Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land - Moral Politics Documentary (2004)

Speaker 1: Suicide bombs against Israeli today.

Speaker 2: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict dominates American news coverage of international issues. Given that news coverage is Americans' main source of information on the conflict, it becomes important to examine the stories the news media are telling us and to ask the question: Does the news coverage reflect the reality on the ground? Gun battles raged tonight in some of the heaviest fighting—

Speaker 1: A battle for Shabab al-Masih.

Speaker 3: —for Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

Noam Chomsky: The West Bank and the Gaza Strip are under a military occupation. It's the longest military occupation in modern history. It's entering its 35th year. It's a harsh and brutal military occupation. And it's extremely violent, all the time. Life is being made unlivable for the population.

Speaker 5: We have what is now quite an oppressive regime. In the occupied territories, where Israelis are lording it over Palestinians, usurping their territory, demolishing their homes, exerting a very severe form of military rule in order to remain there. And on the other hand, Palestinians are lashing back, trying to throw off the yoke of oppression of the Israelis.

Speaker 6: I spent a day traveling around Gaza. With a man named Jabr Washa, who's from the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, and he described the situation as complete economic and social suffocation. There's no economy. The unemployment is over 60% now. Crops can't move. Thousands and thousands of acres of orchards and low-lying crops have been bulldozed and uprooted by the Israeli military. There are checkpoints everywhere. Palestinians can't get from one place to another. Drives that ordinarily would take 10 minutes now take 4 hours.

Speaker 7: There are hundreds of checkpoints in the West Bank. Every Palestinian has to walk through a single ride, 2, 3 checkpoints. And the system of those checkpoints makes Palestinian Ordinary people's life miserable.

Speaker 1: لما كده أنا رحت خلاص توفى خورة. شلون ضيني يا أخوي؟ كذا تحضر خورة طالباً.

Speaker 8: إيش تستريح؟ رايح أصلي.

Speaker 1: ما صلي.

Speaker 9: ليش الصلاة حرام كمان؟ لا حرام يلا. هنا رايحين على الأوتس.

Speaker 1: من الرؤى هنا في رامالل. من وين نعدي؟ وايه معنا أوراق؟ شوفي. أي كله من كوبات حليم.

Speaker 7: كله من المستشفى.

Speaker 1: ما فيش ولا حد راضي عدينا.

Speaker 9: ما بعرفش ليش ممنوع يعني إحنا مش أوادم مش بشر إحنا لازم ندخل.

Speaker 5: It can even reach very immediate forms of oppression, such as not being able to leave your homes during curfew hours, as the Palestinians are forced sometimes to remain in their home day after day because the Israeli army says. We don't want you out of the house, on the street. It means they can't buy food, can't send their children to school, can't walk across the street to their neighbors, can't get medical attention, can't do any of the basic things that you must leave your home to do. So, that's really— that's a horrible way to live your life.

Speaker 10: Since the Intifada number 2 began, You have a much heightened level of repression. Often, these towns or villages are surrounded by the Israeli army, and people aren't allowed to go out of their village to the next— to next door. It's basically a horrendous, horrendous situation. It's like living in a very big jail.

Speaker 1: When one lives under oppression, and there is no other way out, and he's being violated every day by violent means, No!

Speaker 11: No! No! No!

Speaker 1: No! No! No!

Speaker 2: Then, sometimes, the only way out of that situation is through violence, particularly if the one that is violating your rights and taking away your freedom is ruthless and uses systematic methods of violence to oppress you, like torture, Amnesty International has regularly documented serious human rights violations by Israeli military forces in the occupied territories, including unlawful killings, torture and ill-treatment of prisoners, wanton destruction of homes with residents still inside, the blocking of ambulances, denial of humanitarian assistance, and the use of Palestinian civilians as human shields, and has gone so far as to label them We don't see the suffering that the Palestinians are undergoing through occupation.

Speaker 5: We don't really understand how bad the occupation is for them.

Speaker 6: That's what's become so twisted, that the dearth of reporting, the absence of images, the lack of analysis, the void of The lack of voices describing the experience of Palestinians under occupation is so vast that people have no idea that an occupation is going on.

Speaker 8: CBS Evening News.

Speaker 2: Americans rely on the news media for information about events occurring around the News, especially television news, exerts a powerful influence on our perceptions, telling us which events are important and shaping our understanding of the issues. Given the central role played by the United States in the Middle East conflict, and thus the vital role played by American voters, influencing U.S. media coverage of the conflict is crucial. Controlling the images and words used to explain the conflict has become an important extension of the struggle.

Speaker 11: Israel is really fighting a war on 2 fronts. The first is a military campaign being waged in the occupied territories against the Palestinian people. And the second is a PR campaign being waged here in the U.S. through the American media to ensure continued support for Israel's occupation. Alon Pincus, consul general for Israel in New York and the coordinator of Israel's PR efforts, was recently quoted as saying, we are currently in a conflict with the Palestinians, and engaging in a successful PR campaign is part of winning the conflict. So you could say that in addition to the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel is also involved in an attempt to ideologically occupy the American media.

