Recently at the Doha-Tribeca Film Festival, attendees screened a documentary on Hollywood and United States media portrayals of Arabs and Muslims. The large audience adored the film, “,” and had fulsome praise for its chief creator, Michael Singh.

Meaningful Debate

Much of the documentary was spot on, including assertions that Hollywood films about Arabs and Muslims tend to focus on war and terrorism, and that Hollywood splatters Arabs with stereotyped tones that are unconscionable for other ethnicities.

The film reverts somewhat to the early 2000s and prior, though, when discussion focuses on US coverage of Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

“We actually have a huge debate about abortion in this country,” John Mearsheimer, coauthor of the 2007 book, The Israel Lobby, told the camera. “We have a huge debate in this country about affirmative action… But we do not have any debate, any meaningful debate in this country about Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories, or about the US-Israeli relationship.”

This statement was more accurate when Mearsheimer published his book but, thankfully, today we have somewhat different, if only slightly more nuanced, coverage of Israel and Palestine. The US arguably produces the most pro-Israel coverage of any nation in the world, even compared with Israel itself, but there are small signs of change.

The matter of whether American media are imbalanced in Israel-Palestine coverage may seem like a small thing. It is not. There is perhaps not a single global criticism of US journalism more common than the underreporting of Palestinian suffering.

It is difficult, but not impossible, for US journalists to publish sensitive material related to Israel. “Fatima Qortoum was just 9 years old when she saw the brains of her brother, 7-year-old Ahmed, fall out of his head,” Erin Cunningham from Gaza in November for GlobalPost. “He was struck with shrapnel after an Israeli airstrike.”

In mainstream media outlets, I have that Israel is a modern democracy, defended the right to utter on US college campuses, and highlighted Israel’s (as well as Hamas and the Palestinian Authority’s) of journalists. On December 2, the Committee to Protect Journalists published an to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urging him to explain his military’s killing of journalists in the Gaza Strip. Three journalists were killed and nine more injured in recent attacks.

Is US coverage of Palestinian plight lacking overall? As surely as humans bleed. After much of Israel’s recent attack on Gaza had quieted, 160 Palestinians and six Israelis lay dead. I cannot think of another human conflict with, say, a death ratio of 32:1 in which American media so frequently dismiss the underdog. In a November speech hosted by the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Israel of lacking generosity and empathy toward Palestinians, but most major US news organizations did not carry the quote.

American News Editors

The New York Timesran a front-page in November of frightened Palestinian schoolgirls in Gaza looking at the ruins of their school, which Israeli bombs destroyed. The caption inexplicably read, “Girls at a Gaza school were stunned to find it closed. An emboldened Hamas may lead Israel to harden its stance.” [Emphasis mine.]

The late foreign correspondence legend, Anthony Shadid, says in “Valentino’s Ghost” that many American news editors are reluctant to question Israeli military actions because they simply do not want to deal with the backlash. "You know,” Shadid recalls an editor saying of a story on Israeli military roadblocks, “I really don't want to deal with this; we're going to get a ton of letters." In order for Michael Singh to show “Valentino’s Ghost” in the US, an affiliate of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has demanded the deletion of certain portions critical of Israel.

I recently wrote a piece about Israel for a publication in New York, and the editor scrubbed the draft clean of virtually all criticism of the powerful country. He seemed a bit embarrassed, but it was clear he would not budge.

In the same piece, I failed to designate Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, since the US and most of the world does not recognize it as such. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) pressured the editor to print a correction anointing Jerusalem Israel’s capital. The editor made the (inaccurate) correction, illustrating how American editors can be cowed by interest-group politics.

Yet, US journalists themselves are becoming more vocal on the shortcomings of American coverage of Israel and Palestine. “Palestinian suffering has been far too little noted,” journalist James Carroll recently in The Boston Globe. The New York Times ombuds Margaret Sullivan that the Gaza school bombing caption was poor, and The Nation blogger Greg Mitchell , “You had to go to other photos way over at the NYT [New York Times] site to find out that the school was completely destroyed by an Israeli air strike…While prominent placement of the photo might draw criticism from Israelis, the caption seemed aimed at softening that.” I tweeted that the caption “was a disgrace. It came across as an apology for running a photo of a school Israel destroyed” — a note that The New York Times retweeted.

