Current Events, Episode 161

israel at war, EXPLAINED: The PR War

october 31, 2023

BLOG VERSION below | PODCAST VERSION HERE

In the constant struggle to keep up with what’s happening, how can we understand what we’re seeing on the news? The media ecosystem often accepts Hamas’ claims uncritically, while Israel’s are subjected to days of scrutiny and doubt. Skepticism and patience are our best tools to navigate the complexities here.

A few months ago a viral video made the rounds through my news feed. It was grainy footage from a security camera in the Old City of Jerusalem. For several seconds it showed a heavily-armed Israeli police officer violently shoving a Palestinian woman to the ground. It was, of course, yet another example of Israeli “police brutality,” defiling the dignity of a Muslim woman in public as a act of shame intended to demean the Palestinian people. This, captioned the various versions of the video going around, is what Israel is, the apartheid regime in action.

It took another day or so for the rest of the footage — the entire original scene — to make its way around. This one began several seconds earlier, when the Palestinian woman walked up the cop, drew a huge knife, and tried to stab him in the throat. He wasn’t shoving her to the ground so much as wrestling her to drop the weapon. A reaction that could be expected from any cop — or anybody — anywhere in the world. 

But I agree with one part of that original caption: this is Israel. In the military battle against Hamas, Israel is well equipped. But in the PR war, which might be just as important, Israel is hopelessly outgunned. They have been for a long time. In a future episode I’ll tackle the infuriating scenes we’re seeing around the world, as hundreds of thousands of people rally in support of Hamas. But so many of them are also getting their information from an ecosystem that is a complete mess. We all know about the toxic stew that is social media, purposely designed to foster and spread lies and outrage. But it’s also the mainstream news, the branded names of recognizable newspapers and TV channels that show us the photos and give us the statistics, and who claim to report the objective truth through the rigorous pursuit of facts and the professionalism of nuanced and reasonable actors. And yet when it comes to Israel, such promises elude them. Instead we find ourselves in a situation in which, after the worst crime against the Jewish people since the Holocaust, the news media reports Hamas’ claims uncritically, while Israel’s come in for doubt, scrutiny, and disbelief. It’s not everywhere, and it’s not all the time — but it’s enough to inflame what is already a catastrophic situation, and to frustrate those of us who know that things are not as straightforward as the media pretends them to be. 

And so I’m struggling. Because I know that the Palestinian civilians in Gaza are suffering terribly, and undeservingly. Surely many innocent people have died in this war that Hamas started, victims of Israeli air strikes, and at the mercy of their own genocidal government, which it is committed to killing as many Palestinians as possible in order to make Israel look bad. But I also know that I can’t trust any of the information coming out of Gaza, because it’s all coming from Hamas, passed through the lens of what will ensure the worst coverage for Israel. Its become impossible to know what to believe, and therefore what to think.

So there’s the military war being waged right now, and then there’s the war as the vast majority of us experience it: through the constant refreshing of news sites, through the 24-hour TV coverage, through the social media videos and press releases and statements and speeches and photographs sent instantly around the world. This is what forms our perceptions of this war and, of course, Israel itself. Covering any war is tough. Covering the Middle East in general is tough. And so we have to understand how the media is working — or not — right now.

It’s Day 24 of the war against Hamas. I’m your host, Jason Harris, and this is Jew Oughta Know.

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Another viral video made its way into my Instagram feed the other day. A Palestinian man raced into a jam-packed hospital room, screaming in distress. He cradled a baby swaddled completely in a white sheet streaked with blood. Hands reached into the camera frame to frantically wave the man over to a table, where he placed the baby down. The camera jerked and panned trying to see around the people who crowded around the child. Their efforts were apparently in vain. After a moment, the wailing man picked up the child as several women sobbed hysterically, and he turned to leave the room. It was then that the camera caught a couple of seconds of the child’s face. It was a doll. An instantly-recognizable cheap plastic doll found in every toy store around the world. 

