Info Wars

How half of the Israel-Palestine conflict is fought online and in the media.

As the old saying goes, ‘The first casualty of war is the truth.’ Also, the factor that in numerous wars and conflicts, views and opinions differ, particularly for those who might have a direct or connected stake in that conflict. But in few conflicts has there been such a seismic shift in opinions over the last four decades as in the Israel-Palestine conflict. How and why has that drastic shift taken place?

Indeed, if we take the clock back to 1947 and the initial UN partition vote, we see that with 33 votes in favour of partition and Israel’s formation versus 13 against with 10 abstentions, the UN-Nation stance was very much on Israel’s side – particularly when we consider that the 13 against were nearly all Arab-League nations, many of whom then launched a war against Israel as soon as it announced its formation.

That war action was roundly condemned in the UN, and the opinions of the media and most of the populous of those nations outside of the Arab world was also very much on Israel’s side. After all, a brave new nation formed mainly from holocaust survivors set upon by numerous much larger hostile Arab nations, it ticked all the right boxes both ethically and as underdogs. Most of the world was rooting for Israel.

That almost unquestioned support continued for the next twenty years until just after the 1967 six-day war. That was the first time that some questioned whether Israel was perhaps not quite the ‘underdog’ initially perceived, if it could win a war so speedily against numerous surrounding foes. That period also saw the rise of Palestinian nationalism, and the first time that western media started to take notice of it. The Palestinian ‘plight’ was for the first time an issue to be given column-inch space. There was another effort six years later with the Yom Kippur War, which at one point came dangerously close to success, before various Arab nations threw in the towel and started making peace deals with Israel.

It was almost as if they decided, ‘We obviously can’t win against Israel now with conventional warfare, what other ways can we destroy them?’ And the main birth of ‘Info Wars’ against Israel took root. One major factor to help this on its way was the growth and changes within AP – Associated Press – the world’s largest news agency. At the time, the Middle East was a hot bed of activity, with over the next ten to twenty years the region seeing the Iranian Islamic revolution, the civil war in the Lebanon, the Iran-Iraq war, South Yemen civil war and First Gulf War, all aside from the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict.

It wasn’t lost on the Associated Press that to get quick and accurate reporting on all of this, they needed people on the ground in that region, the vast majority of which were Arabic-speaking (with some Farsi-speakers for Iran). This grew to such an extent that by the late 1990’s the number of Arabic and Farsi reports handled by the AP outnumbered those in English by over two to one. And of course the favoured hobby-horse of most Arabic-speaking journalists was the Israel-Palestine conflict.

To add to this burgeoning bias against Israel we had the formation of Al-Jazeera in 1996, who pump out an almost exclusively Arab-viewpoint on the conflict, and then not long after came the growth of the internet and social media, and the floodgates truly opened. Not long after the millennium saw the appearance of Electronic Intifada, Mondoweiss and Middle East Eye, followed not long after by mostly online hate-hack-journalists such as Jonathan Cook, Asa Winstanley and Sarah Wilkinson – who combined pump out a daily barrage of one-way slanted articles against Israel. Little observation is made of accuracy by these journals and journalists, condemnation and demonization of Israel is the main objective.

To defend against this onslaught, a number of counter organizations have emerged, such as ‘Honest Reporting’, Camera, MEMRI, ‘Pallywood’ and UN-Watch, whose time is spent mostly disseminating and picking apart this ongoing avalanche of false or biased reporting. However, this onslaught of anti-Israel reporting is now so strong that the effect of these counter-agencies has only been minimal. As Sam Harris reported not long ago, ‘Israel is clearly losing the media and public opinion war.’

But the need for these counter-information agencies is telling within itself. Israel’s critics discard it purely as ‘Hasbara’ – Israel internal information control – but we see that the ‘information control’ boot is now clearly on the other foot. The need for UN-Watch is particularly interesting, where we’ve gone from a situation of 70% of the chamber voting in favour of Israel’s formation in 1947 to a situation where Israel gains more resolutions against in the Chamber than any other nation. In a year which saw Assad kill hundreds of thousands of his own people, some with gas attacks, Syria gained only two resolutions against compared to Israel’s six. Most of this due to the OIC – Organization of Islamic Cooperation – whose 47 members within the UN tend to vote en bloc. So, votes tend to go almost automatically against Israel, but those same OIC members are loathe to join in resolutions against fellow Muslim nations – regardless of how abhorrent their actions.

