Stephanie Gutmann's The Other War: Israelis, Palestinians and the Struggle for Media Supremacy
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In a world where the New York Times’ most progressive columnist on the issue of Israel and Palestine is Thomas Friedman, it seems confusing that Israel’s amen-corner accuses the mainstream media of being pro-Palestine. No side in any conflict is going to like how it looks in the press. But Stephanie Gutmann’s book takes us deeper.
Gutmann, who has written for the Times and the neoconservative Weekly Standard, traveled to Israel to find out what was causing the “psychosis,”— the word she uses for sympathy for the Palestinians—sweeping America.
“It was as if this image of the Boy-versus-Tank had become a projective screen for anyone and everyone’s sense of personal grievance,” she writes. “Boy-versus-Tank could become David and Goliath, Poor versus Rich, the Third World versus Western Colonialism, Man versus Machine, even you-in-third-grade versus those-guys-who-always-beat-up after school.”
Gutmann does not attempt to debunk the “Boy-versus-Tank” paradigm. Instead, besides providing a few humorous observations (“For one thing, Israel is simply too splintered and disorganized to run a nice, clean fascist government”), she argues that Western journalists in the Middle East tend to sympathize more with the Palestinians than with the state of Israel. This skews their coverage.
It would have been great enjoyment for any reader if Gutmann had given some account that portrays the Palestinians—who live under foreign military rule, curfews, and are confined to utter squalor—as enjoying the same standard of living as their Israeli counterparts who can travel freely between cafes in Tel Aviv or between Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank. Not to mention that the Israeli government has high-tech weaponry while the Palestinians are left with stones, homemade explosives, ancient Kalashnikovs, and slingshots.
In Gutmann's travels we meet many journalists who hunger for propagandistic footage of Palestinian suffering with no genuine interest in getting the Israeli government’s side of the story. She cites a few examples where journalists have shirked their duty to be balanced. Gutmann gives a lengthy account of how foreign correspondents initially assumed Israel had committed mass murder at the Jenin refugee camp before the facts became clear. Monitoring the Chicago Tribune's coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, she writes, “In one set of headlines, ‘bombs’ seem to explode themselves and kill Israelis, while in the second set, ‘Israelis’ very clearly kill Palestinians.”
What irks Gutmann is that the Israeli security apparatus is often under more scrutiny by the press than the Palestinian Authority and militant Palestinian groups. But why should they be treated the same? Israel is a sovereign state with an elected government. Palestinians are stateless with a government-like body, while much of their day-to-day existence is dictated by the IDF. And with such heavy coverage of suicide bombings in Israel, the media are not doing any favors for groups like Hamas.
Its media recognition of the imbalanced power dynamic that really bugs Gutmann. Her prejudices are revealed in the book’s first eleven words, “Jews (later known as Israelis) and Arabs (later known as Palestinians)…” The “Jew versus Arab” paradigm has a very specific power structure. “This mental mapping,” Christopher Hitchens writes in Slate, “with a small Zionist island amid a vast sea of swirling Arab regimes, semiautomatically enlisted the latent sympathy for the underdog that was the least one could expect after the Jewish experience in Eastern and Central Europe.” Before the Six Day War, the persecuted Jew was being picked on by the autocratic regimes of the Arab states. After 1967, things changed.
Beginning with the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, followed by the first Intifada in 1987, for the first time, foreign correspondents encountered a different Israel - one which, with massive amounts of American economic and military assistance, acted like a violent colonial power instead of an innocent, friendless state continually on the defensive. Thus, the now-familiar imagery of Israeli tanks confronting stone-throwing youths, and children like Mohamed al-Dura getting caught in crossfire between guerillas and IDF troops. The message in this iconography is simple: It is Israel that controls the situation of the Palestinians, not the other way around.
Lamenting that many journalists do not side with Israel, Gutmann fears that if people understand the current balance of power in Israel/Palestine, Israel will never earn the sympathy of the outside world. Thus, in The Other War, she intends to expose the shortcomings of many Western journalists working in the Middle East in order to call into question what we read and see concerning the Occupation, and how it unfairly distorts our understanding of Israel's side of the story.
While there is much to complain about regarding a great deal of mainstream coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Gutmann's analysis typifies the kinds of apologetics we are used to hearing from American Jewish neoconservatives. The media is biased, if not anti-Semitic and the Palestinians are master manipulators of spin. However, Gutmann's arguments are sharp and her investigative reporting is excellent.For progressives seeking to reform media coverage of the Middle East, they are worth taking into account in order to fully understand the complaints of the other side, particularly when they are as intelligently executed as The Other War. However, the author's ideological motivations frequently undermine her investigative coups.
Media manipulation, disinformation and the coercion of journalists is a permanent part of any conflict. While it is a categorical imperative for journalists to always be wary of taking sides, in The Other War, Gutmann's zealousness in correcting the historical record often obscures the brutality of the Occupation. In this sense, contrary to the author's desire, the loser remains Israel. While the Diaspora left could indeed be more charitable to Israelis - and do a better job of distinguishing between its citizens and the policies of the Israeli state - neoconservative Jewish criticisms of media bias such as Gutmann's do little to correct this painful and dehumanizing deficit.
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