With Gaza, Journalists Fail Again

The assault on
Gaza exposed not only Israel's callous disregard for international law
but the gutlessness of the American press. There were no major
newspapers, television networks or radio stations that challenged
Israel's fabricated version of events that led to the Gaza attack or
the daily lies Israel used to justify the unjustifiable. Nearly all
reporters were, as during the buildup to the Iraq war, pliant
stenographers and echo chambers. If we as journalists have a product to
sell, it is credibility. Take that credibility away and we become
little more than propagandists and advertisers. By refusing to expose
lies we destroy, in the end, ourselves.

All governments lie in wartime. Israel is no exception. Israel
waged an effective war of black propaganda. It lied craftily with its
glib, well-rehearsed government spokespeople, its ban on all foreign
press in Gaza and its confiscation of cell phones and cameras from its
own soldiers lest the reality of the attack inadvertently seep out. It
was the Arabic network al-Jazeera,
along with a handful of local reporters in Gaza, which upheld the honor
of our trade, that of giving a voice to those who without our presence
would have no voice, that of countering the amplified lies of the
powerful with the faint cries and pain of the oppressed. But these
examples of journalistic integrity were too few and barely heard by us.

We retreated, as usual, into the moral void of American journalism,
the void of balance and objectivity. The ridiculous notion of being
unbiased, outside of the flow of human existence, impervious to grief
or pain or anger or injustice, allows reporters to coolly give truth
and lies equal space and airtime. Balance and objectivity are the
antidote to facing unpleasant truths, a way of avoidance, a way to
placate the powerful. We record the fury of a Palestinian who has lost
his child in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza but make sure to mention
Israel's "security needs," include statements by Israeli officials who
insist there was firing from the home or the mosque or the school and
of course note Israel's right to defend itself. We do this throughout
the Middle East. We record the human toll in Iraq, caused by our
occupation, but remind everyone that "Saddam killed his own people." We
write about the deaths of families in Afghanistan during an airstrike
but never forget to mention that the Taliban "oppresses women." Their
crimes cancel out our crimes. It becomes a moral void. And above all we
never forget to mention the "war on terror." We ask how and who but never, never do we ask why.
As long as we speak in the cold, dead language of those in power, the
language that says a lie is as valid as a fact, the language where one
version of history is as good as another, we are part of the problem,
not the solution.

"Bombs and rockets are flying between Israel and Palestinians in
Gaza, and once again, The Times is caught in a familiar crossfire,
accused from all sides of unfair and inaccurate coverage," New York
Times public editor
Clark Hoyt breezily
began in writing his assessment of the paper's coverage, going on to
conclude "though the most vociferous supporters of Israel and the
Palestinians do not agree, I think The Times, largely barred from the
battlefield and reporting amid the chaos of war, has tried its best to
do a fair, balanced and complete job-and has largely succeeded."

The cliche that Israel had a right to defend itself from Hamas
rocket attacks--that bombs and rockets were "flying between Israel and
Palestinians in Gaza"--was accepted in the press as an undisputed truth.
It became the starting point for every hollow discussion of the Israeli
attack. It left pundits and columnists chattering about
"proportionality," not legality. Israel was in open violation of
international law, specifically Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva
Convention, which calls on an occupying power to respect the safety of
occupied civilians. But you would not know this from the press reports.
The use of attack aircraft and naval ships, part of the world's
fourth-largest military power, to level densely packed slums of people
who were hungry, without power and often water, people surrounded on
all sides by the Israeli army, was fatuously described as a war. The
news coverage held up the absurd notion that a few Hamas fighters with
light weapons and no organization were a counterforce to F-16 fighter
jets, tank battalions, thousands of Israeli soldiers, armored personnel
carriers, naval ships and Apache attack helicopters. It fit the Israeli
narrative. It may have been balanced and objective. But it was not true.

The Hamas rockets are crude, often made from old pipes, and largely
ineffectual. The first homemade Qassam rocket was fired across the
Israeli border in October 2001. It was not until June 2004 that Israel
suffered its first fatality. There are 24 Israelis who have been killed
by Hamas rocket fire, compared with 5,000 Palestinian dead, more than
half of them in Gaza, at least a third of them children. This does not
absolve Hamas from firing rockets at civilian areas, which is a war
crime, but it does raise questions about the story line swallowed
without reflection by the press. I covered the Kosovo Albanians'
desperate attempts to resist the Serbs, which resulted in a handful of
Serb casualties, but no one ever described the lopsided Serbian
butchery in Kosovo as a war. It was called genocide, and it led to NATO
intervention to halt it.

It was Israel, not Hamas, which
violated the truce established last June. This was never made clear in
any of the press reports. Hamas agreed to halt rocket fire into Gaza in
exchange for an Israeli promise to ease the draconian siege that made
the shipment of vital material and food into Gaza nearly impossible.
And once the agreement was reached, the Hamas rocket fire ended.
Israel, however, never upheld its end of the agreement. It increased
the severity of the siege. U.N. agencies complained. International
relief organizations condemned the Israeli blockade. And there were
even rumblings inside Israel. Shmuel Zakai,
an Israeli brigadier general who resigned as commander of the Israel
Defense Forces' Gaza Division and was forcibly discharged from the
military amid allegations that he leaked information to the media, told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on Dec. 22 that the Israeli government had made a "central error" during the tahdiyeh,
the six-month period of relative truce, by failing "to take advantage
of the calm to improve, rather than markedly worsen, the economic
plight of the Palestinians of the Strip. ... [W]hen you create a tahdiyeh, and the economic pressure on the Strip continues," Zakai said, "it is obvious that Hamas will try to reach an improved tahdiyeh,
and that their way to achieve this is resumed Qassam fire. ... You cannot
just land blows, leave the Palestinians in Gaza in the economic
distress they're in, and expect that Hamas will just sit around and do
nothing."

