The Israeli Origins of Anti-Israel Bias

Seth Frantzman

The international media’s anti-Israel bias is a story of detached liberal elites in Israel and abroad reinforcing each other’s prejudices.

The Gaza War has sparked a major debate about the anti-Israel bias of the international media • But the bias would not be so powerful were it not for an influential group of Israelis in the local media and political scene who readily supply the ammunition for painting Israel in the worst possible light • Seth Frantzman on a curious phenomenon

Framing the story against Israel. A photojournalist covering a Palestinian protest. Photo: Flash90

In the aftermath of the recent Gaza war many media professionals and pro-Israel advocates began to search through the rubble of the media’s portrayal of Israel to understand how, once again, Israel was portrayed in a negative light and numerous facts, such as those relating to civilian casualties, seemed to have been manipulated. Matti Friedman’s piece ‘an insider’s guide to the most important story on earth’ seemed to reveal the secret “answer” to what many felt was a biased media: The media gets Israel’s story wrong because it is basically anti-Semitic.

This mantra – that the media hates Israel and there isn’t much one can do about it – creates an easy scape-goat. Blame the New York Times for the coverage of Israel. Blame the Guardian and BBC. Blame “them.” But it misses the forest for the trees. The fact is that almost every anti-Israel story originates in Israel, not in the conspiracy minded editorial offices in New York or London, and many of those stories are the result of Israeli media and Israeli NGOs. When I raised this point to a media professional here he replied “Israel is a free country with a free press.” Israel is a free country, but some of its critical press is unrelenting in creating well-packaged stories to feed to a salivating foreign media.

Liberal Western Angst…

To understand the problem we should begin by parsing Friedman’s allegations.

“Israeli actions are analyzed and criticized, and every flaw in Israeli society is aggressively reported,” he alleges. He notes that stories about Israeli corruption get traction but no one reports about Palestinian corruption. He argues that the AP and others focus on “moral failings of Israeli society—proposed legislation meant to suppress the media, the rising influence of Orthodox Jews, unauthorized settlement outposts, gender segregation, and so forth.”

Furthermore; “Most reporters in Gaza believe their job is to document violence directed by Israel at Palestinian civilians…Our narrative was that the Palestinians were moderate and the Israelis recalcitrant and increasingly extreme.” Israel is “the pool into which the world spits” and the international press is “the tool” by which the modern anti-Semite bashes Israel.

Amazingly Steven Gutkin, the AP Bureau Chief in Jerusalem from 2004-2010, wrote a reply to Friedman on September 6th. Gutkin reveals something fascinating about his view of the Israeli “story.” For him “it’s also a story about the persecuted becoming the persecutors. All of this, of course, is happening to the people of the Bible, the descendants of the Hebrew slaves who were led out of Egypt by Moses and from whose ranks emerged Jesus Christ. It’s as if a new chapter of the Bible is being written in our times.”

Gutkin claims “I have no doubt that my Jewishness gave me a keener appreciation of the Israeli cause. I also know that my intense feelings about Jewish persecution – and the fact that much of my own family was murdered in the Holocaust – made me even more sensitive to the plight of the weak, no matter who they were.” Gutkin reveals that those who most affected him included a “devout Muslim” AP colleague in Afghanistan, “a Palestinian colleague in Gaza” and another “former colleague in Gaza.”

The Palestinians are always victims, Israelis aggressors – and the stories designed to reinforce that prejudice. Photo of a house destroyed in the Gaza War. Photo: Flash90

read more: The Israeli Origins…