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August 14 / 19, 2002
Susan Davis
Played
Out: a Journey to Central City, Colorado
CounterPunch Staff
Our Favorite
Films
Jeffrey St. Clair
Usonian
Utopia's:
Frank Lloyd Wright, Working Class Housing and the FBI
Gilad Atzmon
Sharon and the Iron Wall
Uri Avnery
A Phone
Call from Hell
Wendy Brinker
Racism
is Alive and Well in the South Carolina Death House
Hamit Dardagan
The
Unbearable Lightness of Bombing
Ahmad Faruqui
The Legacy
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Philip Farruggio
Leading
by Example
Anthony Gancarski
Union
Jackass: Richard Perle's UK Charm Offensive
Jeff Halper
Fortress
Israel: the Message of the Bulldozer
Robert Jensen
Our Failures
are Borne by the Palestinians
Gary Leupp
An Open
Letter to Bruce Springsteen about Bush's War on Terrorism
Dave Marsh
Sing a
Simple Song
Rashmi Mayur
To Johannesburg
in Search of Hope
Steve Perry
Another Fine Mess:
Martha Stewart and Paul Wellstone
Anis Shivani
What's
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Edward Said
Punishment
by Detail
Jeff Taylor
Paul Wellstone's
Legacy
August 13, 2002
Robert Fisk
At the al--Qaeda
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Mokhiber / Weissman
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Betrays Ireland
August 12, 2002
Messier / Dreier
The IDF
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No Iraqi
Surprise: Look Now
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Fran Shor
Psychic
and Political Numbing
in Preparations for War
August 10/11, 2002
Bruce Jackson
Buffalo
in Black and White
Robert Fisk
US Bombs
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Lawrence McGuire
How Does
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Ralph Nader
The Quest
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Fuel Efficient Car
Frank Fugate
The Arabs
I Know
Jan Oberg
Visit Iraq
Jill Drier
Dodging
Bullets in Nablus
Walt Brasch
The Bush
2 Legacy...So Far
Poetry
M. Shahid Alam
Death by
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Anthony Gancarski
Coin of the Realm
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Einstein's
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August 9, 2002
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Gul Agha:
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Nelson P. Valdés
An Open
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on Cuba Policy
Mokhiber / Weissman
Corporate
Crime:
More Shareholder Power
Not the Solution
Ansar Ahmed
The Waning
of the
Pax Americana
Alexander Cockburn
War,
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August 8, 2002
Ron Jacobs
Iraq:
The Final Storm?
Dave Marsh
Now Ain't
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Mark Weisbrot
Bush
Administration Tries to Hide Role in Venezuela Coup
Anthony Gancarski
AIPAC,
Congress and Iraq
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Families
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Karzai's
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August 7, 2002
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The First
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Fallon's
Fallen
Is the US Navy Killing
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Robert Fisk
For the
Forgotten Afghans,
the UN Offers a Fresh Hell
Dr. Susan Block
Rigas in
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Bill Christison
Disastrous
Foreign Policies of the US Part 5: the Call of Democracy?
August 6, 2002
Philip Farruggio
Signs
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Bruce Gagnon
We Must
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From
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Global
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Return to
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The
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August 5, 2002
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Inside
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US Mute
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Norman Madarasz
Brazil:
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August 4, 2002
Susan Davis
Fat Americans
August 3, 2002
David Krieger
Nuclear
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Gilad Atzmon
The End
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Everybody's
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Alexander Cockburn
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
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August
19, 2002
A
former CIA Analyst Asks
Just How Much Does The New York
Times Tilt Towards Israel; and How Much Does It Matter?
by Kathleen Christison
former
CIA political analyst
It won't surprise anyone, I'm sure, that I think
New York Times coverage of Arab--Israeli and particularly
Palestinian--Israeli issues--taking into account all types of
coverage, from straight news reporting, to analysis, to editorial/op--ed
coverage--tilts distinctly toward Israel. This is noticeable
to a limited extent with straight news coverage, much more obvious
with analysis, and very evident with editorial and op--ed coverage.
Often this is a matter simply of reporting or analyzing from
an Israeli perspective, without taking the Palestinian perspective
into account--as if all reporting from Israel and about Israelis
is essentially reporting on "us" and on concerns in
which we the readers are vitally interested, whereas reporting
on Palestinians is about a different, foreign people and therefore
of much less interest.
