http://www.jkcook.net
Jonathan Cook: War of Media Deception
August 3, 2006
War of Media Deception
Israel, Not Hizbullah, is Putting Civilians in Danger on Both Sides of the
Border
By JONATHAN COOK
Nazareth.
Here are some interesting points raised this week by a leading commentator
and published in a respected daily newspaper: "The Israeli Prime Minister
Ehud Olmert embeds his soldiers in Israeli communities, next to schools,
beside hospitals, close to welfare centres, ensuring that any Israeli
target is also a civilian target. This is the practice the UN's Jan
Egeland had in mind when he lambasted Israel's 'cowardly blending ...
among women and children'. It may be cowardly, but in the new warfare it
also makes macabre sense. For this is a propaganda war as much as a
shooting one, and in such a conflict to lose civilians on your own side
represents a kind of victory."
You probably did not read far before realising that I had switched
"Israel" for "Hizbullah" and "Ehud Olmert" for "Hassan Nasrallah". The
paragraph was taken from an opinion piece by Jonathan Freedland published
in Britain's Guardian newspaper on 2 August. My attempt at deception was
futile because no one seems to seriously believe that criticisms of the
kind expressed above can be levelled against Israel.
Freedland, like most commentators in our media, assumes that Hizbullah is
using the Lebanese population as "human shields", hiding its fighters,
arsenals and rocket launchers inside civilian areas. "Cowardly" behaviour
rather than the nature of Israel's air strikes, in his view, explains the
spiralling death toll among Lebanese civilians. This perception of
Hizbullah's tactics grows more common by the day, even though it flies in
the face of the research of independent observers in Lebanon such as Human
Rights Watch.
Explaining the findings of its latest report, HRW's executive director,
Kenneth Roth, blames Israel for targeting civilians indiscriminately in
Lebanon. "The pattern of attacks shows the Israeli military's disturbing
disregard for the lives of Lebanese civilians. Our research shows that
Israel's claim that Hezbollah [sic] fighters are hiding among civilians
does not explain, let alone justify, Israel's indiscriminate warfare."
HRW has analysed the casualty figures from two dozen Israeli air strikes
and found that more than 40 per cent of the dead are children: 63 out of
153 fatalities. Conservatively, HRW puts the civilian death toll so far at
over 500. Lebanese hospital records suggest the figure is now well over
750, with potentially many more bodies yet to be excavated from the rubble
of buildings obliterated by Israeli attacks.
Giving the lie to the "human shields" theory, HRW says its researchers
"found numerous cases in which the IDF [Israeli army] launched artillery
and air attacks with limited or dubious military objectives but excessive
civilian cost. In many cases, Israeli forces struck an area with no
apparent military target. In some instances, Israeli forces appear to have
deliberately targeted civilians."
In fact, of the 24 incidents they document, HRW researchers could find no
evidence that Hizbullah was operating in or near the areas that were
attacked by the Israeli air force. Roth states: "The image that Israel has
promoted of such [human] shielding as the cause of so high a civilian
death toll is wrong. In the many cases of civilian deaths examined by
Human Rights Watch, the location of Hezbollah troops and arms had nothing
to do with the deaths because there was no Hezbollah around."
The impression that Hizbullah is using civilians as human shields has been
reinforced, according to HRW, by official Israeli statements that have
"blurred the distinction between civilians and combatants, arguing that
only people associated with Hezbollah remain in southern Lebanon, so all
are legitimate targets of attack."
Freedland makes a similar point. Echoing comments by the UN's Jan Egeland,
he says Hizbullah fighters are "cowardly blending" with Lebanon's civilian
population. It is difficult to know what to make of this observation. If
Freedland means that Hizbullah fighters come from Lebanese towns and
villages and have families living there whom they visit and live among, he
is right. But exactly the same can be said of Israel and its soldiers, who
return from the battlefront (in this case inside Lebanon, as they are now
an invading army) to live with parents or spouses in Israeli communities.
Armed and uniformed soldiers can be seen all over Israel, sitting in
trains, queuing in banks, waiting with civilians at bus stops. Does that
mean they are "cowardly blending' with Israel's civilian population?
Egeland and Freedland's criticism seems to amount to little more than
blaming Hizbullah fighters for not standing in open fields waiting to be
picked off by Israeli tanks and war planes. That, presumably, would be
brave. But in reality no army fights in this way, and Hizbullah can hardly
be criticised for using the only strategic defences it has: its
underground bunkers and the crumbling fortifications of Lebanese villages
ruined by Israeli pounding. An army defending itself from invasion has to
make the most of whatever protection it can find: as long as it does not
intentionally put civilians at risk. But HRW's research shows convincingly
that Hizbullah is not doing this.