The November 2012 assault on Palestinians in Gaza was covered differently than in years past. George W. Bush’s lame duck administration stayed in its hammock in late 2008 and early 2009, when Israel bombed Gaza and killed more than 1,400 people, with a ratio of over 100 dead Palestinians for every fallen Israeli. There was a shortage of outrage in the American press.

This time, though, American journalists, as well as a US administration that did not wait for body counts in the thousands to intervene, acted more as they should when people are dying. To the dismay of Israel supporters, The Washington Post ran a of a Palestinian infant killed by Israel. Many Israel supporters complained that a photo of a dead baby is biased, but The Post was unapologetic. The picture, The Washington Post ombuds Patrick Pexton, is “a split-second version of the truth,” and one that “moves the viewer toward a larger truth.”

One morning in November, The International Herald Tribune ran side-by-side op-eds supporting Palestinian aspirations. One of the essays, which was coauthored by Jimmy Carter, opposed a policy of the sitting president and urged nations to vote for upgraded Palestinian status in the United Nations. This tandem of articles would have been less likely fifteen years ago.

Israel supporters, of course, often decry coverage of the country in US media, too. The ADL routinely pressures news organizations following critical coverage of Israel. Stanford researchers in the 1980s identified something called the “,” which demonstrated that when opponents in political disputes view the same coverage of the conflict, both sides frequently rate the coverage as similarly antagonistic to their cause. Even when I have written articles sharply critical of Israel, Palestinians often comment or contact me complaining that I got things wrong and used kid gloves.

Palestinians, though, seem less concerned with media coverage of, say, Hamas’ atrocities, than with a lack of coverage of their suffering. Palestinians rarely protest coverage that labels Hamas negatively for shooting rockets at civilians. Palestinians’ chief complaint, rather, is that Palestinian deaths and subjugation are not accorded the journalistic outrage they deserve.

Pressure Tactics

This is true, but things are changing. More American journalists are aware of, and arguing for column space for, Palestinians’ indignities. Columnist Roger Cohen last month that since 2008, “Israel’s interest in the ‘dream’ of a two-state peace has been expressed mainly in the expansion of West Bank settlements.” Following Israel’s announcement of new settlements after the UN upgraded Palestine’s standing, The New Yorker's David Remnick that "the Israeli political class is a full-blown train wreck."

I taught recently at the University of Maine, and my students, while not abundantly informed about the Middle East, tended to see Palestinians as they see Tibetans or Chechens — a people occupied by a foreign military. This awareness is due to more complete reporting on Israel and Palestine.

US editors will likely face less lobbying and pressure tactics in the future from groups like the ADL and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The AIPAC crowd is aging, while Arab-Americans in the US are very young and are rapidly increasing in number. Additionally, Arab-American political groups are expanding.

Just as Obama has been more blunt than past administrations about Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land and the toxicity of new settlements, US journalists have greater flexibility to cover this decades-long conflict.

It will take time, perhaps years, for American journalists to finally cover Israel and Palestine as they do other conflicts, but we are heading in that direction.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51勛圖’s editorial policy.

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Palestinian reporters are muzzled by their own governments in the West Bank and Gaza. Government censors block certain political speech and kill criticism of local officials and municipalities. Reporters are also denied freedom of association by the Israeli military, which restricts their movement.

In June, the UN���s independent monitor of global freedom of speech, Frank La Rue, both Israeli and Palestinian governments for muting speech in violation of international standards.

Shortly after touching down in Tel Aviv, I felt some of the pressure journalists here face. I told the immigration officer at Ben Gurion airport that I was a journalist planning to, among other things, do some work in the West Bank. The woman did not like what she heard.