This occurs, for instance, when we're
treated to frequent features on the personal and psychological
impact of suicide bombings on Israelis but seldom see stories
about the impact on Palestinians of the occupation and all its
aspects--the civilian deaths, the roadblocks, the land confiscation,
the curfews, the depredations by settlers, the shootings by soldiers,
the  destruction of olive groves,
etc., etc. Times reporters seem to spend little time
in the West Bank and Gaza--less and less as Israel tightens its
control over these territories--and as a result there is relatively
little reporting on the situation there. Even the stories about
Israel's July 22 missile attack in Gaza that killed 14 innocent
civilians were filed from Jerusalem, not from Gaza.
Imbalance in news coverage is chiefly
a matter of omission rather than commission, as the examples
above show. Since the beginning of the intifada almost two years
ago, the Times has only rarely given casualty totals for
Palestinians and Israelis--one suspects because Palestinian deaths
outnumber Israeli deaths by about three to one, which makes it
difficult to portray Israel as the party under siege. Times
editorialists never saw fit to comment on the July 22 Israeli
missile attack on Gaza, although they generally do run editorials
decrying large Palestinian terrorist attacks.
The Times also seldom uses the
word "occupation" to describe Israel's 35--year--old
rule over the West Bank and Gaza, seldom describes East Jerusalem
as occupied territory, seldom informs readers that the 200,000
Israelis who live in East Jerusalem are settlers who reside not
in "neighborhoods" or in "suburbs" of Jerusalem
but in settlements built on land confiscated from Palestinians,
seldom reports on the steady expansion of Israeli settlements
throughout the West Bank, and seldom indicates that the intifada
is an uprising against Israel's occupation.
A comparison of Times news reporting
with Washington Post reporting shows the Post to
be far superior in its on--the--ground coverage. Whereas Times
reporters seem usually to file their West Bank and Gaza stories
from Jerusalem, Post reporters generally write them directly
from the West Bank or Gaza. Post stories are for the
most part broader in scope, more in--depth, more probing, and
more balanced than Times articles. Post reporters
tend to get "down and dirty," more often reporting
the grim realities of Palestinian life under occupation, more
often following Israeli soldiers as they blow in doorways and
walls in house--to--house searches in refugee camps, more often
catching the uncomfortable realities of Israel's occupation practices,
such as sniper shootings of rock--throwing Palestinian teenagers.
Whereas the Times only rarely
reports casualty figures, the Post did so with some regularity
until Israel's reoccupation of the West Bank in April. It is
unclear whether Post reporting on deaths has dropped off
because numbers became much harder to track during that month--long
siege, or because the Post, and all other papers, have
begun to receive much heavier criticism from Israeli supporters
in recent months, and all print and electronic media are on the
defensive. The Post's employment of an ombudsman--veteran
reporter Michael Getler--although not a key to perfection, helps
keep the paper more nearly honest. Getler writes a weekly column,
which he frequently devotes to a thorough analysis and questioning
of Post reporting from the Middle East.
Analytical reporting in both the Post
and the Times is spotty. In the Times, analysis,
which is usually done by the paper's best diplomatic correspondents,
often indicates at least a mild bias, usually in the form of
an inability to fathom where the Palestinians are coming from
and what the Palestinian perspective is. One gets the impression
that few if any Times correspondents understand what drives
the intifada or accept that there is any legitimacy to Palestinian
resistance to the occupation. For instance, in October 2000,
during the first few days of the intifada, Palestinian citizens
of Israel demonstrated in solidarity with West Bank--Gaza Palestinians,
who at that point were being killed in very large numbers by
Israeli soldiers, and during the demonstrations Israeli police
shot to death 13 Israeli Palestinians.
In an analysis of the nationalistic reaction
to the intifada throughout the Arab world written two weeks into
the intifada, Judith Miller wrote that the "rift between
Israeli Jews and the Arab citizens of Israel" was another
"profound emotional scar" left by the violence. Her
evidence of the "emotional scar" was that Israeli Jews
"were horrified by the ferocity of this uprising, which
closed off large sections of their country, and by the 'Death
to the Jews' slogans chanted by the Arab protesters." She
made no mention of an emotional scar for Israeli Palestinians,
no mention at all of the fact that 13 unarmed Israeli--Palestinian
demonstrators had recently been shot to death, no mention that
Israeli police had never in Israel's history opened fire on demonstrators
when they were Israeli Jews, and no mention of the fact that
Israeli Jewish demonstrators had chanted "Death to Arabs"
during demonstrations at the same time.
