, bringing academic rigor to a topic so politicized that many avoid it out of fear. Thanks to Dunsky for this brave and timely book.” –Robert Jensen, University of Texas at Austin

“This is an important book. There have been several treatments that have addressed the topic, but this work provides a systematic, fairly comprehensive, and up to date analysis of the U.S. media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is a vital contribution to the scholarship on this issue. The empirical evidence that the author has so diligently provided for her arguments constitutes the book’s greatest strength. ” –Karim H. Karim, director of Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication in Ottawa

“Dunsky has done us a great service by showing that there is a decidedly pro-Israel bias in the American media’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which makes it almost impossible to have intelligent debates about that dispute and its effects on U.S. Middle East policy. Anyone concerned about why the United States is in so much trouble in the Arab and Islamic world should read Pens and Swords.” –John J. Mearsheimer, R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science, the University of Chicago

“Written by a journalist and scholar who has reported from the region, this book is a perceptive, careful, and factual assessment of why the American mainstream media does such an exceedingly poor job of conveying the realities of the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, perpetuating stereotypes, and echoing the conceits of policymakers in Washington. ” –Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies, Middle East Institute, Columbia University

This book will be available soon through Columbia Press in paperback at a reasonable price.

About The Author

shergald

10 Comments

BooMan on November 11, 2007 at 11:35 pm

sounds like an interesting book, although all one has to do to understand the bias is to listen to or read international news from any other country…including Israel.
AliceDem on November 12, 2007 at 8:38 pm

So the myth of the Palestinian terrorist, who just happens to be fighting a long and incessant military occupation that the UN has called illegal

It is not a myth. Much, maybe most of the Palestinian struggle has consisted of terrorism. How is it working?

No good to say the occupation is illegal. Guess what, the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states, to say nothing of Eastern Europe, was illegal. You didn’t see Latvians blowing themselves up in Moscow. There are Palestinian terrorists. It stains the whole movement. It is shameful.

If Ghandi or Martin Luther King, Jr. was leading the Palestinian movement there would have been two state solution 50 years ago.
- shergald on November 13, 2007 at 3:57 pm
  You have been snookered by Israeli propaganda. I have posted this data showing that the Palestinian suicide bombings that occurred during the second Intifada, were retaliatory in the mode of an “eye for an eye” and did not fall into the formal definition of terrorism, as the 1972 Munich Olympic attack by Black September. Read these evidence:
  
  Alison Weir, in her documentary Off the Charts, noted the following:
  
  Before a single suicide bomber had entered Israel after the start of the Second Intifada, sometimes called, after Sharon’s provocative visit to the Temple Mount, the al Aqsa Intifada, during its first month, 27 Palestinian children had been killed by Israeli Defense Forces in the West Bank and Gaza, the youngest only four months of age, and the majority due to gunshots to the head. Numerous children were also wounded. In the first three months alone, 159 children lost an eye presumably to rubber bullets shot from IDF rifles. Clearly the IDF were intentionally targeting these children, aiming at their heads with either rubber bullets or real bullets in the case of the child kills. We are talking here about a trained, mechanized army versus civilians, children participating in the intifada, the nonviolent resistance instituted by child and teenage Palestinian boys and girls. Oh, yes. Let’s be fair. We did hear that an Israeli soldier lost his eye from a rock thrown by a Palestinian boy from a pretty IDF spokeswoman, but it was the only such incident reported in three years.
  
  In addition to these children, many more innocent adult civilians were killed, in the month before suicide bombings commenced. If terrorism is the intentional killing of civilians, then clearly, Israel’s armed forces were deep into terrorism, state sponsored terrorism, long before the Palestinians engaged in it to any degree. As a people fighting a military occupation, it would seem that the ultimate cause of all of these horrors on both sides rests with Israel and the purpose for which it continued its long occupation, the stealing of Palestinian lands.
  
