Chicken and egg: did media-bias spark passion for Palestine or vice-versa?
I keep asking myself – and almost every Jew I know keeps asking themselves – the same question: how did we get here?
How did we reach a point where Israel-hating and delusion on “Palestine” is so endemic in a mainstream political party that a UK Prime Minister can write a letter expressing sorrow to UK Jews on the anniversary of a savage terror attack in Israel, yet fail to mention “Israel” or “Israelis” even once?
How did we reach a point where every news report sounds as if it has been scripted by an apologist for Islamist fundamentalists? And not just the BBC. While the BBC remains the most culpable among broadcasters, Sky, Channel 4 and Global, which provides bulletins for – among others, that Middle England favourite Classic FM – all appear to be contaminated by the same virus that leads them to frame reports in ways that seem to deliberately reinforce negativity on Israel.
How did we reach a point where thousands of Britons – joined by some Jews – take to the streets on a weekly basis to support murderous terrorists and call for the annihilation of the world’s one Jewish state as it defends itself from 10 years of rockets fired on its civilians by terrorist armies aiming to wipe it off the map?
How did we reach a point where a politician is expelled for challenging the patently absurd allegation of Israel “committing genocide” fighting terrorist militias embedded on its borders?
How did we reach a point where a London golf club is defaced with swastikas and ugly Jew-hate? How did we reach a point where a judge at an industrial tribunal feels the allegation that Israel “pursued apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide” is a view “worthy of respect” in a democratic society?
To answer my own questions, we are “here” because supporting Palestine/Palestinians is the zeitgeist, thus “normalising” Israel-hate (and even “normalising” Jew-hate, if the Metropolitan Police seem not to feel it’s necessary to arrest people who can be heard loudly and clearly chanting on a London street that “Zionists are not wanted here.”)
But how has it become the zeitgeist? How has Israel-hate been normalised?
Obviously, we all know that media has played a huge role in the normalising of Israel-hate which has so rapidly, painfully and entirely predictably metastasised into Jew-hate.
It started like the title of Celeste Ng’s best-selling novel, with little fires everywhere as the British media, and then much of the rest of the world’s media, began routinely reporting Israel-Palestine in ways that fed a pro-Palestine narrative, and reinforced an anti-Israel one. Before long, the little fires everywhere”had joined up and anti-Israel bias in media had sparked a roaring conflagration that led many people – including some Jews and many young, impressionable people – to perceive Israel as a “racist” “apartheid” state that “oppressed” Palestinians.
So perhaps the next question to ask if we are seeking to understand how this bush-fire started, is the perennial chicken-and-egg one, did the zeitgeist beget media bias or vice-versa? Answering this will require looking back, which I do not suggest out of a wish to indulge in Boomer reminiscence, but because I believe that the last quarter of the last century may hold some answers and may, perhaps, help us find ways to put out the bush-fire of Jew-hate raging across the planet.
When considering this issue, we need to first ask how likely is it that so many journalists would spontaneously become almost universally sympathetic toward the Palestinian cause, while so many would – again spontaneously – develop a profound belief in the culpability of the very tiny (albeit quite powerful) Jewish state. Perhaps, therefore, we should consider that the “capturing” of media for the Palestinian cause was the first objective of what Eylon Levy called the “information war” against Israel, and what Einat Wilf calls “the war of words.”
If that was the case, their allegiance would have to be achieved with subtlety – at least initially. The kind of naked Israel-hate/Jew-hate that plays well on the streets of Tehran, or Khartoum or on the backstreets of Munich would not be acceptable to liberals, leftists or “intellectuals,” (and certainly not to Jews; even very left-wing ones) so the almost pathological hate that most Arab states felt for the tiny Jewish nation, had to be packaged more seductively. That meant disguising it as something altruistic such as the “poor Palestinians” who had been “dispossessed” and “made refugees” by those “colonialist” Jews. It even fitted with age-old antisemitic tropes.
I don’t know when Mr Eylon or Ms Wilf think that “information war” or the “war of words” started, but I think they started in the cold-war era at a point when the Soviet Union was aggressively pursuing its own regional geo-political agenda, as well as supporting the objectives of its Arab “clients” who had thus far been unable to defeat Israel through all-out wars, deadly campaigns of attrition or murderous terrorism (across the world as well as inside Israel).
I also think that all the methods employed in cultivating this anti-Israelism bear the hallmarks of the KGB. Ultimately, these would include vast donations of oil money as well as more sophisticated “spin” techniques such as carefully stage-managed visits for VIPs, press and “influencers” to “refugee camps;” and teams of propagandists sent out as full-time spokespeople to evangelise the fake narrative.
But first there was “grass-roots” activism straight from the KGB “liberation” handbook with angry young Muslim men in keffiyahs arriving on UK campuses chanting hate-filled slogans claiming Israel had “dispossessed” Palestinians.
By the late 1980s, “Palestine societies” were an established feature of UK campus life. There were “Jewish societies,” too, of course, but while J-Socs laid on Friday night dinners, “Palestine societies” reached out to all students – including Jewish ones – dispensing mint tea and disseminating their fabricated version of history that omits all inconvenient truths, such as Jews having lived continuously in Palestine for over 2,000 years; Arab Palestinians rejecting their own state in 1948; that at roughly the same time as 700,000 Arab Palestinians had been driven out/made refugees from Israel, some 900,000 Jews had been driven out/made refugees from Arab countries; that more than two million fully-enfranchised Arabs live in Israel and that Palestinians had been relentlessly committing acts of murderous terrorism continuously since the 1920s.
And while the anti-Israelism was being systematically ramped up outside the lecture-hall, inside it the Palestinian narrative was starting to be treated as “fact” and even integrated into some academic syllabuses thanks to those donations from oil-rich Middle East states now flowing to a number of higher education institutions (LSE, SOAS and Exeter, spring instantly to mind).
But even if you reject the idea that this was a campaign, as that sounds too like conspiracy theory (or a touch paranoid), it is undeniable that these activities all took place at this time. and in this way. Thus, starting from at least the mid-1970s most students at most British universities – undoubtedly including many Jewish students – were exposed to that fake narrative full of libels, half-truths and omissions.
And while only a few would fully embrace the Palestine cause, no-one – including those who would have careers in media – could un-hear this “tragic” tale of Israeli “oppression.”
And if the early waves of indoctrination”were mild, they would become stronger as each subsequent cohort of students – who would undoubtedly include many Jewish students – would not only hear the same litany of lies, libels and distortions on campus, but would then have Israel’s “oppression” and “aggression” “confirmed” by increasingly biased media coverage. And so it went on, with each generation of students hearing the lies and distortions and then having this false version “confirmed” ever more uninhibitedly by an increasingly biased media until – terrifyingly – some 40 years, on, the lies have been regurgitated so often they’ve been transmuted into “truth” – which would not matter if we didn’t know where this kind of prejudice can lead (or couldn’t see where it has already begun to lead.)
A plethora of reports (including a recent one on the BBC) have tried to shine a light on the bias that constantly feeds the flames, while organisations and individuals battle valiantly to fight the raging inferno of Israel-hate.
But it’s like fighting a forest-fire with a garden hose when what is needed is the equivalent of dropping thousands of gallons of water to put out a bush fire. I’ve no idea how that could be done, but we need to find out before the flames engulf us all.