More recently, on July 14, 2002, Serge
Schmemann wrote a brief essay accompanying pictures of several
West Bank Palestinians who described their frustration with U.S.
policy. (A 12--year--old boy, for instance, says that he likes
Americans when they support Palestinians, but then he notes that
Colin Powell came to visit Yasir Arafat and "said something
about" a Palestinian state but then did nothing. A taxi
driver who had been waiting for hours for Israeli soldiers at
a checkpoint to return his ID papers, said he blames everybody
for the situation, including the Palestinian Authority, and feels
that the U.S. gave the green light to Israel to continue the
occupation.) Under a headline that does sympathetically acknowledge
the Palestinians' "deep despair," Schmemann seems to
give them the back of his hand by concluding his essay this way:
"It is easy to argue with these voices, to recite the litany
of Mr. Arafat's failings and lost opportunities. Perhaps
it is useful, though, to simply hear them" [my emphasis].
If Schmemann didn't actually mean to be patronizing, as this
sounds, then he must have felt it necessary to apologize for
letting Palestinians speak their minds.
One other example of the failure of Times
correspondents to understand--even to fathom -- the Arab and
Palestinian perspective: on March 3, 2002, diplomatic correspondent
Elaine Sciolino ran a long article on the mood in Saudi Arabia
and appeared on C--SPAN that morning to talk about it. On C--SPAN,
she said she had been quite surprised during a three--week trip
to Saudi Arabia to discover how much all levels of Saudi society
focused on the Palestinian situation. It amazed her, she said,
how very much the Palestinian crisis dominated Saudi conversation,
and how the crisis informed their thinking about the U.S. because
the U.S. armed Israel. It also surprised her, she said, that
television pictures of Israelis attacking Palestinians appear
all the time in Saudi Arabia [her emphasis]. She repeatedly
emphasized her amazement at this discovery, and the tenor of
the article was similar, although a little less obviously surprised.
The article spoke of seeing television footage of "the
Palestinian interpretation of the intifada," by which Sciolino
meant that the pictures were one--sided, showing Israeli soldiers
firing into crowds and dead Palestinian babies but no Palestinian
suicide bombers or Israeli bombing victims.
What's most amazing about Sciolino's
discoveries was not that the Saudis were concerned about the
Palestinian plight, but that Sciolino was surprised to discover
that they were. No media person and no one as well informed
and savvy as Sciolino should ever have been surprised that the
Arab man in the street sees frequent television pictures of Palestinians
being beaten and shot by Israelis and that this arouses genuine
anger on behalf of the Palestinians. This is an appalling level
of obliviousness and denial. The Times understands historic
Jewish fears and the impact these have on American Jews when
they see Israelis under attack, but it generally isn't able to
apply this same level of understanding to Arabs and their sense
of solidarity with fellow Arabs under attack.
Times
editorials, columns, and the selection of op--ed articles are
far more blatant in their tilt toward Israel. In an article
in Roane Carey's The New Intifada, Ali Abunimah and Hussein
Ibish described the tilt of editorials and op--eds run during
the first four months of the intifada. Of 15 editorials on the
conflict, they labeled 14 as pro--Israeli and one as neutral
because it focused on internal Israeli politics and made no mention
of Palestinians. Of 33 op--eds, 25 were pro--Israeli, six were
pro--Palestinian, and two were sensitive to both sides. (The
Post doesn't come off any better in its editorial coverage.
Abunimah and Ibish found that of 13 Post editorials in
the same period, 12 were strongly pro--Israeli, the remaining
one neutral. Of 27 op--ed articles, 20 were pro--Israeli, five
were sympathetic to the Palestinians, and two were sensitive
to both sides.) Times editorial writers have criticized
Israel for settlement construction and harsh practices in the
West Bank and Gaza, but in the two years since the Camp David
summit collapsed--years that have seen the outbreak of the intifada,
a steady escalation in Palestinian violence, an increase in suicide
bombings, Israel's complete termination of the negotiating process
six months after Camp David, the election of hardliner Sharon,
the collapse of various cease--fire and negotiating plans such
as Mitchell and Tenet, a campaign of Israeli assassinations of
Palestinians, the reoccupation and siege of the civilian population
of the West Bank, the destruction of the Palestinian civil infrastructure--Times
editorials have concentrated the burden of blame for all turmoil
almost entirely on Yasir Arafat and the Palestinians.
