Film explores how media shapes perceptions of conflict

A behemoth public relations campaign sanitizes the bloody reprisals that continually rip through the Holy Land, and unquestioning American journalists propagate this misinformation to keep the public in the dark.

Why would this be so? Because herding American public opinion into the coral of ignorance fuels Israel's illegal war machine and lines the pockets of a special few, at least according to Peace, Propaganda, and the Promised Land, a film directed by Bathsheba Ratzkoff and Sut Jhally that more than 60 students watched Tuesday night in McGuinn.

The directors head the Media Education Foundation, which seeks to disillusion and encourage citizens when it comes to biased news coverage, especially regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Their pro-Palestinian documentary rests on alarming statistics, jarring footage, and the opinions of public figures like Noam Chomsky and Michael Lerner - the editor of the progressive Jewish magazine Tikkun - to illustrate how news of the Palestinian plight percolates through a four-chamber filter.

The film says U.S. media moguls compose the largest filter and profit off the conflict by playing to Americans' anti-Palestinian ethos.

According to the film, political elites like World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld serve as the second filter, and use unethical means to ensure support for Israel as a proxy force to challenge the European Union and Russia in a competition for regional power and oil. "The flow of U.S. oil depends on Israel," said the film's narrator.

Next is the Israeli government itself, according to the film, which employs dozens of American public relations firms that correspond with Israel's nine American consulates (compared to Palestine's one in D.C.) along with fervent Jewish and Christian organizations, like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

The documentary says groups like AIPAC ostracize and demonize moderate Jewish organizations fighting for peace. Jeremy Kaplan, A&S '07, agreed and a fter the film he said that a new group he has helped set up here at BC, Jews for Justice, aims to combat such marginalization by shoring up support for the Israeli peace movement.

This entire public relations campaign appeared after the "massacres of Sabra and Shatila."

Israel occupied West Beirut in 1982 to root out Palestinian Liberation Organization militants attacking Israel from within Lebanon. After the Israeli army effectively cordoned off the area that included the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, militiamen of the right-wing Lebanese political party Phalange went into the area. Thirty-eight hours later, 2,000 refugees had been murdered, according to the film and the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

Images of the carnage flooded living rooms across the world, and the BBC showed former U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East Morris Draper berating then-Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, saying, "The situation is absolutely appalling. They are killing children. You have the field completely under your control and are therefore responsible for that area."

After incurring international condemnation and even being called "Nazi Israel," the film says Israel began "Hasbara," its public relations campaign that means "explanation" in Hebrew and relies on the fourth filter: alleged watch-dog groups like the Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) that fight anti-Israeli coverage in America.

After this process, the film says talking heads like Katie Couric tell Americans "what's happening."

Beyond filtration, subtleties on TV and in newspapers further wash American reporting by saying Israel "retaliates" or "responds" to Palestinian "attacks," which falsely portrays Israel as defending herself against "hatred," according to the film.Noam Chomsky says Israel's "harsh and brutal military occupation" forces Palestinians, not Israelis, to retaliate in the language of their oppressor, albeit often with rocks and Molotov cocktails instead of American-provided tanks and fighter jets.

"You can't defend yourself when you're militarily occupying someone else's land," said Chomsky. "It's not defense - call it what you like - but it's not defense."

Only four percent of network reports analyzed mentioned "occupation," according to the film, which also calls out CNN for a memorandum sent to its reporters in 2001, instructing them to call one settlement a "neighborhood" so as to connote it positively.

Calling settlements neighborhoods "avoids seeing Israel as an imperial, colonial force," said Katrina Quisumbing King, A&S '07, who organized the event on behalf of the Global Justice Project. When asked if she thought the movie ignored Palestinian wrongs, King said that it's irrelevant.

"The point of the movie was how the U.S. media portrays the conflict, not which side does wrong to the other," she said. "The movie provided a socio-historical lens to look at a problem that … isn't about religion, [but] about land."

In January 2001, 53 Israeli soldiers refused to serve in the occupied territories because they didn't want to "dominate, expel, starve, and humiliate" Palestinians, but the movie says their protest and the peace demonstration of 2000 Israeli and Palestinian women in Jerusalem didn't receive any air time.

"There is a great deal of punishment meted out to anyone who empathizes with Palestinians," said theology professor Rev. Ray Helmick, S.J., who led a discussion after the film and mentioned cuts in National Public Radio's funding after covering Gaza heavily.

The documentary centers on the issue of occupation, but the 2004 production predates Israel's withdrawing of all permanent settlements and military outposts from the Gaza Strip in September 2005, and the withdrawal of four others from the West Bank, largely seen as a conciliatory gesture on the part of Israel.