"Between the Hague and Jerusalem": An Introduction

Some stories start with an epilogue. On Monday, February 23, 2004, as this book was already well on its way, the International Court of Justice at the Hague launched its hearings on the legality of Israel's Separation Wall. For most Jewish Israelis, this was only another painful proof of the inherent hostility of the world community towards Israel, a hostility rooted in anti-Semitism, which also spelled a fundamental indifference towards Jewish suffering: on the previous morning, a Palestinian suicide bomber boarded bus No. 14 in Jerusalem and blew himself up. Eight citizens, among them two children, were killed. Dozens were wounded. The two major Israeli newspapers, Yediot Ahronot and Ma'ariv, dedicated their entire news sections on Monday morning to this dramatic contradistinction "between the Hague and Jerusalem". Yediot Ahronot's front-page headline was actually directed at the ICJ judges themselves:

"You Sit in Judgment – And I Bury a Husband"

Under the headline appeared an open letter from Fanny Haim, whose husband, Yehuda, was killed in the terror attack. The letter was accompanied by a picture of the couple, hugging each other, looking at the camera, with an unmistakably Dutch landscape stretching behind them – a couple of windmills in a grass field and a lake. As the caption explained, the picture was actually taken in the Hague, when the couple visited Holland a few years ago. This is what Fanny Haim said in her letter:

Today, you will sit there, in the Hague, and judge. Today, I will bury my husband, and my heart, torn into pieces. I am no politician. I address you as someone who has lost a husband, a person whose heart no longer functions – and a person whose tragedy could have been prevented by the separation fence ... Today, when you start discussing the big issues, think, if only for one moment, of the little people behind this bloody struggle. Think for just one moment about my husband's good heart, or about his little son, Avner. He is only ten years old. Maybe you can try and explain to him why the hell he no longer has a father ... Do not judge my country, do not try to prevent it from preventing more victims. Today I bury a husband. Do not you bury justice.

Next to the letter appeared a commentary by Nahum Barnea, arguably the single most important journalist in the Israeli press. Under the title "When Israelis Weep", Barnea said:

Terror has cut a quick shortcut between kitsch and death: inspired by the installation created by the former Israeli Dror Feiler in Stockholm, the rescue and recovery organization ZAKA has decided to transport to the Hague a bus from one of the terror attacks in Jerusalem. By the time the bus arrived at the Hague and its pieces had been re-soldered, another bus exploded in Jerusalem.

Ma'ariv's perspective on that morning was practically identical. Its entire front page was covered by an enormous picture of a wounded soldier, his face covered with blood. The top banner highlighted the contradistinction of the day:

Jerusalem: 8 Murdered in a Terror Attack; The Hague: Israel Stands Trial

The main headline, stretched across the picture in red letters, was directed not at the ICJ judges, but at the paper's own readers:

You Be The Judges

and the subheadline added: "The terrorist who murdered children on their way to school penetrated Israel where there was no fence. For the judges' information".

There was relatively little news in the papers on that morning, and a lot of emotion. What the two newspapers mostly did was express, reflect, impress and highlight a certain collective sensibility: a sarcastic, angry, irritated, tenacious, frightened sense of siege – a physical siege, of course, but also, and much more significantly, a mental siege. More than anything else, what reverberated from the papers much more than the fear, or the anger, or the mourning for the victims of the suicide attack, was the insult of blame.

This book tells the story of the Israeli media and their coverage of operation Defensive Shield, the largest Israeli incursion into the Palestinian territories since the outbreak of the second Intifada, but on the morning the ICJ hearings opened I thought I should open the book with their coverage. Not just because they are, in a way, the last episode in the story, as we shall see immediately, but also because they turned into reality something that hovered over the Israeli collective consciousness for a very long time, and took over the coverage of the operation itself: the desperate need to suppress, to dismiss, to fend off guilt. The newspapers of February 23 are the most explicit demonstration of what, in operation Defensive Shield, takes a much more complex form.

