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| Newsflash: Goliath is Jewish | |
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My remote control has been very useful to me lately as a means of trying to learn the truth about the Middle East crisis. First I use the remote to go to CNN or BBC. There I see footage of relatively harmless looking youth throwing stones and of heavily armed and armored Israeli soldiers, with tanks in the background and/or helicopter gunships overhead, firing guns at these stone throwing youth. The reporter tells a story of Israeli aggression against harmless civilians who are asking only for the return of what the aggressors "seized" from them. Then I use my friendly remote to flip over to Israeli news. The footage there is of groups of masked Palestinians armed with automatic rifles and hand grenades chanting "Slaughter the Jews." There are pictures of the lynch in Ramallah and their mourning families, pictures of the soldiers kidnapped by Hizbullah and their mourning families, and interviews with children living in Gilo who show the viewers the bullet holes in their windows and walls. Finally I use my remote to turn off the television, and I try to imagine a truth that lies somewhere in between these two versions of the story.
The question which sticks in my mind is always: Why does the international media prefer to portray the Palestinians as David and the Jewish Israelis as Goliath? I have found some interesting answers to this question.
Thomas Friedman, in his book From Beirut to Jerusalem, proposes that today the world loves to see the Jews as the immoral victimizers.
It was the Israelites who introduced the world to the concept of a divine moral code, the Ten Commandment. And since Jews were victims throughout history, they were always in a position to criticize the morality of other nations.
Today people enjoy seeing the Jews failing to live up to their own code of ethics. Israeli philosopher David Hartman said, "Historically speaking, if the Jews behaved well, they made those around them feel deficient. If they misbehaved, those around them felt relieved of the moral demands the Jews represented in history" (Friedman, 1989, p. 433). Friedman writes, "Indeed for some people, there is something almost satisfying about catching the Jewish state behaving improperly. It is a bit like catching one's Sunday school teacher in an indiscretion" (Friedman, 1989, p. 18).
Charles Krauthammer, Associate Editor of The New Republic, writes that the media unfairly expects Israel to behave better morally than any other nation. Although Israel should be expected to act more humanely than its Arab neighbors, Krauthammer writes that the "neighborhood standard" should not be ignored when judging Israel's behavior. According to Krauthammer,
It is plain that compared with the way its neighbors treat protestors, prisoners and opposition in general, Israel is a beacon of human rights. The salient words are Hama, a town where Syria dealt with an Islamic uprising by killing perhaps 20,000 people in two weeks and then paving the dead over; and Black September (1970), during which enlightened Jordan dealt with its Palestinian intifada by killing at least 2,500 Palestinians in ten days, a toll that the Israel intifada would need ten years to match (Krauthammer, p. 77).
The thrust of the reporting and, in particular, the commentary is that Israel has failed dismally to meet Western standards, that it has been particularly barbaric in its treatment of the Palestinian uprising. No other country is repeatedly subjected to Nazi analogies. In no other country is the death or deportation of a single rioter the subject of front-page news, of emergency Security Council meetings, of full-page ads in the New York Times, of pained editorials about Israel's lost soul, etc., etc. (Krauthammer, p. 78).
It should be noted that the Palestinians have benefited from the higher moral standard the West expects of the Jewish State. In the past the Palestinians have been the victims of their Arab brothers, but they only received sympathy from the West when they came into conflict with the Jews. Friedman writes, "The Palestinians have been greatly affected by the way in which the West relates to Israel. Their great fortune derives from the fact that their conflict is with Israeli Jews, whose role in Western civilization loomed, and continues to loom, so large. Had they had the misfortune of the Kurds, in conflict with the Iraqis, or of the Armenians, fighting the Turks, the world would be largely ignorant of their plight. It is through their struggle with the Israelis that the Palestinians really entered the consciousness of the West" (Friedman, 1987, p. 66).
The media's excessive criticism of Israel's ethical behavior can be extremely damaging to Israel. Extremist groups will not attack less or agree more to Israel's presence in their region of the world if Israel acts more ethically. "Yes, if Israel proves to be 10 percent ethically superior to the rest of the world, it will be a 'light unto the nations'. Yes, if it proves to be 25 percent superior it will bring the Messiah. But if it is 50 percent better it will be dead" (Zuckerman, p. 75).
By transmitting this unbalanced picture of the crisis in the Middle East in which David is Palestinian and Goliath is Jewish, the international media is doing a fine job of selling their news to the world, yet a real disservice to the Middle East. As long as violence puts the Palestinians on the front page as the underdog, they will see the violence as a means of gaining more international support that they could not get at the negotiating table. And as Thomas Friedman stated in his New York Times' article,Arafat's War, with no partner for peace and no alternative to peace, the Middle East will become a place where we mourn the dead.
Sources
Blitzer, W. (1985). Between Washington and Jerusalem: A Reporter's Notebook. New York: Oxford University Press.
Friedman, T.L. (1989). From Beirut to Jerusalem. New York: Doubleday.
Friedman, Thomas. (October 13, 2000). Arafat's War. The New York Times.
Karetzky, S., & Frankel, N. (Eds.). (1989). The Media's Coverage of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. New York: Shapolsky Publishers.
Krauthammer, C. (1990, February, 26). Judging Israel. Time, pp. 77-78.
Shimoni, Giora. (1992). Bias in the Media: The Case of Israel.
Zuckerman, M.B. (1990, January 22). The PLO As Image Maker. U.S. News & World Report, pp. 75-76.
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