LOOKING AROUND:Show, don't tell
By Barbara Sofer
April, 11 2002
Hungary is the homeland of my swimming friend Hanna. Decades of pool chlorine haven't bleached out the tattoo she bears from Auschwitz. But she's lucky to be alive, she'll tell you. Over 565,000 Hungarian Jews perished, the result of the collaboration of their Hungarian neighbors with the Nazis. So it was with bitter irony, on the week when Jewish hearts were raw with intense identification with Holocaust and Martyrs Remembrance Day, poised for Memorial Day for those who gave their lives to establish and maintain our state, and apprehensive over our grim daily news, that we received a letter from Hungary questioning the morality of Israel's fight against terror.
Apprehension for the fate of the Jewish people and skepticism over the way Israel is presented in the media should be fixed in the minds of anyone watching TV, and even more so in any land of the Holocaust. That a Jew in Hungary should feel bereft of cogent answers to stand up for his brethren in Israel underscores just how sickeningly effective the enemy's manipulation of the press is, and how woefully lacking is our own public relations effort. When our enemies can't stop our soldiers with missiles, they use missives.
How does this work?
The opening thrust is the singling out of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as a villain. Remember that old phrase, "it's not Jews we're against, just Zionists?" The current refrain is that Sharon, a man with a tarnished past toward Palestinians, has "lost all proportion" in reacting to the attacks against Israeli citizens. Our elite troops are rooting out terrorists and caches of arms; lawyers and car mechanics have been called to back up the 19 year olds in the search for suicide bombers. Israeli tanks are patrolling city streets where rioters routinely called - not just for Israeli political concessions, but for the slaughter of the Jews.
Such reports presume that Sharon, not PA Chairman Yasser Arafat, could turn off the terror. If he'd only remove the soldiers who have "occupied" the territories. If only he'd give Palestinians freedom of movement, those who indeed wish to visit their cousins in Hebron could do so. And those who want to propel the next rat poison-soaked nails into our children's eyes and brains would put down their weapons.
In contrast, Arafat - limned by candlelight in his "isolated" chambers where he greets guests from the hypermoral countries of the world - is a folk-hero. Documents proving he personally approved suicide bombers are assumed to be false. The Million Martyr March he's proposed on Jerusalem is dismissed as high rhetoric.
That the Palestinians living under "AOT" (Arafat-Occupied Terror-tories) have been deprived of a reliable justice system, cheated out of grants given by well-meaning foreign governments, deprived of jobs because of terrorism, or executed for supposed collaboration, has had little impact on the portrayal of the man. Palestinians are hostages of a dictator, as surely as Arafat's gunmen took nuns and priests at the Church of the Nativity. Has the press ever come up with even one vociferous Israeli-Arab radical who would volunteer to live under Arafat rather than Sharon?
THE MOST successful element of the Palestinians' foreign press coverage is their skilled use of the old adage: show, don't tell. Last week, a French TV reporter complained to me that she simply couldn't get access to Jewish children who had been victims of terror, that our hospitals insist on parental consent before filming. "The Palestinians let us take all the pictures we want in the hospital," she said, frustrated.
While it's always tempting to write off such a complaint as just another anti-Israel ploy by the French or to rejoice at our own moral superiority in protecting our children's privacy, our reluctance to show the pain and ongoing trauma gains us no points. No one is going to feel sympathy because we can't sit at our local cafes, yet those are the images that proliferate on TV.
We clean up too fast: Let's invite foreign TV teams to film the severed limb on a bloodied Seder floor. Let them stand with the Hesed shel Emet teams gathering skin and cartilage. Where are the correspondents who beg to put on green and follow IDF forces house-to-house, or model the polite behavior they demand of our soldiers while checking for explosive belts at dusk?
Even the most anti-Israel reporters will tell you how delighted they are to serve in Israel, with its comforts, voluble citizens, sophisticated communications and access to officials. Many of today's Middle East correspondents have had a stint in Afghanistan, and I haven't heard any pining for a second tour.
Among Palestinians, every member of the press corps is treated as a potential ally. In contrast, our resentment of foreign coverage expresses itself in uncivil behavior. We lose empathy before the reporters get their first questions out, and then we justify our unfriendly behavior by assumed knowledge of their secret motives. Even though most Israelis express heartsickness over our portrayal in the international press, I have seen doors literally slammed in the faces of correspondents and heard diatribes launched against the politics of the reporter's home country.
My fellow Israelis, this is not a winning strategy. And please don't harangue me about why it's justified.
Before the current outbreak of violence, I once went to Gaza to cover the arrival of a group of American doctors who fly to impoverished areas to repair children's scarred faces. The deformities they saw were real enough. Many of the injuries were typical of the burns from spilled cooking pots in crowded kitchens. The surgeons had seen such faces in most countries they worked in. Yet one surgeon told me that each child he examined in Gaza claimed that his disfigurement was caused by an Israeli. He wondered aloud if this was a learned mantra.
International reporters should be wary of being duped, and be careful not to seek out "facts" to justify a preconception. In particular, those who represent countries whose record toward Jews is shameful need to go out of their way to validate any claim made against Israel, lest they perpetuate the sins of their fathers.
I stand by my people's track record. How many critics of Israel can say the same?
