thanks for sharing David,
best
John
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From: Media, Communications and Cultural Studies Association (MeCCSA) [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of David Kaposi [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 31 July 2014 09:32
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Media, Gaza, violence, understanding
Couple of weeks ago I was commissioned to write a piece for a newspaper - it then did never get published, the editor did not like it. I find it painfully relevant to the discussion here too.
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Violence and understanding
It is common knowledge that Britain’s broadsheets are either conservative right wing (Telegraph, The Times), or progressive liberal-left wing (Guardian, Independent). It is also next to common knowledge that conservatives are ‘pro-Israeli’, and left-liberals more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. Perhaps less widespread, but many people also presume that these political opinions actually mask some other agenda: that the allegedly progressive pro-Palestinian stance of the left often carries antisemitism; or that the predilection to take note of this 'antisemitism' is but a conservative ploy to deflect criticism from the State of Israel.
I am writing here as these more and less common assumptions will be echoed in the questions – 'what would you do if militants indiscriminately fired rockets on Hampstead?' or 'do you think the death of 173 and counting Palestinian civilians is proportionate to that of 0 Israelis?' – we hear these days. I do not know how to answer these questions, partly because they are all too often but vehicles of this or that sort of emotions. The reason I am writing is because I spent some time examining how conservative and progressive broadsheets wrote about the last major flare-up of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the 22-day long 'Gaza war' or 'Operation Cast Lead' that ended on 18 January, 2009.
In short, British broadsheets did not write all that differently from each other. They uniformly replicated the logic of war rather than advancing that of peace.
Examining what topics were high on the newspapers' agenda, hardly any difference could be detected. Reporting of facts of the war, actions of the participants, deaths occurring on either side of the conflict, mundane or controversial events; the broadsheets attributed roughly the same amount of space to these issues. In fact, not only were references made to these topics in equal measure but it was The Times where the only major divergence from the consensus appeared on any given topic: the conservative newspaper wrote considerably more of Israel's controversial use of the chemical substance white phosphorous than any other newspaper.
Of course, numerical frequency of topics is one thing whereas arguments in which those topics are embedded may be quite another. And focusing on narratives and judgments of the war presented in editorials did in fact appear to convey a different picture. Yet there were no differences beneath the surface to speak of, inasmuch as the act of understanding the war became for all newspapers invariably exhausted in their search for a black-and-white story of blame and innocence. We only learned (from conservative papers) that Hamas does what it does as it is evil and antisemitic, or that Israel responds as it does simply because it is violent (from the Guardian). We did not learn why Hamas might be antisemitic or Israelis violent. And we never heard about what impact Hamas's action may have on Israeli identities and actions; or how Israeli policies might influence what Hamas had come to act and to be.
Indeed, the power of a common myth of Good and Evil governing the understanding of the conflict never became more visible than in The Times’ weaving the topic of the potentially ‘illegal’ material of white phosphorous into its editorial argument. The logical consequence of arguing for some sort of inquiry into Israeli responsibility somehow never got uttered. It was the potentially sinister motives of 'those accusing Israel' of war crimes that the newspaper occasioned instead. It was as if innocence and purity had to be kept apart from blame and impurity – never more so when the pure actually appeared to act in problematic ways.
A terrible (hi)story of human relations became replaced by a mythical (hi)story of Good and Bad. For those believing that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict occurs between two people, both of whom will bleed if you prick them, this black-and-white logic replicating war must be replaced by the grey logic of political-moral responsibility. What matters for peace to be ultimately achieved is not whether one is pro-this or pro-that, not even whether right now one argues for military intervention or not, but the capacity to understand what bleeding is masked by someone pricking the other.
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