Arafat alone was blamed for the collapse
of Camp David, Arafat has been blamed for provoking Israel into
taking harsh measures during the intifada, Arafat and the Palestinians
are blamed for escalating violence. In an August 2001 editorial,
the Times declared that both sides needed to work to contain
the violence and that their mutual goal should be "to create
a calm enough atmosphere to take the first steps toward resumed
negotiations." Getting to that point would, in the Times's
view, require two things: that Arafat show "more responsible
behavior" and that Israel be willing to recognize that "for
now he [Arafat] is the only realistic Palestinian negotiating
partner." In other words, Israel need do nothing except
grin and bear Arafat; all real concessions and good behavior
had to come from Arafat. The usual presuppositions were at work
here: Israelis always show responsible behavior and don't need
the admonition given Arafat, and, unlike Palestinians, Israelis
obviously always desire "a calm enough atmosphere to take
the first steps toward resumed negotiations."
The Times demonstrated its unbalanced
approach most noticeably in July 2001 in its commentary on a
major one--year--later retrospective on the Camp David summit
published by Jerusalem bureau chief Deborah Sontag. In a striking--and,
one must assume, deliberate--effort to maintain its own blame--Arafat
position on Camp David, a Times editorial on the Sontag
story undermined Sontag by contradicting her principal conclusion.
Having done extensive interviews with Israeli, Palestinian,
and American participants in the summit and in--depth analysis
of what went wrong, Sontag concluded that Arafat was by no means
solely to blame for the summit's collapse and that all three
parties were responsible, more or less equally, for mistakes
made over the entire seven years of the peace process. A "potent,
simplistic narrative has taken hold" in Israel and the United
States, Sontag wrote. "It says: Mr. Barak offered Mr. Arafat
the moon at Camp David last summer. Mr. Arafat turned it down,
and then 'pushed the button' and chose the path of violence."
But officials to whom she spoke had concluded that the dynamic
was actually far more complex than this, that Arafat did not
bear sole or even a disproportionate share of the responsibility.
In fact, Sontag concluded, Barak did not offer Arafat the moon
at Camp David but rather proposed a solution that might have
been generous and even politically courageous in Israeli terms,
but that would not have given the Palestinians what they regarded
as a viable state.
Rather than accept Sontag's considered
assessment of where responsibility lay, a Times editorial
two days later persisted in praising Barak and blaming Arafat.
Barak had come to Camp David, the editorial proclaimed, "with
a daring offer, a peace plan that essentially vaulted over the
interim steps outlined under the Oslo accords.Mr. Barak gambled
that Mr. Arafat would accept his approach." But, the editorial
contended, Arafat was not up to the task, acted too hesitantly,
did not offer any proposals of his own, and condoned and, it's
implied, stirred up "the violent uprising" that erupted
two months later. Words and phrases like "daring,"
"vaulted," and "condoned the violent uprising"
set the tone here. The editorial is saying that, despite what
Sontag wrote, Barak did offer Arafat the moon, and Arafat was
solely responsible for letting it all fall apart. (Interestingly,
Sontag left Jerusalem after this article was published. She's
still with the Times and occasionally writes for the Magazine,
but I can't help wondering if she got kicked upstairs, or aside,
or something. Maybe she intended to leave anyway; this article
would have been a great swan song. But maybe it turned into
a swan song after the Times editors decided they didn't
like it, or after they received complaints from pro--Israeli,
anti--Arafat readers?)
The story of what actually transpired
at Camp David, unearthed by Sontag a year after the fact, is
also an indictment of the U.S. media, including particularly
the Times. By unquestioningly accepting the U.S.--Israeli
version of Camp David, which from the moment it ended placed
the entire responsibility for failure on Arafat, the media made
a very serious political and diplomatic miscalculation that has
had far--reaching consequences. As Rob Malley, an American diplomat
who participated in the summit and has written extensively on
it since, wrote recently in the New York Review of Books,
"The one--sided account that was set in motion in the wake
of Camp David has had devastating effects--on Israeli public
opinion as well as on US foreign policy," setting in train
a string of misperceptions that add up to a mythology about the
Palestinians' supposed inability to make peace.
