Apartheid

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billion worth of damage to the Palestinian economy, 190 attacks in
three months on Palestinian ambulances - perhaps the most sobering
are that eighty per cent of British people do not know where the four
million Palestinian refugees come from, and only nine per cent knows
that it is the Israelis who are the occupiers. . . . Palestinian violence is
magnified through stronger language than that used for the
overwhelmingly larger Israeli violence, from Israelis speaking twice
as much on television news as Palestinians, and, contrary to Israeli
violence, Palestinian attacks never being ‘in retaliation’. Less than 0.5
per cent of media text on this second intifada explained the crucial
history to the conflict. 690
In a second Glasgow study, the main British public and private television news
programs and the audiences’ staggering misperceptions of the conflict, based upon these
programs, were analyzed. As in the USA, words describing Palestinian attacks as attacks, but
Israeli attacks as ‘retaliations’, or as other kinds of responses, were used at a ratio of six to
one. The Palestinian perspectives and narratives were marginalized to the benefit of the
militarily stronger players involved in the conflict:
There is a preponderance of official ‘Israeli perspectives’, particularly
on BBC 1, where Israelis were interviewed or reported over twice as
much as Palestinians. On top of this, US politicians who support Israel
were very strongly featured. They appeared more than politicians from
any other country and twice as much as those from Britain. 691
So much for the media in the USA and the UK, until recently the two greatest weapons
sellers, and still the greatest media content exporters in the world. (As mentioned in Chapter
I.1.3, the UK has slipped to fifth position in weapons exports since 2000, but the USA has
consolidated and extended its worldwide lead.) Words, indeed, are also weapons. The USA
and the UK remain very closely allied with regard to foreign policy, and for these and several
related reasons they are possibly more dependent on misinformation and clever manipulation
of their own electorates, and of the decision-makers of other countries, than any other two
countries in the world, except, perhaps, Israel.
Public broadcasters, especially, cannot be forgiven for this. Whereas privately owned
media may always be excused for reasons of profitability (they have to give their audiences
what their owners, advertisers and audiences want), and are thus to be taken less seriously,
although they may profess and even believe in their own objectivity, public broadcasters are
bound by law to inform accurately and objectively. But in the USA and Britain, they
spectacularly fail to do so. Unfortunately, this fact usually raises few eyebrows in the two
countries that habitually pride themselves as the ‘leaders of the free world’. There, the
freedom of the press has to a great extent become the freedom for the elites to mislead, to lie
and to get away with it. One might counter that most of the Arabic-language media,
690 Sammonds: The Ending of History: Israel/Palestine, 2002. See also one of the authors of the Glasgow study:
Philo: Missing In Action: New Research Suggests that Television News Fails to Inform Young People About
What’s Going On in the Occupied Territories, Or Why, 2002: ‘Only 9% knew…that the settlers were Israeli.
There were actually more people (11%) who believed that the Palestinians were occupying the territories and
that the settlers were Palestinian.’ On pro-Israeli media bias in the USA and the UK, see also Edwards, David:
Hide The Looking Glass: The Observer, ITV, Channel 4, The New York Times, The Washington Post, 2002, and
Solomon: Palestinians Are Blurry In The Editorial Frame, 2002.
691 N.N.: Glasgow University Media Group: Bad News from Israel, Greg Philo and Mike Berry, 2004; See
Miller, D. Information Dominance: The Philosophy Of Total Propaganda Control?, 2003, on the US/UK military
and political strategy of ‘information dominance’, a new kind of propaganda that, among other things, tolerates
(or better: ignores) dissent as long as it does not present obstacles, i.e. effective resistance, to US and UK
military and political goals. Thus, an illusion of healthy media pluralism is also generated.