British media coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict has changed radically over the past five years. From broad sympathy for Israel, the tone has become critical and hostile. This has been evident during the invasion of Gaza, just as it was during the Israeli incursion into Lebanon in 2006. Media attitudes are largely dictated by what makes good drama and, above all, by pictures. The violent death of 700 people in a week – in the midst of shattered homes and schools – is a bigger and more shocking story than the same number of deaths on, say, 30 or 40 separate occasions. The Independent's Robert Fisk said on the BBC that "it is the job of journalists to be impartial on the side of those who suffer most". But as Fisk knows, it isn't like that: journalists are impartial on the side of those who suffer most visibly and dramatically.
Since the beginning of the second intifada in 2000, Palestinian casualties have exceeded Israeli casualties by four to one. But for several years, this was obscured by the attention given to suicide bombings inside Israel, which reached a peak of 55 in 2002. Suicide bombing, always a story, became a bigger one after 9/11, when it was believed Britain faced similar threats. Even in 2002, Palestinians suffered at least twice as many casualties, but not in the same dramatic manner. Now suicide bombings have virtually disappeared – there was only one in 2007 – and rocket attacks from Gaza have killed just 14 Israelis in four years.
What such figures do not reveal, argues the Daily Mail's fiercely pro-Israel columnist Melanie Phillips, is how, in parts of Israel, "traumatised children" are "all but living in bomb shelters". In the same way, Palestinian supporters used to complain that nobody reported how suicide bombings were prompted by the daily misery of military occupation in Gaza and the West Bank. As Israeli opinion sees it, rocket attacks from Hizbullah and Hamas, both allies of Iran, pose far more of an existential threat than suicide bombing did. But no amount of lobbying and PR can get away from a simple truth: Israelis no longer appear as victims.
So, always excepting Phillips, Israel has had little support even from usually reliable quarters. Stephen Glover, while endorsing nearly all arguments in Israel's favour, also insisted in the Mail: "We cannot ... defend what is happening. The disproportionality is too great." In the Mail on Sunday, Peter Hitchens, describing himself as "a consistent hardline supporter of the Jewish state", argued that there was "no important way" in which Israel's bombing and shelling differed from Arab murders of Israeli women and children.
The Daily Telegraph's Middle East correspondent, Tim Butcher, based in Jerusalem, argued that the Israeli attacks were driven by politicians looking ahead to February's elections. This was billed as "a personal view", a newspaper's way of signalling that the editor – or at least the proprietor – doesn't agree. But Butcher's piece – and the accompanying picture of a Palestinian child leaving his bombed home – must have had more impact on readers than a leader headed "Peace in Gaza is in the hands of Hamas". Only Rupert Murdoch's papers tried to show Israel in a more positive light, but they struggled. The day after Israel bombed UN schools, the Sun splashed on "Extremist threat to UK Jews", with a picture of Alan Sugar . The schools were at the bottom of page 9, below further details of the "Hate Hit List".
Earlier, the Sun thought it worth reporting that the British embassy in Tehran had been "stormed". The paper has form on this: the day after Israel killed 56 people in Qana, a Lebanese village, in 2006, it gave 10 paragraphs to the massacre, 11 to the protests (headlined "Hate in the raw") and 41 to Tony Blair's address to News International executives in California. But this time, the Sun ran pictures captioned "Devastation ... mushroom cloud rises after bomb" and "Fireball ... family flee".
Last Tuesday, it had a long report from Sderot – to which numerous journalists were shepherded by Israeli government spin doctors – headed "I felt blast as rockets hit homes of Israelis", along with a tiny picture of a middleaged white man standing in what looked like a patio extension abandoned by cowboy builders. But whatever the effect on readers, it would have been overwhelmed by the picture opposite, showing a father in Gaza grieving over his three dead children.
Newspapers are supposed to be better than TV at putting over context. But they rarely are. This has always been a problem in the Israeli-Arab conflict where, as Jonathan Freedland observed in the Guardian, there is a "Newtonian chain of claimed action and reaction that can stretch back to infinity". Lack of context normally works against Palestinians who are portrayed as "terrorists" and wild "bomb-throwing militants" bent on undermining a well-ordered, western-style state. By banning foreign journalists from entering Gaza, Israel helped turn the context problem against itself. Nearly all the stories and pictures came from local Palestinian reporters and photographers. They were not likely to investigate Israeli allegations that Hamas deliberately based its fighters among civilians and fired mortars from the UN schools. Such stories had to remain as nothing more than Israeli "claims".
Not that the results of any journalistic investigation would have been acceptable to both sides. One side's context is the other side's lies and distortions. As any journalist knows, attempts at fairness and balance in the Middle East are doomed. Allowing the drama of visible events to dictate the coverage is probably the best course after all.
PS: Reminds me so much of Kristina Riegert's assessment of the Domestication of Foreign News (TJC)
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