A War on the Words of War

Spray-painted murals drip like blood from the walls of slums here: There are scenes of American and Israeli flags burning, bombed Jerusalem buses cracking like eggs and fighters with black masks and AK-47s gleefully smashing Jewish settlements.

Gaza’s miles of wartime graffiti have been an evolving chronicle of the Palestinian uprising, a very public illustration of militant histories and fantasies. But to officials who are trying to piece together a delicate Israeli-Palestinian peace under tumultuous circumstances, the pictures are a call to arms, fuel for a fire they are trying to stifle.

At the prodding of Israeli negotiators, Palestinian crews have begun spreading a thin wash of white paint over the tangles of graffiti. “It’s good for calming everybody down,” said one painter, who would only identify himself as a municipal worker.

Cleaning the walls is just the beginning. Television broadcasts, radio programs, newspapers and sermons will soon come under inspection by a newly formed committee of Palestinian and Israeli monitors. The U.S.-backed peace plan requires both Israelis and Palestinians to immediately stop inciting violence, and Israel has been particularly adamant that Palestinians must get rid of the fiery rhetoric that has characterized the 33-month-old intifada, or uprising.

“Something has to be done,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Jonathan Peled. “This is not a way to raise a generation to peace.”

The government of Israel blames TV, radio, newspapers and textbooks for teaching Palestinian youths to hate the Jewish state.

For their part, Palestinians believe Israeli children are raised to stereotype Arabs, that Israelis learn young to write off all Palestinians as “terrorists” and deny their historical land claims.

“There are so many implicit ways of not letting the Israeli children see the Palestinian as a human being,” said Sami Adwan, an education professor at Bethlehem University who worked on a joint Israeli-Palestinian study of textbooks.

“Palestinians appear to Israeli children as inferior, uncivilized, vicious. They’re only there to attack you.”

The first time his own children met with Israeli youths, Adwan said, they came home dismayed. “They said, ‘They’re surprised we can play chess and use computers, that we have discussions with our families,’ ” he recalled. “ ‘They’re surprised we can swim.’ ”

The walls of Israel boast graffiti of their own -- “Kill the Arabs” in a Tel Aviv plaza, and a rash of “Kahane was right” in memoriam of the rabbi, Meir Kahane, who urged a systematic ethnic cleansing to rid the land of Arabs.

Derision on Pirate Radio

Every day, settlers take to the airwaves to jeer at the peace process and deride the Palestinians via a popular pirate radio station. Far right-wing leaders sometimes compare Palestinians to dogs or donkeys. Just last week, Israeli transportation minister and hard-liner Avigdor Lieberman suggested that Palestinian prisoners should be drowned in the Dead Sea.

But that brand of explicit hatred is generally regarded as the stuff of fringe elements. If anything, mainstream Israeli politicians tend to publicly discourage harsh rhetoric out of self-protection. When an Israeli law student indoctrinated by the radical right killed Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, the Jewish state remembered a hard-learned lesson: Words can kill. Israel sharpened its anti-incitement laws, and dozens of offenders have been prosecuted.

Israel uses even greater vigilance when it tracks and documents Palestinian discourse, which is treated as a deadly threat.

“Seeds of Hatred,” a short movie produced by the Israeli Foreign Ministry, culls clips from Palestinian television. In one scene, a tiny schoolgirl stands before her classmates to say, in wispy voice and with childish pauses, “I will become a suicide warrior in battle dress.” The children around her burst into appreciative claps; her teacher leaps to her feet with a cry of “Bravo!”

“The Jews are Jews; fight them wherever you are,” preaches an imam during a broadcast of Friday prayers included on the Israeli video. “Wherever you meet them, kill them. Wherever you are, kill those Jews.”

To the dismay of Israelis, official Palestinian language refers to any Palestinian killed in the fighting -- whether a suicide bomber or a child shot by Israeli troops -- as a shahid, which is Arabic for “martyr.” Israelis cringe at references to “Zionist enemy” instead of “Israel,” and “martyrdom operation” instead of “terrorist attack.”

Easing the tone of textbooks and broadcasts is an easy way for Palestinian officials to demonstrate their willingness to make peace, the Israeli government argues, even if they can’t crack down on the radical factions.

But incitement is tricky to define, and the project of bleaching it out is somewhat ambiguous. Israel accuses the Palestinian media of worsening a seething political climate; Palestinians reply that their media reflect the world around them.

“If you call these facts, these pictures, incitement, then how should we show fact?” asked Samir Sharif, interim director of the state-run Palestinian Satellite Television. “Official television in any country is a mirror of general politics. If things are on fire, I cannot be calm.”

Blaming the Messenger

Moreover, while violence continues, and when openly anti-Israel organizations such as Hamas form a social backbone in places like the Gaza Strip, some Palestinians say the complaints about incitement are just a fancy way to blame the messenger. As long as children are hardened by the fighting and humiliation, they say, it doesn’t much matter what’s written on the walls.

“Let us talk about the whole situation,” Palestinian Authority Information Minister Nabil Amr said. “If we want to speak of a new generation, it’s not just what they watch on TV. It’s what they’ve faced from the beginning to the end of their day.”

Shafiq Masalha, an Arab Israeli psychologist, teaches at an Israeli university, trains Palestinian psychologists and raises his own children in Jerusalem. He speaks Arabic, Hebrew and English fluently, and passes constantly between the two warring cultures. He says that children are psychologically damaged by mutual loathing and dehumanization layered into both societies. Israeli incitement is subtle, he says -- on the Palestinian side, language is more blunt.

In a dream analysis study of 10-year-old Palestinians, Masalha concluded that about 80% of them dream about political violence, usually culminating in death. About 15%, he found, dream of becoming shahids.

“We can’t keep on viewing the other as an animal or demon, and at the same time try to make peace,” he said. “Stopping the incitement is a legitimate demand for both sides, but you can’t really focus on that without changing the reality.”

The government-run television studios in Gaza City are tucked into a sunny, spare building decked with a bronze bust of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat and all manner of framed Arafat likenesses. It is from these rooms that the Palestinian government transmits a rough-hewn potluck of low-budget programming around the world via satellite. There’s grainy news, attack footage, children’s specials, religious teachings, clumsily cut music videos -- and many, many shots of Arafat.

“If an Apache helicopter comes and bombs a street, how can I continue with a children’s program?” asked Sharif of Palestinian Satellite Television. “Everything is upside-down; I have to turn the mood 180 degrees. For the next hour I can’t speak about peace.

“Then Israel says Palestinian television is putting on incitement.”

More Moderation

These days, slowly, the montage is becoming more moderate. Amr, the Palestinian information minister, sent a message to state media to lighten their rhetoric, and Israeli monitors have already been praising the evolution. On a recent afternoon the television news showed images of Arafat meeting with priests, with a French delegation and with horseback riders. The tone was mundane, even dull. Gone were the pounding music and the carnage.

Soft drums beat, and the camera cut to pictures of men praying at the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. “My hopes will be sweet, my dear Al Aqsa mosque,” trilled a singer.

Still, in some quarters, the linguistic intifada rages on. Last week, two days after Islamic Jihad bomber Ahmed Yehiyeh walked into the home of 65-year-old Israeli Mazal Afari and killed her by blowing himself up, the Palestinian newspaper Al Ayam celebrated him as a “hero” in a front-page tribute.

“The Islamic movement in Jenin proudly sends condolences that the heroic martyr is dead,” read a paid advertisement in a customary salute to those killed in the uprising.

“We proudly tell our people that he carried out a martyrdom operation Tuesday. Jihad [holy war] until victory or martyrdom!”