Original subtitles

[street noise]

[explosion]

[explosion]

[music]

Narrator: On July 8, 2014, Israel launched a

devastating military attack on the Gaza Strip.

[explosion]

Narrator: Over the course of 51 days, the Israeli

military dropped nearly 20,000 tons of explosives on Gaza,

a densely populated area the size of Philadelphia,

killing over 2,000 Palestinians and wounding tens of thousands more.

The overwhelming majority of these casualties were civilians.

Television news montage: This strip of land is

being bombarded from the air, sea, and land...

Israel launched at least 160 strikes on the Gaza strip...

And there's one less hospital in Gaza now. Israel today flattened Wafa Hospital.

Narrator: The sheer scale of the attacks sparked

outrage and condemnation around the world.

News anchor: Israel's month-long pounding of

Gaza shocked many people around the world.

Mass demonstrations have been held in many of the world's major cities.

[protesters chant]

Narrator: But in the United States, the story was different.

Polls showed the American people holding firm in their support for Israel.

CNN anchor: This is the latest CNN-ORC poll of Americans...

shows 57% of those polled say Israel's action

in Gaza is justified, 34% say unjustified.

Narrator: These numbers were striking, but they weren't new.

Over the course of a conflict in which Palestinian

casualties have far outnumbered Israeli casualties,

the American people have consistently shown far

more sympathy for Israelis than for Palestinians.

Peter Hart: It's very difficult to divorce public opinion on any question

from the media coverage that people rely on to form opinions.

And I think the most prevalent lesson from looking at the coverage

is that the coverage tends to see this conflict from the Israeli side.

Sut Jhally: Study after study has demonstrated that Israeli perspectives

dominate American media coverage.

So by far the most common thing we've heard is that

everything comes down to Israel's right to defend itself.

Tzipi Livni: Israel is a state that implements

its right to defend itself and its citizens.

Yousef Munayyer: It is a talking point that is set from the top,

and by the top I mean from the highest officials, government officials, who are

commenting on this issue, which the media obsessively covers and repeats.

Benjamin Netanyahu: A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do,

and you say a country's gotta do what a country's gotta do.

We have to defend ourselves.

Munayyer: In the most recent war in 2014,

when we looked at mainstream media outlets,

almost by a margin of 3 to 1, Israeli spokespeople were

overrepresented compared to Palestinian spokespeople.

So almost every time you turned on the screen there

was an Israeli representative on the screen telling you

Israel is the one that's in a position of defense. It is being attacked.

Ron Prosor: And basically, Israel is saying:

hey, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand

that if rockets fly on your head, you're allowed to defend yourself.

Munayyer: Add to this the fact that you have American elected officials

also reinforcing Israel's right to defend itself.

President Barack Obama: As I've said many times,

Israel has a right to defend itself against rocket and tunnel attacks from Hamas.

Munayyer: And you hear some of the same

framing by anchors who reiterate and reinforce

many of the same talking points that the

Israeli official spokespeople are making.

CNN anchor: Israel has the right to defend itself against Hamas, of course -

a group that is firing rockets on Israel,

coming out of tunnels to attack Israelis.

Munayyer: That imbalance there was very significant in

shaping the way the public understood this conflict.

Rula Jebreal: I worked in the European media for a long time.

The coverage is the opposite.

There's Palestinian legislators,

Palestinian thinkers, Palestinian intellectuals,

pro-Palestinian thinkers. Many voices.

Hanan Ashwari: So let me say then very

frankly, it's very easy to blame the victim.

It's very easy to pull out the terrorist label.

Jebreal: You come to America and you think that you are an alien,

you're looking at a different world, or a different planet,

and I'm thinking, "What's going on here?"

Mark Crispin Miller: When a narrative is so dominant...

Michael Oren: Thousands of rockets...

Mark Crispin Miller: ...without any visible dissent or complication,

it's extremely difficult to make clear to people that it is -

it is basically a propaganda story.

John Kerry: Israel is under siege by a terrorist organization.

Miller: How do you make that clear

when the mainstream spectacle is so unrelenting and total?

Jhally: We hear over and over again that the conflict

comes down to Palestinian terrorism and Israeli security,

and what gets pushed out of the frame entirely

is the fact now that for almost 50 years,

Palestinians have been systematically dispossessed from

their land and denied their most basic human rights.

[music]

[newsreel music]

Newsreel narrator: Pioneers and refugees from

countries of the oppression, young and old,

they are going now to a land, which accepts them.

They will march to their work in the Jewish settlements:

To build roads. To quarry stones.

They will drill wells to restore to Palestine's

soil its long-neglected fruitfulness.

Narrator: Zionism, the nationalist movement

that emerged in Europe in the late 1800s,

was dedicated to the idea that the Jewish people,

after centuries of living as persecuted minorities within other countries,

were entitled to a state in historic Palestine,

the biblical homeland of the Jews more than 3,000 years before.

But there was a basic problem with the choice from the start.

Palestine was already home to hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs,

who had been living in Palestine for centuries -

first under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, and since

World War I under the control of the British Empire -

and for decades had aspirations of their

own for an independent state in Palestine.

Tensions steadily escalated during the 1930s,

placing more and more pressure on the British colonial government

to reconcile the competing interests of both sides.

[marching]

After World War II and the Holocaust, the situation reached a breakpoint.

Ultimately the British colonial government made the decision to withdraw

and to pass the problem on to the newly created United Nations.

In 1947, UN Resolution 181 recommended that Palestine be split into two parts.

Jews, who were a third of the population, would receive 56% of the land.

Palestinians, who were two-thirds of the population

and possessed more than 90% of historic Palestine,

would receive 44%.

These terms were immediately rejected by Arab leaders as unfair.

But in the spring of 1948, Zionist leaders declared

Israel a state along the proposed borders anyway,

triggering the first Arab-Israeli war.

Archival newsreel: Arab armies set out to destroy

the newly born nation, and suffered repeated defeats.

Narrator: After winning a crushing victory,

Israel took possession of even more land.

By the time armistice was declared in 1949,

Israel controlled 78% of historic Palestine.

The creation of the new state would be celebrated by Israelis as a triumph.

