Apartheid

on Soviet Jewish immigration. 699
281
‘Newspapers Under the Influence’, a book on Israeli daily newspaper coverage of the
initial weeks of the Second Intifada, written by the former journalist, now linguist and media
researcher, Daniel Dor, an Israeli, concludes that objectivity actually existed in that coverage,
but mainly in the back pages. Especially editorial decisions on headlines and front-page
photos, the real movers in public opinion, were ‘incomplete, committed, biased’ and
sometimes plainly false. The simple professional demand for objectivity in the mass media
reporting was frequently seen by the Israeli newspaper-reading public, as well as by many
media workers themselves, as close to treason. Instead of fairness, honesty, objectivity or
truth, patriotism had become the main journalistic virtue in the Israeli media. Dor’s
conclusions are truly alarming: “We can say that anyone who relied on the coverage of the
events in the Israeli newspapers…simply don’t know anything about what happened here
during that [first] month, about the infinitely complicated causal chain that led from Ariel
Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount on Thursday, September 28, 2000 to…the next ‘war of no
choice’…” 700
In an interesting piece on similarities and differences between South African and
Israeli apartheid with regard to newspapers, Raymond Louw – who was the editor-in-chief of
the main anti-apartheid newspaper during the 1970s and ‘80s in South Africa, the Rand Daily
Mail – recalls the similar financial pressures that Ha’aretz, the main liberal daily in Israel,
now faces. Due to financial withdrawals, readers cancelling subscriptions and companies
cancelling advertisements, the Rand Daily Mail had to close down in 1985. 701
Although censorship, harassment and brute force against the domestic (and the
foreign) media, perpetrated by the elites of the privileged ethnic minority, was (is) present in
both apartheid societies, these extreme measures were found by the elites to be less efficient
(and less objectionable to the international community) in the cases of the Rand Daily Mail
and Ha’aretz than financial pressures combined with propaganda. This conclusion again
highlights the otherwise so often underestimated responsibilities of civil society. The word
699 Committee to Protect Journalists: Attacks on the Press 1990: A Worldwide Survey, 1991: 9f; See also
Committee to Protect Journalists/Article 19: Journalism under Occupation: Israel’s Regulation of the Palestinian
Press, 1988; Israeli military censorship goes on today, to the point of misleading the public, according to the
Israeli media, which accused the army of lying about types of weapons it uses against Palestinian civilians,
apparently in order to preclude criticism over unnecessary killings. See N.N.: Israel’s Military Admits Error in
Report on Raid, November 19, 2003.
700 Dor: Newspapers under the Influence (in Hebrew), 2001: 19. Reviewed in Lavie: All the News that Fits,
2001. See also Harrer: Konflikt findet auch in den Medien statt, 2002. On yet another possible main virtue in
journalism, namely, the demand for reporting human rights violations, i.e. injustices, and on the concept of
‘democratic journalism’, see Kunczik: Closing Remarks: Is There an International Ethics of Journalism? 1999;
245-268. On the conspicuous lack of reporting gross human rights violations carried out by Israelis against
Palestinians by the BBC, and thus, the worst possible journalistic and media vice from this perspective, the
media being accessory to a cover-up of systematic human rights violations, see de Rooij: The BBC and Ethnic
Cleansing of Palestinians, 2004: ‘...the BBC’s bias is evident primarily in terms of omission.’
701 Louw: Dealing with Hostile Readers, 2001: 29. The main differences related by Louw are, again, differences
of degree rather than of kind: the intensity of censorship in South Africa and the whole-hearted rejection of
apartheid in the wide sense by all members of his staff, as opposed to members of the staff at Ha’aretz in Israel.
Nevertheless, Louw’s visit to Israel and the Occupied Territories was sponsored by the then editor-in-chief of
Ha’aretz, Hanoch Marmari, and some of the newspaper’s Jewish reporters did criticize Israel for implementing
‘apartheid’ during a visit to the West Bank that Louw undertook with them during his visit to the region. More
recently, Ha’aretz’ Managing Editor, Yoel Esteron, said that Amira Hass and Gideon Levy, two reporters wholeheartedly
opposed to Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, have cost Ha’aretz ‘a few dozen’
subscriptions. See also the article on Hass by Miller, M.: Voice for Israel’s Enemy, 2002. For criticism of the
differences between Ha’aretz’ Hebrew (‘nationalistically correct’) and English editions, see HaCohen: Looking
Behind Ha’aretz’s Liberal Image, 2002. For criticism of the one-sidedness of Israeli media reporting of violence
and security issues, see Reinhart: “According to Security Sources”: What Remains of the Israeli Media, 2005 and
Keshev.