Glasgow University Media Analysts Report Widespread Confusion among News Consumers about History of Palestinian-Israeli Conflict

TV news is the main source of information for about 80 per cent of the population. Yet the quality of what they see and hear is so confused and partial that it is impossible to have a sensible public debate about the reasons for the conflict or how it might be resolved. This is the conclusion of a major new study by the Glasgow University Media Group which for the first time brought journalists, academics and ordinary viewers together in research groups to study the influence of news on public understanding. Over 800 people were interviewed and questioned and the researchers examined around 200 news programmes. Senior journalists told researchers that they were instructed not to give explanations- the focus was to be on hot live action. As Paul Adams, the BBC defence correspondent, put it ‘it’s a constant procession of grief, its covered as if it’s a very large blood feud, and unless there’s a large amount of blood, it’s not covered.’ George Alagiah stressed the problem of ratings and the current belief in the BBC that the attention span of viewers is about twenty seconds:

In-depth it takes a long time but we’re constantly being told that the attention span of our average viewer is about twenty seconds and if we don’t grab people- and we’ve looked the figures- the number of people who shift channels around in my programme now at six o’clock, there’s a movement of about three million people in that first minute coming in and out.

The result of this approach is that there is almost nothing on the news about the history or origins of the conflict and viewers are extraordinarily confused about this. Many believed that the Palestinians were occupying the occupied territories or that it was basically a border dispute between two countries who were trying to grab a piece of land which separated them. The great bulk of those we interviewed had no idea where the Palestinian refugees had come from and some suggested Afghanistan, Iraq or Kossovo. We also interviewed media and journalism students from the USA and less than a third of these knew that the Israelis were occupying the occupied territories and that the settlers were Israeli.

The history of the Palestinian refugees is contested but some prominent Israeli historians such as Professor Avi Shlaim have given documented accounts of how the Palestinians lost their homes and land. He argues that from April 1948 the military forces of what was to become Israel had embarked on a new offensive strategy which involved destroying Arab villages and the forced removal of civilians. The intention was to clear the interior of the future Israeli state of what were seen as potentially hostile ‘Arab elements’. As he writes:

The novelty and audacity of the plan lay in the orders to capture Arab villages and cities, something [they] had never attempted before... Palestinian society disintegrated under the impact of the Jewish military offensive that got underway in April, and the exodus of the Palestinians was set in motion...by ordering the capture of Arab cities and the destruction of villages, it both permitted and justified the forcible expulsion of Arab civilians. (Shlaim, 2000: 30)

He also notes how the displacement of the Palestinians and its consequences were clearly acknowledged by Moshe Dayan, one of the most prominent of Israel’s military leaders and politicians. Speaking in 1955 at the funeral of an Israeli, killed by Arab insurgents, Dayan commented:

What cause have we to complain about their fierce hatred for us? For eight years now they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived. (quoted in Shlaim, 2000: 101)

The Palestinian view was indeed that they had been forced from their land and homes in 1948. They had then to live as refugees in countries such as Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and on the West Bank (of the Jordan River) and the Gaza Strip. There followed a series of conflicts and at times, outright war between Israel and its Arab neighbours. The most significant of these conflicts was perhaps the 1967 (Six Day) War. In this, Israel occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem (which had been under the control of Jordan), the Gaza Strip (which had been under the control of Egypt) and the Golan Heights (which were Syrian). This occupation brought many Palestinian refugees under Israeli military control and was bitterly contested. Jerusalem as a religious centre for both Muslims and Jews became a major point of conflict....