So if Israeli officials have been deceiving us about what has been
occurring inside Lebanon, have they also been misleading us about
Hizbullah's rocket attacks on Israel? Should we take at face value
government and army statements that Hizbullah's strikes into Israel are
targeting civilians indiscriminately, or do they need more serious
investigation?
Although we should not romanticise Hizbullah, equally we should not be
quick to demonise it either: unless there is convincing evidence
suggesting it has been firing on civilian targets. The problem is that
Israel has been abusing very successfully its military censorship rules
governing both its domestic media and visiting foreign journalists to
prevent meaningful discussion of what Hizbullah has been trying to hit
inside Israel.
I live in northern Israel in the Arab city of Nazareth. A week into the
war we were hit by Hizbullah rockets that killed two young brothers. The
attack, it was widely claimed, was proof either that Hizbullah was
indiscriminately targeting civilians (so indiscriminately, the argument
went, that it was hitting fellow Arabs) or that the Shiite militia was so
committed to a fanatical war against the Judeo-Christian world that it was
happy to kill Nazareth's Christian Arabs too. The latter claim could be
easily dismissed: it depended both on a "clash of civilisations"
philosophy not shared by Hizbullah and on the mistaken assumption that
Nazareth is a Christian city, when in fact, as is well-known to Hizbullah,
Nazareth has a convincing Muslim majority.
But to anyone living in Nazareth, it was clear the rocket attack on the
city was not indiscriminate either. It was a mistake -- something
Nasrallah quickly confirmed in one of his televised speeches. The real
target of the strike was known to Nazarenes: close by the city are a
military weapons factory and a large military camp. Hizbullah knows the
locations of these military targets because this year, as was widely
reported in the Israeli media at the time, it managed to fly an unmanned
drone over the Galilee photographing the area in detail -- employing the
same spying techniques used for many years by Israel against Lebanon.
One of Hizbullah's first rocket attacks after the outbreak of hostilities
-- after Israel went on the bombing offensive by blitzing targets across
Lebanon -- was on a kibbutz overlooking the border with Lebanon. Some
foreign correspondents noted at the time (though given Israel's press
censorship laws I cannot confirm) that the rocket strike targeted a
top-secret military traffic control centre built into the Galilee's hills.
There are hundreds of similar military installations next to or inside
Israel's northern communities. Some distance from Nazareth, for example,
Israel has built a large weapons factory virtually on top of an Arab town
-- so close to it, in fact, that the factory's perimeter fence is only a
few metres from the main building of the local junior school. There have
been reports of rockets landing close to that Arab community.
How these kind of attacks are being unfairly presented in the Israeli and
foreign media was highlighted recently when it was widely reported that a
Hizbullah rocket had landed "near a hospital" in a named Israeli city, not
the first time that such a claim has been made over the past few weeks. I
cannot name the city, again because of Israel's press censorship laws and
because I also want to point out that very "near" that hospital is an army
camp. The media suggested that Hizbullah was trying to hit the hospital,
but it is also more than possible it was trying to strike -- and may have
struck -- the army camp.
Israel's military censorship laws are therefore allowing officials to
misrepresent, unchallenged, any attack by Hizbullah as an indiscriminate
strike against civilian targets.
Audiences ought to be alerted to this danger by their media. Any reports
touching on "security matters" are supposed to be submitted to the
country's military censor, but few media are pointing this out in their
reporting. Most justify this deception to themselves on the grounds that
in practice they never run their reports by the censor as it would delay
publication.
Instead, they avoid problems with the military censor either by
self-censoring their reporting on security issues or by relying on what
has already been published in the Israeli media on the assumption that in
these ways they are unlikely to contravene the rules.
An email memo, written by a senior BBC editor and leaked more than a week
ago, discusses the growing restrictions being placed on the organisation's
reporters in Israel. It hints at some of the problems noted above,
observing that "the more general we are, the free-er hand we have; more
specific and it becomes increasingly tricky." The editor says the channel
will notify viewers of these restrictions in "the narrative of the story".
"The teams on the ground will make clear what they can and cannot say --
and if necessary make clear that we're operating under reporting
restrictions." In practice, however, BBC correspondents, like most of
their media colleagues, rarely alert us to the fact they are operating
under censorship, and self-censorship, or that they cannot give us the
full picture of what is happening.
Because of this, commentators like Freedland are drawing conclusions that
cannot be sustained by the available evidence. He notes in his article
that "this is a propaganda war as much as a shooting one". He is right,
but does not seem to know who is really winning the propaganda offensive.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is
the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the
Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and available in
the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is
www.jkcook.net
Jonathan Cook: War of Media Deception
August 3, 2006
War of Media Deception
Israel, Not Hizbullah, is Putting Civilians in Danger on Both Sides of the
Border
By JONATHAN COOK
Nazareth.
