Choosing Sides: The US Media and the Palestine Conflict

Seth Ackerman is a media analyst with Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), the media watchdog organisation in New York. His paper was initially presented at a United Nations International Meeting in Support of Middle East Peace held in Nicosia, Cyprus, on 16 and 17 April 2002.

Because of the crucial role the United States government plays in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, US public opinion is potentially a decisive element in the conflict. Since the vast majority of Americans get their information about the Middle East from a few large, established news outlets, the way these organisations present the conflict is of paramount importance.

To give some idea of the picture of the Middle East conflict that the American public has absorbed from watching and reading the news, let me describe the results of a survey carried out during the 1991 Gulf War by researchers from the University of Massachusetts.¹ It was a survey of residents of the metropolitan Denver, Colorado, area—a typical US city. The purpose of the survey was to gauge public knowledge of the Middle East.

Respondents were asked whether there were, to their knowledge, any Middle East territories in addition to Kuwait that were under occupation, and if so, which country was the occupier. Thirty-six per cent said there were no other territories under occupation. Eighteen per cent said they did not know or were not sure. Thirty-one per cent said yes, Israel is occupying land. About 3 per cent said Syria was occupying land and another 10 per cent mentioned various other countries.

Clearly, on this crucial topic, there was widespread ignorance. Yet in the same survey, it was found that 81 per cent of respondents could accurately name the type of missile that the US-led coalition against Iraq was using to intercept Iraqi Scuds—that is, the Patriot.

Occupation—a Taboo Word

The US media system may do a poor job of informing the American public about the Middle East, but it does so selectively. While Palestinian rock-throwers, suicide bombers and militiamen are in full view on American television screens night after night, the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land—continuous since 1967, condemned repeatedly by the United Nations, and rejected as contrary to international law by most of the world—is almost ethereal in its absence. It hovers over each report, and yet it never fully appears.

The word “occupation” has become almost taboo for American reporters. Even the designation “occupied territories”, once routine, has all but disappeared. In the early 1990s, “occupied territories” showed up in hundreds of New York Times articles each year—449 in 1993 and 281 in 1994. More than 40 per cent of all articles mentioning the West Bank or Gaza used the term. By the end of the decade, the number of appearances had dwindled to a few dozen. In 2001, fewer than 4 per cent of such articles mentioned the phrase.

Since the current intifada began in late 2000, the three networks’ evening news broadcasts—ABC’s World News Tonight, NBC’s Nightly News and CBS’s Evening News—have aired 464 news stories mentioning the West Bank or Gaza. Of those 464 stories, 410 failed to mention the words “occupied”, “occupation” or any other variation of the word. Thus, incredibly, almost 90 per cent of US network television reporting on the occupied territories fails to report that the territories are occupied.

Tellingly, while Israel’s occupation was mentioned in 58 per cent of the news stories in the London Independent in 2001, it was omitted from more than three-quarters of stories in the New York Times. Thus, instead of an honest accounting of each side’s grievances, journalists reporting the clashes in the West Bank and Gaza offer what is, in effect, a daily catalogue of seemingly unprovoked Palestinian aggression.

Identifying with Israel

The pattern of new coverage was set in the early days of the al-Aqsa intifada, which began in late September 2000. Take, for example, a typical story filed by ABC correspondent Jim Wooten on the 9 October 2024 broadcast of World News Tonight. Reporting from the West Bank town of Nablus, he described a skirmish between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers:

Thousands of Palestinians began a protest march in the centre of Nablus today, then headed for the outskirts, apparently looking for a confrontation with Israeli troops. And they got it. What began, as usual, with rocks and bottles soon became a genuine gun battle. One more example of how the young Palestinians’ anger is turning more violent and more deadly. Israelis on a nearby ridge opened fire on the marchers. Palestinians soon returned the fire from an olive grove beside the road. Those shooting back were part of Chairman Arafat’s Fatah organisation, but it isn’t clear if he can control the level of violence anymore, given the level of rage in these streets …

Among those injured in today’s battle, these two young men with leg wounds and this twelve-year-old boy shot in the buttocks. Did his mother know he was in the march? Did she approve? “Yes,” she said. “Every Arab should stand up and protest, continue the resistance, keep the revolution alive.”

