A war of words in Mideast

Media: As Israelis and Palestinians try to put their respective spins on the latest round of battles, reporters are left with unanswered questions.

by Peter Hermann
Originally published Apr 24, 2002

JERUSALEM - Fighting a war is only half the battle. Selling the war is an equally important task. Hours after Israel's army began its incursions into Palestinian cities and camps three weeks ago, its public relations experts were ready for the second front: the media.

By the time the first newspapers reporting the action went to press, the war had a name: "Operation Defensive Shield." And Israeli officials were gathering at Jerusalem's International Conference Center, ready to supply journalists with information.

The number of accredited reporters here swelled quickly from 600 to 1,700, and the newly formed media center had booths to accommodate several languages, along with pamphlets describing everything from the local food to recent terror attacks.

"The media war is almost as important as the real war," says Arie Mekel, who runs the press center and is a Foreign Ministry spokesman. "The media war may determine the success or failure of the operation."

Palestinian officials also have a media campaign under way, though they have had a harder time getting their message out because much of the population was locked under 24-hour curfew and top leaders were confined to a small office by Israeli tanks.

"They have the media center, but we have the truth," says Mahdi Abdul Hadi, the director of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs, an independent research group that monitors news reports on Palestinian issues.

While Israel has provided extensive information at the press center, it has not been allowing reporters into the field with the military, in contrast to past practice.

Just a month ago, the army routinely took foreign and local reporters into the battlefield. That ended when a local television station broadcast pictures of soldiers blowing open a door to a house in Bethlehem. Shrapnel struck a Palestinian woman in the chest. She died on the floor of her home in front of her children, as her husband pleaded with the soldiers to allow an ambulance to come.

Israeli censors banned the story from airing, but the television producers felt it was a story that had to be told and broadcast it anyway. That was when reporters were told they could not go into the field, making it difficult for reporters to ascertain independently what was going on.

The latest round of battles has given both the Israeli and Palestinian sides plenty to contradict each other over.

Have the 120 or so Palestinian gunmen holed up in Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity taken priests and others hostage, as the Israelis assert, or have they been given refuge, as church leaders and the Palestinians maintain?

Were hundreds of people, including many Palestinian civilians, victims of indiscriminate killings in the Jenin Refugee Camp, or were only dozens of armed gunmen shot dead or buried under the rubble of bulldozed houses?

With entire Palestinian cities and neighboring villages turned into "closed military zones," it has been difficult for reporters to answer these questions conclusively.

To make up for not letting reporters close to the action, Israel's newly formed press office routinely sends out video clips of soldiers helping Palestinian civilians or allowing food and medicine into cities under curfew.

This is a typical text message sent out to reporters' pagers: "Press wishing to receive filmed material of, 1: the evacuation of an injured Palestinian from the Church of the Nativity; 2: the evacuation of a sick priest from the church; 3: Palestinian gunmen violently stopping a man trying to escape from the church, call ... "

Journalists who have made it into the embattled areas have been shot at, detained and threatened with expulsion from Israel. An Italian photographer was killed and two other reporters shot and wounded during the fighting. Israeli officials will say only that reporters have been warned to stay away.

Even after the Israeli army had pulled out of most areas, reporters were still officially barred from Jenin and the refugee camp, even though the original reason given for keeping them out was to protect them from harm.

Many of the images and stories that come back from the off-limit combat zones are not helpful to the Israeli public relations effort. Pictures from the Jenin Refugee Camp show vast devastation and children digging with bare hands for missing relatives.

Though reporters have uncovered no evidence of a massacre, the scenes that have now been broadcast around the world have prompted top European and U.S. officials to label it a human disaster area and have forced Israel to allow in independent investigators from the United Nations.

It is Mekel's job to counter those images with army commanders and other officials who repeatedly take to the microphones at the media center to deny that they killed Palestinian civilians and left their bodies buried under the rubble of demolished buildings.

Mekel says the Palestinians have "tried to turn a battle into a massacre" and have been fairly successful with the spin. Mekel admits, however, that the pictures from Jenin are difficult to address. "Sometimes the war doesn't photograph very well," he says.

The Palestinians, even though they do not have a well-honed public relations campaign, do understand the power of images. A year ago, long before the latest battle was planned, a spokesman for Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat wrote a memo concerning media coverage.

"To convince CNN and to aid it to reach Jenin to cover the bombing by Apaches is a thousand times more important than a declaration by a spokesman on Arab TV," wrote Bassam Abu Sharif, in his memo addressed to Arafat.

The memo was one of thousands of documents seized by Israeli police from the Orient House, the unofficial Palestinian Liberation Organization headquarters in East Jerusalem that authorities raided last year.

The document also reminds Palestinian officials that many foreign journalists stay at the American Colony Hotel, also in East Jerusalem, and that its bar is a prime spot to spread their message to reporters hanging out after a day's work.

Hadi says that Israel has made it difficult for Palestinian leaders to get their message across because of the isolation of Arafat. "We don't have a Palestinian leader in the international arena," he says. But many top Palestinian officials still make their way onto CNN and other prominent news programs.

In addition, Palestinian media have been largely silenced. Because of the curfew, reporters there are unable to get to the West Bank and newspapers cannot be delivered. "They can't cover anything," Hadi says.

Still, Hadi says the Palestinian message is getting out. "Anyone with eyes can see what is happening to us," he says. "Just look at Jenin or Nablus or our leader under siege. People know what is happening here."

Israeli officials know that images of Palestinian families left homeless, along with destroyed homes and buildings, make for good television and newspaper photographs, and bad public relations for Israel.

"The media by nature prefers underdogs," Mekel says. "We will never be seen as the underdog. We are the big, strong nation with the most powerful military in the Middle East, and the Palestinians are a poor, stateless people."

To combat that, Mekel uses the media center to remind the world of Israel's suffering. Many items are available for perusal, from video documentary of a suicide attack, called Ticking Bomb, to a collection of guns, ammunition and suicide bombing belts seized during army raids.

And the backdrop for interviews is a poster showing the pictures of all 470 Israelis who have died in terror attacks since September 2000.