Beckerman goes out of his way to present a lurid picture of how Israelis were supposedly converted to this deep distrust of Palestinians from their previous support of the Rabin-initiated peace process. He juxtaposes the continuous rebroadcasting in October 2000 of the killing of the young Palestinian boy Mohammed al-Durra with that of the murder of two Israeli soldiers in Ramallah to argue in quite an extraordinary way that these incidents produced parallel revulsion against “the other side” amongst both Palestinians and Israelis.
It’s not just that he appears to present them as morally equivalent events. The one after all, was a shooting which proceeded from an ongoing gun battle. The other was a spontaneous act of brutality which was then publicly celebrated. He builds on the Daniel Dor’s analysis of the two events to argue that the lynching event was used in the Israeli press to present an image of the Palestinians thus:
The lynch was not the only terrible act of violence committed during those days. It was part of a total reality – a violent, tragic, complex and thoroughly paradoxical reality. The tabloids however turned it into an event of mythical significance, disconnected in space and time, that revealed once and for all the “murderous nature” of each and every Palestinian. And it was as such that the Lynch was engraved in the Israeli collective memory throughout the Intifada.”
Beckerman, apparently drawing further on Dor’s work, quotes the Israeli redtop headlines of the day after with Yediot Achronot’s “THESE PALESTINIANS ARE ANIMALS, NOT HUMAN” and Ma’ariv’s “HUMAN BEASTS”. He links those headlines with key articles by nationally known columnists in Ha’aretz and Yedioth Achronot which proclaimed their total disillusion with the idea of peace, and their recognition of a taste for bloodshed and cruelty on the Palestinian side. Dor’s analysis, as presented by Beckerman, went on to argue that this led in turn to a continuing amplification of the lynch story and an erasure of accounting for any Palestinian casualties.
This was subsequently carried through into creating “a relentless focus on Israeli victims of terror, the invisibility of Palestinians and a refusal to see the conflict in anything but emotional terms.”
Quite incredibly, Beckerman tries to argue that it was press hysteria over terrorism that created the climate of fear that took hold of the Israeli public during the high points of the suicide bombing campaigns of 2002-2003. Apparently, Beckerman discounts the impact of the huge number of suicide bombings of buses, cafes and shopping malls that claimed the lives of hundreds of Israelis, and produced a climate of fear and horror of which this is just one graphic account. Would a lack of press coverage, and more articles about the number of Palestinians dying have made any difference?
Omission
Now what is really surprising is not just the lack of moral equivalence between the two events juxtaposed. It is the omission by Beckerman of any reference to the role played by the Palestinian leadership in creating the climate in which renowned Israeli columnists could reflect an apparent decisive change of perspective amongst the Israeli public to rejecting the Palestinians as partners for peace.
For the Lynch had its impact outside Israel as well as in it, and horrific as it was, its significance in shifting attitudes was arguably primarily due to the reaction of the Palestinian leadership. Firstly, in the UK, Hanan Ashrawi, then the key official spokesperson for the Arafat regime, was repeatedly featured in TV coverage I saw at the time, challenging her BBC interviewers. They asked her how it had been possible for such a thing to happen in a Ramallah police station, and what was her reaction. She declared that the soldiers were clearly undercover agents infiltrating Palestinian territory, as if that would then have justified what happened to them. In fact, they were not. Ashrawi repeatedly scornfully rejected the BBC’s questions, asking why they were not asking questions about Israeli undercover soldiers’ operations in the territories, and killings of Palestinians. Finally, she made her own position in relation to the lynching incident she too had seen on TV. She refused to condemn it, and uttered a chilling declaration of solidarity with the lynchers.
Today, she said, I am one of the people.
Secondly, it rapidly emerged that overseas camera crews had been pressurized and sometimes directly threatened by members of the Palestinian Authority administration to either destroy or not show footage of either this incident or other incidents of violence, including intra-Palestinian violence of an horrific nature, and celebration of terrorist suicide bombings. This re-emerged as a “feature” of Palestinian Authority news management that has continued to this day, and was specifically lined up for the purposes of suppressing footage of Hamas violence during the period before, during and after the disengagement.
Moreover, there was no shortage of contrasting outcry in Israel about the killing of Mohammed al-Durra, to say nothing of related outcry about other controversial killings of Palestinian bystanders. The Israeli government apologised for the killing but subsequently contested Palestinian claims that the killing of al-Durra was deliberate, and tried to present a case that he could have been killed by a stray Palestinian bullet. This was never taken seriously by such key Arab media as Al-Jazeera. The killing of the boy has been repeatedly openly used in pro-Palestinian propaganda, in a way that the Lynch has not. You do not see Israeli wall posters commemorating the Lynch or the memories of the soldiers who were murdered.
It's not clear that al-Durra was killed at all anymore, and it is abundantly clear that the news report of his apparent death was faked by the Palestinian France-2 cameraman, with the apparent acquiescence of his superiors:
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=12002025_1
Posted by: Stephen | September 27, 2005 at 12:47 PM