IF HE'S BEATEN HE MUST BE PALESTINIAN!

October 6, 2000

Carnage for the Cameras
By Robert L. Pollock, assistant editorial features editor of the Journal.

Like many Jews at the end of last week, Dr. Aaron Grossman of Chicago must have been following the escalating violence in Israel and the Palestinian territories with great concern. All the more so when he discovered the Sept. 30 edition of the New York Times was carrying a picture of his son Tuvia, in obvious pain and bleeding profusely, backed by an angry looking, baton-wielding Israeli officer. Imagine his surprise when he read the caption: "An Israeli policeman and a wounded Palestinian yesterday." According to Dr. Grossman and other relatives, Tuvia (now recovering) and two friends were pulled from a taxi in Jerusalem by a mob of Palestinian Arabs, then beaten and stabbed.

The misidentified photo Tuvia Grossman and an Israeli policeman.

On Wednesday the Times (and the Boston Globe, which also carried the misidentified picture) ran a correction, attributing the inaccuracy to an erroneous identification from the Associated Press. Mistakes happen of course. But one suspects media bias made this particular mistake a bit more likely. In the minds of many journalists covering the conflict, the Palestinians are innocents under the thumb of an unjust oppressor. That they might gratuitously inflict such injuries as depicted in the photo is almost unthinkable; that the angry looking Israeli officer might be trying to save a life instead of take one all the more so.

Empty Verbs

Indeed, the Times report that accompanied the wrongly captioned picture of Tuvia pretty much offered up the Palestinian Authority line: The violence had been "provoked" and "set off" when "Ariel Sharon, the rightist opposition leader, visited the Muslim compound on Thursday to assert Jewish claims to the site." That the site of the biblical Jewish temple is strictly a "Muslim compound" is hardly obvious. Nor would there seem to be anything "rightist" or extreme in the idea that the Jews might have some claim to the site, which is buttressed by the famous Western Wall. Even more telling, perhaps, are the strangely similar collection of empty verbs the Times and legions of others have used to describe what happened that day. Searching a database of major American and international papers earlier this week, I found some 50 other articles that said Mr. Sharon's visit had "set off" the violence. More than two-dozen said it was "touched off" by him. And more than 120 said he had "sparked" the riots.

For a newspaper like the Times that prides itself on political correctness, and indeed agonized over the potential insensitivity to Asian-Americans of its Wen Ho Lee coverage, such language is strangely dehumanizing -- implying that the Palestinians are a bunch of automatons whose actions can be influenced with nearly as much causative assurance as lighting an actual fire. But removing an entire class of human beings from the realm of moral discourse does serve a purpose if you're convinced Mr. Sharon is at fault: It effectively shuts off debate. After all, you can evaluate the actions of people who choose to respond to perceived provocations with violence. But who can blame folks who were merely "set off"?

In fact, the evidence that the riots were almost entirely premeditated -- that Mr. Sharon's visit was a pretext, not a "spark" -- is almost impossible to deny. Israeli forces had been on high alert for some time before the outbreak, in answer to intelligence reports that Yasser Arafat had given the shock troops of his Fatah faction of the PLO -- the Tanzim, or "organization" -- the green light for serious violence.

The Tanzim has branches everywhere in the Palestinian territories, and is responsible for getting demonstrators out into the street. They were the prime movers behind the riots over the Temple Mount archaeological tunnel that erupted in 1996, as well as those that broke out in the spring of this year.

Ever since the Oslo Accords, Tanzim members have been increasingly armed with automatic weapons, which have helped make these recent riots so deadly. Even if most demonstrators are only throwing stones, the presence of a few guns in the crowd puts Israeli soldiers in an infinitely more precarious position.

The existence and role of the Tanzim are no secret to anyone reporting from the region. Indeed, they seem to have featured in nearly every statement from the Israeli government since the fighting broke out. But their existence is inconvenient for those who want to portray this as a spontaneous uprising of oppressed people, and the dead and injured as entirely innocent victims. So it's little surprise their name hasn't appeared in any but a handful of recent reports in the U.S., even to rebut Israeli government claims.

The organized nature of the violence casts a slightly different light on the most famous photos yet to emerge: those of 12-year-old Muhammed Durrah, cowering with his father before he is killed by a hail of bullets near Gaza. Most accounts describe him as a having been "caught in the crossfire," as if he had simply stepped out of his house.

In fact, the incident took place at Netzarim junction, which lies just outside a Jewish settlement some distance down the road from Gaza City. It's a constant focus of Tanzim orchestrated violence, and was that day the scene of a gun battle between Israeli and Palestinian security forces. It's very unlikely that anyone might have wandered into Muhammed's position just in front of the Palestinian outpost in the middle of a firefight merely by accident. That makes Muhammed's death no less tragic -- but one starts to wonder if more of the blame lies with Palestinian children's shows that praise the virtues of martyrdom, or the PA's terrorist training camps for children (something the Times has reported on).

The media influences not only how events in the Middle East are perceived, but how they unfold as well. I'll never forget a visit to Hebron a few years back. Nothing much was going on that day. But I found a score of television cameras set up in the city center almost as if it were a soundstage. One got the impression that this wasn't just so that the cameras would be there when the next disturbance broke out, but that a disturbance would break out there because the cameras were there to film it.

Stoking the Violence

That's largely what's happening now. After the collapse of the July Camp David summit in which Ehud Barak made concession after concession, Mr. Arafat found himself in a situation he hadn't faced since receiving his Nobel Peace Prize in 1994: taking the blame for the deadlock. He seems to have calculated, quite correctly so far, that offering up a few martyrs for the cameras might swing perceptions back in his favor. If he now succeeds in his demands for international intervention in Jerusalem or something similar, he will resort to violence again in the future. And much of the media will have played a role in stoking that violence. This will be a tragedy not primarily for the Israelis, who will always win the body count, but for future Muhammed Durrahs.