Media coverage of the Arab–Israeli conflict

Media coverage of the Arab–Israeli conflict by journalists in international news media has been said to be biased by both sides and independent observers. These perceptions of bias, possibly exacerbated by the hostile media effect, have generated more complaints of partisan reporting than any other news topic and have led to a proliferation of media watchdog groups.

Types of bias

The language of conflict

Diction, or word choice, affects the interpretation of the same set of entities or events. There is an emotional and semantic difference between the verbs ''died'' and ''killed,'' and similarly between ''kill'' and ''murder''; ''murder'' evokes stronger negative emotions and connotes intent. In the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, various terminological issues arise. The terms "disputed territories" versus "occupied territories" reflect different positions on the legal status of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The terms "security fence" and "apartheid wall," "neighbourhood" and "settlement," and "militant," "freedom fighter," and "terrorist," while used to describe the same entities, present them in a different light and suggest a different narrative. Similarly, describing an attack or bombing as a "response" or "retaliation" again places the events in a different light.

In the immediate aftermath of the Six-Day War Israeli usage initially adopted the standard terminology of referring to the West Bank and Gaza as "occupied territories" (''ha-šeṭaḥim ha-kevušim''). This was soon replaced by "administered territories" (''ha-šeṭaḥim ha-muḥzaqim''). Finally, the West Bank area, excluding East Jerusalem, was renamed " Judea and Samaria" (''Yehudah we-Šomron''), a term chosen to affirm the Biblical basis for the Jewish people's connection to that territory. While the default term in international law is '' belligerent occupation'', over subsequent decades, U.S. media coverage, which initially described Israel's presence in either of the Palestinian territories as an "occupation", gradually dropped the word and by 2001 it had become "almost taboo" in, and "ethereal in its absence" from, American reportage. A poll of British newsreaders that same year found that only 9% were aware that Israel was the occupying power of Palestinian territories. Israeli academic surveys at the time of Operation Defensive Shield (2002) also found that the Israeli public thought the West Bank revolt was evidence that Palestinians were trying, murderously, to wrest control of territories within Israel itself.

Several studies have concluded that "terminology bias" has been a recurrent feature of coverage of the conflict, and scholars and commentators like Yasir Suleiman and Peter Beinart argue that language manipulation plays an important role in endeavours to win over the international public, with some concluding that Israel has proven more adept in this battle. So too Greg Myre wrote of the rise of a "verbal arms race" where "(m)uch of the Mideast conflict is about winning international support", one which escalated with the onset of the Al-Aqsa Intifada. Brian Whitaker, reviewing 1,659 articles covering events in the Guardian and Evening Standard for this period (2000–2001), observed the same effects, adding that omission of important adjectives was notable: 66% failed to mention that the incidents took place in an occupied territory. Hebron was described as a divided city, though 99% of its inhabitants are Palestinian, whereas Israel describes Jerusalem as "undivided" though a third of its inhabitants are Palestinian. Likewise, Jews live in "communities", Palestinians in "areas". In his view Israel had won the verbal war. East Jerusalem is not "occupied" or a cultural and spiritual centre for Muslims and Arabs for 14 centuries, but "the eternal, indivisible capital of Israel" and "reunited". In reporting the capture of Gilad Shalit on Israeli soil and his removal to the Gaza Strip, and Israel's response of detaining 60 Hamas members, half Palestinian West Bank parliamentarians, the former was said to have been ''kidnapped'' while the latter, seized from their beds in night raids and removed to Israeli prisons, were ''arrested''. Beinart's article suggested there was a pattern of Orwellian "linguistic fraud and a culture of euphemism" in the way AIPAC, for one, describes what takes place in the West Bank.

In Israeli newspaper reportage of violence, the IDF ''confirms'', or ''says'', while the Palestinians ''claim''. The word "violence" itself connotes, according to Gershon Shafir, different events in Israeli and non-Israeli discourse: In the former, it is essentially dissociated from the 50 year long practice of occupying Palestinian lands and used to refer only to an intermittent recourse to military methods to contain episodic upsurges of hostile Palestinian resistance, a means employed when the security of an otherwise peaceful state is said to be at stake. Thus, Israeli violence is restricted to responses to specific events like putting down the First and Second Intifadas, Israel's wars in Gaza and the Palestinian knifing attacks in 2015–2016, which were mainly the work of lone wolves.
Shafir argues to the contrary that the occupation "is best understood as ongoing, day-in and day-out coercion, and its injuries include material, psychological, social, and bodily harm". And, he further claims, it is the coercive techniques of the institutions of occupation deployed to enforce submission that produce the occasional eruptions of "military operations" and wars. Violence is omnipresent reality for Palestinians, on the other hand, and found in all facets of the occupation. Consequently, he concludes, the most intense suppression of uprisings and wars cannot be considered in isolation from the occupation regime as an everyday experience.