  See Alison Weir’s short documentary, Off The Charts: Media Bias and Censorship in America for the names, ages, places, and dates of these child killings.
  
  http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5600677940569035557&q=Alternate+Focus
  
  To be accurate, there were sporadic bombing incidents engineered by Hamas extremists in Israel during the Oslo period. None at all occurred between 1998 and 2000. But the strong resumption of attacks after 2000, over fifty in the first year, was directly related to civilian and child killings by IDF, and it was not just Hamas, but Islamic Jihad and other Fatah associated organizations that were involved.
  This Time.com article apprises of what motivated them:
  “Until recently most Palestinians believed they had alternatives to the kind of militancy practiced by Hamas. For years after the 1993 Oslo peace accord, which brought limited self-rule to the Palestinians and the prospect of an independent state, polls showed a strong majority of Palestinians supporting the peace process with Israel and only a minority endorsing suicide bombings. Thus, in their headhunting, the fundamentalists were limited to stalwart followers of their doctrine, which holds that any kind of peace with Israel is anathema. Even then, Hamas and Islamic Jihad had to cajole–some might say brainwash–young men into believing that the rewards of paradise outweighed the prospects of life on earth.
  But with the breakdown of the peace process in the summer of 2000 and the start of the latest intifadeh that September, the martyr wannabes started coming to Hamas–and they didn’t require persuading. “We don’t need to make a big effort, as we used to do in the past,” Abdel Aziz Rantisi, one of Hamas’ senior leaders, told TIME last week. The TV news does that work for them. “When you see the funerals, the killing of Palestinian civilians, the feelings inside the Palestinians become very strong,” he explained.”
  From the mouth of Rantisi, but it also motivated Fatah supporters, to exact revenge for the killing of Palestinian civilians. Revenge is not a formal use of terrorism. See Alison Weir’s film, Off The Charts, at Google Video.
  
  (Why Suicide Bombing Is Now All The Rage)
  http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101020415-227546,00.html
  
  This commentary is from an article by Rami Khouri, editor of the Beirut newspaper, The Daily Star, which cynically denounced Olmert’s statements professing concern for the well-being of Palestinian children:
  
  (Ehud Olmert’s Profound Ethics and Deep Lies)
  http://www.ramikhouri.com/
  
  “For anyone interested in the facts about the impact of Israeli policies on Palestinian children, a good place to start is the carefully checked data disseminated by the Palestinian Nongovernmental Organization Network (www.palestinemonitor.org). Their data is compiled and verified on the ground by the Ramallah-based Health Development Information and Policy Institute, which has been honored by the World Health Organization for its work in promoting Palestinian health needs. So these people know what they are talking about when it comes to health conditions on the ground in Israeli-occupied Palestine. Some of the facts they provide are as follows.
  
  In just the first two years of the second intifada, from September 2000 to November 2002:
  
  383 Palestinian children (under the age of 18) were killed by the Israeli army and Israeli settlers, i.e. almost 19% of the total Palestinians killed; those figures have increased since then.
  Approximately 36% of total Palestinians injured (estimated at more than 41,000) are children; 86 of these children were under the age of ten; 21 infants under the age of 12 months have been killed.
  245 Palestinian students and school children have been killed; 2,610 pupils have been wounded on their way to or from school.
  The Israeli policy of widespread closure has paralyzed the Palestinian health system, with children particularly vulnerable to this policy of collective punishment. Internal closures have severely disrupted health plans which affect over 500,000 children, including vaccination programs, dental examinations and early diagnosis for children when starting schools.
  During the first two months of the intifada, the rate of upper respiratory infections in children increased from 20% to 40%. Almost 60% of children in Gaza suffer parasitic infections.
  An overwhelming number of Palestinian children show symptoms of trauma such as sleep disorders, nervousness, decrease in appetite and weight, feelings of hopelessness and frustration, and abnormal thoughts of death.
  There have been 36 cases of Palestinian women in labor delayed at checkpoints and refused permission to reach medical facilities or for ambulances to reach them. At least 14 of these women gave birth at the checkpoint with eight of the births resulting in the death of the newborn infants.
  
