October 18, 2001	Thursday	Rajab 30, 1422

AL-QUDS: Critics claim Israel’s media have turned inward, and shifted to the right since the new Intifada.

“Five Palestinians killed in Gaza” read a recent headline in international newspapers. In Israel, however, the papers focused on the story of young Israeli sweethearts, slain the night before at a shooting spree outside their Gaza Strip settlement. On Israeli television newsmagazines, features about the trials and tribulations of the Palestinians — regular prime-time viewing until a year ago — have become few and far between.

Meanwhile, Israeli radio has returned to the way it covered the conflict in the years before peace efforts began. “Two terrorists were killed,” it often reports, without reference to nationality or group affiliation.

But a year since the new “Al-Aqsa” Intifada began — ushering in the worst and most consistent Israeli-Palestinian violence since Israel’s founding in 1948 — one of the casualties has been the loss of interest in understanding how things look from the other side.

“I know that the things I write reach fewer and fewer people. I know that they don’t want to read it,” says Amira Hass, an Israeli reporter for the liberal Haaretz newspaper, who covers the Palestinians by living among them.

After basing herself in Gaza when the Palestinian Authority was formed in 1994, she now lives in the West Bank city of Ramallah — a place few Israelis dare go since a number of Israelis were murdered there over the past year.

Indeed, Palestinian-controlled areas are closed to almost all Israelis because, the army says, it cannot guarantee their safety.

At a time when the conflict is taking a daily toll on Israeli and Palestinian lives, it is not surprising that their media have turned inward.

But some here are concerned that, beyond neglecting the toll of bloodshed on the Palestinian side, the Israeli media have — alongside the Israeli public in general — veered to the right. The neo-patriotic reflex is not unlike the impact the Sept. 11 attacks have had on the US media. When a nation is feeling under siege, the tendency to rally behind the leadership and to lose empathy for the “enemy” is often a byproduct of war.

But here the “enemy” is an intimate neighbour. And, over the past decade, the Israeli media have played an important role in bringing the humanity of its neighbours into Israeli homes. Now, that role has almost disappeared, says Yoel Cohen, an expert on Israel’s media at the School of Communications at Netanya Academic College, about an hour north of Tel Aviv.

“There have been some efforts to examine the political strategy of the other side, but the fact that the human story is single-sided probably means that the media have probably contributed to the widening gap between the Israelis and Palestinian Arab population, which was beginning to come together before the new intifada.”

Dr Cohen points out that only Ms Hass and a few other Israeli journalists are covering the Palestinian viewpoint because the public is not interested in Palestinian tragedies when Israeli lives are lost in suicide bombings and drive-by shootings.

“When a country is in crisis, journalists need to be attuned to the expectations of their readers and viewers and listeners, and if it’s unpalatable, even if it’s the truth, they have to consider that,” says Cohen.

While Israel has a comparatively free press, Hass of Haaretz says that the media here are not free from the same tendency — taking their cues from the government. “When the officials were talking about Oslo as a peace process, the Israeli media echoed it, and gave a very positive portrait of some Palestinian figures,” she says. —Dawn/The Christian Science Monitor News Service.