Imprimir

When one realizes that some 300 foreign journalists have entered Israel in the past 10 days, joining the 500 who arrived in February — not to mention those hundreds already permanently assigned to the country — one cannot but be amazed at the fascination that this tiny nation holds for the international media. Often, this fascination blossoms into obsession — an obsession that can lead to distorted perception, which in turn results in biased reporting.

The Washington Post provides an outstanding case study of such misrepresentation. And you don’t even have to be literate to see it.

In the last two weeks, The Post has run about 25 pictures of the Palestinian uprising/war; 15 portrayed Israeli tanks on their way to a refugee camp or a Palestinian city, or Israeli soldiers searching or arresting blindfolded Palestinians. In other words, Israel’s «expansionist aggression.»

When a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up in a Jerusalem cafe killing 11 and wounding more than 100, The Post (on March 10) published four pictures: two of the carnage and two of Israeli soldiers arresting Palestinians. The qualification was obvious: You cannot show Israeli victims without exposing Israeli oppression, the «roots» of terrorism.

When Palestinian gunmen killed six Israelis traveling in the north of the country, The Post (on March 13) captured the event with a picture showing Israeli soldiers, in full combat mode, searching for the terrorists. No Israeli victims were pictured.

Not that The Post doesn’t have a soft spot: You can almost always find pictures extolling Palestinian victimhood such as the one published on March 13, illustrating a Palestinian father comforting his son in front of their ruined home — destroyed by the Israeli army — in the Jabalya refugee camp (Israel targeted the camp as a breeding ground for terrorism).

Another example: The March 2 picture highlighted «protesters in Gaza wav[ing] flags as Israel continued an assault on two West Bank refugee camps. «The effect of the sunlight behind the Palestinian flags was artistically brilliant.

But The Post’s best photo commentary thus far was published on March 8 (the same picture later showed up in Time): white doves soaring in front of an advancing Israeli tank. A Pulitzer for sure.

All this is not to say that pictures portraying Israel in a negative light shouldn’t be published. The problem is that the media generally tend to display a disproportionate amount of these pictures. In fact, this selective photo editing is an unrepressed manifestation of the hostility that some journalists harbor toward Israel. Or, alternatively, of the infinite sympathy that some in the media feel for what they perceive as the Palestinian longing for freedom and independence. Their perspective is hopelessly trapped in the David-versus-Goliath framework that the journalists themselves helped to create during the first intifada.

Still, it requires a wide stretch of the imagination to see «underdogs» in murderous terrorists who blow defenseless civilians to bits only to be later eulogized by their society as honorable martyrs. It’s an even greater stretch to portray the Palestinians — who have all the geostrategic weight of the Arab world behind them, with 22 countries resting on a vast territorial expanse that surpasses Israel’s meager size in a 1/500 ratio — as the weaker side.

In any case, the media’s professed motto «to sympathize with the weak» is wrong. Terribly wrong. The media should not side with perceived victims; their job is to report, not to take up causes. But if they must adopt a stance, they at least should side with the righteous side, not just necessarily the weak, for the weak can be mistaken. Indeed, the media have to abandon the insufferable moral equivalence between self-defense and aggression even, as best-selling author Bernard Goldberg argues, » if it means going against their liberal sensibilities and reporting that sometimes even the underdog can be evil.»

But the media won’t. They won’t abandon conceptual prejudice, they won’t embrace fair reporting, and they won’t strive for professional objectivity. For doing so would destroy the simplistic paradigm that journalists have built up and perpetuated — driven by their cherished intellectual fetish of moral relativism, the «blame Israel first» Pavlovian reflex, and their Holy Secular Bible that commands them to «see no evil.»

In sum, to maintain even moderately balanced reporting in this conflict, journalists would have to jettison the axiomatic principle by which they always see Israelis as victimizers and Palestinians as victims. This, they cannot do.

Julián Schvindlerman is a political analyst and journalist in Washington D.C.