Images Are Ammunition in Battle for World’s Sympathy

“Press wishing to receive footage of Palestinian propaganda, please call,” says the message from an Israeli propaganda arm.

“As part of the Al Aqsa intifada activities, Palestinians will march in Ramallah at 1 p.m. Thank you,” says the message from a Palestinian counterpart.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a thousand pictures just might win the war. That is the calculation of Israeli and Palestinian officials who are doing battle on beepers, mobile telephones, the Internet and television cameras while their forces face off in the streets.

Both sides want to mobilize their compatriots, to rally national support for their leaders and to sway international public opinion their way. Neither wants to be blamed for the violence that has claimed about 100 lives, most of them Palestinian. Each wants to make the point that it is the victim of the other’s wrath.

Every photograph--and, indeed, every word--is a weapon in the media war.

That is why Palestinian officials confiscated journalists’ film of a West Bank mob lynching two Israeli soldiers last week. They failed to get all of it, and images of a battered body tossed from a window, and of a Palestinian waving bloodied hands in triumph, were beamed across the world.

Until then, the most searing image of the conflict was the on-camera death of a terrified 12-year-old Palestinian boy who cowered behind his father during a firefight before he was killed by an Israeli soldier’s bullet.

“The media war is not only coverage of the real war, maybe the real war is the media war,” said Israeli government spokesman Nachman Shai.

That is why the Israel Defense Forces are arming their soldiers with video cameras as well as guns. They feel that too many news programs are airing footage from the Palestinian viewpoint rather than from the Israeli soldiers’ angle. They want to show that the bullets fly both ways. Israel Television has run the soldiers’ videotape, showing Palestinians shooting at them.

During retaliatory raids for the lynching, Israeli gunships targeted the Voice of Palestine radio transmitters in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Israel accuses the Palestinians of using the radio to incite rioters with anti-Israeli tirades, and a halt to such broadcasts is one of their demands for negotiating a cease-fire at the summit in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el Sheik today.

Since the beginning of the clashes Sept. 28, Palestinian radio has broadcast nationalistic songs and continuous news of the street fights. For a while, the radio waves were open for listeners to vent their rage at Israelis, although not to criticize Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.

The theme running through the broadcasts is how Israel took the land of Palestine and turned its people into refugees. When the clashes were at their peak, calls went out for the people to defend their country and to prepare themselves to fight for Palestine.

The missile attack took the channel off the air for about 30 minutes, but transmission resumed through local FM stations. Still, Voice of Palestine’s audience is greatly reduced and the damages ran to $3 million, according to Director General Bassem abu Sumaya.

Israeli Radio director Amnon Nadav, meanwhile, instructed his program editors not to give a greater platform to the Arab perspective than to the Israeli position in news reports.

“This is Israel Radio and not the Voice of Palestine,” Nadav was quoted as saying in the daily newspaper Maariv. He complained that Israelis interviewed on the radio sounded “apologetic and abject” compared with the Arabs.

Israeli media enjoy far more freedom than Palestinian newspapers and broadcasting outlets, particularly regarding internal politics. Unlike the Palestinian press, Israeli columnists and newspapers routinely criticize the government and, in normal times, cover the Palestinians’ position.

But the Israeli media have closed ranks behind their government at a time when the country feels under siege from Palestinians and Israeli Arabs. There is little disagreement among leftist and rightist columnists and newspaper editorials. After the lynchings last week, several Israeli commentators referred to the Palestinians as “barbarians” and “animals.”

Most Israeli journalists say this consensus is a reflection of public opinion, not a manipulation of it. Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi says the effect is the same.

“The Israeli media as a whole has adopted the official version and increased the sense of hostility and distrust of the Palestinian people,” Ashrawi said. “They have accepted the dehumanization of Palestinians.”

One of the Palestinians’ most articulate international representatives, Ashrawi was furious because an Israeli closure of West Bank cities prevented her from making it to Jerusalem on Sunday for an interview with CBS-TV anchor Dan Rather.

For the Palestinians, international public opinion is part of a negotiating strategy. Arafat has lost confidence in President Clinton as an impartial mediator and wants to bring more sympathetic allies in the United Nations and European Union into peace talks--a move Israel vehemently opposes.

Arafat also wants the Arab and Muslim worlds to rally behind him in the struggle for an independent state with Jerusalem as its capital. Thus, the Palestinian media have dubbed the clashes the Al Aqsa intifada, or the uprising for the holy Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.

For Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, the goal is to avoid being seen as the bully in an unequal fight. Israel has the heavy weapons and well-trained army and, even if provoked, risks looking as if it is beating up on a weakling.

In this case, Israel responded to the riots with considerable might and paid a heavy price in international public opinion. The U.N. Security Council condemned Israel for having used “excessive force.”

The Israeli government quickly realized it had image problems. It has since opened a special media center and brought in the soft-spoken and bespectacled Shai to represent the country. Shai was also Israel’s spokesman during the 1991 Persian Gulf War against Iraq.

“The Gulf War was a completely different situation. We were attacked by Iraq and immediately enjoyed sympathy from the whole world. We were expected not to hit back, and we didn’t,” Shai said.

“This is different. It is Israelis versus Palestinians, and it was seen as an armed people against a child. The goal is to bring Israel back to where it was--[seen] as a peace-loving country,” he said.

So urgent is the battle that Shai agreed for the first time to appear on television on the holiest Jewish holiday, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement when Jews fast. Since then, he has been holding daily news briefings and has “mobilized” envoys to Europe and the United States, and to foreign media, with daily “talking points” to get the Israeli viewpoint across.

Shai thinks that, after stumbling in the first days of the conflict, Israel is gaining ground in the media war.

“In the first stage, we were not prepared,” he said. “Once words replace shooting and fire, we will win.”