Such omissions and alterations in the terms used are cited as an example of the pervasive use of euphemisms or loaded terminology in reportage on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a problem which the International Press Institute thought sufficiently important by 2013 to issue a handbook to guide journalists through the semantic minefield. What Palestinians call "assassinations" – the shooting of people suspected of terrorism – Israel first called "pre-emptive strikes", then "pinpoint preventive operations", and also "extrajudicial punishments" or "long-range hot pursuit" until "focused prevention" was finally settled on. Offers to return "occupied territory" are "(painful) concessions" rather than a compliance with international law. For decades, Israeli announcements, speaking of arrests of children, never used the word "child". Even a 10-year-old shot by the IDF could be referred to as "a young man of ten." The use of the term "colonialism" by New Historians to describe Zionist settlement, a term likening the process to the French colonization of Algeria and the Dutch settlement of South Africa, has likewise been challenged, with some asserting that this is a demonizing term used in Palestinian textbooks. In the immediate aftermath of the 2021 Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Associated Press reporter Emily Wilder was fired because of tweets made during the conflict, after right-wing media sources complained of her pro-Palestinian views.
Robert Fisk argues that the descriptive language used by major political players and the press to describe the occupation is one of " desemanticization": occupied lands become "disputed territories"; colonies are described as "settlements", "neighbourhoods" "suburbs", "population centres"; dispossession and exile are referred to as "dislocation"/"displacement"; Israelis are shot by "terrorists" but when Palestinians are shot dead they die in "clashes"; the Wall becomes a "fence" or "security barrier". Suicide bombers for Palestinians are "martyrs" (''shahid''); Israel prefers "homicide bombers". Israel calls one of its uses of Palestinians as human shields a "neighbour procedure". If children are killed by Israeli fire, these events are often contextualized by the "shop-worn euphemism" (Fisk) of their being "caught in the crossfire". Deporting West Bankers to Gaza as collective punishment for families who have siblings that participated in terror incidents is known as an "order limiting the place of residency". Israeli military actions are customarily referred to as "responses" or "retaliations" to a Palestinian attack, even if it is Israel that strikes first.

Media and academic coverage

The quality of both Media coverage of the Arab–Israeli conflict and research and debates on university campuses have been the object of extensive monitoring and research.Public discussion of the occupation is also contested, especially on university campuses. Pro-Israeli Jewish students complain that they have been vilified or harassed; some proposed talks on Palestinian perspectives have been cancelled on the grounds that audiences might not be able to objectively evaluate the material. In response to attempts to silence several high-profile critics of Israeli territorial policies concerns have been expressed that the topic itself is at risk, and that the political pressures restricting research and discussion undermine academic freedom. In the latter regard, organizations like Campus Watch closely report and denounce what they consider "anti-Israeli" attitudes. In addition to Israel's hasbara organization, intent on countering negative press images, there are also many private pro-Israeli organizations, among them CAMERA, FLAME, HonestReporting, Palestinian Media Watch and the Anti-Defamation League which subject reportage to scrutiny in the belief news on Israel has systematically distorted reality to privilege Palestinian versions. In Ehud Barak's view Palestinians are "products of a culture in which to tell a lie..creates no dissonance". Others allow that both sides lie, but "Arabs" are better at it. The term Pallywood was coined to suggest that Palestinian coverage of their plight, in a genre called "traumatic realism", is marked by a diffuse intent to fraudulently manipulate the media, beginning with the killing of Mohammad Durrah, and, it has been argued, still being evoked as late as 2014 to dismiss Israeli responsibility for the Beitunia killings. The idea has been dismissed as bearing the hallmarks of a " conspiracy theory". On the other hand, book-length studies have been devoted to testing the theory that the world's understanding of the conflict, though "mediated by Israeli newspapers to a domestic audience", is "anti-Israel".Attempts have been made to silence several high-profile critics of Israeli policies in the territories, among them Tony Judt, Norman Finkelstein, Joseph Massad, Nadia Abu El-Haj and William I. Robinson. Such difficulties have given rise to anxieties that the topic itself is at risk, and that the political pressures circumscribing research and discussion undermine academic freedom itself.

Internal Israeli studies have argued that local press coverage has traditionally been conservative, reflecting the often tendentious and biased views of the political and military establishment, and similar tendencies have been noted in Palestinian reportage. In a sample of 48 reports of 22 Palestinian deaths, 40 Israeli accounts only gave the IDF version, a mere 8 included a Palestinian reaction. Tamar Liebes, former director of the Smart Institute of Communication at the Hebrew University, argued that Israeli "Journalists and publishers see themselves as actors within the Zionist movement, not as critical outsiders". The explosive expansion of the Internet has opened up a larger sphere of controversy. Digital forensics flourishing on social networks have occasionally revealed problems with a few widely circulating images of dead Palestinians, but, according to Kuntzman and Stein, technical suspicion quickly yielded ground, among Israeli Jewish social media practitioners who combined a politics of militant nationalism with global networking conventions, to unfounded polemical claims, making out that, 'the fraudulent, deceiving Palestinian was a "natural condition" that required no substantiation', and that, generically, images of dead or injured Palestinians were faked.Palestinians commonly use the phrases "gang of settlers" or "herd of settlers" to refer to Israeli settlers, expressions perceived as offensive and dehumanising because "gang" implies thuggish criminality (though some Palestinians view settlers as criminals) and "herd" uses animal imagery to refer to people. A former vice president of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs in the United States has remarked that many rabbis themselves address their congregations by tiptoeing around the topic of Israel and Palestine, and that there is a widespread fear that speaking forthrightly will make their community life and careers insecure.

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have argued that "the American media's coverage of Israel tends to be strongly biased in Israel's favour" compared to reportage in other democratic countries' media, with a tendency to marginalize anyone who voices a critical attitude. A 2001 study concluded that press coverage had highlighted violent displays and demonstrations of Palestinian grievances as if it were Palestinians who "looked for a confrontation", but consistently failed to add any context of the systematic abuses to which they are subjected. Marda Dunsky argues that empirical work appears to support Mearsheimer and Walt's claim. She concluded that coverage of (a) the refugee problem; (b) settlements; (c) the historical and political background, (which are either frequently skimmed over or entirely omitted), and (d) violence, "reflects the parameters of U.S. Middle East policy", regarding both U.S. aid and support for Israel. This view that American media are biased towards Palestinians has been challenged by authors who cite research that concluded most mainstream media have a "liberal" bias, a criticism extended to European outlets like Le Monde and the BBC
...