So here I was, sitting with this father. In that moment it didn’t matter that he was Palestinian. Or maybe it did matter that he was Palestinian, because it was a human face that reminded me of the incredible suffering on the other side of this war. I’m still here struggling with the gruesome brutality visited on Israel — on people I consider kinsmen and family, and some of whom I have personal connections to. But the Palestinians are trapped, too, under the tyranny of Hamas, a fact that brings a strange sort of closeness to people historically divided by bitterness and hate and this intractable conflict. We’re all victims of Hamas here. So I can’t and don’t want to minimize the horrors the Palestinians of Gaza are facing: the destruction of their homes and communities, the tragedies of death and injury, the terrifying depths of not knowing what is going to happen next. The shortages must be real, the desperation authentic, the anger and helplessness sincere. We cannot doubt it, and we shouldn’t.

And then I remember again the video with the plastic doll. A couple of days ago the news media began reporting that 8,000 Palestinians have died in Gaza so far, including 4,000 children. So now I’m seeing this statistic everywhere. And when you actually read the articles, you see that all of them are pulling these numbers from the exact same source: the Gaza Ministry of Health. 

Up until a few days, the media didn’t tell you that the Gaza Ministry of Health is actually the Hamas Ministry of Health, since, after all, Hamas is the government of Gaza. And so the Gaza Ministry of Health isn’t some independent group of sober medical professionals but an arm of Hamas, which has no incentive to report accurate facts.

And even if the daily drumbeat of statistics were true, Hamas’ Ministry of Health doesn’t tell us how many of the dead were Hamas fighters as opposed to civilians. Nor how many of the civilians were killed by the terrorist groups themselves, from rockets fired at Israel that instead fell on Gaza. Nor how many of the civilians were killed because they were intentionally placed in harm’s way by Hamas, cynically used as human shields.

For most of this war, the media told you none of this when they blared the daily death toll from Gaza. Only recently have I been seeing qualifiers:“the Hamas-controlled Gaza Ministry of Health,” and “these numbers couldn’t be independently verified.”  But of course, those are usually buried in the article while the figures from Hamas make into the headline. It’s incredibly dishonest.

And so the effect is to make you think that Israel is committing wave after wave of atrocity, smashing Gaza without regard for civilian casualties; or worse, that it’s an intentional act of revenge. And yet, while Palestinian civilians have undoubtedly been tragically killed by Israeli air strikes, we have zero evidence that Israel has intentionally targeted civilians at any point. 

All of this came to a head with the now infamous attack on the al-Ahli hospital in Gaza on October 17.

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For the foreseeable future — and I’m talking decades and even centuries, not years — millions of people around the world will wholeheartedly believe that Israel intentionally bombed a hospital in Gaza, killing 500 Palestinians in an act of genocide aimed at eradicating the Palestinian people. There is nothing, now, that can be done to erase this notion. It will be held up as the essential example of Jewish bloodlust, and will be trotted out as justification — and a rallying cry — for acts of violence against Jews and Israelis everywhere.. 

The story of al-Ahli hospital is built on a lie, but rather than having been conjured up in the dark fringes of an antisemite’s basement, it was formed on the front pages of the world’s major media outlets.

An explosion did indeed occur at the hospital on October 17. Shortly thereafter, the New York Times printed what Hamas told them. “Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians Say. At Least 500 Dead in Gaza Attack, as Biden Prepares to Visit Israel.” Of course the New York Times didn’t mention that the Palestinians quoted in the headline were Hamas. Of course the New York Times didn’t bother to confirm the story, or express any skepticism. Not only did the New York Times not provide a shred of evidence from Hamas that it was an Israeli attack, they discounted what they already knew. Which is that decades of evidence actually demonstrates that the Israeli military does not target civilians, and that, therefore, such a direct attack on a hospital would be extraordinarily unusual. But instead, the Western world’s most important newspaper accepted without question that Israel must have bombed the hospital. Because a genocidal regime waging war against Israel told them so. A BBC reporter informed his readers that Israel was investigating. “But, you know, it’s hard to see what else this could be, really — given the size of the explosion — other than an Israeli airstrike or several airstrikes.”

