Coverage Trends

For two-and-a-half days, since it began on the night of Saturday 7 October 2000, large groups of settlers were rampaging through Palestinian villages and towns in the West Bank and 1948 areas/inside the Green Line, attacking Palestinians and their property. In many cases they were protected and even aided by the Israeli military.

On Friday 6 October 2000, it was noted that many radio/TV reports from the first two-thirds of the day suggested that the clashes were winding down when the reality was that, by the end of Friday, 11 more Palestinians were killed (5 WB, 6 Gaza) and Palestinian human rights organisation Addameer recorded 177 injuries in the West Bank and 132 in Gaza.

In various news reports, the Palestinian minority in Israel is selectively termed as “Arab Israelis” or “Israeli Arabs.” Palestinians living in what became known as Israel call themselves “Palestinians”, sometimes further specifying that they are “Palestinians of 48” and thus are an integral part of the Palestinian people.

The phrase “rubber bullets” was used to describe rubber-coated metal bullets, heavy steel projectiles with a thin coating of rubber, that are regularly used to lethal effect alongside — not instead of — live ammunition.

Israel has long been trying to get journalists to normalise their annexation of East Jerusalem and occupation of Palestinian land. Semantics is one of the battlegrounds.

Most media still present events in Palestine in the context of an ongoing, struggling, or dying “Peace Process” a phrase that since the signing of the Oslo accords has all but replaced pre-Oslo references to Israel’s military occupation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank (including East Jerusalem).

A common formulation in reporting on the conflict holds that even the most severe Israeli attacks are acts of “retaliation”, regardless of what preceded the events.

Although the use of the adjective ‘vigilante’ is unlikely to be intended by any journalist to imply that killing three Palestinians — including a baby — on their way to a wedding party is an act of ‘justice’, their inappropriate use of this word does make it obvious that many journalists shy away from applying the adjective ‘terrorist’ to Jews or ‘Israelis’ but do not apply the same restraint when writing about Palestinians.

This is not a new coverage trend, but rather has been a persistent pattern, both with respect to Israel’s violence against Palestinians and during Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon.

In fact, the city of Jerusalem and Israel itself have been closed to 99 percent of the 3 million Palestinians since March 1993.