The term propaganda is a communication pattern that aims at consolidating certain convictions and ideas in the recipient public through ‘the manipulation of significant symbols’, and consequently, ‘the management of collective attitudes’ (Lasswell, 1927, p. 627). In the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the prevailing vision between the two parties about the media of the counterpart is that it belongs to a media propaganda system that lacks credibility and does not tell the truth and that it’s a media that present non-innocent and tendentious information. It is a key vision with the Arab journalists and researchers, as well as with the ordinary Arabs alike towards the Israeli media. The same applies to the vision of the Israeli party towards the Arab media system. The reason is that it’s the enemy media (Liebes & First, 2003, p. 61).
There are those who believe that this psychological war is one-sided, imposed by the Israeli strongest media side against the most vulnerable Palestinian side. The psychological war, being the control of the information directed to the public in order to create confusion, affect the psychological condition and propagate despair among the ranks of the enemy and their proponents. In this sense, the Israeli media system wages in its totality a psychological war against the Palestinians, and here the assessment of this psychological warfare and media power, as well as the ac- quisition of the power features and the clarity of the media mission, are different. Each party accuses the other of exercising propaganda and psychological warfare propaganda and incitement against him and his community. The conflict came to be seen not as mere acts of mutual violence and balance of deterrence, but also as a balance in media images and narratives, and that the collective self-portrayal is targeted and that the party concerned is the victim (Shinar, 2003, p. 6).
Narratives
Many Arab and Palestinian experts wrote about the Israeli media’s role and its em- ployment of all printed and audio-visual means and harnessing them as to serve the objectives of the Zionist project which stipulates that Palestine is a liberated Jewish land and not a Palestinian occupied territory, and that the present Israel is a rep- etition of ancient Israel, and that Palestine’s history begins with the Kingdom of David in the tenth century BC and ends with the new Israel, which represents a res- urrection of ancient Israel and a revival of this latter. In the context of these Israeli allegations (Yiftachel, 1999, p. 8), the former Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Be- gin, addressed the Knesset during the visit of the Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat to Israel in 1977, saying:
‘We did not seize any foreign land. We are back home, and the tie that is between our people and this land is an eternal tie, that has been established since the dawn of history, and was never loose, at any time. In this land, our ancestors established our civilization, and it prophesied the coming of the prophets, and when we were displaced under the bulk of the force used against us and moved away from our country, we have not forgotten this land, even for one single day’.
This has been referred to by Abdul Qader Abdul Ali (2003) as the land nar- ratives, which include legends (narratives) that are consistent with the idea of the promised land Palestine as a poor land, almost empty of dwellers and of any other people, which in his view is a biblical legend that has been developed by the Zion- ists with the emergence of the Zionist movement and the Zionist romantic litera- ture, allowing the Zionist movement to become a national, secular movement, but on ethnic-religious principles inspired by Jewish religious narratives that are secu- larized (Bein, 1990, p. 284; Rowley & Taylor, 2006, p. 45). For example, the Torah has been viewed not as a divine book, but as a historic document, and the religious traditions and rites have been seen as national folklore that has preserved the Jewish people from being dissolved. Abdul Ali also added that the legend of forced exile, through which the Jewish people in his opinion believe that they have incurred twice a forced exile(1)from their country. The historical fact refers to the broad dispersion of Jewish communities across the major cities of the Mediterranean (Alexandria, Athens, Rome, and more) much earlier than this date through migrations and move- ments dictated by the commercial interests of the Jews in that era. This narrative is for the media of benefit as it encourages migration and proves the legitimacy of Jewish immigration to Palestine and the establishment of settlements at the expense of the indigenous population (Gavison, 1999, p. 55).
In response to these Israeli allegations, the Palestinian writer Zakaria Mohammed (2004) commented saying:
‘The Palestinian citizen found himself in the light of these false claims sud- denly without history, without a past, and became just a guest of this history. Where Israel ancient history seems to be a moment in the long Palestinian history, this moment has been focused on the Israeli propaganda machine, pretending that it is the core of this history. Everything before it is void. It seems that the moment of Israel’s creation in 1948 has swallowed all forego- ing moments embodied in the Palestinian history, which is rooted in Palestine since its first era’.
