When Pro is Con by Saul Rosenberg Guest Column Jerusalem Post May 10, 2002 Now that the smoke over Jenin is beginning to clear, it's worth taking a moment to wonder what we have learned. One lesson is that dishonest media coverage of theIsraeli-Palestinian conflict hurts the Palestinians more than it hurts the Israelis. Given that most Western jouralists don't actually think it matters when dozens of Israelis are killed, but howled at the "colonialist massacre" at Jenin, this is a lesson from which they might be willing to learn something. First, a fact: Everyone now knows there was no massacre, except for Yasser Arafat. The 500 bodies Arafat was still claiming for "The battle of Jeningrad" on television yesterday - even after his own Fatah organization had made an official announcement that there were some 50 Palestinian dead - were a fiction from the start. The Palestinians, with their ready eye for distorting the story for the world's cameras, have been embarrassed by footage of "corpses" falling off their stretchers and running off. Second, the general professionalism of the Israel Defense Forces. The sheer numbers alone tell the story. That two Israeli soldiers were killed for every five Palestinians makes it clear that the army was not even beginning to use its enormous firepower in its search for the bomb factories and the Palestinians who man them. And that the Israelis went in on the ground instead of simply dropping bombs from above - the general policy of Western armies - certainly proves their dedication to minimizing casualties, even at the cost of increasing their own. What does the media make of these two facts? Not, it appears, a willingness to admit to having been fooled, and to challenge the Palestinian spokespeople who fooled them as having embarked - once again - on a campaign of wholesale lying to the world press in order to maintain sympathy for the Palestinian David in its battle with the Israeli Goliath. Instead, the early claims that there had been a massacre having dutifully been splashed onto the front pages of newspapers around the world, the news of "not necessarily a massacre" either went heavily under-reported, or were laid out as part of a he said/she said story, in which no more credence was to begiven to one side than to the other. In the meantime - just in case there would turn out to have been no massacre - and in order that one's readers should not have to give up that satisfying feeling of moral outrage - the anger directed at Israel began to be transferred to the matter of "war crimes" in the conduct of the Jenin campaign. By the time it indeed appeared there had been no massacre, the transference was complete, and everyone was fulminating about the "massive devastation," the "humanitarian catastrophe" on the ground, and the Israeli stonewalling of Kofi Annan's enquiry. Carefully-angled shots making it look as if Jenin in its entirety had been destroyed - rather than just one part of a camp that is itself just 15 percent of the area of the city - were deployed to shore up articles pushing the notion that war crimes must have been committed. That the above is evidence of anti-Israel bias in the press goes without saying. But this is only part of the problem. Not only is the blatantly pro-Palestinian coverage dishonest, but it does less than nothing for the Palestinians. By encouraging the Palestinian leaders to believe that their energetic press maneuvering activities will always generate sympathetic coverage, regardless of how brutally they behave, the press abets them in maintaining the misery of the Palestinian populace - misery greater any the Israelis would ever have inflicted on it. Consider the response of the leadership in Jenin after the incursion. Rather than encourage rebuilding efforts, it focused on expanding "evidence" of Israeli war crimes for the cameras by digging up two-year-old bodies to dump in a mass grave and refusing to allow rubble and some tens of decomposing corpses - a serious health risk - to be cleared away. Similarly, the comedy of Arafat himself emerging from his captivity in Ramallah to denounce the Israelis to the waiting cameras as "racists" and "Nazis," for setting a blaze at the Church of the Nativity that had already been put out by the time he started shouting about it - and that appears to have been started by Palestinians in the first place. Meanwhile, over in the United States, where the population is apparently naive enough to think the Israelis may at this point in the story be the wronged party, we have the likes of Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, Hassan Abdel Rahman and Hissein Ibish soberly moving from one TV talk show to the next to provide the "political context" by insisting that no Israeli offer was made at Camp David, and that "nothing was written down at Camp David." It is as if the Palestinians had to choose between putting their energies into building a real society, or conducting massive terror campaigns against Israel while putting on theatre-of-the-absurd displays for the world's cameras - and chose the latter. Journalists do not appear to understand that they are encouraging the Palestinian leadership in a doomed strategy of refusing to come to terms with the fact that Israel actually exists while using them (the media) to make it appear that they seek only the end of an Israeli presence beyond its June 4, 1967 borders. The first part of this strategy is the reason Arafat turned down the Camp David/Taba offer - since it would actually have created the "two states for two peoples" in which he clearly has no interest. The second part is the reason his spokespeople now so urgently claim there was no offer in the first place. The notion that the Palestinians are still bound and determined to destroy Israel is of course just too troubling - too inconvenient - for many. And so, in spite of all the evidence, most journalists persist in reporting this conflict as one in which the recalcitrant Israelis under the militarist Sharon refuse to dismantle the settlements that make impossible returning Gaza and the West Bank to the Palestinians. They have forgotten that Sharon's career was dead until Barak's peace offer was turned down, a peace offer that included dismantling those settlements. Indeed, they have satisfied themselves that the Palestinian "No" at Camp David/Taba somehow wasn't a real "no" - handing Messrs. Ashrawi, Ibish, and Rahman a victory so easy they must laugh at those journalists when the cameras are turned away. Somehow, they have persuaded themselves that, in the absence of even the slightest of security guarantees, the onus is still on Israel to withdraw. What drives this self-persuasion is a perception of the conflict within the framework of colonialism - whereby Israel is the Western, colonial power, and the Palestinians the oppressed indigenes. There is more than one problem with this perception. First of all, the logic of colonization - for either profit or prestige - is laughably absent in this case. Secondly, no colonial power was ever existentially threatened by the loss of its colony. And third, Israel really has tried to give back territory. Acknowledging these points, however, would require Western journalists to complicate their sense of their own history; and that is something they do not seek to do. Essentially, then, the media bears parts of the responsibility for the failure of the Palestinians to moderate their strategy; and hence for their misery. As long as the world can be fooled that the Palestinian plan is simply to share the land with Israel, why should the Palestinian leaders take on the difficult and bitter business of persuading hundreds of thousands of angry young Palestinians that the way forward is through compromise? Why should they even persuade themselves? But in the wake of Camp David/Taba, Israelis no longer trust the Palestinian leadership, and consequently will only allow the negotiating process to move forward in the context of trustbuilding measures - measures the Palestinian leaders are not prepared to take, because they would involve signaling to the Palestinian populace that the strategy has changed. ---------- The author is a writer and editor living in New York.