The suppression of guilt is a much wider phenomenon than the mere suppression of information that potentially implies guilt. The suppression of such information is of course one way to suppress guilt, but the examples we have looked at demonstrate some of the others: the accentuation of victimhood, for example, and the rhetorical usage of sarcasm. The papers do not suppress guilt by playing down the information about the ICJ trial: they highlight the hearings, and dismiss the implication of guilt by playing the hearings against the suicide attack in Jerusalem. As we shall see, guilt can also be suppressed by counter-blaming (the other side is guilty, therefore I am not), and by disqualifying the source of blame or the judging authority (they have no right to judge me). It can be explained away by blurring intention (I did not mean to do that, it happened by mistake), and by recourse to a claim about coercion (I was forced to do what I did). And guilt can be bluntly pushed aside in defiance (I know exactly what I did, but I don't care). We shall see examples of all these in the book; together, they give the Israeli coverage of operation Defensive Shield an unmistakable character.

The operation was launched almost two years after the outburst of the second Intifada (approximately two years before the ICJ hearings), on the night of March 29, 2002, after a long month of almost daily suicide bombings, culminating in the attack on Park Hotel in Netanya, on Passover Eve, March 27. Twenty-eight people who had attended the Seder dinner at the hotel were killed. Within 24 hours, the army had issued emergency call-up notices for 20,000 reserve soldiers, the largest such call-up since the 1982 incursion into Lebanon. The next day, the tanks rolled into Ramallah, and by April 3, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) were conducting major military operations in most Palestinian cities. The operation, the largest of its type since the occupation of 1967, lasted for more than three weeks, and reached its most dramatic and violent point in the conquest of the Jenin refugee camp, which elicited allegations in the international press about a massacre. Rather then being suppressed, these allegations featured prominently in Israeli coverage of the events. What determined the nature of the coverage, however, was not the contents of the allegations, but the allegations themselves – the very fact that Israel was being accused of immoral and intentional behavior. Thus, just as with the ICJ hearings, the unsaid topic of coverage was the issue of guilt.

Throughout the first, crucial week of the operation, all journalists, Israeli and international, were barred from 'military' areas, which included all the major Palestinian cities. When the operation ended, the West Bank was for all practical purposes under renewed Israeli occupation, Yasser Arafat was held prisoner in his headquarters, the muqata'a, in Ramallah, and the Palestinian Authority was in effect dismantled. More than any other event throughout the Intifada, the operation changed the reality on the ground in the most fundamental fashion, and paved the way to the next stage of the conflict, in which Israel, having regained control of the areas it had previously withdrawn from, launched the construction of the wall – the very wall it was to stand trial for less than two years later.

This book examines the coverage of the operation by the five major Israeli news providers – the three major national newspapers, Yediot Ahronot, Ma'ariv and Ha'aretz, and the two major television channels, Channel 1 and Channel 2 – between March 29 and April 26 2002. Chapter 2 begins with a discussion of methodology. Far from technical, it attempts to propose a novel approach to the question of bias, an approach which does not presuppose an objective description of reality as a standard against which media representations of reality are compared and evaluated. As I will try to show, the release of the analysis from the competition between narratives and the struggle over truth will help us develop an intertextual method of critical analysis, which will, in its turn, allow for a better understanding of what the essence of the bias consists of.

Chapters 3 through 5 then present the actual analysis of the coverage. Some of the questions which these chapters attempt to answer are: how do the different media present the goals and overall significance of the operation to the public? To what extent do they try to question the goals of the operation as formulated by the government? Do the different media accept the government's contention that the Palestinian Authority should be equated with the "infrastructure of terrorism"? How did they present Arafat's role in the ongoing events? To what extent do they allow for the exposition of the Palestinian perspective on the events? How do they report the IDF's activities on the ground, the results of these activities and the situation of the civilian population under renewed IDF occupation? How do they react to the IDF's closure of the territories to journalists? How do they treat the political (parliamentary and grassroots) opposition to the operation? How do they describe the public's sentiments with respect to the operation? To what extent do they take an active part in the propaganda war which took place throughout the operation, especially after the events in Jenin?