But to this day, it is commemorated by Palestinians as "The Nakba" -

the Arabic term for "The Catastrophe" -

in memory of the hundreds of thousands of

Palestinians who were driven from their homes

to make way for the new Jewish state.

All told, approximately 700,000 people, more than

half of Palestine's native population, were uprooted.

Yousef Munayyer: There's a lot of sympathy

that can be generated, and I think rightly so,

for what Jewish people as a whole have dealt with in Western societies,

and globally, because of anti-Semitism.

The question then becomes: what is the proper response to that?

The Zionist answer is, of course, statehood,

and there's many people who would sympathize

with that if it was in fact done in a vacuum,

and if it was, in fact, done for a people

without a land in a land without people.

The reality is that's just not the way that it happened.

There were people here.

They lost their homes, their livelihood, their nation, their everything.

Rami Khouri: This was a land, in 1910, that was

93% Palestinian Arab and six, seven percent Jewish.

How did it suddenly become 80% Jewish and 20% Palestinian?

This was not a normal demographic transition.

This was a consequence of Israel's desire to create a Jewish state,

and to do that it had to get rid of as many Palestinians as possible.

There's other more complex factors, but that's

cutting it to its bare bones as we see it.

Rashid Khalidi: That is, I think in a certain sense, the core of the conflict.

The Palestinians have suffered inordinately

as a result of the creation of Israel.

The creation of a Jewish state, in a country that had an Arab majority,

necessarily and inevitably caused them irreparable harm.

Phyllis Bennis: The Palestinians use the term

catastrophe to speak of the 1948 consequences,

when they lost their land the first time around.

In '67, it was another Nakba, another catastrophe.

Narrator: In June of 1967, Israel won what

was perceived as a stunning underdog victory

over much larger Arab armies during the Six Day War.

With victory, in addition to taking land from Egypt and Syria,

Israel began to militarily occupy all remaining Palestinian territory

in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem.

Bennis: Suddenly all of Palestine is now lost.

We now had no Palestinian land left under Palestinian control.

You had a huge Palestinian population living

as refugees or living under occupation.

Palestinians are governed under military law. They are essentially prisoners.

They are treated as if they were all prisoners of war. They have no rights.

Narrator: In the immediate aftermath of the '67 war, the

United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 242.

Citing international law forbidding the takeover of territory by war,

242 explicitly called for Israel to withdraw its armed forces.

But to this day, Israel has largely failed to comply -

not only holding Palestinian territory, but confiscating additional land

and building massive Jewish settlement blocks in the West Bank and East Jerusalem

in direct violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention,

which expressly forbids states from transferring

civilian populations into territory it occupies.

In addition, Israel has established an entire matrix of security control

on Palestinian land to secure these settlements,

including checkpoints that prevent Palestinians

from traveling freely within their own land,

and a 440-mile security wall along the Israeli

border that cuts into Palestinian territory.

Munayyer: We're talking about massive denial

of human rights, for millions of people.

At the most basic level, the government that is ruling over these people

is not a government in which these people, the Palestinians, have a voice.

Jhally: There's really no way to fully understand why

the Palestinian people have resisted Israel for so long

without understanding this basic history of dispossession and occupation.

But for the most part, this isn't the story we get in American media coverage.

Instead, the legitimate grievances of Palestinians,

including their right to resist an illegal military occupation,

get pushed out of the frame by this constant discussion

about extremism and terrorism and anti-Semitism.

Fox News Channel anchor: You know, rational, clear-

minded people understand that Hamas is a terror group

and it is committed to killing Jews and wiping Israel off the face of the earth.

That's not debatable. That's a fact.

Bennis: It's never about land somehow, that gets dropped out.

It's never about settlements.

It's always about "they hate us because we're Jewish."

Khalidi: Whatever the Palestinians have done is

portrayed in terms of mindless violence against Jews

out of some kind of primeval anti-Semitism.

No sense of how this started, where this animus comes from.

It's completely inexplicable in the way in which it's generally presented

and these people basically kill because they hate

and they hate because they're irrational Muslim fanatics or whatever.

Benjamin Netanyahu: And I think Americans largely get it.

They know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.

Khalidi: This is not an illusion.

American public opinion is generally supportive

of Israel because it's been led to believe

that Israel is in the right and the Arabs are bad guys.

Jhally: None of this is by accident.

It's the result of a deliberate effort to

shape American perceptions of the conflict -

a propaganda effort that really begins to take

shape with Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

[music]

Television news montage: Israel unleashed

another massive air attack on Palestinian

guerilla targets in Lebanon today...

From the sky, the howl of Israeli jets, bombing and bombing...

Tonight, Israel has never been closer to,

nor more in control of, an Arab capital.

Narrator: In the summer of 1982, Israel invaded

neighboring Lebanon in an attempt to drive

the Palestinian Liberation Organization out of its

encampments on the southern border with Israel.

Israeli officials justified the attack as a

defensive action required to take out terrorists.

But as the story played out on American

television, a different narrative began to emerge,

one that presented Israel as the aggressor.

NBC anchor: What in the world is going on?

Israel's security problem, on its border, is 50 miles to the south.

What's an Israeli army doing here in Beirut?

The answer is that we are now dealing with an imperial Israel,

which is solving its problems in someone else's country, world opinion be damned.

Norman Solomon: The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was a watershed.

It was Israel breaking out beyond its immediate

region to aggressively attack another country

and it was a bit of a shock to many people.

[gunshots]

[tank fire]

ABC reporter: Israel was always that gallant little underdog democracy

fighting for survival against all the odds.

Now the Israelis have annexed East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights,

settled down more or less permanently on the

West Bank, and occupied close to half of Lebanon.

In the interests of self-defense, that gallant little underdog Israel

has suddenly started behaving like the neighborhood bully.

Narrator: By the time the war was over, the Israeli

military would kill 17,000 Lebanese and Palestinians,

and wound another 30,000, almost all of them civilians.

News reporter: In West Beirut, hospitals are so packed

with the injured that they have become specialized.

This center takes only burn victims of phosphorous shells.

Shrapnel cases, concussions, and fractures are directed to other facilities.

Narrator: And just a few months later, American

media coverage would take an even darker turn.

