Fiamma Nirenstein is an Italian journalist who writes from Israel for the daily La Stampa and the weekly magazine Panorama.
More from Fiamma Nirenstein
	How suicide bombers are made
	The questionable objectivity of Intifada reporting

The information coming out of Israel these days is heavily influenced by the political imagination of the reporters and columnists and cameramen who have flocked to the scene from the four corners of the earth to cover this latest installment of violence in the ongoing Middle East conflict. They tend--they are expected--to place those clashes within an agreed-upon framework: the framework, roughly, of David (the Palestinians) versus Goliath (the Israelis). It is only when they fail to follow this paradigm that they, their editors, and their readers or viewers become confused.

And no wonder. Imagine a weary journalist, getting back to his office or pressroom in Jerusalem at the end of a hard day: how is he to begin describing what he has seen? The events he must try to present are, in truth, terribly complicated, and, when it comes to an informed perspective, he himself is often wet behind the ears. As for the subtle interplay between what in the swirl of events is cause and what is effect, between the norms of Western and Eastern civilizations, between democracy and dictatorship, between the Judeo-Christian world and the world of Islam--all this gets lost in the confusion of daily armed clashes and terror bombings, so alien to the normal rhythms of normal societies.

And so, like the morning mists that envelop the city of Jerusalem, the reality of the situation often dissipates into a fog made up of the psychological impulses and fixed ideas of those observing it. From an elevated spot like the suburb of Gilo, where I happen to live, the local geography does in fact sometimes disappear in the mist, and Jerusalem itself can seem transformed into a white lake. My neighbors and I are left only with the explosions of firearms aimed in our direction from the nearby Arab village of Beit Jalla, and the furious responses of Israel's Apache helicopters.

And what about the view from East Jerusalem? In the Arab city, from early morning on, the international media breathe the perfumed mist of something indescribably romantic and archaic mingled with the aroma of youthful furor. In the fog, the Jerusalem of the Jews must loom in the imagination like a powerful machine, an established mass pushing with its force and its money on a weaker, newborn world. The fog offers an opportunity, a screen, against which foreign correspondents project the attitudes they came with: their reflexive critiques of capitalism, of consumerism, of globalization, even of themselves and their own societies.

The American Colony, a lovely old hotel in East Jerusalem, is home to almost all the international journalists who have come here on temporary assignment. The ancient vine-covered stone is part of the hotel's charm, and so too is its storied past, redolent of travelers' tales, of miraculous reunions after shipwrecks at sea and near-escapes in faraway climes. Above all, its charm derives from the discreetness and quiet of the remote little street where it stands, a symbol of understatement amid the vertiginous passions of the surrounding environs.

Not far away runs Salah-al-Din, the central thoroughfare of Arab Jerusalem, all stores, noises, traffic jams. Here is where some of the Friday clashes take place, after morning prayers at the mosques. By evening, the restaurant at the American Colony has become packed with dusty, tired journalists, just back with their cell phones and notebooks from Gaza or Ramallah, from the areas of shooting. They are, most of them, between the ages of thirty-five and fifty, old enough to appreciate a moment of relaxation. In this comradely setting one feels the extraordinary informal power of the media--iconoclastic, sporty, ironic, virtually all of one mind.

The support crews are largely Arab, the stringers Palestinian and often the cameramen, too. The hotel waiters and staff are likewise Palestinian, as are the regular guests one runs into in the halls, left over from the time of the Intifada of the late 1980's--the first Intifada, the real one. The leaders of that uprising regard the American Colony as their private stomping ground, a place for keeping appointments, for conducting interviews, for jocularly confiding in foreign newsmen. An acquaintance amusedly tells me of overhearing a correspondent thanking his Palestinian source for supplying him with the precise hours of the next day's "spontaneous" clashes.

The American Colony--with its reassuring air of Arab refinement, the plashing of the fountain in the hotel's paradisiacal little garden where breakfast is served amid jasmine and roses, its white and blue Armenian tiles, its Eastern touches adjusted to Western tastes, the friendliness of its staff cloaked in courtesy and dignity--is much more than a hostelry: it is a metaphor for the sympathy the international press harbors for the Palestinian cause and, conversely, its complex animosity toward Israel. Slightly vain, many of the guests here still bask in memories of themselves at age twenty, Arab kaffias around their necks, on the campuses of American or European universities: young rebels, young heroes, young up setters of the hegemonic powers-that-be. For them, pro-Palestinian leanings are as natural, as elegant, and as correct as the American Colony's famous Saturday-morning brunch.

