The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE WRONG STORY

Greg Shupak’s book is a nuanced, engaging and accessible deconstruction of the often distorted media narratives around Palestine/Israel. He compels the reader to see beyond simplistic headlines and overly rehearsed soundbites. —Rafeef Ziadah, University of London, author and performer of We Teach Life

By refusing the ‘both sides’ narrative Greg Shupak reminds the reader of the asymmetrical relation between the colonizer and the colonized … Distortions, falsifications and omissions, the author asserts, have largely been characteristic of existing media. I highly recommend this book for media students and experts. —Nahla Abdo, Carleton University, author of Captive Revolution

"Shupak’s The Wrong Story is a crisply written yet formidable analysis of some of the key tropes underlying media narratives surrounding Palestine–Israel. Neatly organized around the New York Times’ coverage of Israel’s attacks against the Gaza Strip in 2014, the book powerfully reveals the hidden histories of colonization, dispossession, and occupation." —Adam Hanieh, University of London, author of Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States

A powerful and insightful analysis that confronts, challenges and exposes the systematically deceptive frameworks and narratives in English-language mainstream media regarding Palestine and the Palestinian people. Shupak’s careful and precise work lays bare the colonial realities that are routinely evaded by major corporate and official media. —Charlotte Kates, International Coordinator, Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network

Gregory Shupak dismantles the mainstream English-language press’ deeply problematic—and false—narrative about Palestine … Give this book both to those interested in learning (or unlearning) about Palestine, and to those eager to learn about deconstructing the media’s lies and, unfortunately, all too often the false framing of the so-called human rights organizations.

—Rania Masri, Professor

In the tradition of Norman Finkelstein’s work, Shupak uses evidence to challenge three dominant narratives presented by the mainstream media about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. … This book is a great teaching tool about the Israeli occupation of Palestine for university students as well as general audiences. —Angela Joya, University of Oregon

In his judicious study of corporate media narratives on the Israel-Palestine conflict, Gregory Shupak uncovers and debunks the misleading tropes that have allowed Israel to maintain its military and expansionist policies. —Jerome Klassen, University of Massachusetts Boston, author of Joining Empire

"The unrelenting, decades-long pattern of biased media coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict has had deadly consequences for the Palestinians. In The Wrong Story, Greg Shupak demonstrates not only how and why the media are so awful on this issue, but also what coverage of Israel/Palestine reveals about media frames and biases more generally."—Justin Podur, York University, author of Haiti’s New Dictatorship

© 2018 Greg Shupak

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First printing 2018

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CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter One: Not Both Sides

Chapter Two: Extremists and Moderates

Chapter Three: Israel Does Not Have a Right to Defend Itself

Conclusion

Endnotes

Works Cited

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

News media outlets tell stories. This happens at the level of individual pieces that provide accounts of real-life characters, events, and places. News outlets also construct metanarratives about issues that receive repeated coverage over an extended period. When a topic is presented in a similar fashion widely and frequently, these approaches coalesce into relatively coherent narratives through which those segments of the public that depend on news media to comprehend the world around them come to understand the subject.

This book examines three such narratives that are pervasive in coverage of Palestine-Israel. Chapter One discusses the position that both sides of Palestine-Israel are victims of, and at fault for, the ongoing violence to a comparable extent. Chapter Two considers the view that Palestine-Israel is largely a conflict between extremists and moderates. The third chapter looks at news media outlets that frame Palestine-Israel in terms of Israel’s supposed right to defend itself against Palestinian violence. To say that particular narratives are persistent is not to say that every word in every media story about Palestine-Israel rigidly conforms to one of those narratives. Nor is it to deny that outright deviations from these paradigms exist or preclude the possibility of other narratives being identified. The point is that recurring tropes spread across multiple media outlets in material published in different years about disparate events in Palestine-Israel are grounds for concluding the narratives that I identify are persistent.

In each chapter of this book, I demonstrate that the narrative under consideration is both widespread and distorted. Each one misleads, furthermore, in a manner favorable to Israel. The both sides narrative identifies a small portion of the injustice done to Palestinians while proportionately inflating the harm done to Israelis. This perspective, moreover, advances a false equivalency between the rights and responsibilities of the colonizers and the colonized. Framing Palestine-Israel in terms of extremists and moderates diagnoses the problem of ongoing violence as being a result of Palestinian terrorists and in some cases a fringe of hardline Israelis. Such a view implies that Palestinians resistant to US-Israeli prerogatives are dangerous fanatics as are Israel’s settlers and far right and prescribes the solution of isolating Palestinians who are unwilling to accommodate US-Israeli designs and empowering more pliable Palestinians. This narrative also suggests that the right wing fringes of the Israeli polity are deviations from an otherwise civilized society who can be brought under control by the majority of the country’s ruling class, which is allegedly democratic and peace-seeking. The story of Israel defending itself supposes that the question of Palestine is unresolved because of Palestinian attacks, judges Palestinian militants’ engagement in armed conflict to be unjustified and Israel’s involvement to be justified, and advocates solutions characterized by Palestinian surrender and Israeli dominance.