CBS anchor: There's been another horrendous turn of events in the Middle East.

Hundreds of men, women, and children,

perhaps as many as a thousand people in all,

have been massacred in two Palestinian refugee camps in West Beirut.

Narrator: Israel's Lebanese allies, operating

with the consent of the Israeli government,

had massacred several thousand Palestinian

civilians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila.

And American news media had the pictures to prove it.

Reporter: The Israelis permitted an armored column of right-wing Christian gunmen

to enter West Beirut late Friday.

They took up positions surrounding Shatila refugee

camp last night, and this morning they were gone.

Reporter: A bloody massacre which has

heightened tensions between the US and Israel.

Bennis: Sabra-Shatila was hardly the first massacre committed by Israel

against Palestinians and against Arabs.

There's a dirty legacy of Israeli massacres from the

pre- state through the creation of the state and beyond.

The big difference was this one was televised.

CBS reporter: By all appearances, groups of

men had been ordered to stand against the wall

and then gunned down in cold blood.

NBC reporter: Today, Palestinians searched frantically for relatives.

They took our children, one said. They're killing our families.

Bennis: This was a game-changer in terms of how Israel

was going to deal with the question of publicity.

They went on the offensive for the first time.

Israeli spokesperson: All the direct or implicit accusations

that the IDF bear any blame whatsoever for this human tragedy in the Shatila camp

are entirely baseless and without any foundation.

The government of Israel rejects them with the contempt which they deserve.

Bennis: It was perhaps the first time they

recognized at the highest levels inside Israel

how much they needed to do that

if they expected to maintain the kind of

understood support in the United States -

Israel can do no wrong, Israel is always the victim,

Israel is the little David against the big bad Goliath.

Narrator: Two years after the Lebanon invasion, the American Jewish Congress

sponsored a conference in Jerusalem to

devise a formal public relations strategy -

known in Hebrew as "Hasbara."

Participants included PR and advertising executives,

media specialists, journalists,

and leaders of major Jewish groups.

According to a brochure from the Congress:

As one conference participant put it:

The primary aim of the conference was to develop

strategies to spin unpopular Israeli policies

and to counter negative press coverage by shaping the media frame in advance.

Israel-based advertising executive Martin

Fenton would put it in even more blunt terms:

The conference was chaired by US advertising executive Carl Spielvogel,

the legendary adman who created the highly

acclaimed Miller Lite Beer ads in the 1970s.

Jhally: The choice of Spielvogel makes perfect sense.

He's known as a master of image inversion and re-branding -

the ad man responsible for transforming Miller Lite,

which had been viewed before as a women's beer,

into a manly beer that tough guys would drink.

[Ad] - The best part is that it tastes so great.

The best part is it's less filling.

- Nah, tastes great. - Less filling!

Jhally: His job with Israel would require the same kind of re-branding,

only in the opposite direction -

to help soften the image of a country that's coming to be seen as a bully.

So he recommends creating a cabinet post

dedicated exclusively to explaining policy,

whose job would not be setting policy,

but presenting it in the most attractive way to the rest of the world.

Solomon: Classic PR is to say, the problem

is not the policy. It's the presentation.

When the policies are so reprehensible that many people become critical,

rather than acknowledge there's anything wrong with

the policy, there's a doubling down on the PR effort.

Jhally: After Lebanon, you start to see the basic hasbara strategy in action.

Images of Palestinians fighting back against Israel's occupation

make their way onto American television screens -

and the Israeli military crushes this resistance in brutal ways

that undercut Israel's image as underdog and victim.

NBC reporter: Israeli helicopter gunships deliberately

fired a missile into a crowd of civilians last night,

killing seven Palestinians and wounding 70 more.

Jhally: Then Israeli officials go into full hasbara

mode and act like the occupation doesn't even exist,

framing all Palestinian resistance as terrorism

and Israeli aggression as self-defense.

Israeli spokesman: We will do whatever it takes

to defend ourselves, and defend ourselves we will.

Jhally: That's the basic hasbara strategy in a nutshell.

Even when you're violently crushing resistance to your own brutal occupation,

portray Israel as an innocent victim by

demonizing Palestinians as nothing but terrorists.

Israeli spokesperson: The Palestinian terror campaign continues.

It only justifies again and again that we,

Israel, have to continue to defend ourselves.

Bennis: There have been horrific Palestinian terrorist attacks,

and I use that word very specifically to mean what terrorism means,

which is attacks on civilians for a political purpose.

News reporter: Anger in Israel today over last night's suicide bomb in Tel Aviv,

which killed four and wounded around fifty.

Bennis: Those are horrific attacks, which should be condemned.

They are violations of international law, period.

But the problem is that Israeli violence is assumed

to be legitimate because it's always self-defense.

News reporter: Some of the people who have been killed are said to be civilians.

In fact, two of them are said to be little girls.

But the Israeli military says they try to the best of their knowledge

to make sure whoever they are striking was a known militant.

Amira Hass: All the cases when Palestinian

people were killed by the Israeli military,

and this is not called acts of terror.

And one should ask why if it is civilians who are being

killed, but from a plane and not by a suicide bomber,

why this is not terror and only terror is

when somebody's killed by a suicide bomber.

Solomon: If the terrorist label can only be affixed

to one set of people but not another set of people,

then you're in an Orwellian zone, you're down

a rabbit hole of linguistic manipulation.

Netanyahu: The last thing they want is a political settlement.

What they want is more demonstrations, more riots, more bodies.

That's what they want.

[piano music]

Munayyer: And so this becomes the framing of the situation:

Israel is defending itself, which means Israel is not the aggressor here.

That doesn't square with the reality on the ground, and we know that.

You have a right to defend yourself.

You don't have a right to occupy people, deny them

their human rights, and then cry foul when they resist.

That's not the right to self-defense.

That's the right to repression.

That's what Israel is asking for here:

Let us do away with these dissenters, these

Palestinian dissenters, and call it defense.

Narrator: As news media have proliferated over the years,

Israel's public relations efforts have only

become more and more explicit and intense.

[Song: "For the Love of Money"]

Max Blumenthal: In the United States, we have a show called The Apprentice,

where Donald Trump auditions people to work in his corporate boardroom.