Speaker 2: The roots of Israel's public relations campaign go back to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, that earned it worldwide criticism, in particular, the massacre of Palestinian civilians at the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. To the Israeli government, the problem was not the deaths of thousands of civilians. Rather, it was the damage to Israel's public image, a public relations disaster in need of damage control.

Robert Fisk: They surrounded Beirut. In 3 months, 17,500 people, almost all of them civilians, were killed. I saw Many thousands of their bodies. Then came the massacre of Sabra and Shatila by Israel's own allies, as the camp was surrounded by Israeli troops. And they desperately said, what went wrong? It was concluded that the problem was there wasn't good enough public relations.

Speaker 11: After the public relations disaster of Lebanon, Israel decided to set up permanent institutional structures to control how Americans would think about the Middle East. In 1983, Israel launched the Hasbara Project, the aim of which was to ensure good press in the U.S. media. The goal was to train Israeli diplomats in communications and public relations. For example, they trained press officers in Israeli consulates in the U.S. to ensure that American journalists would write stories favorable to Israel. As one of these press officers said in the 1980s, he had breakfast, lunch, and dinner with journalists, and that a typical day would involve conversations with producers at leading news and TV talk shows about the content of the program. He described it as, in fact, This targeting of the American media goes on in the present day.

Speaker 6: The Israeli press office is spitting out press releases, statements, information all the time.

Speaker 13: Because of lack of access to Palestinian officials in the West Bank and the sophistication of Israel's PR techniques inside Israel, a lot of times the stories are already Tilted in Israel's favor before they ever leave American journalists sitting in the area.

Speaker 6: When you're talking about how the story's covered from the U.S., the propaganda machine is even more effective than it is in Israel.

Speaker 2: American news coverage is influenced by a complex set of institutional relationships. These influences can be thought of as a series of filters through which the news must travel before it emerges in the voices of news anchors. To understand how American news media report on the Middle East conflict, we need to understand how these institutional filters operate. Among the most important of these filters are the business interests of the corporations that own the mass media, interests that extend beyond the United States and across the globe to the Middle East. The economic interests of media owners are shared by political elites. Politicians and policymakers who form a second filter. These political elites have the power to access and influence mainstream media and are themselves part of a system dominated by corporate money and interests. The strategic importance of the Middle East to these 2 groups is reflected in media coverage of the region and of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A third filter, Israel's own public relations efforts further affects the coverage. The government of Israel employs some of the largest American public relations firms as image consultants to coordinate its political and media campaigns. 9 Israeli consulates help implement these PR campaigns by developing relationships with journalists and monitoring media outlets. Scores of private American organizations, both Christian and Jewish, reiterate the official line and organize grassroots opposition to any coverage deemed unfavorable to Israel. The most important of these is AIPAC, the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee, widely regarded as the most powerful foreign lobby in Washington. This institutional framework of American business and political interests, in combination with Israeli public relations, shapes media coverage of the Middle East. At the same time, those progressive organizations opposing Israeli government policy, such as Jews Against the Occupation and Americans for Peace Now, rarely make it through these filters. Finally, if any news stories critical of Israeli policy do surface, There are a host of media watchdog groups that monitor and pressure journalists and media outlets, the most important of which is CAMERA.

Speaker 6: You have activist organizations from the right, the pro-Israeli right, that very effectively— they say monitor, I would say harass— They target journalists and their editors and try to, try to make sure that the coverage is objective, by which they mean pro-Israel.

Speaker 9: You can see all of the, you know, kind of pressure groups who, you know, write campaigns of letters to the editor against, you know, news outlets and ask for, you know, demand that stories be changed or that, you know, that reporters be fired.

Robert Fisk: Is something you just have to take into account. If you, you know, both literally and metaphorically, if you work in the Middle East, you've got to take the sticks and stones. What I object to is that my American colleagues don't seem to be prepared to do that.

Speaker 9: And even in Israel itself, you know, you can find the main daily newspapers, like Haaretz, for example, provides coverage on the ground and analysis, some of which takes, you know, takes, has views on the conflict that you would never, that would be almost beyond the pale for an American journalist, say, at the New York Times, to write.

Robert Fisk: The main major television news networks and newspapers in the United States have long ago got their fear to be supreme over their duties as journalists. They are not monitoring the centers of power when it comes to the relationship Between America and the Middle East, Israel and America, and America and the Arabs and the Palestinians. They will not ask the right questions. They will not report it using the correct words. They will not confront the reality. And they've given up. And I think once you acquire fear, it's very difficult to get rid of it.

Speaker 1: I'm a journalist.

Speaker 11: One of the things you have to keep in mind when you're looking at how media report on something like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not only understanding what's there in the story, but more importantly, what's not there, what's being left out. In that sense, absence is as vital as presence in terms of how people make sense of the story. Context is everything.

