December 21, 1998
Israel charges that the level of incitement in the Palestinian media
and the education system is sowing the seeds of the next conflict.
If you look for it, you’ll have no problem finding it — by the
suitcase-full. It lurks daily in the pages of the Palestinian newspapers,
on the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation radio and TV, in the textbooks
currently being studied in the Palestinian Authority schools.
Anti-Israeli incitement is what occupies Itamar Marcus, director of
Palestinian Media Watch, a privately funded Jerusalem-based
monitoring organization. But he hesitates to use the “i” word. Rather,
he says, the problem lies in the whole atmosphere — the totality of
messages coming at the Palestinian public from all angles, creating an
all-pervasive, war-like environment in which the idea of peaceful
coexistence is entirely absent and in which Israel is either vilified, or
not recognized at all.
The more outrageous cases periodically burst into the Israeli
headlines. Like Yasser Arafat’s now-infamous Ramallah speech of
November 15 in which he declared “our guns are raised. And we will
aim them at anyone who prevents us from going to Jerusalem.”
Or the scenes broadcast on PBC TV from last summer’s Palestinian
Authority military-style children’s camps, in which the cute-looking
boys and girls chanted, recited poems and sang in praise of armed
revolution, jihad and martyrdom.
Then there was the November 7 opinion piece penned by guest
columnist Nasser Ahmad and published in Al-Hayat al-Jadeedah, the
semi-official PA daily, asserting: “Corruption is in the nature of the
Jews all over the world, to the point that only rarely do you find
corruption that the Jews are not behind… If we take a look at history,
we discover to what extent the Jews were exposed to oppression and
expulsion worldwide because of their ugly deeds and their
wickedness.”
Or the fact that every news broadcast on PBC TV starts
off, and ends, with ’the map’: the whole area of Israel, the West Bank
and Gaza Strip, with no borders and no names.
And no sensitivities were spared when PBC recently produced a short
film commemorating the anniversary of a problematic Israeli retaliatory
attack in October 1953 on the West Bank village of Qibiyah, in which
the IDF destroyed scores of houses, killing over 40 civilians in the
process. The five or six minute-long film clip included black-and-white
images of eyeless and limbless children, taken from the Intifada and
possibly elsewhere, as well as staged scenes of ‘Israeli soldiers’
lining up and shooting groups of men and women against a wall, all set
to an emotional narrative and plaintive background flute.
Says Marcus: “Its purpose was only one — a definite desire to create
hatred. You can’t watch that kind of stuff and not hate the people behind
it.”
From first grade up, the textbooks used in PA schools in the West Bank
are suffused with similar messages. The West Bank schools still use
the Jordanian curriculum, as they have done for the past 30 years —
and despite the 1994 peace treaty with Jordan, the material has
remained violently hostile. Gaza uses the Egyptian curriculum, which
is far milder in its treatment of Israel. The Jordanian books are
published in Amman, but are then embossed with the Palestinian
Authority stamp of approval. During the occupation, the Israeli
authorities used to edit out offending parts, redesigning pages and
reprinting whole books to avoid large white gaps, but the PA has
chosen not to.
An exhaustive search of these school texts by Marcus’s staff — he
himself knows no Arabic — resulted in a report that has left many an
Israeli gasping. Second-graders, for example, are taught a ‘Poem of
Palestine,’ including the lines: “For me, the promise of martyrdom and
Palestine is my song/From Jerusalem I shall build my ladder towards
eternity.”
On page 29 of the ‘Our Arabic Language’ primer for
sixth-graders, pupils are asked to “form logical sentences making use
of the following expressions: Wise opinion the Zionist danger he called
for a Jihad disaster remaining cool-headed.”
In a language primer of
the same series, seventh-graders are given the following as a subject
for composition: “How are we going to liberate our stolen land? Make
use of the following ideas: Arab unity, genuine faith in Allah, most
modern weapons and ammunition, the use of oil and other precious
natural resources as weapons in the battle for liberation.” And so on.
The boundaries of what constitutes ‘our stolen land’ are kept vague, at
best. The new PA-approved atlas, in this case privately published in
the West Bank city of Nablus, shows Israel, the West Bank and Gaza
as all one area with no labels. Where the territories are marked
separately, for example in the 10th-grade textbook ‘Modern Arab
History and Contemporary Problems, Part Two,’ the color key refers to
“Arab lands occupied before 1967” and “Arab lands occupied in 1967.”
“The Palestinians haven’t yet internalized the recognition of Israel,”
says Marcus, who moved to Israel from the United States in 1974. He
worked in the Religious Affairs Ministry under the previous Labor-led
government before turning to full-time monitoring after the 1996
elections.