(1)The first one in the era of the Babylonian Assyrian Empire led by Nebuchadnezzar when the Israelis were exiled to Babylon, and the last exile was in the Roman era, during which the temple has been destroyed in 70 AD.
This led to the formation or promotion of counter-narratives passed by the Pales- tinian media, which is considered as a model for the Arab media and is dedicated to discourses post-Nakba (catastrophe) and post-setback (1967 war) (Alray, 2010). The Palestinian media have developed a set of narratives in its entirety. These were a response to the Zionist discourse and were coping with it. Among this is the Is- raeli denial of the identity and the continuous Palestinian history. The reaction is the production of a national discourse that restores the Palestinian folklore and the local traditions and a display of the history of the region before and during the bib- lical era and during the Islamic period, enabling thereby the Palestinian media to produce a narrative history of a Palestinian nationalism throughout the whole his- tory, which shows that the contemporary Palestinian is a descendant of the people of the ‘Giants’ and the Canaanites (Dabash, 2011, p. 1; Zarley, 1990, p. 11). Further- more, Arab analysts view that the Israeli media promote the notion of the Islamic fundamentalism as to delude the world that extremism is the origin of Islam and the essence of its teachings. It is noted that the Western media, the American in particular, fell prisoner to this notion until the distance shrunk between the Islamic fundamentals and the political extremism movements that ‘abolish’ the other, shed his blood, and harm these Islamic fundamentals in the light of the developments that take place in the Arab world, as is the case in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya and the spread of ISIS and the radical political thought that distorted the image of Arabs and Muslims (Abu Sway, 2009).
Among the topics that fuel the conflict is the term anti-Semitism, which for Jews is a reality and tragedy suffered by the Jewish people in the Diaspora, where the Israelis think that a Jew remains hated outside his homeland. In this context, the phrase ‘Siege Mentality’ pops up, which according to Bar-Tal and Antebi (1992a, p. 633) “denotes a mental state in which group members hold a central belief that the rest of the world has negative behavioral intentions toward them”. Therefore, Jew- ish people must have, they say, a homeland or a refuge that shelters them and lets them live like other peoples, the matter which promotes immigration and adherence to the Promised Land allocated to the Jews. Most of the Arabs, and the Palestinians in particular, consider this fact as a merely Zionist narrative that reduces the histor- ical reality of the presence of Jewish groups and distorts the facts and shortens the position towards the Jews to a binary, namely either with or against, and omits the third position, which includes indifference to the Jews, and overlooks the historical objective reasons for the hatred of Jews associated with the conditions of the so- cial and economic life of the Jews and their representation of professional groups working in trade and certain special crafts and ally themselves with the supreme authorities in any country they dwell in (Neuberger, 1998). Therefore, many Jewish groups were left vulnerable to persecution whenever the status of power has altered and became the victim of popular uprisings as happened in Russia, Ukraine and
Poland during the eighteenth and nineteenth century.
It’s noteworthy to refer also to the legend of the besieged fortress, in which the world stands against the people of Israel. This is what Bar-Tal and Antebi (1992b, p. 251) referred to as the ‘siege mentality’, which he defined as “a belief held by group members stating that the rest of the world has highly negative behavioral intentions towards them”. This narrative in its various diversities instilled in the psyche of Jewish Israeli individuals and in the Jewish collective memory the no- tion of being in a permanent and present danger, caused by the hostility of gentiles (non-Jews) to the people of Israel (Laqueur, 2003, p. 3). It reflects, in fact, an accu- mulated experience of a collective memory of Jewish groups, especially the Jews of Eastern Europe, who have had a long experience with repeated massacres and per- secutions. Such a legend is reinforced by a set of historical narratives, for example, the narrative of ‘Masada’, created by secular Zionism(2), the Jewish fortress that has been besieged by the Romans in 70 A.D. after the fall of Jerusalem, where Jewish fighters, according to the narrative, refused to surrender and committed collective suicide. They preferred to commit suicide rather than to fall prisoners into the hands of the Romans. This narrative, which projects the story of ‘Massada’ in this form, is intended to foster the national affiliation and the revival of Jewish heroism, which refuses to surrender to pagans. There is also the narrative of the permanent danger delimited by the facts of the Holocaust or the Nazi holocaust as a historical happen- ing, the actual events of which are exaggerated or hyper-dramatized (Ben-Yehuda, 1995, p. 9).