Narratives such as these emerge when an issue is repeatedly covered using the same media frame. To frame, according to Robert Entman, is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described. Typically frames diagnose, evaluate, and prescribe.¹ Through these processes, the media send messages about the nature of socio-political problems, their causes, who bares responsibility for them, how conflicts can be resolved, and which parties must take which actions for that to happen. Joseph N. Cappella and Kathleen Hall Jamieson write that news frames are those rhetorical and stylistic choices, reliably identified in news which have the capacity to alter the interpretations of the topics treated and are a consistent part of the news environment.² By taking these approaches, media outlets construct overarching stories about the subject in question.

The stories told about Palestine-Israel are as notable for what they exclude as they are for what they include. Narrative frames, as Entman points out, are defined by what they omit as well as include, and the omissions of potential problem definitions, explanations, evaluations, and recommendations may be as critical as the inclusions in guiding the audience.³

The frames through which stories are presented direct audiences toward specific understandings of issues by highlighting some details at the expense of the others and emphasizing particular contexts while obscuring others. Presenting Palestine-Israel as a conflict in which both sides have wronged and been wronged to comparable degrees means burying such matters as, for example, the 1948 Nakba in which Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in order to create the Israeli state. When the Palestine-Israel question is described as a story about violent extremists who have prevented a solution from taking hold, this account necessarily leaves out the ways that peace has been undermined by the systemic economic and geo-political forces that drive Israeli colonization and the American role in enabling that colonization. A narrative that emphasizes Israel’s right to defend itself requires leaving out the Palestinians’ right to defend themselves as well as the persistent pattern of Israel initiating fighting and killing where more Palestinians are killed by Israelis by an order of magnitude.

Nothing in this book should be taken to suggest that audiences consist entirely of dupes who uncritically accept whatever the media says. People can and do think critically about the media they consume. Yet when media outlets misrepresent issues, they hamper the public’s capacity to systematically understand the topics of the day. Ideally, the news media would present the public with easily accessible, comprehensive depictions of the world that people can draw on during the often short periods available to them to learn about political affairs in their daily lives. This, however, is far from the case. Viewers, readers, and listeners who approach news media with skeptical attitudes may have a general sense that they are being presented with skewed perspective. However, absent readily available and more precise information, skepticism does not necessarily translate into a clearer grasp of the issues being covered.

The stories presented in news media are not disseminated in a vacuum and it is necessary to understand that they are circulated in specific cultural contexts. According to Faiza Hirji, ruling class techniques for securing ideological hegemony only work when they are affirming beliefs that are already held by media viewers or readers.⁴ A multitude of factors shape those political views such as one’s class position, gender, racial identity, educational background, or the national or cultural groups to which they belong. While news media is not the only source that influences ideology, it is undoubtedly an important source: consumption of a media text can craft the conceptual frames that will then be applied to future acts of media consumption. Similarly, Capella and Jamieson contend that: Frames not only make the interpretations possible but they also alter the kinds of inferences made. The inferences derive from well established knowledge structures held by the audience and cued by the messages read or watched.⁵

In the West, narratives about Palestine-Israel activate the well established knowledge structures that exist in a ­broader cultural context that is colonial, imperialist, Orientalist, or some combination of these, wherein Israel is widely regarded as an outpost of Western civilization in a struggle with backward, savage Arabs. Frames, Capella and Jamieson argue, may be able to activate knowledge, stimulate stocks of cultural mores and values, and create contexts within which what are typically called media effects are produced. In the case of Palestine-­Israel, the stories that are told register in an ideological climate that is deeply Islamophobic, anti-Arab, and permeated by fears of terror attacks.

This book pays close attention to The New York Times’ summer 2014 editorials on Israel’s Operation Protective Edge. Focusing on that newspaper is warranted because it is perhaps the most influential print media source in the United States, if not the entire English-speaking world. Because most of the media articles that I examine are from 2014, I have tried to the greatest extent possible to evaluate them with sources published before the commentary being discussed. Using this approach means that important contexts that are left out of the media narratives I consider were readily available to their authors when they wrote the articles in question. This book also looks at analysis