“It would be completely valid if they were to put a map on TV
of the whole West Bank and Gaza without a single settlement. But
Israel of 1948 is not in dispute now. They’re constantly talking about
Lod, Jaffa, Acre and Haifa in future terms, which creates dangerous
expectations. It’s a general world view — a view that was supposed to
have changed with Oslo. Instead of promoting peace, it’s sowing the
seeds of the next conflict.”
Israel’s delegation went off to the Wye Plantation talks in October
armed with Marcus’s reports. It came back with a commitment from the
Palestinians to issue a decree prohibiting all forms of incitement to
violence or terror, comparable to existing Israeli legislation, and to
join Israeli and U.S. representatives on a trilateral committee to find
ways of preventing incitement.
The decree was issued in mid-November. And on the 24th of the
month, the committee held its first meeting.
Marcus was the ‘professional’ on the four-man Israeli team, headed by
former Knesset member Yoash Tsidon of the right-wing Tsomet party.
The Palestinian side was headed by former Arafat spokesman Marwan
Kanafani. U.S. Ambassador Ed Walker stood in for former
Congressman Mel Levine, who was unable to attend the opening session.
The sides came out agreeing to work on a definition of what constitutes
incitement, and to meet again in early December. Now, The Jerusalem
Report has learned, the Palestinians are concentrating their efforts on
building up their own files citing examples of Israeli incitement against
the Palestinians. Whether or not they’ve fully come to terms with
Israel’s existence, one thing the Palestinians have clearly internalized
is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policy of reciprocity.
“We have our own claims of Israeli incitement, every day,” Hafez
Barguti, chief editor of Al-Hayat al-Jadeedah, told The Report the
morning after the first meeting, having already coordinated positions
with Kanafani.
“When Sharon tells
settlers to grab any empty land they can, what do you call that if not a
call to violence? It must be mutual, from our side and the Israeli side.
On the Palestinian side, you might find an individual here or there. But
on the Israeli side, it’s government ministers who make these
declarations.”
Asked about the recent ‘corruption’ article that appeared in his paper,
Barguti said he’d spent several weeks abroad around that time, and
that it was “difficult to control every word in this situation. Yesterday,”
he went on, “I gave my editors instructions not to use this word —
‘corrupt’ — about a whole people. We’re going to make peace with
these people.”
Barguti added that another recent anti-Semitic item using Shylock
imagery had slipped by while he was preoccupied with his father, who
was in a coma. As for references in Al-Hayat al-Jadeedah to Israel as
the ‘Zionist entity’, he said he wouldn’t use such terminology himself,
then asked rhetorically, and somewhat disingenuously, “since when
being a Zionist was an insult? I think the Zionists should be happy to
use this, no?”
At PBC headquarters in Ramallah, the PA’s temporary ‘capital’ in the
West Bank, radio and television head Radwan Abu Ayyash sits under
a portrait of Arafat and the national flag. So far, he says, he’s invested
three years of very hard work in getting PBC on its feet. And he insists
that while the salaries of the TV and ‘Voice of Palestine’ radio staff
come from the Palestinian Authority, and the PBC is accountable to
Arafat’s own office (the general coordinator, Hisham Mikki, is based in
Gaza), there’s no real interference from on high.
Abu Ayyash even points to moments of daring. Like the time when the
popular radio program ‘Good Morning Palestine’, which deals with
local issues, was trying in vain to get PA Information Minister Yasser
Abd Rabbo on the phone. With each call, Abd Rabbo’s secretary
became ruder, until she was positively cursing. Abu Ayyash instructed
staffers to tape the last call, and broadcast it live. Only Arafat himself
is immune to criticism on PBC stations. “He’s a symbol. I cannot gamble
with this,” says Abu Ayyash.
When it comes to the subject of incitement, however, the PBC is
definitely up for a fight. Abu Ayyash pulls out copies of Marcus’s
reports, on which he’s scribbled his own notes, and dismisses
Palestinian Media Watch as ‘a Beit Agron production’, referring to the
Jerusalem press center which houses, among other things, the Israeli
Government Press Office and the military censor.
He accuses the
Israelis of ‘picking and choosing’ from the programs and taking things
out of context. “If some sheikh says live on TV that all the Israelis
should be thrown into the sea, what can I do? Cut off his tongue?” he
goes on. “I can’t change the hearts, the brains, the language of my
people. I can’t make them fall in love by force. We are journalists,
mirrors, reflectors. I’m not here to lie, or make propaganda.”
Abu Ayyash says that he’s put aside all the songs and poems calling
for Israel’s destruction that were daily fare on PLO radio that used to
air out of Algeria. “I try to be fair,” he says, “but at the same time,
I cannot surrender my nationality to fit somebody’s mood. We have to build
up our national feeling, to chart our origins, like any other people.”