Here are some interesting points raised this week by a leading commentator
and published in a respected daily newspaper: "The Israeli Prime Minister
Ehud Olmert embeds his soldiers in Israeli communities, next to schools,
beside hospitals, close to welfare centres, ensuring that any Israeli
target is also a civilian target. This is the practice the UN's Jan
Egeland had in mind when he lambasted Israel's 'cowardly blending ...
among women and children'. It may be cowardly, but in the new warfare it
also makes macabre sense. For this is a propaganda war as much as a
shooting one, and in such a conflict to lose civilians on your own side
represents a kind of victory."
You probably did not read far before realising that I had switched
"Israel" for "Hizbullah" and "Ehud Olmert" for "Hassan Nasrallah". The
paragraph was taken from an opinion piece by Jonathan Freedland published
in Britain's Guardian newspaper on 2 August. My attempt at deception was
futile because no one seems to seriously believe that criticisms of the
kind expressed above can be levelled against Israel.
Freedland, like most commentators in our media, assumes that Hizbullah is
using the Lebanese population as "human shields", hiding its fighters,
arsenals and rocket launchers inside civilian areas. "Cowardly" behaviour
rather than the nature of Israel's air strikes, in his view, explains the
spiralling death toll among Lebanese civilians. This perception of
Hizbullah's tactics grows more common by the day, even though it flies in
the face of the research of independent observers in Lebanon such as Human
Rights Watch.
Explaining the findings of its latest report, HRW's executive director,
Kenneth Roth, blames Israel for targeting civilians indiscriminately in
Lebanon. "The pattern of attacks shows the Israeli military's disturbing
disregard for the lives of Lebanese civilians. Our research shows that
Israel's claim that Hezbollah [sic] fighters are hiding among civilians
does not explain, let alone justify, Israel's indiscriminate warfare."
HRW has analysed the casualty figures from two dozen Israeli air strikes
and found that more than 40 per cent of the dead are children: 63 out of
153 fatalities. Conservatively, HRW puts the civilian death toll so far at
over 500. Lebanese hospital records suggest the figure is now well over
750, with potentially many more bodies yet to be excavated from the rubble
of buildings obliterated by Israeli attacks.
Giving the lie to the "human shields" theory, HRW says its researchers
"found numerous cases in which the IDF [Israeli army] launched artillery
and air attacks with limited or dubious military objectives but excessive
civilian cost. In many cases, Israeli forces struck an area with no
apparent military target. In some instances, Israeli forces appear to have
deliberately targeted civilians."
In fact, of the 24 incidents they document, HRW researchers could find no
evidence that Hizbullah was operating in or near the areas that were
attacked by the Israeli air force. Roth states: "The image that Israel has
promoted of such [human] shielding as the cause of so high a civilian
death toll is wrong. In the many cases of civilian deaths examined by
Human Rights Watch, the location of Hezbollah troops and arms had nothing
to do with the deaths because there was no Hezbollah around."
The impression that Hizbullah is using civilians as human shields has been
reinforced, according to HRW, by official Israeli statements that have
"blurred the distinction between civilians and combatants, arguing that
only people associated with Hezbollah remain in southern Lebanon, so all
are legitimate targets of attack."
Freedland makes a similar point. Echoing comments by the UN's Jan Egeland,
he says Hizbullah fighters are "cowardly blending" with Lebanon's civilian
population. It is difficult to know what to make of this observation. If
Freedland means that Hizbullah fighters come from Lebanese towns and
villages and have families living there whom they visit and live among, he
is right. But exactly the same can be said of Israel and its soldiers, who
return from the battlefront (in this case inside Lebanon, as they are now
an invading army) to live with parents or spouses in Israeli communities.
Armed and uniformed soldiers can be seen all over Israel, sitting in
trains, queuing in banks, waiting with civilians at bus stops. Does that
mean they are "cowardly blending' with Israel's civilian population?
Egeland and Freedland's criticism seems to amount to little more than
blaming Hizbullah fighters for not standing in open fields waiting to be
picked off by Israeli tanks and war planes. That, presumably, would be
brave. But in reality no army fights in this way, and Hizbullah can hardly
be criticised for using the only strategic defences it has: its
underground bunkers and the crumbling fortifications of Lebanese villages
ruined by Israeli pounding. An army defending itself from invasion has to
make the most of whatever protection it can find: as long as it does not
intentionally put civilians at risk. But HRW's research shows convincingly
that Hizbullah is not doing this.