Speaker 6: The context that's often missing from the current reporting is that the Palestinian uprising is a revolt against a 34-year-long occupation. And if there's no occupation in the story, then the story doesn't really make sense. And the occupation is frequently missing.

Speaker 9: A typical TV news report, for example, on, you know, ABC News, will show dramatic pictures of these confrontations where Palestinians are confronting Israeli troops and the Israeli troops are responding.

Speaker 14: But Friday saw more clashes in Hebron between stone-throwing Palestinian youths and Israeli soldiers armed with batons.

Speaker 9: For most Americans who don't understand the history of the conflict, this is an example of riots that are going on, where the authorities are taking measures to crack down. What's not mentioned is the fact that these confrontations are taking place on occupied territory, that the Israeli troops who are there are defending an occupation that's That doesn't have any international legitimacy. That's illegal.

Speaker 7: The American media, they are concentrating only on the deeds, on the violence, and not on the reasons, and not on the basic facts of occupation.

Speaker 1: Israeli troops were pelted with stones, and they responded with tear gas and rubber bullets.

Speaker 15: This is not presented. as an army using its arsenal against young people who are largely unarmed and who are protesting because of the occupation, the siege, the total oppression of a whole nation.

Speaker 2: The lack of context is so dramatic that only 4% of the network news reports on the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip mentioned that the The Israeli military sends its troops into the occupied territories to defend what is considered an illegal occupation.

Speaker 9: And when the population there resists, Israel is presented as being under attack.

Speaker 1: Israel was responding to an attack today.

Speaker 13: Israel has beefed up forces following a Palestinian mortar attack.

Speaker 15: They don't present it as saying Israel is the aggressor, Israel is killing people on their own land, in their own homes, as an occupier.

Speaker 1: To Sharon, the West Bank invasion is simple self-defense.

Speaker 10: The Israeli prime minister reiterated Israel's right to self-defense.

Speaker 13: Israel's basic posture is anything but defensive. Israel is the only country in the world right now which, in contravention to UN Security Council resolutions, maintains tens of thousands of heavily armed troops outside its borders in somebody else's country for the sole purpose of taking their land away from them and in the process forcing them to live under the worst form of tyranny imaginable, which is a foreign military dictatorship.

Speaker 15: The tanks, the gunships, the snipers, they are all on Palestinian land. And I don't see why they have to protect themselves on our land if they're occupying our land. That context is always missing.

Speaker 1: A crowd throwing stones and homemade stun grenades at the soldiers The troops opening fire, killing 2 Palestinians and injuring—

Speaker 15: So, even when Israel is busy murdering people in cold blood, it is always presented as part of the self-defense mechanism of Israel.

Noam Chomsky: When Israel, in the occupied territories now, claim that they have to defend themselves, they are defending themselves in the sense that any military occupier has to defend itself against the population they're crushing.

Speaker 11: Prime Minister Ariel Sharon justified the siege as self-defense.

Speaker 16: You can't defend yourself when you're militarily occupying Once we know that the occupation is illegal and we know that it's subject to international condemnation, and it's very costly in terms of lives and money, Then we have to ask why Israel continues to maintain the occupation. And the reason is because it intends to annex the territories eventually.

Speaker 2: For decades, Israel has been colonizing Palestinian land by building settlements on that land. The settlements are in contravention of the 4th Geneva Convention that forbids the transfer of population into land colonized by illegal force. The settlements are dotted throughout the Palestinian territories and are set up strategically, often on hilltops, to give Israel military control of the land and its natural resources, namely water. The settlements, together with the surrounding land that they have expropriated, control over 40% of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Israeli settlements are Jewish-only settlements, and they are linked Together by a network of bypass roads that carve up the West Bank, restricting Palestinians' freedom of movement, and that simultaneously link the settlements to Israel proper. The strategic placement of the Israeli settlements and the bypass roads can be described as an Israeli matrix of control over the occupied territories.

Speaker 16: Given that Israel's goal is eventual annexation of the occupied territories, The settlements, of course, are a means to attaining that goal, but they would appear to be threatening colonies if they were presented in their true light. So, better to hide their identity, to sanitize the language that describes them.

Robert Fisk: CNN sent out a memorandum to its staff in the Middle East: In future, Gilo is to be called a neighborhood.

Speaker 1: The Jewish neighborhood of Gilo on the outskirts of Jerusalem. The Israeli neighborhood Gilo. Gilo, a Jewish neighborhood in East Jerusalem.

Robert Fisk: Now, there's a great deal of difference between a colony, which is what the settlement is— colonie, as the French say— and a neighborhood. A settlement, an Israeli settlement, is built for Jews and Jews only on Arab land, and it's illegal, against international law. A neighborhood is just a nice, friendly place.

