Because they are trying to hide what is really going on
Misleading US media reports about Palestinian-Israeli violence
The Israeli police beat the Palestinian mourners who were carrying the coffin of the journalist Abu Aqla.
Getty
Bennett initially said that Shirin was killed by random bullets fired by Palestinians.
Reuters
The place where Abu Aqila was killed is where her colleagues said there were no Palestinian gunmen, not even civilians.
Reuters
picture
The Israeli police attacked mourners of Palestinians who were carrying the coffin of the slain Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Aqleh on May 13th.
However, many US media outlets had a different impression of what happened.
"The Israeli police clashed with mourners in the funeral procession," the MSNBC television website said in its report.
"Israeli forces and Palestinians clashed in the West Bank before the journalist's funeral," said the Wall Street Journal.
"Fox News" TV started the news by saying, "The clashes erupted on Friday in Jerusalem when mourners attended the burial of Al-Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Aqleh, who was shot on Friday when she was covering the events in the city of Jenin in the West Bank."
The news did not mention who had provoked the violence, nor did it allude to the disparity in power between the heavily armed Israeli police and defenseless Palestinian civilians.
Such language and omissions are common in covering violent acts by the police or the Israeli army.
Neutral terms are not always neutral
The use of words like "clashes" might make sense in topics such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where violence is perpetrated by both sides.
But as a scholar of Palestinian history and an analyst in the US media's coverage of this topic, I believe that using neutral words like "clashes" to describe Israeli police and army attacks on Palestinian civilians is completely misleading.
It ignores cases in which Israeli forces incite violence against Palestinians who pose no threat to them.
The US media has long been accused of misinformation when it comes to acts of violence against Palestinians.
A 2021 study conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on 50 years of The New York Times' coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict found that "the disproportionate use of the passive voice to refer to negative or violent actions against Palestinians" has encouraged occupying forces to further use misleading terms. In describing what is happening in the occupied Palestinian territories.
The use of the passive voice, for example, “Palestinians were killed during the clashes” rather than “Israeli forces killed Palestinians” helps to obscure Israel from the news, and also adds a kind of ambiguity to the reasons for the anger of many Palestinians towards the Israelis.
This is not related to the New York Times. In 2019, an analysis by data researchers in Canada of nearly 100,000 headlines over 50 years covering five American newspapers concluded that “the coverage of the conflict by the major American media gives preference to Israel, through the large amount of stories it covers. And providing more opportunities to amplify and strengthen the Israeli narrative.”
Competing novels
One of the problems associated with the use of the word “engagement” is the blurring of events during which the Israeli police and army attack Palestinians who do not pose a threat to them.
Amnesty International and a human rights group described the recent events at Al-Aqsa as one of the brutal attacks carried out by the Israeli police against Palestinian worshipers in and around Al-Aqsa Mosque, during which they used violence amounting to torture and other ill-treatment, in order to dispersal of gatherings.” Accordingly, the word “clashes” is not appropriate to convey the truth of what happened.
In fact, the word "clashes" gives more credibility to the Israeli version of the story than to the Palestinian version.
Israeli officials accuse Palestinians of instigating violence, and claim that soldiers and police used lethal force to fend off Palestinian attacks.
And so these events are covered.
But the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem's database of Palestinian and Israeli deaths shows that most of the 10,000 Palestinians killed by Israelis since 2000 "did not take part in hostilities" at the time they were killed.
The Palestinians are the cause of the violence
We witnessed this attempt to make the Palestinians the cause of the Israeli violence in the case of the murder of journalist Shireen Abu Aqleh.
According to her colleagues at the place of her death, an Israeli sniper deliberately shot and killed her with live bullets, even though she was wearing a flak jacket and the word “press” was written on it in addition to the helmet.
Another sniper shot her colleagues while they were trying to rescue her, according to witnesses from the scene.
At first, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said, "Palestinian gunmen fired indiscriminately and uncontrollably" at the time of the journalist's killing, pointing out that the Palestinians had killed Abu Aqila.
But when the evidence appeared to belie this claim, Israeli officials changed their minds, and said that the source of the shooting had not yet been determined.”
The New York Times said that Abu Aqleh "was killed during clashes between the Israeli army and Palestinian gunmen that took place in the city," and the same news says that the Palestinian journalist Ali Al-Samudi, who was wounded in the same incident, said, "There are no Palestinian militants, resistance, or even civilians in the area." But this point of view is not found in the main title and the opening paragraph of the news.
A few days later, the international investigative journalism group Bellingcat, after analyzing video images available from the scene, concluded that the evidence “supports” witnesses who said there had been no armed activity at the scene and that the shooting came from an Israeli military sniper.
As of this writing, The New York Times has not updated its original story to show the new evidence.
This is a clear example of the reasons for the criticism of the word "clash" by Palestinian and Arab journalists.
In 2021, the Union of Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists issued a recommendation to journalists urging them to “avoid the word clashes for the sake of a more accurate description.”
incomplete picture
There is another problem with the word "clashes", as limiting the media's attention to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict only when "clashes erupt" gives the Western reader and viewer an incomplete picture.
Because it ignores what B'Tselem describes as "the daily routine of explicit and tacit government violence" faced by Palestinians in the occupied territories.
Without an understanding of the daily violence Palestinians suffer, as documented by human rights groups and Amnesty International, it will be difficult for news consumers to fully understand why these 'clashes' occurred in the first place.
But the means by which people get their news changes, and so do Americans who watch the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
This is especially true of young Americans, who are less likely to receive news from the mainstream media.
Recent opinion polls have indicated that young Americans sympathize with the Palestinians more than adults.
This is changing among young American Jews as well, as well as young evangelicals, who, together, have traditionally expressed strong feelings of support for Israel.
Likewise, American journalists are working to change the way their media covers Israeli violence.
Last year, a number of American journalists from news platforms such as the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and AB News issued a letter calling on their fellow journalists to “tell the whole truth without fear or favour, to acknowledge that this blackout over Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians is It goes against the journalistic standards they believe in.” So far, nearly 500 journalists have signed the letter.
• A few days later, the international investigative journalism group "Bingcat" concluded that the evidence "supports" witnesses who said that there had been no armed activities at the site of Abu Aqila's killing and that the shooting came from an Israeli sniper.
Maha Nassar is Professor of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona.
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