The outbreak of the second Intifada in October 2000 marks one of
the most dramatic changes that Israeli public opinion has gone
through in the past 50 years. It did not simply move to the right.
The very terms of public discourse have changed. The seven years
that passed between the beginning of the Oslo process and the
outbreak of the second Intifada were characterized by fierce
political struggles between the supporters of the Oslo agreement
and its opponents - struggles that reached their tragic peak in the
assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The beginning of
this Intifada saw the Israeli collective consciousness withdrawing
once again into the defensive, enraged consensus of a society that
saw its dream of peace vanish in a cloud of smoke. In this long
period of violence, following what seemed to be the final failure
of diplomatic negotiations, public discourse in Israel re-invented
itself - basing itself on a new narrative, which was instantly
subscribed to not only by the right, but also by the majority of
the traditional left. In schematic form, this is what the new
narrative states1:
1) Ehud Barak's government did everything possible to achieve a
final status agreement with the Palestinian Authority. At the Camp
David summit, convened in July 2000, it presented the Palestinians
with extremely generous offers for withdrawal from Palestinian
Territories.
2) The Chairman of the Palestinian Authority, Yasser Arafat,
refused the generous Israeli offers made at Camp David. Barak's
conciliatory position at Camp David was thus profoundly "useful":
It finally uncovered Arafat's real intentions, and proved that his
regime did not really seek peace.
3) Arafat then initiated a massive Palestinian uprising, the second
Intifada, which quickly developed into an organized terror attack
on Israel, with the purpose of creating international and internal
Israeli pressure that would eventually lead to further Israeli
concessions.
4) Faced with the severe violence of the Palestinian Intifada,
Israel responded with restraint, doing everything in its power to
protect its civilians, while refraining from the use of military
resources against Palestinian civilians. This sharp contrast
between Palestinian and Israeli conduct provided additional proof
of the "inherent" differences between the two national
cultures.
5) All the acts of violence committed by Palestinians since the
beginning of the Intifada were directed by Arafat, who maintained
full control of the field, at least until April 2002. Israel has
passively awaited his decision to stop the violence, and is willing
to return to the negotiating table the moment violence comes to an
end.
The most important characteristic of this narrative is that it
seems, on the face of it, to be absolutely non-ideological - a
non-controversial factual story which allows for a simple,
common-sense interpretation: The traditional ideological debate
within Israeli society centered on whether or not Israel should
withdraw from the territories in exchange for peace. Since October
2000 it "turned out" that the logical foundation of the debate was
wrong: Barak's government offered to withdraw and the Palestinians
rejected the offer, which implies that peace does not depend on
anything Israel can do. The Palestinians simply are not interested
in peaceful solutions. In fact, polls consistently show that the
majority of Jewish Israelis still accept the general framework of
"territories for peace." They just do not believe there is a
partner on the other side for such a solution.
As I show in Dor (2001, 2003, in press), the Israeli media played a
key role in the dissemination of this narrative within Israeli
society, especially during Barak's tenure.
The Israeli Media Under Barak
Since the beginning of the second Intifada, the Israeli media have
provided their readers and viewers with a one-sided, partial,
censored and biased picture of reality - a picture which seemingly
supports the new hegemonic narrative. It sustained and exacerbated
the readers' sense of distress and anxiety, but hardly corresponded
with events as they unfolded in reality. Much more importantly -
and this is a point of special theoretical significance - there was
a stark contrast between this picture and the factual reports sent
in by the reporters, the patterns of deviation being first and
foremost the result of editorial policy. The media systematically
suppressed certain elements of reality, and emphasized and
accentuated others, in a way that provided the "factual" platform
for the hegemonic narrative that has become ingrained in the
Israeli collective consciousness ever since.
An example may help here. One of the most important questions the
media had to deal with in the beginning of the second Intifada was
Arafat's personal responsibility for its outbreak. Reporters
received relevant information from about ten different sources on
this question. As it turned out, nine out of the ten insisted that
the riots were a spontaneous outburst of Palestinian anger and
frustration - following the long stalemate in the negotiations and
Ariel Sharon's visit to the Haram al-Sahrif/Temple Mount. These
sources included not just Palestinian and American officials, but
also, importantly, senior sources in the Israeli Secret Service
(Shin-Bet) and the Israeli Police. A single source explicitly
declared that Arafat planned and initiated the Intifada - Prime
Minister Ehud Barak. Crucially, Barak's "factual" statement
captured the main headlines, whereas the statements of the other
sources were published in back pages, weekly supplements and so on,
and never entered the public discourse.
The same pattern of suppression and accentuation applies to
information pertaining to Barak's role in the failure of the Camp
David talks, the IDF's conduct in the territories and the role it
played in developing the Intifada into a full-scale war of
attrition, and the events within the Green Line where Israeli
police forces killed 13 Arab demonstrators. Note that no conspiracy
theory is implied here. This behavioral pattern results from a
complex combination of converging influences and dynamics: The
surge of public fear and anger; undercurrents of racism; the almost
exclusive reliance of the media on the flow of information from the
Prime Minister's entourage and from senior officials in the defense
establishment; the automatic adherence of the media to the task of
national unity vis-à-vis what appeared as the clear and
imminent danger of a "general conflagration;" the systematic
disregard of the fact that the Palestinians in the territories
still live under almost complete Israeli occupation, even after the
implementation of the first stages of the Oslo agreements; and,
probably most importantly, the deep conviction that Barak did
everything that could be done for peace, and therefore did not, and
could not, have contributed to the deterioration of the
situation.