So if Israeli officials have been deceiving us about what has been
occurring inside Lebanon, have they also been misleading us about
Hizbullah's rocket attacks on Israel? Should we take at face value
government and army statements that Hizbullah's strikes into Israel are
targeting civilians indiscriminately, or do they need more serious
investigation?
Although we should not romanticise Hizbullah, equally we should not be
quick to demonise it either: unless there is convincing evidence
suggesting it has been firing on civilian targets. The problem is that
Israel has been abusing very successfully its military censorship rules
governing both its domestic media and visiting foreign journalists to
prevent meaningful discussion of what Hizbullah has been trying to hit
inside Israel.
I live in northern Israel in the Arab city of Nazareth. A week into the
war we were hit by Hizbullah rockets that killed two young brothers. The
attack, it was widely claimed, was proof either that Hizbullah was
indiscriminately targeting civilians (so indiscriminately, the argument
went, that it was hitting fellow Arabs) or that the Shiite militia was so
committed to a fanatical war against the Judeo-Christian world that it was
happy to kill Nazareth's Christian Arabs too. The latter claim could be
easily dismissed: it depended both on a "clash of civilisations"
philosophy not shared by Hizbullah and on the mistaken assumption that
Nazareth is a Christian city, when in fact, as is well-known to Hizbullah,
Nazareth has a convincing Muslim majority.
But to anyone living in Nazareth, it was clear the rocket attack on the
city was not indiscriminate either. It was a mistake -- something
Nasrallah quickly confirmed in one of his televised speeches. The real
target of the strike was known to Nazarenes: close by the city are a
military weapons factory and a large military camp. Hizbullah knows the
locations of these military targets because this year, as was widely
reported in the Israeli media at the time, it managed to fly an unmanned
drone over the Galilee photographing the area in detail -- employing the
same spying techniques used for many years by Israel against Lebanon.
One of Hizbullah's first rocket attacks after the outbreak of hostilities
-- after Israel went on the bombing offensive by blitzing targets across
Lebanon -- was on a kibbutz overlooking the border with Lebanon. Some
foreign correspondents noted at the time (though given Israel's press
censorship laws I cannot confirm) that the rocket strike targeted a
top-secret military traffic control centre built into the Galilee's hills.
There are hundreds of similar military installations next to or inside
Israel's northern communities. Some distance from Nazareth, for example,
Israel has built a large weapons factory virtually on top of an Arab town
-- so close to it, in fact, that the factory's perimeter fence is only a
few metres from the main building of the local junior school. There have
been reports of rockets landing close to that Arab community.
How these kind of attacks are being unfairly presented in the Israeli and
foreign media was highlighted recently when it was widely reported that a
Hizbullah rocket had landed "near a hospital" in a named Israeli city, not
the first time that such a claim has been made over the past few weeks. I
cannot name the city, again because of Israel's press censorship laws and
because I also want to point out that very "near" that hospital is an army
camp. The media suggested that Hizbullah was trying to hit the hospital,
but it is also more than possible it was trying to strike -- and may have
struck -- the army camp.
Israel's military censorship laws are therefore allowing officials to
misrepresent, unchallenged, any attack by Hizbullah as an indiscriminate
strike against civilian targets.
Audiences ought to be alerted to this danger by their media. Any reports
touching on "security matters" are supposed to be submitted to the
country's military censor, but few media are pointing this out in their
reporting. Most justify this deception to themselves on the grounds that
in practice they never run their reports by the censor as it would delay
publication.
Instead, they avoid problems with the military censor either by
self-censoring their reporting on security issues or by relying on what
has already been published in the Israeli media on the assumption that in
these ways they are unlikely to contravene the rules.
An email memo, written by a senior BBC editor and leaked more than a week
ago, discusses the growing restrictions being placed on the organisation's
reporters in Israel. It hints at some of the problems noted above,
observing that "the more general we are, the free-er hand we have; more
specific and it becomes increasingly tricky." The editor says the channel
will notify viewers of these restrictions in "the narrative of the story".
"The teams on the ground will make clear what they can and cannot say --
and if necessary make clear that we're operating under reporting
restrictions." In practice, however, BBC correspondents, like most of
their media colleagues, rarely alert us to the fact they are operating
under censorship, and self-censorship, or that they cannot give us the
full picture of what is happening.
Because of this, commentators like Freedland are drawing conclusions that
cannot be sustained by the available evidence. He notes in his article
that "this is a propaganda war as much as a shooting one". He is right,
but does not seem to know who is really winning the propaganda offensive.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is
the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the
Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and available in
the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is
www.jkcook.net