Israel Puts Media Clamp on Gaza

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Written by ETHAN BRONNER ETHAN BRONNER

Published: 06 January 2009 06 January 2009

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[NOTE: one of the cornerstones of civilization necessary for human rights is a free press and the right of human rights organization and U.N. human rights officials to travel freely to monitor situations where there are potential abuses.  Israel, by denying entry of independent journalists and UN officials, by that very act, is violating the human rights of Palestinians.  All repressive regimes claim that their clamp down on journalism and independent oversight is only because the journalists are "biased."  Israel, itself a repressive regime, makes the same claim.]

JERUSALEM — Three times in recent days, a small group of foreign correspondents was told to appear at the border crossing to Gaza. The reporters were to be permitted in to cover first-hand the Israeli war on Hamas in keeping with a Supreme Court ruling against the two-month-old Israeli ban on foreign journalists entering Gaza.

Each time, they were turned back on security grounds, even as relief workers and foreign nationals were permitted to cross the border. On Tuesday the reporters were told not even to bother coming.

And so for an 11th day of Israel’s war in Gaza, the several hundred journalists here to cover it wait in clusters away from direct contact with any fighting or Palestinian suffering but with full access to Israeli political and military commentators eager to show them around southern Israel where Hamas rockets have been terrorizing civilians. A slew of private groups funded mostly by Americans are helping guide the press around Israel.

Like all wars, this one is partly about public relations. But unlike any war in Israel’s history, in this one, the government is seeking to control entirely the message and narrative for reasons both of politics and military strategy.

“This is the result of what happened in the 2006 Lebanon War against Hezbollah,” noted Nachman Shai, a former army spokesman who is writing a doctoral dissertation on Israel’s public diplomacy. “Then, the media were everywhere. Their cameras and tapes picked up discussions between commanders. People talked on live television. It helped the enemy and confused and destabilized the home front. Today Israel is trying to control the information much more closely.”

He and others, including the post-Lebanon war investigation commissioned by the government, said that the army found that when reporters were allowed onto the battlefield in Lebanon, they got in the way of military operations by posing risks and asking questions.

As Maj. Avital Leibovich, an army spokeswoman, said, “If a journalist gets injured or killed, then it is Central Command’s responsibility.” She said they are trying to protect Israel from rocket fire and “not deal with the media.”

Beyond such tactical considerations, there is a political one. Daniel Seaman, director of Israel’s Government Press Office, said that “any journalist who enters Gaza becomes a fig leaf and front for the Hamas terror organization, and I see no reason why we should help that.”

Foreign reporters deny that their work in Gaza has been subject to Hamas censorship or control. But most Israelis accept Mr. Seaman’s assessment and shed no tears over the lack of media access to the conflict, despite repeated Foreign Press Association protests, including again on Tuesday.

A headline in Tuesday’s Yediot Aharonot, the country’s largest selling daily newspaper, expressed well the popular view of the issue. Over a news article describing the generally negative coverage so far, especially in the European media, an intentional misspelling turned the headline “World Media” into “World Liars.”

This attitude has been helped by supportive Israeli media whose articles have been filled with “feelings of self-righteousness and a sense of catharsis following what was felt to be undue restraint in the face of attacks by the enemy,” according to a study of the first days of media coverage of the war by a liberal but non-partisan group called Keshev, the Center for the Protection of Democracy in Israel.

The Foreign Press Association of Israel has been fighting for weeks to get its members into Gaza, first appealing to senior government officials and ultimately taking its case to the country’s highest court. On Wednesday, the justices worked out an arrangement with the organization whereby small groups would be permitted in to Gaza when it was deemed safe enough for the crossings to be opened for other reasons.

So far, every time the border has been opened, journalists have not been permitted to go in.

On Tuesday, the press association released a statement saying, “The unprecedented denial of access to Gaza for the world’s media amounts to a severe violation of press freedom and puts the state of Israel in the company of a handful of regimes around the world which regularly keep journalists from doing their jobs.”

At the same time that reporters have been given less access to the conflict, the government has created a new structure for shaping its public message, ensuring that spokesmen of the major branches meet daily to make sure all are singing from the same sheet.

“We are trying to coordinate everything that has to do with the image and content of what we are doing and to make sure that whoever goes on the air, whether a minister or professor or ex- ambassador, knows what he is saying,” said Aviv Shir-On, deputy director general for media in the foreign ministry. “We have talking points and we try to disseminate our ideas and message.”

Israelis say the war is being reduced on television screens around the world to a simplistic story; American-backed country with awesome military machine fighting third world guerrilla force leading to a handful of Israelis dead versus 600 Gazans dead.

Israel and its supporters feel that such quick descriptions fail to explain the vital context of what has been happening — years of terrorist rocket fire on civilians have gone largely unanswered and a message had to be sent to Israel’s enemies that this would go on no longer, they say. The issue of proportionality, they add, is a false construct because comparing death tolls offers no help in measuring justice and legitimacy.

There are other ways to construe the context of this conflict of course. But no matter what, Israel’s diplomats know that if journalists are given a choice between covering death and covering context, death wins. So in a war that they consider necessary but poorly understood, they have decided to keep the media far away from the death.

John Ging, an Irishman who directs operations in Gaza for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency and entered on Monday as journalists were kept out, told Palestinian reporters in Gaza that the policy is a problem.