As it turns out, there were other things it could possibly be. Everything we know today tells us that it was a misfired rocket from the Islamic Jihad terrorist group. Aimed at Israel, it instead crashed into the parking lot of the hospital, not the hospital itself. Instead of 500 killed, estimates vary between a dozen and a couple hundred. A tragedy in any number — killed not by Israel, but by Hamas.

The media, however, struggled to keep up. The New York Times changed its headline from an Israeli strike to just a strike to a blast, while other outlets still leaned into the Israeli air strike story while hedging their bets with a mention of the Islamic Jihad rocket. Eventually many news outlets threw up their hands, declaring the hospital attack to be a matter of “dispute” between Israelis and Palestinians. Finally, six days later, the New York Times admitted it had received no evidence from Hamas as to the Israeli air strike or the casualty count. “The report left readers with an incorrect impression about what was known and how credible the account was.” 

That incorrect impression, pushed so hard by the media, had real-world impact. Jordan and Egypt canceled their upcoming meeting with President Biden, what was supposed to be an important diplomatic moment. Riots broke out against both Israel and United States. A Molotov cocktail was thrown at a synagogue in Berlin, Jews were harassed, and Israel was condemned worldwide. The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting  and Analysis, known as CAMERA, studies the way the media impacts the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They write that, ultimately, “the message delivered to those Palestinian terrorists responsible was that even when they kill their own civilians, Israel will be blamed.”

So what we have is a situation in which Hamas’ claims are instantly accepted, while Israel’s denials are met with skepticism, doubt, and days of investigation in which, the media concludes the truth cannot be determined. Michael Oren is an American-Israeli diplomat, politician, and historian. He writes that, “Reflexively, the world imputed evil to Israel. [I]t was the mediaʼs predictable switch from an Israel-empathetic to an Israel-demonizing narrative as the image of Palestinian suffering supplanted that of Israelis beheaded, dismembered, and burnt. It was the gnawing awareness that dead Jews buy us only so much sympathy.”

The al-Ahli lie, unfortunately, is here to stay. 

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The al-Alhi hospital is just the most dramatic of the coverage of this war, but it fits a very longstanding pattern. The media uncritically accepts charges of Israeli atrocities, eagerly plastering them on the front pages before later acknowledging Israel’s denials, which are never presented as convincingly as the original accusation. Israel is always guilty until proven, well, not innocent. The scholar Yossi Klein Halevi writes that, “Whether Israel had technically committed this particular crime, it was guilty because it could have bombed the hospital, because sooner or later it will commit an atrocity, because it is in essence, for much of the world, a criminal state.”

There is a long history here, of the media and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and it’s worth mentioning a few broad points. 

I was at an event this past weekend and ended up talking about the war with an experienced media executive. He told me that news directors have lost control of their newsrooms. These outlets are filled with young journalists who see themselves as social justice advocates, not objective reporters. They have bought into the narrative that Israel is the ultimate white oppressor state, and the Palestinians helpless victims of color. This ideology has captured the American cultural landscape and has been imported to the international scene. These young journalists insist that the Middle East fit neatly into the black-vs-white racial narrative of the United States, and so impose that perspective in order to flatten the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Taking that logic to its extreme, then, is to accept at face-value Hamas’ claim to be liberators of the Palestinians, and to discount any information from the Israeli side as white supremacy. As Michael Oren puts it, “I’ve long known that the terrorists are ‘militants’ solely because their victims are Jews, and only in a conflict with Israel are terrorists considered credible.”

Of course there are plenty of honest reasons why reporting in such wartime conditions can sometimes go wrong. Matti Friedman is an American-Israeli writer and journalist who has written extensively on the way the media reports on Israel. He notes such mistakes as being due to reporters being in a hurry, editors who are overworked, events changing rapidly in what can be dangerous environments. But Friedman also dismisses those as being responsible for small-scale errors, not the overwhelming biases we see ever-present in the coverage. He, too, notes that journalists swim in their own very particular social circles. And when it comes to Israel, they are especially entwined with non-governmental organizations, humanitarian groups that reporters admire and therefore don’t critically cover. 