Malley puts it this way: "Barak's
assessment that the talks failed because Yasser Arafat cannot
make peace with Israel and that his answer to Israel's unprecedented
offer was to resort to terrorist violence has become central
to the argument that Israel is in a fight for its survival against
those who deny its very right to exist. So much of what is said
and done today derives from and is justified by that crude appraisal.
First, Arafat and the rest of the Palestinian leaders must be
supplanted before a meaningful peace process can resume, since
they are the ones who rejected the offer. Second, the Palestinians'
use of violence has nothing to do with ending the occupation
since they walked away from the possibility of reaching that
goal at the negotiating table.And, finally, Israel must crush
the Palestiniansif an agreement is ever to be reached."
Although Israel and the U.S., and most
especially President Bill Clinton and his Middle East advisers,
are responsible for starting up this body of myths by stridently
playing the blame game and loudly trumpeting Arafat's "sole
responsibility" for Camp David's failure, the media--and
the Times as the leading U.S. newspaper--bear an equal
or nearly equal share of the responsibility for buying into this
line without questioning, without investigating, without ever
wondering if there might be something self--serving in the U.S.
and Israeli versions of the story.
Deborah Sontag did a good job of research
and in--depth analysis in publishing her story, but it should
not have taken a year to get the real story. It was there to
be ferreted out much earlier from the Palestinian press, the
Israeli press, various Internet websites, and the numerous officials
on all sides who were at Camp David, but no U.S. media organ
was interested. It should have been obvious from day one that
there was something not quite straight in the tales of Barak's
great readiness to compromise versus Arafat's total stone--walling.
No negotiation is ever that black and white. But the mindset
and the body of assumptions from which the media and U.S. policymakers
have always approached this issue blinded correspondents and
commentators to what was actually going on.
Thomas Friedman's commentaries, perhaps
more even than the Times editorial line, determine the
impressions gained by Times readers of what's involved
in the conflict, who's responsible for its continuation, and
where it's headed. I won't go into a detailed analysis of Friedman's
writings since Camp David, but suffice it to say that he has
in repeated columns over two years obsessively heaped blame on
Arafat and the Palestinians (taking the line that the intifada
proves that Palestinians cannot make peace and want to destroy
Israel) and seriously distorted what Israel offered at Camp David
(repeating the fiction that Barak offered "95% of the West
Bank and half of Jerusalem, with all the settlements gone,"
never mentioning that the resulting so--called "state"
would have been broken up into several non--contiguous parts).
Friedman likes to blame Arafat for "provoking
the Israelis into brutalizing Palestinians" and for provoking
the "ritual sacrifice" of Palestinian children: "The
Palestinians seem to have no qualms about putting up their youths
to be shot at." He adds that Israelis seem to have no qualms
about shooting at Palestinians, but it's clear that in his book
the basic fault lies with the Palestinians. This is the way
Middle East policy is often made in Washington--through the commentary
of leading opinion--molders like Friedman and Times editorialists
who spout distortions like these all the time and whose critical
position at the center of public discourse enables them both
to influence public thinking and at the same time to reflect
that thinking upward to policymakers.
Kathleen Christison worked for 16 years as a political analyst with
the CIA, dealing first with Vietnam and then with the Middle
East for her last seven years with the Agency before resigning
in 1979. Since leaving the CIA, she has been a free-lance writer,
dealing primarily with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Her
book, "Perceptions
of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy,"
was published by the University of California Press and reissued
in paperback with an update in October 2001. A second book, "The
Wound of Dispossession: Telling the Palestinian Story,"
was published in March 2002. Both Kathy and her husband Bill,
also a former CIA analyst, are regular contributors to the CounterPunch
website.
Other CounterPunch articles by Bill and
Kathleen Christison:
Bill Christison: Disastrous Foreign
Policies
of the US Part 3: What Can We Do About It?,
July 8, 2002
Kathleen Christison: The Story of
Resolution 242, How the US Sold Out the Palestinians,
June 28, 2002
Kathleen Christison:
Israel
and Ethics, May 11, 2002
Bill Christison: The Disastrous Foreign
Policies of the United States,
May 10, 2002
Kathleen Christison: Before There
Was Terrorism, May 2, 2002
Bill
Christison: Oil and the Middle East, April
6, 2002
Bill
Christison:
Why
the War on Terror Won't Work,
March 5, 2002
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