  The Israeli army killing of Palestinian children continues apace. In its annual report May 16, the respected global human rights organization Amnesty International accused the Israeli army of killing 190 Palestinians, including 50 children, last year (2005).”
  
  Here is some commentary from Jonathan Cook on a grandmother suicide bomber. It gives some more evidence on the motivation of Palestinian suicide bombers which had nothing to do with terrorism.
  
  If one thing offers a terrifying glimpse of where the experiment in human despair that is Gaza under Israeli siege is leading, it is the news that a Palestinian woman in her sixties — a grandmother — chose last week to strap on a suicide belt and explode herself next to a group of Israeli soldiers invading her refugee camp.
  
  Despite the “Man bites dog” news value of the story, most of the Israeli media played down the incident. Not surprisingly — it is difficult to portray Fatma al-Najar as a crazed fanatic bent only the destruction of Israel.
  
  It is equally difficult not to pause and wonder at the reasons for her suicide mission; according to her family, one of her grandsons was killed by the Israeli army, another is in a wheelchair after his leg had to be amputated, and her house had been demolished.
  
  Or not to think of the years of trauma she and her family have suffered living in a open-air prison under brutal occupation, and now, since the “disengagement”, the agonising months of grinding poverty, slow starvation, repeated aerial bombardments, and the loss of essentials like water and electricity.
  
  Or not to ponder at what it must have been like for her to spend every day under a cloud of fear, to be powerless against a largely unseen and malign force, and to never know when death and mutilation might strike her or her loved ones.
  
  Or not to imagine that she had been longing for the moment when the soldiers who have been destroying her family’s lives might show themselves briefly, coming close enough that she could see and touch them, and wreak her revenge.
  
  Yet Western observers, and the organizations that should represent the very best of their Enlightenment values, seem incapable of understanding what might drive a grandmother to become a suicide bomber. Their empathy fails them, and so does their humanity.
  
  Just at the moment Fatma was choosing death and resistance over powerlessness and victimhood — and at a time when Gaza is struggling through one of the most oppressive and ugly periods of Israeli occupation in nearly four decades — Human Rights Watch published its latest statement on the conflict. It is document that shames the organization, complacent Western societies and Fatma’s memory.
  
  Below, I’ll give you a better idea as to what terrorism really is. But clearly, these cycles of violence were started by Israeli forces, Sharon, the killing of over a hundred adults and the 27 children noted above, which, according to Rantisi, were revenge attacks. Did anyone ever consider that Israel was at the same time accused of state terrorism for its killing of Palestinian civilians? Reread the figures above. You are perhaps defining terrorism as the intentional killing of civilians. Wrong by any definition.
- shergald on November 13, 2007 at 4:06 pm
  
  Wikipedia
  
  Terrorism is a term used to describe violence or other harmful acts committed (or threatened) against civilians by groups or persons for political, nationalist, or religious goals. As a type of unconventional warfare, terrorism means to weaken or supplant existing political landscapes through capitulation, acquiescence, or radicalization, as opposed to subversion or direct military action.
  
  Free Dictionary
  
  terrorism – the calculated use of violence (or threat of violence) against civilians in order to attain goals that are political or religious or ideological in nature; this is done through intimidation or coercion or instilling fear
  
  Proposed Definitions of Terrorism
  
  1. League of Nations Convention (1937):
  “All criminal acts directed against a State and intended or calculated to create a state of terror in the minds of particular persons or a group of persons or the general public”.
  
  2. UN Resolution language (1999):
  
  “criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes are in any circumstance unjustifiable, whatever the considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or other nature that may be invoked to justify them”. (GA Res. 51/210 Measures to eliminate international terrorism)
  
  Clearly, the Palestinians were reacting to the killing of civilian adults and children and were exacting revenge. They were not in it for religious, political, or ideological reasons. The PLO was a terrorist organization, by contract, until its reputation was whitewashed.
  