Speaker 1: This is southern Jerusalem. A quiet neighborhood. And while the only thing beating down on me right now is the rain, bullets frequently rain in this area, which is the reason those Israeli tanks are right back there.

Robert Fisk: So, by pressuring journalists into changing the use of words, by making them alter their lexicon, by linguistically changing the narrative story, not only are the journalists kept in line— this is the language, this is the the system of linguistics you must use. But it also successfully takes away from one side in the dispute, the Palestinians, the reasons why they act in the way they do, whether we approve of it or, or say that it's a wicked thing.

Speaker 11: When we look at the British press, which remains pretty independent of the Israeli public relations machine, you get a very different story about the settlements. They emphasize both the illegality and their vital importance in the conflict.

Speaker 17: They look like ordinary Israeli neighborhoods— suburban, modern and comfortable. But the Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip are now the key issue in the conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis. There are something like 200,000 Israelis living on land captured from the Palestinians in the War of 1967. The government knows it's under intense pressure to stop expanding the settlements which are illegal under international law. But the people left with no choice are the Palestinians. They see every new Israeli building on occupied land as a gross violation of their sovereignty, and they insist that the Israelis must stop all building.

Speaker 11: In contrast to British coverage, in American news coverage, the settlements are downplayed, and questions regarding their legality are rarely raised. In fact, there are times when they're flat-out legitimized and defended.

Speaker 14: Israeli settlements are so interspersed throughout Palestinian territory that a border around them all would be too long to defend. And evacuating Jewish settlements, even those deep inside the territories, is politically impossible, at least for now.

Speaker 16: What American reports tend to obscure is the fact that the Israeli government has promoted the settlements as part of a strategy.

Speaker 8: The right is in government and armed with bulldozers, expanding in the West Bank and Gaza, staking a claim to the land, making space for new immigrants, whose numbers are meant to counter the fast-growing Arab population.

Speaker 13: The insertion of a large Israeli population in certain areas gives the Israeli government a rationalization for refusing to relinquish control. And to give Israel an argument that this part of the occupied territories has become so Israeli, has so many Jews living in it, that it simply has to be annexed to the state of Israel, which is why you can see East Jerusalem completely ringed by a pattern of heavily fortified Israeli settlements designed to cut East Jerusalem off from the rest of the West Bank for the permanent domination and eventual annexation of, at the very least, key areas, if not, in the end, the whole thing.

Speaker 16: The settlements are illegitimate by international law. But what's worse is that many of the occupants of the settlements, their founders and people who live there today, are very aggressive toward Palestinians. They go around fully armed, submachine guns. They carry grenades. And they frequently threaten Palestinians.

Speaker 8: In Hebron, settlers initiated more clashes. They say they're tired of coming under attack. But their communities are illegal under international law.

Speaker 1: They set fire to Palestinian fields, smashed cars, and vandalized shops. And all this during what's still being called officially a ceasefire.

Speaker 8: Settlers have vowed to intensify protests against the ceasefire. They want Ariel Sharon to hit back. Some of them have already carried out their own vigilante attacks on Arab villages.

Speaker 2: Israeli colonization of Palestinian land has been a twofold process. On the one hand, Israel has been constructing Jewish-only settlements on Palestinian land. On the other, Israel has taken various measures to drive Palestinians out. One way this has been done is by demolishing Palestinian homes. In 2.5 years since the outbreak of the Intifada, Israel has demolished over 1,000 Palestinian homes, making thousands of civilians homeless.

Speaker 3: It's a large-scale process of demolishing the homes of Palestinians in order to effect what Israel is largely about, which is controlling the territory, making life uncomfortable for the Making Palestinians leave their homes on the West Bank. It's tacitly a gradual ethnic cleansing process.

Speaker 1: If you are a Palestinian family and you have clear and uncontested title to your land, even, a clear security record, you can stand on your head, and in most cases you're not going to get a legal building permit. Then you build— if you go ahead and have to build in any case, for demographic reasons, what have you, You build an illegal home, and it's subject to demolition. And thousands of people have been made homeless this way. And today there are at least 2,000 standing demolition orders. And, of course, each of those orders represents a family. So, basically, land which belonged to Palestinian families for generations was now considered state land.

Speaker 8: This was home to 4 generations of the 15 people, 11 of them children. Too much for Ziad Al-Hirbawi to take. He helped build the house with his own bare hands. This is the babies' food, a relative says. Israel, what are you doing? It was making a family homeless. They had no permit to build. But for Palestinians in Jerusalem, permits are almost impossible.

Speaker 11: If you watch American coverage, Israel's demolition of Palestinian homes is presented as simply enforcement of the law. What we don't see is how the law is unequally applied in order to steal Palestinian land.

Speaker 16: The demolition of Palestinian homes is done on the excuse that they're not legal, that they don't have permits to be built, when in reality this is a way of clearing Palestinians from the land. Making it impossible for them to live there, pushing more and more of them off in order to be able to claim the land for Israel.