The culture of the press is almost entirely Left. These are people who feel the weakness of democratic values, their own values; who enjoy the frisson of sidling up to a threatening civilization that coddles them even while holding in disdain the system they represent. Twice a day the muezzin calls from the minaret right outside the wall of the hotel. Sitting by the pool, one feels very near Ramallah, only a few kilometers away, where the children sent to the head of the demonstrations are throwing stones at Israeli soldiers their own age or slightly older. The children are fixed in one's consciousness in all their touching humanity, while the Jewish inhabitants of nearby Psagot, showered with bullets nightly by Arafat's Tanzim in Ramallah, seem but so many insensate obstacles on the road to peace and justice.

Besides, "settlers," like those in Psagot, by definition can never be "victims," just as the Israeli army by definition never responds to fire but rather actively shoots at child demonstrators. BBC or CNN broadcasts begin: "Israeli helicopters attacked Beit Jalla tonight." Only then will they add: "Just before, shots from houses in the Palestinian village hit the neighborhood of Gilo." In some reports it has become customary to call Gilo itself, where 45,000 Jews dodge bullets, a "settlement"--that is, another colonial intrusion, another obstacle to peace and justice.

In the shelter of the American Colony, meanwhile, Palestinian spokesmen repeat their familiar themes of victimization and triumph, deploying the moral high cards of freedom, justice, and self-determination. Who is to question them? Because they come from an authoritarian society, they themselves are magically imbued with authority. European or American journalists pose respectful questions to representatives of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and note down their answers quite as if it were possible to investigate these statements or to check them against alternative Palestinian sources at any time. Since it is not possible, the only thing that makes news in the end is the ever-climbing number of dead and wounded. And that too is impossible to verify.

Not even the world-famous episode of the little boy killed by crossfire in Gaza, whose death, captured on film, was aired ceaselessly to demonstrate the barbarity of the was subject to investigation by the world press. Although the Israeli army ultimately determined that the fatal bullet may well have originated not from the Israeli checkpoint but from one of the seven locations from which Palestinians were shooting, this could hardly be expected to gain traction against the idea that the child was a martyr, a shahid, murdered by the Jews. From the very beginning, the exact cause of his death was never considered worth investigating, lest it impinge on the axiom that Israel was committing "aggression against unarmed people" and causing "the daily massacre of children."

The most flagrant instance of this syndrome in action involved the journalist Ricardo Cristiano from RAI, the Italian state television network. On October 12, two Israeli reservists on their way through Ramallah were seized, beaten, lynched, and horrifically mutilated at the hands of Palestinian police and a civilian mob. PA forces on the scene promptly hunted down and confiscated film and videotape of the incident to prevent its being aired--but not before a crew from a private Italian TV channel managed to send a clip of the atrocity to Rome that was soon broadcast around the world. Thereupon Cristiano published a letter of apology in the official Palestinian daily, Al-Hayat Al-Fadida. In it, he explained that he and RAI were not the ones at fault; blamed the misdeed on his colleagues at Mediaset, owned by Italy's right-wing opposition leader Silvio Berlusconi; reiterated his commitment to "respect" the "rules" laid down by the Palestinian Authority--rules that presumably prohibit anti-PA reporting; and promised to bend every effort to prevent similar images being shown in the future.

A more explicit statement of fealty, or a more outrageous violation of journalistic integrity, can scarcely be imagined. Yet, with one or two honorable exceptions, the reaction was muted both in Italy and elsewhere. Cristiano himself went back to Rome, and neither the directors of RAI nor its owners--that is, the Italian government--seemed to feel the need for further explanation. As for the community of journalists in Israel, at most they bestirred themselves to blame both the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli government for creating difficulties for the working press, with one Dutch correspondent taking the occasion to accuse the Israeli army, preposterously, of shooting at journalists.

But what else could be expected of a profession that does not even appear to know that it has struck a pact with Palestinian censorship? Every day, the "rules" that Cristiano declared he "respected" find a positive echo in the hearts of those who somehow cannot bring themselves to film, or to air, images of shooting by Tanzim or Palestinian police who have been positioned in the farther ranks of the demonstrating mobs, behind the stone-throwing children in the front rows. For such images would violate the tacit agreement by which Palestinians are to be seen always as victims, Israelis always as aggressors.

