These are the notes for my talk given at the Jerusalem Multidisciplinary College (המרכז האקדמ הרב תחומי ירושלים) on 13 January. The public college, a higher education institution focusing on vocational subjects, serves all sections of Israeli society including Arab and Jewish students. A video clip from my talk is at the bottom of the article.
I haven't got much time so I just want to outline what I think the main form media bias against Israel takes. I'm not saying it's the full story. I want to look at media bias itself, what drives it and how it relates to the protests on western university campuses. And by the end of my talk I hope it will become clear why I have tackled the elements of the topic in that order.
1)The denial of war.
If you watch TV channels such as the BBC or Sky, as well as reading prestigious papers such as the Guardian and the New York Times, you could easily get the impression that Israel was not fighting a war in Gaza. Hamas is peculiarly absent from most of the coverage. Instead Israel is typically presented as attacking Palestinians for no good reason. It seems, in the way it is presented, to just be a form of blood lust. From this false premise it is easy to draw the erroneous conclusion that Israel was and perhaps still is committing genocide in Gaza. In fact, if I based my opinion on those media sources, I would probably draw the same conclusion.
Of course you as Israelis know it is a war. I know some of you here have been involved in combat. You know that Hamas has an extensive network of about 500km of tunnels (more than the entire length of the London Underground) which allow it to literally shield itself under the civilian population. You know that the 7 October 2023 pogrom was a deliberate provocation for Israel to attack a carefully prepared battlefield. You know that, from Hamas’s point of view, civilian cases are welcome as they can be used in the propaganda war against Israel. You know that time and again, many times since 7 October, its leaders have expressed a desire to repeat the horrors.
When 7 October is mentioned in the media it is played down. It typically goes along with the anti-Israel movement which insists that the ‘context’ of decades of oppression explains the ‘resistance’. The context of decades of threats to destroy Israel is somehow forgotten.
When official Israeli spokesmen, or Israel's supporters in the West, are invited to give their view they are interrogated aggressively. The default assumption is that they are lying. In contrast anti-Israel figures tend to be given a soft ride. It is assumed that they are probably telling the truth.
And anti-Zionist Jews, particularly Israelis, are normally welcomed with open arms. It is assumed that they are bravely telling the truth about Israel’s goals. The fact they face no consequences in Israel for making such statements, and are widely lauded in the West, is ignored.
2) Identity politics is the main driver of anti-Israel media bias at present.
Many people will say the main driving force behind this bias is anti- Semitism. But on its own that doesn't really account for what is going on. It doesn't explain why it's exploded relatively recently. The media was not nearly so biased against Israel a few years ago, let alone a generation ago. It also doesn't explain the contemporary language of anti-Semitism. With concepts such as settler colonialism, genocide and apartheid coming to the fore.
It seems to me the key driving force is what is called identity politics. Closely related to wokeism and progressivism. This is the view that the world is sharply divided into identity groups. These can be defined by religion, skin colour or other characteristics. From there the next step is to argue there is a hierarchy of oppression. With people of colour and Muslims seen as stuck at the bottom of the ladder while whites are at the top.
From this ludicrous premise - which is rife in elite media - it is all too easy to draw the absurd conclusion that Jews are hyper-white beneficiaries of oppression. They may have suffered discrimination in the past but, so the argument goes, they have ‘become white’ at the expense of the oppressed. From this argument it is a short step to argue that Israel is the representative of white supremacy in the Middle East. From there the mainstream media all too often concludes that Israel's incursion into Gaza was simply about the genocidal assertion of dominance.
3) Elite universities are the creators of this identitarian ideology.
It is important to remember that the anti-Israel protests on American university campus were concentrated on elite universities. The Columbia's Harvard's and Princeton's of this world. Statistical studies show this.
From there it becomes clearer that the protests were not against the university authorities. On the contrary, the students were putting into practice what they had been taught by faculty. Particularly in humanities and social sciences. That is the key tenets of identity politics including critical race theory and post-colonialism.
This syllabus was complemented by two other related factors. A campus environment which encouraged student activism. Many such students also wanted to go on to work for NGOs rather than for private companies or in academia.
The framework of diversity equity and inclusion (DEI), a big enterprise at universities nowadays, also embodied the ideas of identity politics. That is universities should encourage "equity" by discriminating against the supposedly privileged and for the supposedly oppressed. In so doing its sets different sets of students against each other.
Conclusion: Bias against Israel in the elite media has surged with the rise of identity politics. And this identity politics is in turn taught to students in the humanities and social science faculties at the most elite universities. The three factors are closely related to one another.
PHOTO: Irit Shmuel