In Israel, the version of The Apprentice is called The Ambassador.

TV Spot: The Ambassador! In a world where the real

battles take place in newsrooms and TV studios,

the ability to create a positive image for your

country is a crucial task for every ambassador.

Blumenthal: It's a show where Israelis

compete for who can offer the best hasbara -

that means explain in Hebrew, explain our situation.

CNN reporter: While The Apprentice tests

contestants' ability to sell lemonade on the street

or handle office politics, The Ambassador finalists

have learned that selling real politics is a lot harder.

Contestant: The problem is that when you sell lemonade, nobody hates lemonade.

Nobody is going to say that your lemonade occupies

territories or that your lemonade kills babies.

Blumenthal: Israel's mechanism of projecting

its propaganda, or what they call hasbara,

is one of the most sophisticated arms of its government.

It's a weapon of Israeli warfare.

Jhally: And when you look today at how the media cover the conflict,

you see just how successful Israel's propaganda

has been in reversing the legacy of Lebanon.

Netanyahu: If there's any complaints, and there should be, about civilian deaths,

the responsibility, the blame, belongs in one place: Hamas.

I don't think anyone should get that wrong.

Hart: The Israeli position is the first position.

They are allowed to determine the narrative,

determine the facts on the ground.

Ron Dermer: Hamas is a terror organization committed to our destruction.

They fire thousands of rockets at our cities.

Hart: It becomes a story of Israelis responding to Palestinian attacks.

News reporter: Israel says this is a response to the almost 800 rockets

that had landed in Israel from Gaza this year alone.

Jhally: Again and again, the wider context of

Israel's occupation simply drops out of the coverage,

so that it comes across as this confusing and endless cycle of violence

that begins when Palestinians attack and Israelis retaliate in self-defense.

News anchor: Three Palestinians were shot and

killed while allegedly trying to attack Israelis

with kitchen knives.

NBC anchor: This cycle of violence continues.

When Hamas launches rockets from Gaza, Israel hits back.

Munayyer: Cycle of violence pre-supposes this back and forth retaliation.

It's the same sort of thing with "a lull in the violence"

or "a relative calm."

CNN anchor: After three days of relative calm,

the violence is once again picking up here in the Middle East.

Munayyer: Well, relative to who and to what, right?

What's actually going on - on the ground - is

not ever a lull in the violence for Palestinians.

In fact, occupation is a system of violence that goes on every single day.

Just because there's no violence that Israelis are witnessing

for a particular period of time before it resumes again,

does not mean that there's no violence facing Palestinians from the occupation.

So this lull in the violence is only seen through the

prism of Israeli victimhood, not Palestinian victimhood.

Hart: It's no wonder that Americans would

identify with the Israeli side or support it.

It would be shocking if they didn't.

And I think this is the lesson to be drawn from thirty years of media coverage

that I think has been slanted heavily in favor of Israeli interests.

Jhally: What we've seen is really another kind of occupation -

an occupation of American media and what we could call "the American mind"

by a pro-Israel narrative that's deflected attention

away from what virtually everyone recognizes

as the best way to resolve this conflict: end the occupation and the settlements

so that Palestinians can finally have a state of their own.

[music]

Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen,

Mr. Arafat, Chairman of the Executive Council

of the Palestine Liberation Organization,

his excellency Yitzak Rabin, Prime Minister of Israel,

the President of the United States.

[applause]

Narrator: The ongoing peace process that

began with the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993

was designed to negotiate the terms of

Israel's withdrawal from Palestinian territory

in accordance with UN Resolution 242, which made an explicit connection

between Israeli withdrawal and a just and lasting peace.

Noam Chomsky: For decades, there has been an overwhelming international consensus

on a political settlement of the conflict,

namely a settlement on the internationally recognized border.

Jhally: The international consensus for a two-state solution

is based on the borders in place before the '67 War.

This means that Israel gets 78% and the Palestinians

get the rest - 22% of historic Palestine.

22%. That's it.

Narrator: But since Oslo, Israel has actually taken

more Palestinian land for its Jewish-only settlements.

In 1993, there were approximately 200,000 illegal Jewish

settlers living in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Since then, that number has more than tripled,

with approximately 650,000 settlers now

living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

In addition, since 1967, Israel has also

demolished approximately 28,000 Palestinian homes.

BBC news anchor: The United Nations says there's been a big increase

in the number of Palestinian homes demolished by Israeli forces.

BBC news reporter: This is what Palestinians have called ethnic cleansing.

Demolitions and evictions carried out by Israel in the occupied West Bank.

Norman Finkelstein: So if you look at the

result, not the words and the pretty phrases,

what's happened over the past 20 years,

and was inaugurated at Oslo, was not a peace process.

It was an annexation process.

Khalidi: What has happened is that now one in eleven

Israeli Jews live in these illegal settlements.

So the failure to confront the settlement enterprise

from the very beginning, I think, has created a

almost insuperable obstacle to a creation of a Palestinian state.

There's no place to put it.

Bennis: And that's what the settlements are all about.

It's to claim the land, facts on the ground, that become

"nothing we can do about it now, it's too late."

Israel wants as much of the land as they can get away with

with as few Palestinians on it as possible.

Henry Siegman: Israeli governments from the very beginning, after the '67 war,

never considered giving up Israeli control of the territories.

Moshe Dayan, who served as defense minister

and foreign minister, people asked him:

what will be the future now that we're controlling the territories?

And he said the future will be exactly what it is today.

We must continue to retain control of these territories.

Jhally: Just listen to Netanyahu talking in

private to his right wing settler base in 2001

about how he has no intention, despite what Israel agreed to at Oslo,

of giving up land and ending its illegal settlement expansion

in the West Bank and the rest of the Jordan Valley.

Jhally: Netanyahu's clear that Israel's not giving anything up,

but he's also very clear that the way to make

that argument is to invoke security threats.

And he's especially confident that he can manipulate

the American people to buy into this security argument.

Jhally: And this of course is exactly the case he's made to the American people,

time and time again, whenever Israel's been called out

for refusing to end the occupation and its settlement project.

Netanyahu: We're willing to make great concessions for peace,

but there is something that I will never compromise on.