Speaker 2: Palestinian resistance to the occupation has been both nonviolent and violent. Some of the violent resistance has been aimed at Israeli soldiers and civilians in the occupied territories, and some has been spilling over into Israel proper in the form of suicide bombers.

Speaker 8: A scene of chaos and destruction, rescue workers rushing to search for the living among the carnage. The center had been packed. It was just before the Jewish Sabbath. Now shoppers lay dead on the street, victims of a suicide bomb.

Robert Fisk: I was very close to the pizzeria bombing in Jerusalem in August of last year, and I got there, you know, faster than And I saw an Israeli baby without a head, a woman with a chair leg sticking out of her chest. My reporting, for example, I'm pretty brutal about suicide bombers. I call them wicked. And I say that. I use the word. But I also make a point of saying, why?

Speaker 10: When you have a population that is being occupied, when their fundamental human rights are being systematically denied, Whoa! When they're not allowed to move from city to— from city to city or from place to place without huge amount of harassment, when they're being subjected to torture, when people are essentially in desperate conditions, it's not a surprise that they're going to be very, very, very angry.

Speaker 8: No!

Speaker 5: They feel so helpless in the face of a powerful Israeli army that some Palestinians think the only answer— and I condemn this— but some Palestinians think the only response to a powerful army is a guerrilla tactic, going into Israel and setting bombs off in cities. And there's increasing support for this among Palestinians because of the fact that they They're doing it with horrible means.

Speaker 7: It's something inhuman. I totally condemn it. But we have to understand that these are the effects of the occupation.

Speaker 16: In the non-American coverage, BBC, for example, the suicide bombings are generally put in the context of the occupation. That they are a response to conditions which are very dehumanizing to Palestinians and against which they are defenseless.

Speaker 8: The attack, a reply to Ariel Sharon's devastating airstrikes. We found the bomber's family in their modest house near Bethlehem— not militants or gunmen, just ordinary people. Ariel Sharon has made good on his threat of a huge military offensive. This may be the only result— more Palestinian attacks, not less. A suicide bombing in this supermarket today, just what Sharon is trying to stop. But all the tanks in the world are no substitute for a political settlement. Today's bomber was not prepared to wait. Here, a brief glimpse of her face— not a hardened fighter, but a girl of 16.

Speaker 10: But there is absolutely no understanding on the part of the American media, and hence on the part of the American population that's educated by that media, about what creates this circumstance. Israel occupies. People strike at Israel against that occupation. They use means that I think are wrong means, namely the terror. And then Israel imposes punishment on the entire Palestinian people, which then generates a climate in which it's much The Israeli Security Cabinet has agreed to still further intensify its operations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Speaker 17: It's difficult to see, though, how such a move can fail to provoke still more Palestinian attacks.

Speaker 11: In contrast to the international press, in American media there's a reversal of cause and effect, in that the occupation is framed as a response to suicide bombings.

Speaker 1: The Israelis moved into the occupied territories to root out the suicide bombers. The Israelis are now stationed in force All over the West Bank, their iron grip designed to prevent suicide bombers getting through.

Speaker 9: And it's true that, you know, Israelis do feel insecure, and they have very good, legitimate reasons for feeling insecure. But overwhelmingly, reporters will see the source of the insecurity they feel as Palestinian hatred— is a word that you see all the time— that this conflict isn't motivated by a struggle over power or over land or territory.

Speaker 14: A Palestinian man emerged from a taxi on a busy shopping street in downtown Jerusalem with a machine gun in his hands and hate in his eyes.

Speaker 3: If the occupation is invisible, as it's been rendered by how the United States government looks at this and how that's echoed in the media, in many cases, then the reason for the frustration seems nonsensical, and therefore they're just inherently Upset people or violent people and so on. It's either in their genes or in their culture.

Speaker 1: Neither the best intention of the Saudis nor the power of the Israelis could stop another young zealot willing to die so he could kill Jews on Passover.

Speaker 3: It's spun in such a way so as to justify Israeli occupation.

Speaker 11: Israeli soldiers say their actions are justified.

Speaker 1: They use suicide bombers, he Yes, Israelis are being shot at and killed. And so, yes, Israel does have real defense needs. At the same time, defense in Israel, in particular, has become this mantra. And once people hear the word defense, they stop thinking. And so, all too often, the defense of Israel is used as a justification for the Anything can be called defense and then justified.

Speaker 2: Israeli bulldozers and tanks moved into the refugee camp at 2 in the morning. 2 hours later, 54 Palestinian homes had been flattened. The raid was widely seen as retaliation for the deaths of 4 Israeli soldiers yesterday.

Speaker 13: Israel is always cast itself, and is always cast by the media, as reactive, as simply Responding to Palestinian aggression. Israel strikes back against terror. Israel retaliates. Israel responds. Palestinians attack. Israel retaliates.

Speaker 2: A day of Palestinian attacks and Israeli retaliation.