Israel, we know from papers such as Haaretz, started planning this
assault last March. The Israeli army deliberately broke the truce when
it carried out an attack on Nov. 4 that killed six Hamas fighters. It
timed the attack, the heavy air and naval bombardment and the invasion
of Gaza to coincide with the waning weeks of the Bush administration.
Israel knew it would be given carte blanche by the White House. Hamas
responded to the Nov. 4 provocation in the way Israel anticipated. It
fired Qassam rockets and Grad missiles into Israel to retaliate. But
even then Hamas offered to extend the truce if Israel would lift the
blockade. Israel refused. Operation Cast Lead was unleashed.

Henry Siegman,
the director of the U.S./ Middle East Project at the Council of Foreign
Relations, noted correctly that Israel "could have met its obligation
to protect its citizens by agreeing to ease the blockade, but it didn't
even try. It cannot be said that Israel launched its assault to protect
its citizens from rockets. It did so to protect its right to continue
the strangulation of Gaza's population."

There were a few flashes of integrity in the American press. The Wall Street Journal ran a thoughtful piece,
"How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas," on Jan. 24 that was unusual in view
of acceptance in U.S. press coverage that Hamas is nothing more than an
Islamo-fascist organization that understands only violence. And some
journalists from news organizations such as the BBC did a good job once
they were finally permitted to enter Gaza. Jimmy Carter wrote
an Op-Ed article in The Washington Post detailing his and the Carter
Center's efforts to prevent the conflict. This article was an important
refutation of the Israeli argument, although it was ignored by the rest
of the media. But these were isolated cases. The publishers, news
executives and editors largely accepted without any real protest
Israel's ban on coverage and allowed Israeli officials to fill their
news pages and airtime with fabrications and distortions. And this made
the war crimes carried out by the Israeli army easier to commit and
prolong.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who is acutely aware of Israel's violations of international law, has already begun to reassure his commanders that they will be protected from war crimes prosecution.

"The commanders and soldiers that were sent on the task in Gaza
should know that they are safe from any tribunal and that the State of
Israel will assist them in this issue and protect them as they
protected us with their bodies during the military operation in Gaza,"
he said.

Israel's brutal military tactics, despite the lack of coverage in
the American press, have come under intense international scrutiny.
Human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights
Watch, blame the high civilian death toll on indiscriminate firing and
shelling, as well as the use of white phosphorus
shells in civilian areas. Israel has admitted using white phosphorus in
Gaza but insists the chemical, used for smoke screens and to mark spots
to be shelled or bombed, was not used directly against civilians.

Hamas is an unsavory organization. It has made life miserable for
many in Gaza and carried out a series of death-squad-style executions
of alleged opponents. But Hamas, elected to power in 2006, also brought
effective civil control to Gaza. Gaza, ruled by warring factions,
warlords, clans, kidnapping rings and criminal gangs, had descended
into chaos under Mahmoud Abbas' corrupt Fatah-led government.
Hamas, once it assumed power, halted suicide bombing attacks on Israel.
It ended rocket fire into Israel for almost a year. It upheld its
agreement with Israel. Hamas' willingness to negotiate with Israel,
albeit through Egyptian intermediaries, led al-Qaida, which has been
working to make inroads among the Palestinians, to condemn the Hamas
leadership as collaborators.

Israel and the United States carried out an abortive and desperate
attempt to overthrow Hamas by arming and backing a Fatah putsch in June
2007. They wanted to install the pliant Abbas in power. Hamas resisted,
often with violent brutality, and expelled Abbas and the Fatah
leadership from Gaza to the West Bank. Israel has now decided to do the
dirty job itself. It will not work. Israel broke and discredited Yasser
Arafat and Fatah in much the same manner. Abbas and Fatah have no
authority or credibility left. Abbas is seen by most Palestinians as a
pliant Israeli stooge. Israel is now destroying Hamas. Radical Islamic
groups, such as al-Qaida, far more violent and irrational, stand poised
to replace Hamas. And Israel will one day look wistfully at Hamas just
as it does now at Fatah. But by then, with Israel surrounded by radical
Islamic regimes in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and even Jordan, as well as
fighting a homegrown al-Qaida movement among the Palestinians, it may
be too late.

The Israeli government bears the responsibility for its crimes. But
by giving credibility to the lies and false narratives Israel uses to
justify wholesale slaughter we empower not only Israel's willful
self-destruction but our own. The press, as happened during the buildup
to the Iraq war, was again feckless and gutless. It bent to the will of
the powerful. It abandoned its sacred contract with its readers,
listeners and viewers to always tell the truth. It chattered about
nothing. It obscured the facts. It did this while hundreds of women and
children were torn to shreds by iron fragmentation bombs in a flagrant
violation of international law. And as it failed it lauded itself for
doing "a fair, balanced and complete job."