And that's Israel's security.

Solomon: The conventional wisdom is that

continuing the occupation makes Israel more secure.

And if you buy that argument, then it's a license to occupy indefinitely.

Munayyer: What we're talking about here is

something that is completely indefensible.

Israel knows this. Israel knows this very well.

And for that reason wants to talk about anything and everything else.

They'd rather talk about terrorism. They'd rather talk about security.

They'd rather talk about Iran - anything but the occupation.

Jhally: The reason they've been able to so effectively change the subject

isn't because they're practicing some kind of mass mind control.

The main reason is that the US government itself

has had a vested interest in promoting

this same narrative for almost 50 years now

This goes back to the start of the so-called

special relationship with Israel in the late 1960s,

when the US decides to deputize Israel

and make it what the Nixon administration called a "cop on the beat"

to protect American interests in the Middle East, especially US energy supplies.

Ever since, the American government has continued

to give Israel roughly $3 billion a year

in military aid while also vetoing one UN resolution

after another condemning the occupation and settlements.

The challenge is to make sure that the American people

stay on board with US aid despite what Israel is doing.

Narrator: A number of well-funded public relations

organizations have emerged within the United States

to help Israel justify its policies, especially the

occupation and settlements, on security grounds.

One of these groups is the Israel Project.

In 2009, the Israel Project turned to conservative

pollster and re-branding expert Frank Luntz.

Stephen Colbert: Frank Luntz!

This is the man that reframed the estate tax as the death tax,

health care reform as government takeover of health care.

Now some critics have called Luntz a spin-doctor who manipulates public emotion.

But Luntz would reframe that as Fox News analyst.

Narrator: The Israel Project hired him to determine which talking points

used by Israeli and US officials over time have been most

effective in maintaining American sympathy for Israel.

Luntz wrote up his recommendations in a 2009

report called The Global Language Dictionary.

Jhally: If you want to understand how the propaganda works, especially in the US,

you need to read the Luntz document.

He's really clear that the occupation - and

especially the settlements - are a problem.

And he points to polls that show a large majority of Americans actually think

that Israel should retreat to the '67 borders.

In fact, he says:

But, and this is his solution:

The key, Luntz says, is to claim that the fight is

over ideology, not land - about terror, not territory.

In fact, these three words - terror, not territory -

summarize the basis of the propaganda campaign in the US.

And Luntz goes on to say that one of the most

effective ways to make the conflict about terrorism

is to refer to an obscure political document

written in 1988 by a small group of ideologues,

the Hamas Charter, that calls for the destruction of Israel.

Even though the Hamas leadership effectively disowned the

charter a long time ago, it's been PR gold for Israel.

Luntz's research has discovered that:

So, he says:

And his advice has been taken up - often hysterically - by Israel's advocates.

Morton Klein: The Hamas Charter not only calls

for Israel's destruction, ladies and gentlemen.

Article 7 calls for the murder of every

Jew! It calls for the murder of every Jew!

It's a Nazi document!

Munayyer: We have the Israeli prime minister saying

movements like Hamas that are national movements

are the same thing as ISIS.

Netanyahu: Hamas is like ISIS, Hamas is like al Qaeda,

Hamas is like Hezbollah, Hamas is like Boko Haram.

Munayyer: And they're completely not the same thing.

And anyone who understands anything about

the Middle East and political dynamics there

will explain to you exactly why that is the case

and immediately spot that for the propaganda that it is.

Siegman: Hamas is as much a nationalist movement as it is a religious movement.

And, in fact, it often assigns priority to its

nationalist goals over its religious goals.

This false notion that Hamas is part of this al-Qaeda network

is not bought even by important elements of the American military.

Narrator: In 2010, the United States Central Command, or CENTCOM,

the highest military command in the US,

issued a classified report that questioned the current

US policy of isolating and marginalizing Hamas,

as well as Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The report described the two groups as "pragmatic,"

and argued that putting them and al Qaeda in the same

sentence as if they're all the same "is just stupid."

And it directly repudiated Israel's publicly stated

view that Hamas and Hezbollah are incapable of change

and must be confronted with force,

warning that failing to recognize their grievances and objectives

would result in continued failure in moderating their behavior.

Jhally: And the US military isn't alone in this assessment.

ISIS itself has attacked Hamas again and

again because they're not radical enough.

They're too pragmatic and too compromising.

But none of these facts stop people from

going on and on about the Hamas Charter anyway

in order to paint Hamas with the same brush as ISIS.

Fox News anchor: I've spent a lot of time on my radio

program going over Hamas' Charter, what it says.

It wants to obliterate Israel. It wants to destroy the Jews.

It is a sick, twisted, you know, perverted ideology,

a religion that has been hijacked by radicals,

and it manifests itself in different forms -

Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic Jihad, Hamas,

Hezbollah, ISIS, al Qaeda, it's all the same thing.

Jhally: Meanwhile, you hear next to nothing

about another extreme political charter

that has much more relevance to the conflict -

the platform of the ruling Likud party in Israel.

Munayyer: Well, if you look at the language

that's in that charter - the Likud Charter -

it flatly rejects, quote, flatly rejects the existence of

a Palestinian state anywhere, anywhere, on that side of the Jordan River.

In other words, completely denying the right of a state of Palestine to exist.

That's far more relevant to have language like the language in the Likud Charter

be in the charter of a party that is the largest

in an Israeli government, driving an Israeli state,

and has the capacity to act upon the words in

their charter in a way that no other party does.

Narrator: To strengthen the case that the

conflict is about terrorism, and not territory,

Luntz points to the effectiveness of another

well-established Israeli talking point:

the claim that Israel gave up control of Gaza in 2005

in hopes of achieving peace and a two-state

solution and got only rockets in return.

Ron Prosor: We left Gaza completely.

We had Gaza, they could have turned it into

a flourishing, wonderful place to live in.

Look at what they did. They turned it into a haven

of terrorists coming from all over the world.

Munayyer: It's completely untrue that Israel left the Gaza strip.

They did withdraw their colonists, but at the same

time they tightened their control over the Gaza Strip.