Speaker 1: Israel resumed its retaliation. Violence could escalate over the coming days as Israel retaliates.

Speaker 11: Calling Palestinian actions attacks and Israeli actions retaliation is meaningful. Retaliation suggests a defensive stance in response to violence initiated by someone else. It places a responsibility for the violence on the party provoking the retaliation. In other words, Palestinian violence, like suicide bombings, is seen as aggression, and thus as the cause and the origin of the conflict.

Speaker 1: That's what has caused this crisis to come upon us, not the absence of a political way forward, but terrorism in its rawest form.

Speaker 11: Since the September 11th attacks on the U.S., Israel's PR strategy has been to frame all Palestinian actions, violent or not, To the extent that they can do that, they've repackaged an illegal military occupation as part of America's war on terrorism.

Speaker 14: This is Israel's war on terrorism. F-16s hit a Palestinian police station in the Gaza Strip this morning.

Speaker 2: The case the Israelis are trying to make: this is no different than what the U.S. is doing in Afghanistan. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon declared on national television tonight that he was determined to root out what he called the terrorist infrastructure in the Palestinian territories.

Speaker 1: Terror, terror, ve'ot terror. Israeli Prime Minister Sharon said his nation has taken many steps to cooperate in the search for peace, but the only thing it's had in return is terrorism, terrorism, and more terrorism.

Speaker 11: Israel has made Americans empathize with its position by linking itself emotionally To Americans' 9/11 experience, making a connection where there really isn't one. It's been breathtaking how American journalists have allowed themselves to be manipulated in this way. A New York delegation toured suicide bombing sites in Israel today. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said the people of Jerusalem and New York City stand shoulder to shoulder against terrorism.

Speaker 2: In nearly 3 years since the outbreak of the intifada, over 500 Israeli civilians have been killed, most inside Israel by Palestinian suicide bombers. On the Palestinian side, over 2,000 civilians have been killed. Most in the occupied territories by Israeli soldiers. Yet while many innocent people have died on both sides, not all are considered newsworthy in the American media.

Speaker 13: There have been periods where almost no Israelis have been killed and large numbers of Palestinians have been killed. Those periods have been referred to routinely by the American press as periods of relative calm. What that means is it's relatively calm if only Arabs are dying.

Speaker 11: In August 2002, news outlets were reporting a period of relative quiet.

Speaker 1: Relative quiet has held in the West Bank town of Bethlehem.

Speaker 11: What the reports failed to mention was that during this same time period, 39 Palestinian civilians were killed. 24 of them were women and children.

Speaker 1: Palestinians claim that in Jenin, hundreds of bodies are buried under the rubble in the center of the town.

Speaker 16: The Israeli army says In the American media, on television, of course, but even in sophisticated media like The New York Times, Israelis, whether they're Israeli citizens or settlers or soldiers, are presented in a very humane, human way, a way in which Americans can identify with them.

Speaker 14: 23 Israeli soldiers were killed in the fighting. 2 were killed in the bombing. Among the dead in the fighting, one of them was Marc and Rena Robinson's 21-year-old son, Matanya. His name means God's gift.

Speaker 7: There's a saying in Hebrew, God gives and God takes. And he took him.

Speaker 15: You have, for example, an Israeli soldier who's on Palestinian territory shooting Palestinians. If he gets injured or killed, immediately you get the fullness of his humanity. You go to his funeral. You see his grieving mother or wife or child. You learn a lot— his name, his hopes, his dreams, where he came from and so on. And yet you have, you know, hundreds and thousands of Palestinians killed, and you never get to know their name. You never get to see a funeral. You never— you're not exposed to the grief of the family.

Speaker 7: Right.

Speaker 15: You don't know that these children, probably many of them, were shot in their own homes, in their own backyards, or on the way to school. It doesn't matter. They become part of the abstraction. You know, 400 Palestinians killed. That's it. It's a number.

Speaker 1: In the West Bank, a car explosion killed 3 Palestinians. 6 Palestinians were killed and 45 wounded by Israeli troops in various incidents.

Speaker 5: There's no attention paid to the Palestinian victims. When an Israeli missile hits a building and kills, collaterally, a number of Palestinians, it's as if— it's as if that's the price they have— that has to be paid.

Speaker 2: The F-16s leveled several Palestinian security buildings, killed 12 Palestinian policemen.

Speaker 1: A funeral for a Palestinian killed, with 2 of his children There's no in-depth empathy.

Speaker 5: There's no— there's no superficial empathy for the fact that these were innocent people who are being killed.

Speaker 14: In the West Bank town of Ramallah, an Israeli tank destroyed a pickup truck belonging to Abu Quake. He wasn't in it. His wife and 3 of his children were. They were all killed, and so were 2 other children nearby.

Speaker 15: This, you know, sort of blowing up of a car and using missiles against For the Israeli people, who— you know, raining death from the skies is something normal. It's part of the procedure.

