Associated Press (AP)

The news tells us less about Israel than about the people writing the news, a former AP reporter says. [1] A rally in support of Islamic Jihad at Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem, in November 2013 (Courtesy of Matti Friedman)

I’ll begin with a simple illustration. The above photograph is of a student rally held last November at Al-Quds University, a mainstream Palestinian institution in East Jerusalem. The rally, in support of the armed fundamentalist group Islamic Jihad, featured actors playing dead Israeli soldiers and a row of masked men whose stiff-armed salute was returned by some of the hundreds of students in attendance. Similar rallies have been held periodically at the school...

Such an event at an institution like Al-Quds University, headed at the time by a well-known moderate professor, and with ties to sister institutions in America, indicates something about the winds now blowing in Palestinian society and across the Arab world. The rally is interesting for the visual connection it makes between radical Islam here and elsewhere in the region; a picture like this could help explain why many perfectly rational Israelis fear withdrawing their military from East Jerusalem or the West Bank, even if they loathe the occupation and wish to live in peace with their Palestinian neighbors. The images from the demonstration were, as photo editors like to say, “strong.” The rally had, in other words, all the necessary elements of a powerful news story.

The event took place a short drive from the homes and offices of the hundreds of international journalists who are based in Jerusalem. Journalists were aware of it: The sizable Jerusalem bureau of the Associated Press, for example, which can produce several stories on an average day, was in possession of photos of the event, including the one above, a day later. (The photographs were taken by someone I know who was on campus that day, and I sent them to the bureau myself.) Jerusalem editors decided that the images, and the rally, were not newsworthy, and the demonstration was only mentioned by the AP weeks later when the organization’s Boston bureau reported that Brandeis University had cut ties with Al-Quds over the incident. On the day that the AP decided to ignore the rally, November 6, 2013, the same bureau published a report about a pledge from the U.S. State Department to provide a minor funding increase for the Palestinian Authority; that was newsworthy. This is standard. To offer another illustration, the construction of 100 apartments in a Jewish settlement is always news; the smuggling of 100 rockets into Gaza by Hamas is, with rare exceptions, not news at all. The pipeline of information from Israel is not just rusty and leaking, but intentionally plugged.

I mention these instances to demonstrate the kind of decisions made regularly in the bureaus of the foreign press covering Israel and the Palestinian territories, and to show the way in which the pipeline of information from this place is not just rusty and leaking, which is the usual state of affairs in the media, but intentionally plugged.

-Israel and the Belgian Media: | ISGAP No. 2. July 2015. A Mirror of the Israel–Gaza Conflict (July–August 2014).

Between Disinformation, Deformation, and Importing the Conflict.

Joël Kotek.

... Due to a lack of correspondents and the absence of shocking images, they do not awaken the slightest wave of international emotion or sympathy. They should, and rightly so. But they do not enjoy the rare privilege of being born Palestinian, nor of being the target of these enemies of choice, the Israelis, the Jews.

Matti Friedman, former reporter for the Associated Press, recently highlighted this disturbing reality in an article recently published in the United States:

When I was a correspondent at the AP, the agency had more than 40 staffers covering Israel and the Palestinian territories. That was l significantly more news staff than the AP had in China, Russia, or India, or in all of the 50 countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined.

All of this would not be too serious, just a bit puzzling, were it not for the unacknowledged but still very real anti-Zionism of the editorial boards.

Matti Friedman pays witness to this on numerous accounts where his colleagues censored themselves, refusing to suggest certain of their photos for the publication, for example, images that showed Palestinians doing the Nazi salute. "It is practically impossible to publish negative information on the Palestinians. When an agency, which provides photos to the media in all four corners of the world, decides to censor an image, this has a huge impact on the coverage of the conflict." In his article, Friedman offers another example: Israeli actions are analyzed and criticized, and every flaw in Israeli society is aggressively reported. In one seven-week period, from November 8 to December 16, 2011, I decided to count the stories coming out of our bureau on the various moral failings of Israeli society—proposed legislation meant to suppress the media, the rising influence of Orthodox Jews, unauthorized settlement outposts, gender segregation, and so forth. I counted 27 separate articles, an average of a story every two days. In a very conservative estimate, this sevenweek tally was higher than the total number of significantly critical stories about Palestinian government and society, including the totalitarian Islamists of Hamas, that our bureau had published in the preceding three years...

Believing that the media had betrayed its vocation, Friedman resigned from the Associated Press. Indeed, no other state receives the same media treatment as Israel does, not even Russia or Turkey, countries whose human and international rights records are questionable. Ankara has imposed a total blockade on Armenia for the last eighteen years, occupies one-third of a member state of the European Union (Cyprus), punishes in blood the Kurdish resistance, and exercises armed acts in Iraq and Syria, though only against the Alawites. The media remain indifferent to all of this, and it takes place with impunity. The Kurds have never benefited from the media compassion enjoyed by the Palestinians, and as a result they do not enjoy the sympathy of international public opinion. Why? Because the Kurds, like the Syrians, the Sahrawis, and the Chechens, are not victims of the Jews, which, according to the

philosopher and psychoanalyst Daniel Sibony, makes all the difference.