  Your statement that if Palestinians had engaged in nonviolent protest 50 years ago, and that they would have a state by now if they did, I am afraid is somewhat naive, not only of Zionist nationalism, but of the fact that there has been nonviolent protest for many decades. And why don’t you know about it? Because gandhian protest requires publicity to be effective, and America, the only country of concern to Israel, has been under news censorship and propaganda supported by the US State Department since the early 1980s.
  
  I would therefore refrain from speaking too authoritatively about this subject.
- shergald on November 13, 2007 at 4:08 pm
  
  And if any asinine uninformed blog owner want to argue this point concerning so-called Palestinian terrorism outside of Munich and some other incidents again, I would be happy to engage him.
- shergald on November 13, 2007 at 4:33 pm
  
  but you really need to take a look at the documentary, Peace, Propaganda, & The Promised Land.
  
  Peace, Propaganda, & The Promised Land (with Noam Chomsky, Robert Fisk, Arik Ackerman, founder of Rabbis for Human Rights, and many others).
  
  It is now available in two parts on YouTube. Before that about a million viewers saw it on Google Video.
  
  Part I
  
  Part II
  
  Here are some comments from the docu by some of its participants which bare on your notion of “terrorism.”
  
  Rabbi Michael Lerner, Founder & Executive Director, Tikkun Magazine: “When you have a population that is being occupied, when their fundamental human rights are systematically being denied, when they are not allowed to move from city to city and place to place, without a huge amount of harassment, when they are being subject to torture, when people are essentially in desperate conditions, it is not a surprise that they are going to be very, very angry. There is no understand by the public media, or the American media, what creates this circumstance. Israel occupies, people strike at Israel against that occupation. They use means I think are wrong means, namely, the terror, and then Israel imposes punishment on the entire people, which creates a climate which makes it easier to recruit.”
  
  Major Stav Adivi, reserves, Israeli Defense Forces, Israel: “we have to understand that these (suicide bombings) are the effects of the occupation.”
  
  Robert Jensen, Professor of Journalism, University of Texas-Austin: “In contrast to the international press, in American media, there is a reversal of cause and effect in that the occupation is framed as a response to the suicide bombings. All of the Palestinian actions are attacks and Israel actions retaliation, is meaningful. Retaliation suggests a defensive stance against violence initiated by someone else. It places a responsibility for the violence on the party provoking the retaliation. In other words, Palestinian violence like suicide bombings is seen as cause and the origin of the conflict. Since the September 11 attack on the US, Israel’s PR strategy has been to frame all Palestinian actions, violent or not, as terrorism. To the extent that they can do that they have repackaged the illegal occupation as part of the war on terrorism.”
  
  News headlines: “This is Israel’s war on terrorism. F16s hit a Palestinian in the Gaza Strip this morning….The case the Israelis are trying to make: this is no different than what the US is doing in Afganistan (air attacks in the West Bank)…Prime Minister Ariel Sharon declared on television tonight, that he was determined to root out what he called `the terrorist infrastructure.'”
  
  So the myth of the Palestinian terrorist, who just happens to be fighting a long and incessant military occupation that the UN has called illegal.
  
  Review of the documentary:
  
  Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land provides a striking comparison of U.S. and international media coverage of the crisis in the Middle East, zeroing in on how structural distortions in U.S. coverage have reinforced false perceptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This pivotal documentary exposes how the foreign policy interests of American political elites–oil, and a need to have a secure military base in the region, among others–work in combination with Israeli public relations strategies to exercise a powerful influence over how news from the region is reported.
  
  Through the voices of scholars, media critics, peace activists, religious figures, and Middle East experts, Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land carefully analyzes and explains how–through the use of language, framing and context–the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza remains hidden in the news media, and Israeli colonization of the occupied territories appears to be a defensive move rather than an offensive one. The documentary also explores the ways that U.S. journalists, for reasons ranging from intimidation to a lack of thorough investigation, have become complicit in carrying out Israel’s PR campaign. At its core, the documentary raises questions about the ethics and role of journalism, and the relationship between media and politics.
  
