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Propaganda and war
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by Edward
Said
Never have the media been so
influential in determining the course of war as during the Al-Aqsa
Intifada, which, as far as the Western media are concerned, has
essentially become a battle over images and ideas. Israel has already
poured hundreds of millions of dollars into what in Hebrew is called
hasbara, or information for the outside world (hence, propaganda). This
has included an entire range of efforts: lunches and free trips for
influential journalists; seminars for Jewish university students who
over a week in a secluded country estate can be primed to "defend"
Israel on the campus; bombarding congressmen and -women with invitations
and visits; pamphlets and, most important, money for election campaigns;
directing (or, as the case requires, harassing) photographers and
writers of the current Intifada into producing certain images and not
others; lecture and concert tours by prominent Israelis; training
commentators to make frequent references to the Holocaust and Israel's
predicament today; many advertisements in the newspapers attacking Arabs
and praising Israel; and on and on. Because so many powerful people in
the media and publishing business are strong supporters of Israel, the
task is made vastly easier.
Although these are only a few
of the devices used to pursue the aims of every modern government, whether
democratic or not, since the 1930s and '40s -- to produce consent and
approval on the part of the consumer of news -- no country and no lobby
more than Israel's has used them in the US so effectively and for so long.
Orwell called this kind
of misinformation newspeak or doublethink: the intention to cover
criminal actions, especially killing people unjustly, with a veneer
of justification and reason. In Israel's case, which has always had
the intention to silence or make Palestinians invisible as it robbed
them of their land, this has been in effect a suppression of the
truth, or a large part of it, as well as a massive falsification of
history. What for the past few months Israel has successfully wanted
to prove to the world is that it is an innocent victim of
Palestinian violence and terror, and that Arabs and Muslims have no
other reason to be in conflict with Israel except for an irreducibly
irrational hatred of Jews. Nothing more or less. And what has made
this campaign so effective is a long-standing sense of Western guilt
for anti-Semitism. What could be more efficient than to displace
that guilt onto another people, the Arabs, and thereby feel not only
justified but positively assuaged that something good has been done
for a much-maligned and harmed people? To defend Israel at all costs
-- even though it is in military occupation of Palestinian land, has
a powerful military, and has been killing and wounding Palestinians
in a ratio of four or five to one -- is the goal of propaganda.
That, plus going on with what it does, but seeming to be a victim
just the same.
Without any doubt,
however, the extraordinary success of this unparalleled and immoral
effort has been in large part due not only to the campaign's
carefully planned and executed detail, but to the fact that the Arab
side has been practically non-existent. When our historians look
back to the first 50 years of Israel's existence, an enormous
historical responsibility shall rest damningly on the shoulders of
the Arab leaders who have criminally -- yes, criminally -- allowed
this to go on without even the most meagre and half-hearted
response. Instead, each of them has fought each of the others, or
has relied on the hopelessly self-serving theory that by trying to
ingratiate themselves with the American government (even becoming
clients of the US) they would assure themselves of longevity in
power, regardless of whether Arab interests were being served or
not. So deeply ingrained has this notion become that even the
Palestinian leadership has subscribed to it, with the result that as
the Intifada rolls on, the average American hasn't the slightest
inkling that there is a narrative of Palestinian suffering and
dispossession at least as old as Israel itself. Meanwhile Arab
leaders come running to Washington begging for American protection
without even understanding that three generations of Americans have
been brought up on Israeli propaganda to believe that Arabs are
lying terrorists and that it is wrong to do business with them, let
alone protect them.
Since 1948, Arab leaders
have never bothered to confront Israeli propaganda in the US. All
the immense amounts of Arab money invested in military spending
(first on Soviet, then Western arms) have come to nought because
Arab efforts have been neither protected by information nor
explained by patient, systematic organising. The result is that
literally hundred of thousands of lost Arab lives have gone for
nothing, nothing at all. The citizens of the world's only superpower
have been led to believe that everything Arabs do and are is
wasteful, violent, fanatical and anti-Semitic. Israel is "our" only
ally. And so $92 billion in aid since 1967 have gone unquestioningly
from the US taxpayer to the Jewish state. As I said earlier, a total
absence of planning and thought vis--vis the US political and
cultural arena is hugely (but not exclusively) to blame for the
astounding amount of Arab land and lives lost to Israel (subsidised
by the US) since 1948, a major political crime which I hope the Arab
leaders one day answer for.
I recall that during the
siege of Beirut in 1982, a large non-governmental group of very
successful Palestinian businessmen and prominent intellectuals
gathered in London to establish an endowment to help Palestinians on
all levels. With the PLO trapped in Beirut and incapable of doing
much, it was felt that a mobilisation of this sort might help us to
help ourselves. I also recall that as the funds were quickly
gathered, a decision was made after much discussion that fully half
the money would go for information in the West. It was felt that
since -- as usual -- Palestinians were being oppressed by Israel
with scarcely a voice lifted in the West to support the victims, it
was imperative that money should be spent for advertisements, media
time, tours and the like in order to make it more difficult to kill
and further oppress Palestinians without complaint or awareness.
This was especially important, we felt, in America, where taxpayers'
money was being spent to subsidise Israel's illegal wars,
settlements, and conquests. For about two years, this policy was
followed; then, for reasons I have never fully understood, efforts
to help the Palestinians in the US were abruptly terminated. When I
asked why, I was told by a Palestinian gentleman who had made a
fortune in the Gulf that "throwing money away" in America was a
waste. The philanthropy now continues exclusively for the occupied
territories and Lebanon, where this association does much good, but
very little in comparison with the projects funded by the European
Union and numerous American foundations.