Writing back in 2014, Matti Friedman said, “In these circles, in my opinion, a distaste for Israel has come to be something between an acceptable prejudice and a prerequisite for entry. I don’t mean a critical approach to Israeli policies or to the ham-fisted government currently in charge in this country, but a belief to some extent that the Jews of Israel are a symbol of the world’s ills, particularly those connected to nationalism, militarism, colonialism, and racism.” This belief system, he writes, translates into editorial decisions that are designed to maximize this symbolism while minimizing any responsibilities on the Palestinians’ part. Friedman writes it’s how you end up with, say, the press ignoring stories about Hamas importing weapons into Gaza, because those stories don’t help the journalists who see their job as advocating for the Palestinians. Friedman writes, “for the international press, the uglier characteristics of Palestinian politics and society are mostly untouchable because they would disrupt the Israel story, which is a story of Jewish moral failure.”

When journalists don’t follow this narrative, though, there are always threats. One of the reasons that reporting on Israel can be so critical is because it’s allowed in the open and free Israeli democracy. No such openness exists in Gaza. Hamas has strict guidelines for reporting on Gaza, such as what can be posted on social media, what can be photographed, what can be written. Bullying, intimidation, equipment confiscation, deportation, and physical threats are all levied against journalists who dare to photograph Hamas fighters in civilian clothing, or take footage of Hamas firing rockets from elementary schools. Because Hamas considers the media to be there for the sole purpose of reporting on Israeli atrocities, any efforts otherwise are deemed to be collaboration with the Zionist enemy. And so many reporters are cowed into silence, refusing to either report what they saw or even admit that they were threatened. Thus they become not objective journalists but official PR agents for a genocidal terrorist group. 

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Michael Oren, the diplomat and historian, writes, “The media is both a mirror and a disseminator of ideas, its two-way function incalculably amplified by the internet. So, the assumption of Jewish guilt and Palestinian innocence permeates the petitions signed by Hollywood stars and Starbucks workers that scarcely mention Hamasʼs unimaginable crimes while emphasizing Israelʼs imagined ones. So, the image of Jews as both child-killers and God-like in their powers translates into accusations that Israelis actually enjoy murdering women and children, deliberately targeting journalists, and crucifying the pure and powerless Palestinians.”

You should not conclude from all this that Israel hasn’t killed any Palestinian civilians in this war. Undoubtedly they have, though it is impossible to tell how many, and, again, there is no evidence it was done deliberately. But it is inevitable that over the course of this war, Israel will make mistakes, as every military does, in which a misplaced air strike really will tragically kill Palestinians civilians. We can easily imagine how the media will cover it.

And so I’m left with my original conundrum: what to believe when the information is coming out of Gaza. To believe nothing would too easily and unjustly dismiss the very real suffering of the Palestinian civilians, who are trapped between their tyrannical oppressors and the Israeli army determined to defend their homes. But to accept the facts and figures reported by the news media would reveal my foolishness in crediting mass murders bent on Israel’s destruction. It’s yet another dimension of this conflict that offers no easy solutions. 

The best advice I can give in a nutshell is to be skeptical and to have patience. The article should say that it’s the Hamas Gaza Ministry of Health, and it should admit that the numbers cannot be independently verified. If those aren’t prominently admitted, then let’s be very skeptical. And the second thing is to have patience for a more complete picture around body counts and facts. That goes for both sides. For instance, today the news is that Israel has struck a refugee camp in Gaza. While Hamas is claiming Israeli war crimes for intentionally murdering Palestinian refugees, Israel says that the IDF was targeting — and killed — a top Hamas commander, terrorists, and the camp’s underlying military infrastructure. Time will tell which version is the more likely. 

So plenty more to talk about. I’m working on an episode right now about the tremendous — and tremendously-frustrating — support that Hamas is enjoying around the world, especially from young people. And it seems that Israel’s ground operation into Gaza has fully begun, which means we need to talk about what happens after. There’s Israeli politics to consider, Palestinians politics, what’s happening in the West Bank, and a few people have asked me to get into how the United Nations fits into all this — the fraught relationship Israel has with that organization. And so much more.

I am, as always, at jewoughtaknow.com and jewoughtaknowpodcast@gmail.com. Thanks for listening, Am Yisrael Chai — the Jewish People live.

© Jason Harris 2023