  Personally, it gets tiresome hearing people blame the Palestinians for their own military occupation, going on now for 40 years, all for the purpose of permitting Israel to colonize the West Bank. And it is still going on this very day. And Palestinians, if they are being killed at the same rate as last year, 457 mostly civilians, according to B’Telsem, are presently being killed at the rate of at least one a day.
  
  Need to get our heads out of the sand with regard to what is really going on here. Want to blame Palestinians? Go ahead. I would rather hold the obvious culprite culpable.
  - AliceDem on November 13, 2007 at 8:37 pm
    
    Retalitory in nature????? You sound like Oliver North defending the Contras.
    
    From Northern Ireland, to the Basque country, to Kurdistan, to Palestine, movements that have embraced violence have failed. That is a fact.
    
    From India, to Alabama, to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, to the Philippines, to South Korea, to Eastern Europe, those who have embraced non-violent political change have succeeded.
    
    You can argue the semantics, but the Palestinian struggle has been characterized by violence and loss.
    
    Most of what I know about the Middle East comes from Keeping Faith and The Blood of Abraham and WNVC.
    
    Peace, Propaganda, & The Promised Land sounds interesting and worthwhile; but the reality is that terrorism is a huge part of the Palestinian struggle, which is why the Tibetans will probably have a state sooner than the Palestinians.
    - shergald on November 13, 2007 at 10:05 pm
      
      “the reality is that terrorism is a huge part of the Palestinian struggle”
      
      Believe what you will. Nobody disagrees that the suicide bombings during the second Intifada damaged the Palestinian cause, but nobody as well can look at the reality and not know that it was the Israeli propaganda effort that turned retaliation for the killing of 4-5 times as many Palestinian civilians into a terrorist plot. I gave you the evidence. It is up to you to evaluate it for what it is or what you would like to believe.
      
      You do understand, right, that the Palestinians have been living and at the time were living under an illegal military occupation, whose sole purpose was and still is the colonization of Palestinian lands in the West Bank, which to date has consumed 46% of that land.
      
      How could anyone sit by and somehow not condemn Israel for what it has done and for instigating that reaction, the suicide bombings.
      
      How could anyone be so blind, except that they are under the mesmerism of the propaganda that was unleashed to vilify the Palestinians, who are the victims in the quarrel, and have been so since 1948.
      
      Clear your mind if you will, stand back, and take another look.
      - AliceDem on November 13, 2007 at 10:29 pm
        
        Just because I condem the use of violence by Palestinians doesn’t mean I support the continued occupation of the West Bank. I don’t. Never have. Part of what attracted me to Jimmy Carter in November of 1975 is because he was the first credible candidate he supported the legitimate rights of the Palestinians, that has already been my position.
        
        I condem Kurdish terrorism, that doesn’t mean I think Turkish suppression of Kurdish culture is acceptable, or that Turkey has any business invading Iraq.
      - shergald on November 14, 2007 at 1:58 am
        
        We all condemn the use of suicide bombings directed at civilians. We all likewise condemn the use of a modern military forces which intentionally kill civilians. Your problem is not your failure to approve violence.
        
        Your problem is your misinterpretation of Palestinian violence during the second Intifada as terrorism. It just plays into the source of all of the violence in the West Bank, Israeli occupation and colonialism, which enables its continuation.
        
        Given that you know the reality, you are simply helping to continue the violence by buying into the propaganda. You’re been snookered and as a consequence, the violence continues, so does Israel’s intransigence regarding peace.
        
        Israel prefers land to peace as long as it can keep fooling people into thinking it is fighting the war on terrorism in the West Bank and Gaza. You said nothing about the military occupation. You must condone it.

Pens and Swords: new book on Israeli-US propaganda

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