The sea change within established Western media has been slower, but no less insidious. The reason for this more gradual change has been that from the mid-1980s up until 2005, the Palestinian cause was pursued with a heavy campaign of suicide bombings, blowing apart women and children in cafes, hotels and on buses – so supporting the Palestinians might have seemed callous at that stage.

But when the security divide was built to deter against this and the attacks as a result lessened, Western media support for the Palestinians also started to increase. The divide was portrayed as if its main purpose was to oppress the Palestinians, rather than very necessary security, and terms such as ‘apartheid’ started to emerge.

This cynical ‘reverse-mode’ reporting – Israel builds a security divide to protect its own civilians and it gets described as oppressing and apartheid – continue to this day. After a terrorist attack, the IDF go into a refugee camp to make arrests, and only the resultant firefight is covered, with often the numbers inflated and described as a ‘massacre’. Terrorists, many of them young teens, kill with knife attacks or car rammings, and often only their being shot by security forces is described, with the headline, ‘Palestinian children killed by Israeli forces.’ 1,200 Israeli civilians massacred and 300 abducted, and in the ensuing war, only the Palestinian losses are focused upon, the original massacre that sparked-off that war is all-but forgotten.

The tactic seems to be the same throughout: prod and bash the beehive with a big stick, have cameras ready when the bees emerge and attack, and make sure only that gets reported on or takes prominence. And when there are not enough facts to support an anti-Israeli stance, invent or distort a few.

The most famous case of false reporting was probably that of Mohammad Al-Dura, a young boy filmed cowering behind his father before being shot by Israeli gunfire. The story went worldwide in the media, became an emotional image of Palestinian resistance and raised much antipathy against Israel. But it was later uncovered in an ‘Honest Reporting’ investigation to be false. Israeli gunfire could not have killed the young boy unless their bullets could go around corners.

The conclusion was either that he was killed by Palestinian gunfire or had not been killed at all, his loading into an ambulance completely fabricated in a ‘Pallywood’-style production. This was the finding too from no less than two Court proceedings in Paris involving France 2, who had originally broadcast the footage. Yet these rulings only appeared in the Israeli Press; the international media, having caused such emotional outrage with their initial story – which indeed cost a number of Israeli lives in resultant uprisings – shied away from offering a retraction or apology, or even reporting on the two Court cases.

Blowing the whistle on bias within the Associated Press, Matti Friedman, an AP journalist for seven years, claims the AP and mainstream press suffer from two malfunctions. ‘One, Israel gets a disproportionate amount of coverage and two, the press has taken sides. The mainstream press corps has largely adopted an advocacy role. They've decided to lobby for the side that they think is right and political decisions are disguised as journalistic decisions.’

Friedman claims Hamas took advantage of this bias. Reporting on the 2014 Israel-Hamas war, Friedman says their strategy was to terrorize Israeli civilians using rockets and thus provoke an Israeli response. ‘Put civilians in Gaza in between the Israelis and Hamas fighters by storing weapons and rockets in tunnels and basements of mosques and schools - then have the huge international media contingent in Gaza film the civilian casualties and not the armed men and use those pictures to spark outrage against Israel abroad.’

And we’ve seen much the same tactic used in the current October 7^th sparked war. The information and stats too, tightly controlled by Hamas, have been grossly amplified or distorted. Hamas were claiming all along that ‘mainly women and children have been killed’, whereas now we discover that 45-50% of casualties have in fact been Hamas militants. Hardly surprising when it’s also been uncovered that hundreds of those listed as female victims had the name Mohammed.

The usual suspects of Jonathan Cook, Asa Winstanley, Electronic Intifada and Sarah Wilkinson have also been out in force. Jonathan Cook propounded that the Israelis had falsely claimed one of the girls released two weeks ago was raped due to a heavy blood patch at her groin, and that she had in fact simply sat on a jeep seat covered in blood – showing his complete ignorance of the transfer of bloodstains, which would have been far higher on her buttocks for such a seat transfer.

Asa Winstanley in league with Electronic Intifada first of all pronounced Hamas’s 7^th October attack as a ‘glorious and remarkably successful operation’, then went on to make the staggering claim that Israel had killed most of its own civilians in a Hannibal-led assault (whereby they kill their own civilians rather than let them be captured). And we are expected to swallow this account when none of the Nova festival teens captured any such action on camera – all their pics and videos were of Hamas militants. Nor anybody capturing the same in the kibbutzes, or indeed any of the Hamas terrorists – who filmed everything else on their go-pro cameras. In today’s digital age, with practically everyone carrying a mobile-phone camera, it is beyond belief that not a single person would have captured this event. Perhaps we should coin the term ‘Hamasbara’ rather than ‘Hasbara’.