Speaker 2: The Israelis say they used the F-16s because they can do more damage. Tonight, they hit the Palestinians hard.

Speaker 13: Tonight in Gaza, Israeli helicopter gunships lit up the night sky.

Robert Fisk: Israel attacked Palestinian targets.

Speaker 15: So this normalization of the horror and the exclusion of the human dimension has become part of the ongoing policy.

Speaker 14: About 20 Palestinians were killed today as Israeli warplanes, troops and tanks targeted Palestinian militants. Israeli soldiers fired on Palestinians violating the military curfew. At least 4 were killed.

Speaker 11: There are other ways of reporting on Palestinian victims. In fact, when you look at the British press, the ways in which the Palestinian victims are dismissed and downplayed in the American media, the ways in which their deaths are justified in American coverage, becomes even more glaring. A really clear example of this is the BBC story on 6 Palestinian kids killed by an Israeli booby trap, and one the next day by Israeli soldiers.

Speaker 8: 5 small bodies on their way to the grave. Carried shoulder-high, a martyr's funeral in Gaza for the dead schoolboys. Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Sources in the Israeli government and security services have admitted they were probably the victims of an Israeli booby trap, victims who died side by side, 2 sets of brothers and a cousin, all members of one devastated Palestinian family, the Alastals. Naeem lost his oldest son and his youngest who was only 6. Both good boys, he told me, who never gave any trouble. This Israeli minister wants a full inquiry, but claims it wasn't a civilian area.

Speaker 1: Civilians were not there. That's exactly what was stated.

Speaker 8: I stood there yesterday. This is an area where children pass to go to school. This is an area where people cultivate. I have stood there, and I have seen it. Now, is it appropriate that a roadside bomb should be planted in this place?

Robert Fisk: That's exactly what will be investigated.

Speaker 1: That's exactly what will be investigated.

Speaker 8: Even as he spoke, Palestinians say another child was killed in Gaza. They claim Israeli forces fired on these stone throwers, killing a 15-year-old called Wael. The army denies it.

Speaker 11: If you looked at the American coverage from the same day, you'd struggle to think of it as even the same event. The report practically blames the victims for their own deaths.

Speaker 2: In Gaza, a Palestinian teenager was killed in a clash with Israeli troops following the funerals of 5 boys. They died Thursday when one of them kicked an unexploded tank shell.

Speaker 15: There's antiseptic language. There's cleaned-up language that does not show the human reality, the substance, and does not really show the inherent injustice in the situation.

Speaker 9: You'll see most commentators in the media constantly urging the U.S. to become more engaged, more engaged in the negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

Speaker 1: Today that the U.S.

Speaker 11: must get more involved in settling the conflict.

Speaker 2: There are growing calls for President Bush to take on a more active role.

Robert Fisk: Nearly everyone agrees the U.S.

Speaker 9: The premise of that view is the idea that's stated over and over again, that the U.S. is merely trying to bring about a peace, trying to bring the 2 sides together. It has no preconceptions about what— you know, whose side is right and whose side is wrong, you know, which side needs to make more compromises and which doesn't. And I think that's a fundamentally inaccurate view of how U.S. diplomacy has worked over the past several years.

Speaker 16: The United States has presented itself as a neutral broker between these 2 parties. But if you look at its actions rather than its words, you see that it has favored Israel almost 100% of the time. The U.S. has vetoed resolutions many times that would have put a stop to Israel's actions in the territory.

Speaker 1: In New York, a push by the Palestinians and their supporters to win a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for an end to the violence was vetoed by the United Israel has rejected UN involvement in the conflict, backed by its closest ally, the United States.

Noam Chomsky: The US blocked diplomatic moves from the Arab states, from Europe, from the PLO, anything, because it just refused to accept this kind of diplomatic settlement. Well, there's a name for that in the United States. It's called the peace process.

Speaker 1: What it actually is is the process by which the United States prevented The United States has struggled for decades, with widely varying success and failure, to help ease this Mideast conflict.

Speaker 16: The United States as a neutral broker between Israel and the Palestinians is a cruel joke on both Palestinians and the Arab world at large. The United States has exercised its veto many, many times in the Security Council, but perhaps worse than that is that it provides billions of dollars of aid to Israel, a lot of it military aid, and a lot of it in the most lethal possible form.

Speaker 2: American aid to Israel totals over $6 billion per year. Israel receives $3 billion in direct aid, 2/3 of which is military aid intended for the purchase of American-made weapons. In addition, Israel receives $3 billion in indirect This is the direct aid, at least half of which is used for military ventures, such as subsidizing Israel's domestic armaments industry. Not included in this figure are other forms of military aid, such as weapons given to Israel free of charge, including fighter planes and attack helicopters. Total U.S. aid to Israel since 1949 has amounted to over $100 billion, making Israel a country the The pipeline of violence is very much stamped Made in USA.