Some weeks ago the
American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), by far the
largest and most effective Arab-American organisation in the United
States, commissioned a public opinion poll on current American
perspectives on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. A very wide and
deep sample of the population was polled, with quite startling, not
to say disheartening results. Israelis are still believed to be a
pioneering democratic people, even though no Israeli leader did very
well in the poll. Seventy-three per cent of the American people
approve of the idea of a Palestinian state, a very surprising
result. The interpretation of that statistic is that when you ask an
educated American who watches television and reads elite newspapers
whether s/he identifies with the Palestinian struggle for
independence and freedom, the answer is mostly yes. But if the same
person is asked what his idea is about Palestinians, the answer is
almost always negative -- violence and terrorism. Images of the
Palestinians seem to be that they are uncompromising, aggressive,
and "alien," that is, not like "us." Even when asked about the
stone-throwing young people, whom we believe are Davids fighting
against Goliath, most Americans see aggression rather than heroism.
Americans still blame the Palestinians for obstructing the peace
process, Camp David most particularly. Suicide bombing is viewed as
"inhuman" and is condemned universally.
What Americans think of
Israelis is not a great deal better, but there is a much greater
identification with them as people. The most disturbing thing is
that hardly any of the questioned Americans knew anything at all
about the Palestinian story, nothing about 1948, nothing at all
about Israel's illegal 34-year military occupation. The main
narrative model that dominates American thinking still seems to be
Leon Uris's 1950 novel Exodus. Just as alarming is the fact that the
most negative things in the poll were what Americans thought and
said about Yasser Arafat, his uniform (seen as needlessly
"militant"), his speech, his presence.
Overall, then, the
conclusion is that Palestinians are viewed neither in terms of a
story that is theirs, nor in terms of a human image with which
people can easily identify. So successful has Israeli propaganda
been that it would seem that Palestinians really have few, if any
positive connotations. They are almost completely dehumanised.
Fifty years of unopposed
Israeli propaganda in America have brought us to the point where,
because we do not resist or contest these terrible
misrepresentations in any significant way with images and messages
of our own, we are losing thousands of lives and acres of land
without troubling anyone's conscience. The correspondent of the
Independent, Phil Reeves, wrote passionately on 27 August that
Palestinians are dying or being crushed by Israel and the world
looks on silently.
It is therefore up to
Arabs and Palestinians everywhere to break the silence, in a
rational, organised and effective way, not by shooting off guns or
by wailing or complaining. God knows we have reason to do all of the
above, but cold logic is necessary now. In the American mind,
analogies with South Africa's liberation struggle or with the
horrible fate of the Native Americans most emphatically do not
occur. We must make those analogies above all by humanising
ourselves and thus reversing the cynical, ugly process whereby
American columnists like Charles Krauthammer and George Will
audaciously call for more killing and bombing of Palestinians, a
suggestion they would not dare do for any other people. Why should
we passively accept the fate of flies or mosquitoes, to be killed
wantonly with American backing any time war criminal Sharon decides
to wipe out a few more of us?
To that end I was
pleased to learn from ADC President Ziad Asali that his organisation
is about to embark on an unprecedented public information campaign
in the mass media to redress the balance and present the
Palestinians as human beings -- can you believe the irony of such a
necessity? -- as women who are teachers and doctors as well as
mothers, men who work in the field and are nuclear engineers, as
people who have had years and years of military occupation and are
still fighting back. (Incidentally, one astounding result of the
poll is that less than three or four per cent of the sample had any
idea that there was an Israeli occupation in the first place. So
even the main fact of Palestinian existence has been obscured by
Israeli propaganda). This effort has never before been made in the
US: there have been 50 years of silence, which is about to be
broken.
Even though it is
modest, the announced ADC campaign is also a major step forward.
Consider that the Arab world seems to be in a state of moral and
political paralysis, its leaders encumbered by their ties both to
Israel and, more important, to the US, their people kept in a state
of anxiety and repression. As they and their brave Lebanese comrades
did in 1982 when 19,000 were killed by Israeli military power,
Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are dying not only because
Israel has the power to do so with impunity, but because for the
first time in modern history, the active alliance between propaganda
in the West and military force worked out by Israel and its
supporters, has enabled the sustained collective punishment of
Palestinians with American tax dollars, $5 billion of which go to
Israel annually. Media representations of Palestinians show them
with neither history nor humanity, as aggressive rock-throwing
people of violence, and have made it possible for the dim-witted but
politically astute George Bush to blame the Palestinians for
violence. This new ADC campaign sets out to restore their history
and humanity, to show them (as they have always been) as people
"like us," fighting for the right to live in freedom, to raise their
children, to die in peace. Once even the glimmerings of this story
penetrate the American consciousness, the truth will, I hope, begin
to dissipate the vast cloud of evil propaganda with which Israel has
covered reality. Since it is clear that the media campaign can only
go so far, then the hope is that Arab Americans will feel empowered
enough to enter the political battle in the US to try to break,
modify, or fray the link that binds US policy so tightly to Israel.
And then, we can hope again.
Source:
by courtesy & 2001 Al-Ahram Weekly & Edward Said
by the same author:
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