Sarah Wilkinson inverted reality by describing all the Palestinians released as ‘hostages’ and the Israelis released by Hamas as ‘prisoners’. And, along with Jonathan Cook, displayed pics of released Palestinian prisoners, heavily photo-shopped and transplanted on emaciated frames to suggest ill-treatment, with Cook adding about the four female Israeli army-recruit hostages, ‘Look how healthy and smiley they look in comparison.’

Yet we know from Amnesty International reports that conditions in Israeli jails are among the highest, comparable only with those in Sweden. And we see this also first hand from Ahed Tamimi, who appeared glowing and five-pounds heavier upon release. Plus also the account of Mosab Hassan Yousef, ‘Son of Hamas,’ who reported not only the very fair and humane treatment he received in Israeli prisons, but talked also about the very harsh and sometimes brutal treatment from fellow Hamas prisoners.

With Jonathan Cook in particular, the irony seems somewhat lost on him that he reports these one-way scathing reports on Israel while in Nazareth, part of Israel. Yet if he did the same one-way condemnations of Hamas while in Gaza, he’d last at most a week before being shot. At the very least, he’d be kicked out of Gaza and banned from ever returning or reporting there. It’s well-known in journalistic circles that Hamas take the passports of all incoming journalists with the warning that if anything negative is reported about Hamas during their visits, those passports will not be returned and they’ll be barred from future visits. So, little head-scratching required as to why this one-way tide of reporting exists.

Despite all the evidence pointing to media bias against Israel, even among the mainstream media, the Muslim Council of Britian recently came out with the breathtaking claim that media bias was in support of Israel and against Palestine. But I suppose when the media fall even an inch short of labelling the Israelis as genocidal, child-killing savages, this is the sort of ridiculous claim that might arise. It says far more about the Muslim Council’s own bias than anything else.

And with this slough of mainstream media bias along with an OIC-tainted UN and an avalanche of online one-way-reporting Israel-hate jockeys, surely we at least we have that bastion of unbiased information, Wikipedia. But from a recent report, even that needs re-thinking.

Last summer’s successful rescue of four Israeli hostages was described in Wikipedia as a ‘massacre’. The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry claimed that over 200 Palestinians were killed during the rescue operation – though does not distinguish between civilians and terrorists. From an investigation by Jewish Journal, an overwhelming number of anti-Israel editors insisted that the term massacre was required to lend ‘balance’, and gave more prominence to sources who described it as such, including UN Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, strongly renowned for her anti-Israel bias.

Middle East historian Asaf Romirowsky, who heads Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, attacked the credibility of the UN. He told Jewish Journal: ‘They deny the fact UNRWA has been complicit with Hamas … yet all these vehicles is where Hamas turns to when they are trying to put pressure on Israel and use the so-called international humanitarian aid networks, because they all buy into the Hamas propaganda, hook, line and sinker.’

This isn’t the first instance of Wikipedia being accused of elevating anti-Israel viewpoints. Late last year, American news site Pirate Wires reported that an organized campaign of around 40 Wikipedia editors worked to delegitimise Israel, present extremist Islamist groups in a more positive light and position fringe views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as mainstream, something which has intensified since October 7th.

Because of the number of years this anti-Israel media and information bias been mounting, pushing back against it won’t be easy. The best efforts of ‘Honest Reporting’, UN-Watch, Camera, ‘Pallywood’ and MEMRI might not on their own be enough – it might also take a radical change in thinking. Something which, with 2 billion Muslims worldwide versus only 20 million Jews, and with increasing Muslim immigration and influence in Europe and North America, might be slow in coming. If it ever does.

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John Matthews is an experienced writer and journalist. The author of 24 books, including two centred around WW2 and the holocaust in the name of J.C. Maetis (his father’s original Jewish name) his first experience of writing about the Middle East came as a war correspondent covering the last years of the Lebanese Civil War, which led to his second book, ‘The Crescents of the Moon’. He has since written on the subject for a number of journals, including The Times, Sunday Times, Newsweek, The Independent and The Spectator. He was also in the run-up to the millennium editor of European Brief, the main magazine for the European Parliament, editing the likes of Tony Blair, Al Gore and Henry Kissinger on subjects ranging from the fall of the Berlin Wall and European unity, climate change and nuclear fusion to, once again, the Middle East. He lives in London with his wife and family.

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