These set of narratives and more contribute to the building of self-awareness and solidarity among members of the group towards the danger and the enemy, who gains legendary dimensions as to create the so-called ‘Ethos’, which constitutes a set of beliefs or convictions inside the group, including a range of ethical and value constants that determine the orientations of the group towards the enemy and within everyday life.
Societal Beliefs and Conflict Ethos
Societies in intractable conflicts like the case of Palestine and Israel generate and define societal beliefs to cope with such ethnonational conflict, and meet the de- mands of the conflict. The process of coping with the conflict is not solely limited to military, human, and economic resources, but extend to developing psycholog- ical mechanisms or societal beliefs that prepare and reinforce citizens in conflict to bear hardship including physical and mental loss/stress, costs, personal scarifies, and to evoke feelings of solidarity and unity, and much more. Through socialization
(2)“Religious Jews, Zionists and non-Zionists were, to a vast extent, not part in the creation of the myth. Many even objected fiercely to the myth” (Ben-Yehuda, 1995, p. 9).
process beliefs are being imparted into the public shaping the eyes through which they view the conflict, and through which the ethos is formed. Ethos is part and parcel of the group’s “language, stereotypes, images, myths, and collective mem- ories”, through which they react, take actions and decisions (Rouhana & Bar-Tal, 1998, p. 765). Haddad (2004, p. 765) once stated that in definition societal beliefs are “society members’ shared cognitions on issues that are of concern to society and that contribute to their sense of uniqueness. Their contents refer to society’s characteristics and structure and to processes of its development, and they include beliefs about societal goals, self-images, aspirations, norms and values, images of out-groups, and so forth”. This makes the conflict, in the case of ethos being formed around it, approaching the zero solution and remains transmitted from generation to generation so that mobilization on this basis from the media aspect becomes easy. As a result, the mutual hostile perception and the dehumanization of the other party will be enhanced. Accordingly, core beliefs in the conflict ethos are formed from the (a) Negative image of the enemy (b) Positive image of the collective self and legitimacy of its goals (c) Self-portrayal as a victim (d) Positive image of the group and self-determination (e) Self-perceptions of security (f) Own perceptions about the homeland and nationalism (g) Issue of national unity (h) Issue of peace and final settlement (Ibid.).
Perceptions of Israeli Media in the Arab World
Arabs and Palestinians believe that the Israeli media, with their organized and planned propaganda and their distinct, strategic goals seek to silence the Pales- tinian history and cut off any Arab and Palestinian ties with it. That is the same history that bequeathed the Palestinians a sense that their past and their presence have been usurped in the light of this Zionist propaganda and distortion of history (Abu A’rqoub, 2015). Many Arab sociologists believed that the discourse the Is- raeli media pass was a deceitful one, in which the numerous speeches end up with so many discrepancies and contradictions as the addressed groups or communities count. The outcome is an inconsistent image to Israel as a state and society. It is a kaleidoscopic discourse that turns to the US and Western European world portray- ing Israel as a garden or an oasis amid barren desert, as a democratic, liberal and secular state that faces the threat of genocide in the Arab world with its authoritarian countries, that are full of hatred and intolerance against Western democratic values (Abid Elhahmeed, 2014). The same discourse turns to the Asians to portray Israel as an Asian country and a successful pattern in development, and to the Africans with the portray of a state that is suffering from wars and that it is a young country, that has achieved independence and sought development and cooperation with countries of the South.