As we shall see, each of the media institutions actually offered its readers or viewers a significantly different perspective. These perspectives varied with respect to each of the topics mentioned above: many of them were genuinely critical with respect to some of the issues, and the picture which thus emerges makes it quite difficult to pigeonhole most of the different news providers as simply "patriotic", "liberal" or "nationalistic". What the different media did seem to share, however, beyond the factual and interpretative differences between their perspectives, was a certain emotional attitude, not vis-à-vis the operation itself (where they differed significantly), but with respect to the global discourse of blame against Israel.

As I will show in Chapter 5, all the different media, with virtually no exception, implicitly complied with a basic imperative: they supressed reports that could be perceived as incriminating, that is, reports which would suggest unreasonable or immoral acts committed by Israel intentionally, both at the level of government policy and at the level of IDF conduct on the ground. Most significantly, the media suppressed reports which strongly indicated that the goal of the entire operation was not the fight against terrorism, but the reoccupation of the West Bank and the destruction of the Palestinian Authority. This pattern strongly indicates that what is at stake, what lies at the heart of the matter, is the issue of guilt: all the different media found it relatively easy to admit to unreasonable acts committed by Israel (or Israelis) unintentionally, by mistake, but systematically supressed those where prior intention logically implied guilt.

This constant struggle against guilt goes hand in hand with a wider world-view, one which fends off guilt by blaming the other side. This world-view insists that Israel does not have its own agenda in the present crisis, that it was dragged into it by Palestinian terrorism, and that the occupation and the IDF's mode of operation play no role in the persistence of terror. More than anything else, it reflects the deep-seated conviction that a diplomatic solution is not viable at this point, as Israel had already done all it could in order to attain peace, and thus played no active role in the tragic deterioration of the region back into what now seems like an intractable conflict.

In the concluding chapter of this book, I will offer a few theoretical remarks, concentrating on the social role of this type of coverage. I will claim that reducing the coverage to an attempt to manufacture consent with the government, the military and their actions fails to capture the essential nature of the coverage, as well as its overall complexity. To be sure, some of the coverage, some of the time, results in the strengthening of consent (and some of the coverage, as we shall see, is explicitly about that). This, however, does not exhaust the meaning of the coverage. In operation Defensive Shield, most of the media coverage is about the proposition of different alternatives for the construction of an Israeli identity, different alternatives which, among other things (and not necessarily most importantly), include different attitudes towards the establishment. More than anything else, the perspectives offered by the different media are assertions about what it should feel like to be Israeli in the midst of all the confusing complexity which reality produces, and during operation Defensive Shield, all the different perspectives converged around one assertion: being Israeli feels mainly like being accused by the entire world, and sometimes by other Israelis, of something you are not guilty of.

In this sense, the media are doing something they have always done in modern societies, something which is not reducible to the maintenance of the relationship between the people and the establishment: they construct and maintain imagined communities. They provide their individual consumers with an implicit characterization of what the other members of their community feel and think. In other words, they persuade by insisting that the other members, the majority, are already persuaded, and thus preserve and strengthen their own power over the people. In operation Defensive Shield, the context of this type of persuasion is not so much the classic context of the nation-state, its interests and its structural constraints (although these, quite obviously, play a significant role), but the postmodern context of world opinion and the global media. In this context, the Israeli media functions as a local, rather than a national, institution.

It is with this understanding that the very notion of critical analysis should find itself a new foundation. Not with the conviction that the media necessarily manufacture consent, not in the struggle over truth and the validity of narratives, but in the understanding of the relatively independent power that the media has over people, in its ability to construct what people think about themselves – and in the impact of this on what is actually taking place in reality. Obsessed as they are with the discourse of guilt, the Israeli media effectively prevent Israeli society from developing a discourse of responsibility, a discourse which, regardless of the struggle over the "origins of the conflict", understands that Israel, and Israelis, have to assume responsibility for the solution of the conflict, because at present, in reality, the Palestinians are under Israeli occupation and not the other way around. In this, the Israeli media effectively contribute to the continuation of violence.