A Few Things Journalists Forgot to Tell Their Audiences

By John Law

Case Number One:

In The Washington Post of Jan. 16, 1991, special correspondent Sharon Waxman, in a news story from Tunis on the assassination of three PLO leaders two days earlier, cited this comment made on Israeli television by Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens: "I understand that the assassin was caught and it seems clear that he belongs to Abu Nidal's group, one of the factions of the PLO. "

It was not particularly surprising that Arens, like so many other Israeli leaders, would once again attempt to link any act of Middle East terrorism to the PLO. This has always been a favorite theme of. Israeli "disinformation," also known as "lying."

More surprising, though, was that a major media correspondent who writes frequently on the Middle East—and who must have built up at least an elementary knowledge of the area and the identity of its major "players "—would allow Arens's erroneous description of Abu Nidal's affiliation to stand without comment or correction.

As Sharon Waxman should well know, Abu Nidal has not been with the PLO since 1974, when he broke with Yasser Arafat's Fatah organization to form his extremist, anti-PLO group (the Fatah Revolutionary Council), one of whose primary objectives has been to assassinate Arafat himself. Ever since, numerous acts of terrorism carried out by Abu Nidal, such as the massacres at the Rome and Vienna airports, have been connected in the minds of many Americans to the "PLO, " thanks not only to Israel's disinformation program but also to incompetence and partisan bias within the US media, of which the Waxman story appears to be an egregious example of one or the other.

Case Number Two:

One of the regular drum-beaters for Israel—New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal—may be too predictable to bother with. However, the fact that he is read by so many makes it important that he not be allowed to get away with passing along a hoary myth of Israeli manufacture.

The hoary myth he brings up, again, in The New York Times of Jan. 15, 1991, is that "Jordan is Palestine." He raises the issue only in passing, by suggesting that after the Gulf war Israel will be bulldozed into accepting the "creation of another Palestinian state in addition to Jordan. "

Rosenthal does not bother to explain why Jordan is a Palestinian state, taking it as a "given." In manufacturing the myth, however, Israelis built their case on two major arguments, one historical, and one demographic. Both arguments rest on sand.

The historical argument says that the British, after the First World War, regarded the territory then known as Transjordan as part of Palestine, and included it in their Palestine mandate. This allegation is flawed on two counts. First, three months before the mandate became official, Transjordan was detached from the mandate and given the status of an independent state. Second, even if the British had decided that Transjordan was part of Palestine, that would not have made it so. For hundreds of years, under the Ottoman Turks, the territories east and west of the Jordan River had been administered separately, and thereby preserved separate identities. If the British had called the Jordanian apple an orange, that would be no reason to assume that we could get orange juice from it.

That the demographic argument is equally flawed is best ascertained by talking to the people who live there. A visitor would be hard put to find a Palestinian in Jordan who regards that country as Palestine. As for the Jordanians whose roots have always been in the soil east of the Jordan River, they have never considered themselves Palestinians.

Short Memories

Case Number Three:

How short are the memories of those reporting the events of the Gulf war. For example, ever since the Scud missiles began hitting Israel, coverage in both the electronic and print media has focused almost exclusively on the world's horror and its condemnation of Iraq for these random attacks on Israel's civilians. The condemnation is justified. But why do the reports almost always leave the woefully inaccurate impression that these attacks are being carried out against a nation that would never—has never—stooped to carrying out this same kind of terrorist warfare against the civilians of other nations?

It may be true that frequent, and sometimes massive, random killings by Israel of Palestinian and other Arab civilians went relatively unnoticed by the US public during the 1940s, '50s, '60s and '70s. Who, however, did not hear about the Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon during the summer of 1982, which kept millions of Americans glued to their TV sets? This was a two month siege in which 7,000 civilians died in West Beirut alone as a result of random bombing by Israeli planes.

An eyewitness, New York Times correspondent Tom Friedman, has described how he came very close to being fired for insisting on writing that the raids were clearly "random, " and he still sticks to that description. Israeli atrocities against civilians during this period included the frequent use of pain-inflicting phosphorus, which sticks to the skin as it literally burns its way into the victim's body, and deadly cluster bombs, which kill every living thing over a wide area, in defiance not only of international conventions (which prohibit their use even against soldiers) but of specific written pledges made to the US that the weapons would only be used for defensive purposes.

The Israeli air force not only pounded an urban area relentlessly and indiscriminately, on occasion for as long as 14 or 16 hours in a day, but imposed on it a siege of medieval proportions, cutting off the supply of food and water and even medicines. Millions of Americans watched on TV as Israeli soldiers turned back Red Cross and Red Crescent ambulances trying to enter West Beirut to provide urgent help.

Israel imposed a siege of medieval proportions.

How about some of the things that have been going on in the West Bank and Gaza during the past three years of the intifada? It wasn't really very long ago that we saw scenes of Israeli soldiers in the West Bank and Gaza slowly and deliberately breaking the bones of Palestinian teenagers at the order of the Israeli Minister of Defense. We also saw photos of a sickeningly large number of small children and infants who had died or been mutilated when soldiers were scattering their bullets in the direction of their older brothers in flight. We also read or listened to reports by American journalists who had seen lethal (when used in enclosed spaces) tear gas being sprayed into private homes, schools, and even hospitals.

In recent weeks we've seen much less of this on television, but for the wrong reasons. Under nearly round-the-clock curfews Palestinians daily are faced with such life-and death decisions as whether to risk almost certain death by breaking curfew to seek emergency medical attention for a gravely ill child or staying safely at home, hoping the child won't die for lack of treatment. Perhaps it would be in order for the American media to be a little less selective and report more about all the civilians at risk in a war and in a region where the savagery is not confined solely to one side.

John Law was the founding editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, which began in 1982 as a newsletter, and which he edited until mid-1984. As an author and journalist he has been covering Middle East events since 1948, mostly from the scene.