Reporter: This is Gaza's main freight route into Israel,

and normally this road would be bumper to bumper with heavily laden trucks.

But it's completely closed, as is every other border crossing in the country.

Nothing's coming into Gaza, and nothing is getting out.

Munayyer: So the idea that Israel left is 100% bogus.

Bennis: Gaza remains occupied.

Gaza has no control over its coast, over its waters, over its harbor,

over its airspace, over the land or its borders, over its people -

who can come and go is totally at the Israeli discretion.

In Gaza, there are constant military

attacks by the Israeli air force, by drones.

Targeted assassinations go on all the time.

Hart: It wasn't really a withdrawal.

But the conventional shorthand in the media is that

Israel was willing to "give up" an enormous amount to the Palestinian side

and the Palestinians responded with violence.

Sen. Reid: Israel, since 1967, controlled Gaza.

They gave it to the Palestinians in a gesture of peace,

and all they got are a bunch of rockets in return.

Jhally: This is the basic frame of Israel's PR campaign -

make sure the media stays focused on terrorism and

Hamas extremism as the source of the conflict -

not the occupation and the settlements.

If you want to see this in operation

just look at the coverage of any of Israel's

many attacks on Gaza over the past few years.

[music]

News montage: Good evening. In the 60 years of

conflict between Israeli and the Palestinians,

there have been few, if any, days like this one...

The scale and intensity of this attack were surprising -

the deadliest operation against Palestinians in decades...

After an intense three-week assault, 1,300 dead, 5,000 wounded.

Narrator: In late December of 2008, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead,

a massive ground and air assault on the Gaza Strip.

[news report]

Over a period of three weeks, the Israeli

military dropped over 600 tons of bombs on Gaza.

[news report]

Nearly 1,400 Palestinians were killed and thousands more injured.

NBC reporter: The wounded were carried on corrugated

iron, in private cars, on backs, and in arms.

The worst one-day casualty toll in Gaza anybody can remember.

[siren]

Khouri: Normally in a conflict, civilians can run for their lives.

Gaza was one of the few, if not the only, modern conflict

where the helpless civilians who were subjected

to massive technologically advanced firepower

by the Israelis had no escape routes.

CBS reporter: With Gaza City bombed and

burning, Palestinians heeded Israel's warning

to get out of the way but found they had nowhere to go.

What's a safe place for us to go, the woman cried.

Not the UN compound, where 700 people took shelter.

Israeli artillery hit it, then hit it again.

Chomsky: It was a brutal, murderous attack, devastating.

This attack was murderous.

Narrator: As with the Lebanon invasion three decades before,

horrific images of destruction spilled onto television screens around the world.

But this time the Israeli government was prepared.

Six months earlier, it had set up a new unit

within the Israeli Prime Minister's Office

to help coordinate the government's messaging once the invasion started.

NBC reporter: Israel is defending its actions

saying this assault is a direct response

to almost daily rocket and mortar attacks.

M.J. Rosenberg: If you ask any American why that war started they would say

because the Palestinians started, you know, firing rockets at Israel.

Fox News anchor: Hamas keeping up the rocket fire

that triggered the Israeli attacks in the first place.

Fox News anchor: Hamas once again firing

several dozens rockets into Israel today.

Rosenberg: They're always preparing

Americans for an attack against these people

who are incorrigible terrorists who are constantly shooting rockets

and never ever giving the other side of the story.

Hart: We were told endlessly in any media outlet you want to look at

that Israel had to invade and attack the Gaza strip because of an

unending assault from Hamas and various militant groups in Gaza.

CBS reporter: What are the goals of that operation right now?

Ehud Barak: To change totally the behavior of the Hamas.

It is a terrorist regime that keeps shelling Israel with

thousands of rockets and mortar shells.

Hart: What this forgets is that for the latter half of 2008

there was a very successful ceasefire that

curtailed rocket fire into Israel dramatically -

almost to the point at which there was none.

This was shattered in November of 2008 when Israel attacked

what they said was a tunnel building project, killed six Hamas militants.

At that point the ceasefire was off.

And the New York Times, the so-called paper of

record, reported this very clearly - one time.

Jhally: The story gets buried on Page 8 of the

New York Times and hardly registers anywhere else.

Why?

Well, look at the day that Israel chose to break the ceasefire, November 4, 2008,

which just coincidentally happened to be the

day of the historic election of Barack Obama.

It virtually guaranteed that no one in America would notice.

And that's exactly how it played out.

When Hamas resumed rocket attacks after Israel broke the ceasefire,

Israeli officials went on American television

and got away with blaming Hamas for breaking the ceasefire.

Mark Regev: You know, it was Hamas that

unilaterally tore up the ceasefire understandings.

It was Hamas that escalated the violence

that reached a crescendo on Christmas day,

when we had in one 24-hour period

some 80 rockets, mortar shells, and missiles

coming into Israel attacking our civilians.

Now we want to work with the Palestinian government...

Jhally: And the lie was then repeated uncritically by US news media.

CNN anchor: James, there's no question here, is there, that Hamas started this?

Fox News pundit: Well, I don't think Israel had any choice.

There was a ceasefire that was broken by Hamas.

They fired something like 300 rockets into Israel.

I mean this is an act of war. What were they supposed to do?

Jhally: Just compare this to how media outside the US dealt with this.

Channel 4 anchor: Isn't it a fact that during

the ceasefire not a single Israeli was killed

and the reason for that was because Hamas fired not a single rocket.

Israeli spokesperson: No, I think you're wrong, unfortunately.

Because during that ceasefire of six months,

they were firing rockets on a daily basis.

Jhally: On Channel 4 in Britain, you saw an anchor presenting evidence

that the Israeli government itself

acknowledged that Hamas observed the ceasefire.

Channel 4 anchor: This is actually a document

given to journalists by the Israeli government

and in this document it says, and I'm quoting:

"Hamas was careful to maintain the ceasefire."

Jhally: The Israeli official, clearly caught in a lie,

attempts to change the subject to how evil Hamas is.

But the interviewer doesn't let him get away with it.

Israeli spokesperson: They were firing rockets,

and they're always trying to target civilians.

Their main goal is to try to kill children and women. And...

Channel 4 anchor: I'm going to have to stop you.