The last component had an especially paralyzing effect on the
political left in Israel. Intimately connected to the political
parties of Labor and Meretz, the traditional moderate peace
movements, such as Peace Now, kept completely silent throughout
Barak's term. This, of course, made it even easier for the media to
suppress oppositionist perspectives. As is the case in other
Western democracies, the option of critical coverage depends on the
explication of critical perspectives by public figures. In fact,
the only critical perspectives voiced by the media were those of
the extreme right, which were represented by Knesset members from
far-right parties.
The Israeli Media Under Sharon
It may be argued that Sharon's landslide victory in the last two
elections was a direct result of this change in public opinion in
Israel. If it is true that "there is no partner for peace on the
other side," then Sharon is the right man for the job. This
ideological climate also allowed the Labor Party to join in on the
National Unity government after Sharon's first victory, a fact that
further paralyzed the media in terms of critical coverage.
Two additional factors made things worse during this period. First,
the wave of suicide-bombings brought about a real sense of public
fear, which the media reflected and exacerbated. Second, the events
following the September 11 attack on the Twin Towers, and the
ensuing American operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, created a
sense of ideological confidence in the Israeli public, both in
terms of the global "fight against terror" and the "patriotic"
press coverage. The Middle East policy of the Bush administration
thus provided the Sharon government with the ideal pretext for the
continuation of its own policy. If Arafat is the local Bin Laden,
then Sharon does on the local level what Bush does on the global
one. Generally speaking, this comparison is more or less accepted
by the Israeli media.
Nevertheless, especially since the Defensive Shield operation, in
April 2002, the major media in Israel seem to have been diverging
in interesting ways. As I show in Dor (2003), some of the
mainstream media - Channel 2 and Ma'ariv, for example - kept their
"patriotic" line, and provided Sharon with supportive and
uncritical coverage. Channel 1 and Yediot Ahronot, on the other
hand, tried to project a combination of general patriotism (mainly
sweeping support for the IDF) with a surprisingly deep criticism of
Sharon himself. In doing this, they follow the general line of
built-in suspicion on the part of the media establishment of
right-wing governments, and open the door to non-consensual
perspectives. Yediot Ahronot's policy is especially significant.
Some of the most impressive pieces of critical journalism appeared
in this paper, which for the longest time built a reputation for
itself as a jingoistic newspaper. To be sure, Yediot Ahronot's
status as the Israeli paper makes this shift especially
significant.
Haaretz, of course, remains the most liberal and critical newspaper
in Israel, but it has nevertheless been taking substantial steps in
the last two years to change its image and appear more consensual.
Unlike the two tabloids, it routinely provided its readers with
considerable amounts of information about the Palestinian
perspective. But it also consistently published this information on
back pages, making it clear - in main headlines and editorials -
that this is indeed no more than the Palestinian perspective, and
that it accepts the reports from the Israeli side as factually
accurate. This duality makes it impossible to provide a clear-cut
evaluation of Haaretz' conduct in terms of the traditional, liberal
concept of the role of the press in democratic societies. It does,
however, tell a much more revealing story about what Israeli
society, and especially the moderate left, went through during this
critical period.
The different media take different stands with respect to Sharon,
but at a deeper level, they still share the same hegemonic
perspective. They characterize the conflict in intractable terms
(Bar-Tal 1998), and blame Arafat, and Arafat alone, for the
collapse of the diplomatic process and the continuation of the
armed struggle.
Within this framework, Haaretz and Yediot Ahronot regularly
criticize Sharon for "not having a serious plan," for "using
excessive force," or for refusing, to build a fence along certain
parts of the Green Line, a fence which experts claimed could reduce
the number of terror attacks in Israeli cities. They have not,
however, criticized Sharon for refusing to try to get back to
diplomatic negotiations, or for declaring that he would not be
willing to evacuate settlements. Such criticism would, at least by
implication, indicate that they assume there might be a partner for
peace on the other side. In a real sense, then, Barak's perspective
remained at the very foundation of the Israeli media's perception
of the second Intifada long after Barak himself lost the elections
and left the political arena.
Bar-Tal, Daniel (1998). Societal beliefs in times of intractable
conflict: The Israeli case. International Journal of Conflict
Management, 9, 22-50.
Dor, Daniel (2001). Newspapers Under the Influence. Babel
Publishers. (Hebrew)
------- (2003). Behind Defensive Shield. Babel Publishers.
(Hebrew)
------- (to appear). Intifada Hits the Headlines. Indiana
University Press.
1 For the relevant public opinion data, see the peace index, a
project of the Tel Aviv University's Tami Steinmetz Center for
Peace Research, at:
www.tau.ac.il/peace/Peace_Index/p_index.html.)