In such reports, Israel’s grievances are on vivid display. Viewers can see Palestinians “looking for a confrontation” with Israel, wielding “rocks and bottles”, provoking a “gun battle”—yet “one more example” of how their “anger is turning more violent and more deadly”. But what are the Palestinians’ grievances? Why did they choose to confront Israel’s soldiers? Like most of his colleagues, Wooten maintains a studious silence, not mentioning the Israeli army posts surrounding Nablus or the checkpoints controlling the entrances to the town—even before the current round of violence began. Nor does he mention the bypass roads for settlers only or the ongoing expropriation of Palestinian land for the expansion of the four nearby settlements, which are populated by armed militants, many of whom support extremist religious leaders, like the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, who advocated the expulsion of Arabs from the West Bank. And finally, he makes no reference to the fact that the entire apparatus of occupation is illegal under the Geneva Conventions, or that UN Security Council resolutions have repeatedly demanded Israel’s withdrawal.

Occasionally, when the situation has quieted down for a few days, a news outlet will run an isolated feature story recounting some of the background to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Journalists will explain that the territories were “captured” by Israel in 1967 and that the settlements were subsequently built. (That the capture and settlement of the territories were illegal under international law is typically left out.) Such stories are useful, certainly. But then the next round of West Bank clashes or diplomatic moves or suicide bombings occurs, and the coverage switches back to the old routine of stories like Jim Wooten’s. Of course, it would be impossible—and unnecessary—for journalists to rehearse the whole litany of Israeli abuses in every new report on the clashes in the West Bank and Gaza. But the crucial context of occupation could easily be preserved with the use of simple modifiers: “occupied” territories instead of “disputed” territories; “illegal” settlements instead of just “settlements” (or, worse, “Jewish neighbourhoods”).

It is interesting to compare the absence of “occupation” in reporting the al-Aqsa intifada to the word’s ubiquity in covering the Kuwaiti underground—by all subsequent accounts a rather modest affair—during Iraq’s seven-month occupation of Kuwait. In 1990, Peter Jennings on ABC (World News Tonight, 6 September 2024) did not hesitate to refer to the emirate as “Iraqi-occupied Kuwait” and asked a Kuwaiti interviewee to “tell us about the resistance to the Iraqi occupation”. On CBS, Dan Rather spoke admiringly of refugees from Kuwait “bringing stories of an occupied but still unconquered nation” (Evening News, 11 September 2024), while his correspondent in the Persian Gulf reported on heroic “attacks and ambushes on Iraqi soldiers by a fledgling Kuwaiti resistance”. “It is clear that among Kuwaitis in exile there is a will to resist,” the correspondent declared.

But today in the Israeli-occupied territories, CBS correspondents talk of “Israeli soldiers under daily attack” (Evening News, 4 October 2024); “Israel … again feeling isolated and under siege” (Evening News, 8 October 2024); and, in one case where Israeli occupation troops abandoned a fortified position in the occupied West Bank, “Israelis [who] have surrendered territory to Palestinian violence” (Evening News, 7 October 2024).

Casualty Figures

Because US media outlets tend to view the Middle East conflict through the eyes of Israel, they generally focus much more attention on Israeli casualties than Palestinian casualties. Last year, FAIR conducted a quantitative study of the coverage of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict on the national publicly financed US radio network NPR (National Public Radio). The study examined how often NPR reported incidents of fatal attacks on Israelis and Palestinians during the period January through June 2001. NPR is a quality news outlet with a well-educated audience and its reporting on the Middle East is both more thoughtful and probably somewhat more balanced than that of most other national US broadcast news outlets.

During the six-month period studied, 77 Israelis and 148 Palestinians were killed in the conflict. Of those, NPR reported the deaths of 62 Israelis and 51 Palestinians. In other words, there was an 81 per cent likelihood that an Israeli death would be reported on NPR, but only a 34 per cent likelihood that a Palestinian death would be.