Because this document is published by the

Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center,

at the Israel Intelligence Heritage and

Commemoration Center, and they say that Hamas...

It's not the government, sorry...

They say that Hamas maintained the ceasefire.

Channel 4 anchor: It's given to foreign journalists

by the government as a statement of fact.

Israeli spokesperson: Listen! Would you like to hear

the facts or would you like to invent some facts?

Channel 4 anchor: Yes, I would like you to tell me the facts!

Jhally: Exchanges like these are unthinkable in the US,

even though Israel itself, behind the scenes,

acknowledged Hamas had observed the ceasefire -

something another British reporter forced Israeli

spokesperson Mark Regev to admit on camera.

Channel 4 reporter: There were no Hamas rockets during the ceasefire.

Before November the 4th, there were no Hamas rockets for four months.

Mark Regev: And that's correct.

Chomsky: Israel officially recognizes that until it

broke the ceasefire, Hamas didn't fire a single rocket.

I mean, the propaganda is so powerful

that these truisms, literally truisms, are almost inexpressible.

Hart: The lesson is that this conflict started when we say it started.

And we say it started when Israel was attacked.

[explosion]

Narrator: In 2012, and again in 2014, Israel

launched two more devastating attacks on Gaza.

[sirens and screams]

Jhally: Israel can saturate the media with its spokespeople,

but there's still the problem of massive Palestinian

casualties showing up on television screens.

You can't make those images go away.

An Israeli official actually said, "In the war of the pictures we lose,

so you need to correct, explain, or balance it in other ways."

Here again, the Luntz document spells out

which talking points have been most effective

in spinning the brutal reality of Palestinian casualties.

He says the first thing the pro-Israel spokespeople should do

is to express empathy for the innocent victims.

Israeli spokesperson: Unfortunately, innocents

do get hurt. And we, we really grieve that.

Benjamin Netanyahu: We're sad for every civilian casualty.

Michael Oren: The entire situation is tragic.

Jhally: Once you've done that, Luntz says, you

also have to get people to empathize with Israelis

by describing what life is like for them living

in constant fear of Hamas rocket attacks.

So again and again we hear the focus-tested phrase

that the "rockets are raining down on Israel."

Michael Oren: We have thousands of rockets raining down on our civilians.

Hillary Clinton: Rockets were raining down on Israel.

Solomon: Any advertising executive will tell

you, the essence of propaganda is repetition.

News Montage: Rockets raining down on Southern Israel...

Rockets raining down on Israel...

Well, Hamas rockets rained down on Israeli border towns.

Jhally: Then Luntz tells PR spokespeople to "turn the tables"

and ask the American people: "What would you do?"

Benjamin Netanyahu: So what would you do in the United States?

Ron Dermer: Could you imagine what America

would do if it were facing a similar threat?

Israeli spokesperson: We always try to ask you

the question we ask ourselves. What will you do?

Netanyahu: What would you do?

Mark Regev: What would you do if more than

3,000 rockets had been fired on your cities?

Fox News anchor: What would you do? 3,000 rockets.

Regev: What would you do if terrorists were tunneling under your frontiers?

Fox News anchor: What would you do if three

kids are kidnapped because of a tunnel network?

Munayyer: What sort of question is this?

Of course, anybody would act to defend themselves against unprovoked aggression.

But it is a question that is completely devoid of any context.

What drives a society to a point where after multiple devastating wars

they continue to resist with these most feeble methods?

They don't want you to ask that question.

They don't want you to ask what is behind this,

what is the history here, who are these people?

Where did they come from? Why are they so desperate?

No. They want you to understand Israeli behavior.

Israeli behavior is always characterized as a reaction to unprovoked violence.

Jhally: Then on top of that, when massive numbers of

Palestinian civilians predictably die from Israeli attacks,

Israel claims it's part of a deliberate Hamas strategy to drum up sympathy.

Benjamin Netanyahu: They use telegenically dead Palestinians for their cause.

They want, the more dead the better.

Jhally: So that you end up in this upside-down,

Orwellian world where Israelis killing civilians

becomes an unforgivable transgression against Israelis.

CBS anchor: It is hard to come away with any feeling

but that we are in the midst of a world gone mad.

Last week I found a quote of many years ago

by Golda Meir, one of Israel's early leaders,

which might have been said yesterday.

"We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children," she said,

"but we can never forgive them for forcing us to kill their children."

Hart: It's not difficult to imagine Americans

identifying with Palestinians who are suffering.

But they need to be able to see that suffering on

their television screens and in their newspapers.

[explosion]

News reporter: Israel said today its new offensive is targeting terrorists.

Hart: And when your sense of the coverage is that,

there's something that these people did to deserve this,

or they are affiliated with terrorists and terrorist-minded governments,

the fallout of that is an inability to identify with people who are suffering

in far greater numbers and in far greater

proportion than their Israeli counterparts.

[music]

Narrator: The effort to shape American

perceptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

has been taken up by a number of pro-Israel groups based in the US.

Together these groups are commonly referred to as the Israel Lobby.

Nowhere has the lobby's power to shape a pro-Israel

narrative been more visible than in the US Congress,

due largely to the efforts of one of the most influential

lobbying groups working on Capitol Hill today -

the American Israel Public Affairs Committee - better known as AIPAC.

[music]

President Obama: It is great to see so many

good friends from all across the country.

Congressman Eric Cantor: I see more than 10,000 people, young and old.

Narrator: AIPAC's annual conference draws

nearly 10,000 attendees from around the country,

including the most influential members of

both houses of Congress from both parties.

[music]

Tour guide: Remember there are seven Congressional office buildings.

Sen. Bob Casey: As you leave here today to

meet with your Senators and Representatives,

I want you to go there knowing with certainty that

you'll make a difference with every member that you meet.

AIPAC representative: You're going to feel so good when, six months from now,

you see the three major talking points evolve to

three points of legislation for the US government.

Khalidi: It would be very hard for ordinary

Americans to know that they're being deceived,

that some very competent experts at spin management

are in fact deluding them.

There are many reasons for this.

One of them is that the American political class has

basically swallowed the line hook, line, and sinker.