The stance of the media is, at bottom, simple. The reasons behind it, however, are complex. Not least among them, tragically, is the stance Israel takes toward itself. It is a country many of whose elites are insupportably suffused with a sense of guilt, lacerated by historical revisionism, starved for world sympathy, scarred by too many wars. Nowhere are the wounds more visible than in Israel's own press.

Just recently, the weekend insert of Ha'aretz, the country's equivalent of the New York Times, featured three main articles. The first, replete with a devastating caricature, focused on Ehud Ya'ari, a veteran television commentator who specializes in diplomatic and military matters and who happens to be less than enamored of Yassir Arafat; in it, this generally sensible and well-informed observer was accused of harboring a pathological antipathy that invalidated his right to speak as a professional commentator on Palestinian affairs. The second article was devoted to interviews with Palestinian mothers; but instead of asking why they send their underage children out to die--or at least why they do not prevent them from going--the author drew from their testimony of selfless dedication a profound and heartrending lesson that Israeli women in particular needed to heed. In the third, pilots who had taken part in helicopter attacks on Palestinian police headquarters after the lynching of the Israeli soldiers in Ramallah were invited to share their feelings; they duly voiced their remorse over any civilian casualties that might have occurred. (Like most citizens of advanced democratic countries, Israelis have a real horror of war and of killing in war.)

Even the army seems to lack the conviction to justify itself, thus reinforcing the impression that Israel is in the wrong and on the defensive. At a press briefing, one high-level general ruled out the possibility that anything could be done effectively to deter Arab aggression. The problem, he said, was technical: Palestinian civilians have been mixed in with riflemen, and so far the army has been at a loss to deal with this particular battle tactic. Not once did he state for the benefit of the assembled newsmen that (quite apart from such practical questions) Israel has an absolute right to protect itself against violence directed at its citizens and soldiers. By contrast, Palestinian spokesmen like Hanan Ashrawi or Ziad abu Ziad or Saeb Erekat never miss an opportunity to begin their story from the top: this is our land, and ours alone, and the Jews who are occupying it are employing armed force against an unarmed people.

This, incidentally, may help explain, though it hardly excuses, the press's growing habit of viewing all of Israel as contested territory, not to mention its total lack of interest in Israel's painful and ultimately useless efforts over the last years to make territorial concessions to Arafat and the PLO. That, for example, in the latest negotiations at Camp David, Barak offered 92 percent of the West Bank, a sizable portion of Jerusalem, and a formula for international control of the Temple Mount seems to have done little to change the impression that Israel's "occupation" of age-old Arab lands is not a contingent fact rooted in particular historical circumstances but an innate character trait of the Jewish state, which in its entirety sits on "conquered Palestinian territory."

Occluded in this version of history, history as seen from the American Colony hotel, is the reality that Jerusalem is the established capital of the state of Israel, and that Hebrew, not Arabic or English, is the prevailing tongue in its streets. Only "in Jewish tradition," as Palestinian spokesmen like to put it, meaning in the imagination of the Jews, is the Temple Mount the site where the First and Second Temples stood. By such creeping semantic falsities, exactly as in the textbooks studied by Palestinian children, does the historical legitimacy of the Jewish presence in Jerusalem and Israel become, itself, a matter of contention.

It is difficult to believe that Israel's efforts to defend its actions before world opinion--necessary as such efforts are, weak and apologetic as they have been--can change matters in this respect, at least not in the short term. It is not just that we are talking about a profession, the world press that is almost entirely uniform in its attitudes. The truth is that Israel, as the Jewish state, is also the object of a contemporary form of anti-Semitism that is no less real for being masked or even unconscious. (Arab Holocaust-denial, more violent and vulgar than anything in the West, is rarely if ever touched on in the mainstream media.)

And there is something else as well: looking into the heart of Arab regimes, preeminently including that of the Palestinians themselves, is simply too disturbing. For what one is liable to find there are disproportionate measures of religious and/or political fanaticism, bullying, corruption, lies, manipulation, and a carefully nurtured cult of victim hood that rationalizes every cruelty. On the streets and at the checkpoints, among the ardent, stone-throwing youths facing the armed might of the Israeli "aggressor," it is possible for a newsman to forget such discordant realities; at the American Colony, it goes without saying, they are never allowed to intrude.

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