Edward Sa’id; a Palestinian scholar viewed the Zionist propaganda as the most intimidating propaganda machine in the world that deforms the image of an entire people, as the Israeli media apply the method of the information dumping, reitera- tion of the media mission, the use of contrasting and binary reductionism style by presenting Israel as the pioneer, developed country in the Middle East, and, in ex- change, presenting information, studies, reports and statistics about the backward- ness in the Arab world and the rate of illiteracy in it, as well as fanaticism, acts of terrorism, repression by the authorities and ill-treatment of minorities (Said et al., 1998, p. 7). The Israeli media cover truth with falsehood, and portray the victim as executioner and the murdered as a killer; all that to mislead the public opinion, inverse facts or erase them. In this context, Israeli media depict Israel as ‘a vic- tim of Palestinian violence’. It is the overall picture of the Israeli, Western and the US-American media that highlights Israel as being surrounded by violent people attacking it with rocks, and that the Israeli missiles and tanks are used to protect Is- raeli citizens from the Palestinian violence (Hallas, 2014; Abid Elhahmeed, 2014).
On the one hand, the Israeli Media suffers from an inadequate self-censorship. Kasbari (2011, p. 2) added:
‘In times of serious crisis Israeli media coverage adopts an absolute mili- tary agenda; the majority of the media gives an exclusive platform to military personnel and to military correspondence, justifying their attitudes and inter- pretations without offering alternative viewpoints’.
It reports the event as in war situation without any criticism or different views dis- cussed or shown in public. On the other hand, the majority of Palestinian journalists think that the profession is kind of national patriotic task, which hinders the actual role of the press and media during the Israeli occupation (Ibid.). Khaleel Shaheen of Al Ayyam of Ramallah said in an international seminar on the role of media in the peace process (2005):
‘The Palestinian media reflected a realistic image of what was taking place, the barricades, the destructions, the shootings, the settlers uprooting land and destroying houses and the imprisonment of thousands. There could be no peace with occupation’.
In the same seminar, Gideon Levy a Journalist and Columnist of Ha’aretz of Israel said:
‘The majority of journalists were telling the truth, but not all the truth. They wrote maybe that a house of a Palestinian had been demolished, maybe, but they would never write about the 12 children that had now become homeless,
or who would probably grow up to be suicide bombers. Telling only part of the truth was a betrayal. The Israeli reader’s whole political thinking was manipulated towards terrorism and terror. This was a dehumanization of the Palestinians, and it was the biggest crime of the Israeli media’.
Israeli media achieved a great success in portraying ‘the Palestinian struggle’ to the American public opinion by attempting to match between the struggle of the Palestinians and that of Taliban, particularly after the horrific events of September 11, 2001, suggesting that the Palestinian struggle is just ‘acts of violence’, which are not different from the ‘terrorism’ the US administration is combating to secure the US citizen, trying to describe Palestinian youths, holders of guns, and Palestinian children with explosive belts around their waists, with violence and terrorism. The Israeli justification for the targeted assassinations and the indiscriminate bombing is supported by allegations that the bombing targeted weapons’ depots, missiles factories or shelters harboring terrorist stores or that the attacks were to thwart terror acts (Al-Shaer, 2013; Abu Ghneima, 2014; Abu Sa’da, 2010). Al-Qutbi (2015) once added that the Israeli media have been teaching - and continue to teach - the Jewish mind the two complexes: fear of the Arabs and the technical and moral superiority over them as means to achieve their objectives for instilling feelings of resentment, antagonism, and hatred against all that is Arab. There is no doubt that the various media methods pursued by the Zionist media are distinct evidence that the Zionist movement is one of the few movements in this world that has successfully applied the media as a weapon and made the best use of it as to become a powerful and influential tool in their hands. The methods used in the Zionist media are complex, ramified and overlapping one another, but they all meet the wished requirements, be it on the level of extortion, propitiation or as a maneuvering style.
Perceptions of Palestinian Media in Israel