Speaker 3: I mean, the United States has been brokering an alleged peace process for how long? And what does the situation look like?

Speaker 16: The United States, at least the Bush administration and its successors, have been Strategists have recognized that the EU, and possibly Russia, are potential competitors. And so, being able to keep control of trade, investment and the oil industry in a region that is very close to Russia, very close to Europe, this is a way for the United States to maintain its hegemony.

Noam Chomsky: There's a framework of state policy. It's been in place for about 30 years. Of supporting Israel as a kind of base for projection of U.S. power in the region.

Speaker 11: That support intensified under Clinton and intensified even more in the Bush administration with the rise to power of the neoconservatives in the Defense Department, such as Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Donald Rumsfeld, and others like them.

Robert Fisk: Now, when in effect you have people so close to Israel inside the U.S. administration, I think Israel is in the White House.

Speaker 1: This was the 6th meeting between Mr. Bush and Prime Minister Sharon.

Noam Chomsky: Every time he comes, I learn a lot.

Speaker 1: The president has never—

Robert Fisk: There is no difference any longer between U.S. policy in the Middle East and Israeli policy.

Speaker 1: All of us here tonight are brought together by a deep commitment to Israel's security. Prosperity and freedom, and to the strongest possible relationship between Israel and the United States.

Noam Chomsky: The U.S. wants to make sure that Israel can control the situation by violence, as it does, of course, and it'll give the diplomatic cover, and it'll give them the military means.

Speaker 3: Congress.

Robert Fisk: Which is very, very strongly pro-Israeli at the moment.

Speaker 1: 94 votes to 2 was the way a resolution was passed in the Senate the other day, wholeheartedly endorsing everything Israel is doing.

Robert Fisk: At no point, however, has the mainstream media, whether television or newspapers, confronted and challenged this issue in your country, in the United States.

Speaker 9: To find critical views on American diplomacy, you really have to go beyond the American— the mainstream media. You can find very critical views in the British press. You can even find critical views in the Israeli press. But, you know, whereas there will be some criticisms at the margins of details of how America conducts its diplomacy in the Middle East, you don't find a real alternative viewpoint in the mainstream media.

Robert Fisk: It is the last taboo subject in America. You can talk about lesbians, blacks, gays, anything you want. But not America's relationship, or not any serious examination of America's relationship with Israel or what Israel is doing, albeit almost always with American weapons. To see the press conferences, Condoleezza Rice, George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, it's all on first name. And with that, I'm happy to take your questions.

Noam Chomsky: Helen?

Speaker 5: Yeah, April?

Robert Fisk: David?

Speaker 2: Yes, Randy.

Robert Fisk: Jon?

Speaker 1: What do you know about the sourcing of the British report?

Robert Fisk: But the relationship between American journalists, particularly television journalists, and the centers of power has become incestuous. So close— because an argument could cut you off from access to the center of power— so close that it is impossible any longer to convey what you know about the centers of power. All you can do is say what you think they mean and what you know they say. So what's the point of journalism?

Speaker 2: Through its unconditional support for Israel, the American government has become one of the biggest obstacles to achieving peace. Consequently, the struggle for peace and justice in the Middle East will have to be waged here, in the United States.

Noam Chomsky: Because the United States has primary responsibility for this. There's nothing either anti-Semitic or being a self-hating Jew in condemning U.S. policies, which underlie massive atrocities and have been blocking a peaceful settlement, have led the world pretty close to war several times, nuclear war. These are things that we ought to be concerned about. I mean— I think that the United States has a responsibility to What Israel does, that's for them to worry about. What we do is for us to worry about.

Speaker 3: Americans need to wake up and find out what's happening in their name throughout the world. They have a responsibility, if they pretend to live in a democratic society, which is being eroded in terms of how democratic it is, to find out what your government is supporting, what it's doing overseas in your name with your tax dollars.

Noam Chomsky: I mean, people here do not want to send helicopters to attack civilians. You know, they— if people know what's going on in the occupied territories, they're not going to want to support it, I mean, any more than they support other atrocities that we're responsible for. So you keep it quiet. Describe it as a defense against terrorism, not as brutal military occupation, which is evoking resistance.

Speaker 3: Right.

Noam Chomsky: If U.S. policy shifts, the coverage will shift.

Speaker 7: The occupation doesn't serve security. And if the American public opinion will come to understand this very truth that we believe in, we hope that the administration, that the president, will— do whatever he can in order to help to facilitate peace talks, which will bring end to the occupation, on the one hand, safety and security to Israel, on the other hand, and decent life for the Palestinians, as he suggested in his speech. He said it very beautifully, but he's doing nothing about it.

Speaker 5: The only way that Israel will have peace and security is by making peace with our neighbors. The only way that we will have a safe Israel is by making a just peace with the Palestinians.

Speaker 1: Their struggle, in many ways, is a just struggle. What are they struggling? They're struggling for a state.