History lurks behind the bloody headlines from the Holy Land
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Version 0 of 1. It’s not news that covering Israel/Palestine is one of the toughest jobs in the media, carried out under intense scrutiny by furious partisans with irreconcilable narratives. In recent days journalists have been reporting on another spasm of violence, and faced pressure to decide whether it constitutes a new intifada - the Arabic name for the uprising that erupted in 1987 and was repeated in 2000. Exactly what it is is not yet clear: it may evade a neat label and be remembered as another nameless spike in killing that does not alter the fundamental contours of the conflict. But what is certain is that context is vital: so, for example, if you need to explain why the al-Aqsa mosque, on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount (al-Haram al-Sharif in Arabic, Har haBayit, in Hebrew) is such a volatile issue, it helps to look back at the disturbances over the adjacent Wailing (Western) Wall back in 1929. Religion and nationalism, now, as then, are a toxic combination, easily manipulated. James Rodgers, a former BBC correspondent in Gaza and now a media academic, rightly recognises the weight of history in a new book about reporting on and from Israel/Palestine. Rodgers starts with the bombing of Jerusalem’s King David hotel by Irgun terrorists in 1946, two years before Israel’s independence and the Palestinian “nakbah”. Those were fateful days but less contentious than today - largely because the Nazi extermination of the Jews was then so recent and was widely seen internationally as justifying the Zionist claim to a state in Palestine, which had always been opposed by Arabs. Related: Is a third Palestinian intifada on the way – or has it already begun? Western media coverage, which was largely sympathetic to Israel after 1948, changed gradually after the 1967 war. Israel morphed from David into Goliath alongside the recognition, at some point in the 1970’s, that there was another people called Palestinians - not just nameless refugees or terrorists - many of whom were living under military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. The invasion of Lebanon in 1982 marked another shift in perceptions. In the following years, when I was based in Jerusalem, there were certainly complaints about the Guardian’s focus on the occupation - though doveish Israelis as well as Palestinians welcomed it. Still, these were conveyed by letter, phone or fax; the pace and scale of the news and critical responses to coverage was still manageable before every incident generated a Twitter hashtag and a toxic social media blizzard. Back in 1993 the Oslo agreement between Israel and the PLO ushered in a brief period of hope that the conflict could be resolved. But for more than 20 years - from Yitzhak Rabin’s murder by a Jewish extremist, through the second intifada (sparked by Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to the Temple Mount) to his “disengagement” from Gaza in 2005 - and ever since, the story has been unremittingly bleak. New twists have complicated it. On the Palestinian side is the debilitating split between the PLO and Hamas - which rejects Oslo, does not recognise Israel, believes in armed resistance, and has already hailed “a third intifada”. President Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority, which have so far avoided the I-word, are seen by many as collaborating with the occupation in the absence of any kind of peace process. Israelis have shifted dramatically to the right under Binyamin Netanyahu while illegal settlements have continued to expand. Belief that a two-state solution is possible has faded on both sides. No other solution is in sight. International media coverage of Israel-Palestine was in decline when the Arab Spring began in 2011 and there was suddenly fresher news from elsewhere in the region. But the capacity for escalation has not gone away. That was proven by the 2,250 Palestinian and 70 Israeli dead killed in Operation Protective Edge in Gaza in 2014 - which left nothing in place to prevent it happening all over again. Thus the fear that the current wave of stabbings and shootings may indeed snowball into something far bigger and deadlier. And the media, Rodgers argues, has a vital role to play: Unwilling or unable to appreciate the other’s point of view - and having long despaired of persuading their enemies of the validity of their narrative - the Israelis and Palestinians instead concentrate on speaking to their own people, and to sympathisers around the world. Even in an age of social media, journalism remains at the heart of this process: the first draft of history is still the first draft of history - even if a contradictory history exists on the other side of the security fence, barrier, or apartheid wall, depending on who is selecting the description.” Israelis tend to focus on security; Palestinians on their rights. But this upsurge of violence, like previous ones, is driven by underlying causes that are not being addressed. Journalists still need to work hard to provide coherent and contextualised reporting to explain the alarming headlines that continue to be generated from the harsh and contested soil of the Holy Land. Headlines from the Holy Land: Reporting the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, James Rodgers, Palgrave Macmillan |