She put my father and me in an adjacent room for over an hour, after which I was taken to a private room and thoroughly questioned. Why was I in Israel? Why was I going to the West Bank? What do I do for a living? Why did I have Lebanese stamps in my passport? The inquisitors wanted a business card, an ID proving that I was a university professor, my stamped boarding pass to prove from whence I had come, copies of all my hotel reservations with dates, and my Delta Airlines itinerary to show when I would be leaving. They wanted full names and cell phone numbers of everyone I knew in the West Bank. The security officials did not ask to scour my email inbox or other private accounts, although they .

My brief detention is nothing compared to restrictions on the movement of Palestinian journalists, which is stifled by a network of hundreds of Israeli military roadblocks and checkpoints, an indecipherable web of government permits and denials, and Israel���s which wraps around Palestinians and covers over 450 miles���driving distance from Washington DC to Boston.

I visited the West Bank city of Qalqilya, which the Israeli wall was constructed to entirely surround.

One Palestinian I know, said the Israeli government arbitrarily told him he could visit Tel Aviv for the first time in his life, but that he could not fly anywhere from there. When Israel lets him leave the country, he must travel by bus to Jordan and fly from there.

Journalists covering Palestinian demonstrations in the West Bank are often targets for Israeli tear gas, stun bullets, and water cannons. I covered a demonstration in the village of Nabi Saleh, during which Israeli soldiers employed all of these measures, but I managed to escape the water blasts and stun bullets. I was unable to avoid the tear gas. (Palestinian teens were throwing stones, further inciting the countermeasures). On July 13, a New York Times reporter was and held in Nabi Saleh by Israeli forces, and eventually released.

Hamas and Fatah

The work of Palestinian reporters is also frustrated by the governments of Fatah and Hamas. ���Harassing Palestinian journalists,��� Brooke Gladstone said in a May installment of On the Media, ���is not an exclusively Israeli occupation.��� In Hamas-controlled Gaza, journalists are routinely harassed and imprisoned for criticizing local power brokers. All resident reporters in Gaza must obtain licenses to practice journalism from the Hamas regime. Hamas is about as fond of free speech as it is of the Knesset.

Palestinian abuse of journalists in the West Bank achieves similar ends. Palestinian reporter Muhammad Jaradat was by plainclothes Palestinian police while covering a demonstration in July. Another and blogger who captured images of Palestinian police beating a protester was forced to empty his camera. The communications minister for the Palestinian Authority (PA) resigned in April in protest of censorship by the regime. That same month the Palestinian Authority���s attorney general forced Palestinian Internet providers to kill access to eight websites.

Journalists also pay a price for tensions between rivals Hamas and the PA. In the West Bank, the PA is especially rough with journalists from outfits like the Al-Aqsa TV network, loyal to Hamas. Conversely, journalists in Gaza sympathetic to Fatah are more intensely targeted by Hamas. Both governments, to varying degrees, have blocked circulation of newspapers sympathetic to the other side.

Palestinian Authority law embraces censorship if journalistic work threatens to disrupt Palestinian ���unity,��� and the PA uses this legal exception to do to journalists little less than what it pleases. Jillian York of the Electric Frontier Foundation wrote in April that the Palestinian Authority journalists and others for controversial Facebook updates. Moreover, the PA has nary a sense of humor, for in 2011 it the politically satirical Watan Ala Watar from television after powerful PA officials tattled that they were being teased.

Censorship From Israel

Israel is fond of direct censorship, too. Israeli forces the offices of a Palestinian TV news network in the middle of one night in February and drove off with their equipment (the same station, Al Wattan, has been shut down on multiple occasions by the PA as well). Some journalists in Israel must submit their copy to military censors to advance their work, and Israeli security forces can quite easily enforce that silence reporters on certain topics. On numerous occasions Israel Palestinian journalists and held them for extended periods without charge. Hamas and the PA have done the same.

The argument that journalists, even Palestinian reporters, have it better in Israel as opposed to the occupied territories is true, but the distinction hardly warrants a parade. Israel has far too many reminiscent of autocracies, but Palestinian forces also cast a cloak of misery on reporters under their control. There are many Palestinian journalists who endure far more harassment and assault from Palestinian forces than from Israel.

Palestinian journalists have no state of their own, but they are jostled and harassed at home by multiple governments that rarely give them a break.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51勛圖���s editorial policy.

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