Even if one excludes incidents of suicide bombings within pre-1967 Israel, the results are highly lopsided. Looking only at civilians killed within the occupied territories during the period studied, there were 112 Palestinian deaths versus 28 Israeli deaths. Of these 112 Palestinian deaths, just 26 were reported on NPR. Of the 28 Israeli civilians killed in the territories—all of whom probably were settlers—21 were reported on NPR.

Looking now at incidents in both Israel and the occupied territories, of the 30 Palestinian children (under the age of 18) who were killed, the deaths of six were reported on NPR—only 20 per cent. By contrast, the network reported on 17 of the 19 Israeli minors who were killed, or 89 per cent. While 61 per cent of the young people killed in the region during the period studied were Palestinian, only 26 per cent of the deaths reported by NPR were. Apparently, being a minor makes your death more newsworthy to NPR if you are Israeli, but less newsworthy if you are Palestinian.

One of the study’s most telling findings is this: an Israeli civilian victim was more likely to have his or her death reported on NPR (84 per cent were covered) than a member of the Israeli security forces (69 per cent). But Palestinians were far more likely to have their deaths reported if they were security personnel (72 per cent) than if they were civilians (22 per cent).

Why the Bias?

Before I conclude, I would like briefly to address the question of why the US media tend to be more sympathetic to Israel than to the Palestinians. Although a full exploration of the topic is beyond the scope of this paper, I shall make a few points. First, although the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is in many respects an ethnic or religious conflict, considerations of ethnicity and religion play at the very most a secondary role in generating support for Israel in the United States. Indeed, the most influential supporters of Israel in the US media are not, for the most part, Jewish. Virtually none of them are religiously observant Jews.

Second, Israel is by no means the only country whose government finds favour in the US media. Today, for example, the US media portray the government of Colombia as an embattled democracy bravely fighting the scourge of drugs, while next door in Venezuela the regime of Hugo Chavez is depicted as unstable, neurotic, extremist and authoritarian. In Iran, the shah’s regime was admired and respected by US commentators, while his successors have been demonised.

Like Colombia and the shah’s Iran, Israel has since 1967 been regarded by US policymaking classes as an important strategic ally in its region. This was not always the case. During the 1956 Suez crisis, President Eisenhower ordered Israel and its European allies to reverse their attack on Egypt. At that time, Israel was seen differently, as a potentially disruptive and troublesome element in the Middle East. After 1967, however, Israel’s image in American eyes underwent a profound shift, not only in narrow strategic terms, but in the broader American political imagination.

In the post–Second World War era, the United States increasingly found itself confronting radical Third World nationalist movements. For a United States then flailing in its battle against Vietnamese nationalists in South-East Asia, Israel’s resounding 1967 victory over Nasser’s Egypt, the centre of radical Arab nationalism, resonated deeply. Thereafter, American media intellectuals—who tend to share the interests, goals and worldviews of US policymakers—have come to see Israel as not only a source of strategic strength, but as a kindred spirit standing with the United States.

There are two possible paths that could lead to a change in the way Americans perceive the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. One possible path would be a shift in the attitudes of US elites towards Israel. That could happen if the Israeli government defied the United States by carrying out actions that were seen as causing grave and irreversible damage to US strategic goals in the Middle East or globally. The shift in elite attitudes would them be transmitted in US media coverage of the conflict, which would then affect public opinion. The Israeli government alone can decide whether it wishes to take this path.

The second possible path would be the growth of popular US mass movements in solidarity with the Palestinians. Like the movement to end South African apartheid in the 1980s, a successful international solidarity movement could raise awareness of the plight of the Palestinians and effect a profound change in the attitudes of the US public. Unlike the first option, this path is open to ordinary Americans, as well as Palestinians, Israelis and others.

Endnotes

1. Justin Lewis, Constructing Public Opinion: How Political Elites Do What They Like and Why We Seem to Go Along with It (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).