Abu Ayyash complains that Israel is ignoring the fact that ’90 percent’
of PBC’s news broadcasts deal with the peace process — even if they
attack Netanyahu’s political position. Like Barguti, he argues that
calling people ‘Zionists’ is “not a curse.”
As for the map, Abu Ayyash claims at first that the idea is merely to
show the Middle East, and focus on this area. “Give me a final-status
map and I’ll use it,” he declares. Prodded further, Abu Ayyash says that
he would put up a map of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East
Jerusalem, “but to be honest, I still have something to do with Jaffa and
Haifa. I have a Palestinian refugee problem — I have people watching
from Jaffa whose problem hasn’t been solved. That doesn’t mean I
want to get into a tank and drive there.”
Israel has particularly objected to a number of items that have
repeatedly cropped up on PBC TV. These include short clips showing
Intifada violence interspersed daily between regular programming; a
six-minute recording of the song ‘Baladi Ana’, or ‘My Country’, in
which children depict the trauma of 1948, concluding “It’s still my land,
my beautiful land, Palestine”; and a blood- and gorefilled series called
‘Al-Khalidun’, or ‘The Eternal Ones’, which has run weekly for the
past two years. ‘Al-Khalidun’ features Palestinian ‘martyrs’ killed by
Israel, describing their lives and times, and keeping their memories
alive through interviews with proud family members.
Abu Ayyash rejects charges that ‘Al-Khalidun’ glorifies martyrdom,
stressing the centrality of the concept in Islam. “The people don’t need
me to tell them this,” he scoffs. “They get it from the kindergarten to the
grave. It’s part of their structure, their life. I can’t just delete it
from TV.”
Furthermore, he argues, it’s important to remind people of how much
pain it’s taken to get to this point. “Why didn’t Israel forget the Nazis?”
he asks. “Because of Yad Vashem, you had to reach peace. Because
of the Intifada, we have to reach peace. I’m not aiming to destroy Israel,
but we have a right to show its atrocities.”
In the wake of Wye, where the subject of incitement was first raised,
Israel observed slight ‘improvements’ at PBC TV: The daily barrage of
Intifada clips stopped; ‘Al-Khalidun’ abruptly went off the air (Abu
Ayyash says the series “came to its end”); and ‘Baladi Ana’ suddenly
disappeared. That, Abu Ayyash conceded to The Report, was taken off
so as not to give Netanyahu ‘cards’ to play with.
Days after the first incitement committee meeting, however, ‘Baladi
Ana’ reappeared. And all efforts at PBC TV are focused, again, on
reciprocity. Kanafani has charged Abu Ayyash with building a file of
Israeli transgressions. “If they want to play Tom and Jerry, that’s fine,”
says the PBC head. “We’re monitoring them now.”
The PA Ministry of Education, meanwhile, refuses to respond to the
charges of incitement in schoolbooks on grounds that the PA is
working on its own curriculum, to be introduced in the year 2002.
Israel doesn’t want to wait that long. A proposal informally thrown up at
the incitement committee would have the Americans fund an
immediate reprint of edited versions of the books now in use. The
Palestinians replied that they are not prepared to deal with their
schoolbooks unless Israeli textbooks are dealt with at the same time.
Surrounded by the mounds of evidence collected by Itamar Marcus
and his staff, many plain-thinking people might conclude that the
Palestinians don’t aspire to peace at all. Indeed, Marcus’s material has
been enthusiastically adopted by a myriad of right-wing Israeli and
Jewish interest groups who would rather see the Israeli-Palestinian
negotiations stop in their tracks.
Surprisingly, Marcus himself avoids coming to gloom-and-doom
conclusions, instead putting a constructive spin on his work. “I see this
whole media question as the key to peace,” he says. “We’re talking
about the socialization of a people to either accept the Jewish people
here or not. For the long-term good and the development of peace, we
have to create an atmosphere that promotes peace in the media and in
the schools.”
And Marcus goes even further. If the Palestinians themselves were
promoting peace, he suggests, there would be a “revolution” in Israeli
attitudes toward making concessions. But for that to happen, says
Marcus, the Palestinians would need to deal not only with the
symptoms — the blatant bursts of incitement — but with the deeper
illness itself.
The cure, it seems, is not available yet. Several weeks ago, PBC radio
interviewed Marcus about his work. The recording was never aired.
Marcus believes that is because he didn’t come across as the
easy-to-dismiss right-wing provocateur PBC obviously assumed he
was. “They don’t want to present us as reasonable,” he concludes.
“They still fear presenting us as anything but the enemy.”