Congressman Dan Burton: They keep getting rocket attack after rocket attack,

and then they're criticized for human rights

problems because they defend themselves!

Khalidi: This is particularly true for Republicans...

Congressman Scott Perry: They're responding,

Mr. Speaker, to attacks on their civilian population.

I mean, what is it that they want? Well, we know what they want.

They want Israel obliterated from the map, Mr. Speaker.

Khalidi: But it's also true for many Democrats.

Sen. Cory Booker: We stand with our ally.

We stand with the democratic state of Israel.

We stand against terrorism.

Hillary Clinton: This administration will always

stand up for Israel's right to defend itself.

Khalidi: They made the mistake of actually leaving AIPAC's fax address

on one bill that was actually laid before Congress.

And of course, nobody was apparently embarrassed.

The fact that AIPAC writes the legislation

for them, or writes their speeches for them,

doesn't seem in the least to bother people.

Walt: There's nothing happening here that's secret or under the table,

it's not a cabal, it's not a conspiracy.

It is, in fact, domestic politics the way

it's practiced here in the United States.

There are roughly three-dozen or so pro-Israeli PACs that give money.

Over the last 15 or 20 years, they've given

55-60 million dollars in American elections.

There are one or two Arab-American PACs,

and I believe the last time I looked they've given 800,000 to a million.

So you've got 55 million dollars of PAC contributions on one side,

and you've got maybe a million at most on the other side.

And that gives you a pretty good sense of what the balance of power is

if you're planning on running for Congress.

Rosenberg: It's all about the money.

Benjamin Netanyahu: And I do see a lot of old friends here.

And I see a lot of new friends of Israel here

as well, Democrats and Republicans alike.

[applause]

M.J. Rosenberg: Bibi Netanyahu got a joint session,

so that Democrats and Republicans would have

the opportunity to stand up and cheer for him

and it would be good for their campaigns to raise money.

He put out the most hardline propaganda that went entirely against US policy.

Netanyahu: The border will be different

than the one that existed on June 4, 1967.

Israel will not return to the indefensible boundaries of 1967.

[applause]

Rosenberg: And he gets 29 or 39 standing ovations.

What are they applauding? The continuation of the conflict?

Are they applauding that more Israelis and Palestinians are going to keep dying?

Is that what they're applauding?

No, they're applauding, "We want more money in the next campaign!"

That's what it's entirely about. There is no other issue like this.

Jhally: For the most part, the lobby pushes policies

that are consistent with US interests anyway.

And when these interests don't align, we see the limits of the lobby's power,

as we saw with Obama's Iran policy, which passed

despite an intense campaign by the lobby to defeat it.

So we shouldn't overstate the influence of the lobby on American foreign policy.

But at the same time, we shouldn't underestimate the lobby's power

to limit debate about Israeli policies in the occupied territories,

especially far right Israeli policies that are often way

out of step with the political views of most American Jews.

In fact, it's not accurate to call it the

Jewish lobby at all. It's the Israel lobby.

Khalidi: The actual views of most people in the

American Jewish community, according to every poll,

diverge greatly from the extreme right-wing, neoconservative views

of the entire establishment leadership of that community.

Most people in the Jewish community are much more liberal.

They're against settlement. They're against

occupation. They want a two-state solution.

The lobby and its various other

institutions are the main supports and props

of settlement and occupation and of protection of the status quo.

Walt: And there are some key elements of what

we call the Israel Lobby that aren't Jewish,

the so-called Christian Zionists.

Christian news anchor: Evangelical Christians

in America have become Israel's staunchest ally

in an increasingly hostile world.

Jhally: Powerful groups like CUFI,

Christians United for Israel, lobby Congress

for an expansion of Israeli territory because

they believe that's what the Bible calls for.

CUFI announcer: CUFI representatives from all fifty states went to Capitol Hill.

Their purpose was to personally speak with their elected

officials and express concerns for Israel's security

and their support of Israel's right to the land by biblical mandate.

Chomsky: In the United States, roughly a third of the population

believes that every word of the Bible is literally true.

If the Bible is literally true, then the land

of Israel was promised to the Jews by God,

and they have every right to take it over from the usurpers.

Pastor John Hagee: Listen closely, those of

you who are listening in the liberal media.

The Jewish people are not occupying the

land of Israel. They own the land of Israel.

[applause]

The truth about Israel is God gave the land of Israel

to Abraham in an eternal blood covenant 4,000 years ago.

The land of Israel belonged to the Jewish people then,

it belongs to the Jewish people today,

and it will belong to the Jewish people forever.

The land is their land.

Walt: One of the problems with the influence

the Israel lobby has in the United States now

is it has been hard for government officials to have an honest discussion.

Jhally: Just look what happened to President Obama

when he made the mistake of simply saying

out loud what the international consensus is.

President Obama: We believe the borders of Israel

and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines,

with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and

recognized borders are established for both states.

Jhally: It didn't matter that Obama was just

repeating what had been official US policy for decades

or that right-wing president Ronald Reagan had

said essentially the same thing in the 1980s

in even stronger language.

President Reagan: UN Resolution 242 remains wholly valid

as the foundation stone of America's Middle East peace effort.

It is the United States position, that in return for peace,

the withdrawal provision of Resolution 242 applies

to all fronts, including the West Bank and Gaza.

Further settlement activity is in no way necessary for the security of Israel,

and only diminishes the confidence of the Arabs that

a final outcome can be freely and fairly negotiated.

Jhally: When Obama said it, he was immediately accused by right-wing groups

of setting up Israel for another Holocaust.

Announcer: Has President Obama abandoned Israel?

After strong support by 11 consecutive American presidents,

it appears Obama has moved sharply towards Israel's enemies.

And the results could be disastrous.

The leader of Hezbollah has vowed to finish the job Hitler started.

Up till now, America's strong backing of Israel made that impossible.

But with Obama's waffling, can a second Holocaust be on the way?

Jhally: It's a pretty ingenious tactic.

How are you supposed to have a rational discussion about the occupation

when pro-Israel extremists call the '67 borders "the Auschwitz borders"?

Rosenberg: These are the two alternatives: you're either

going to be in Auschwitz or you're supporting Israel.

Because Israel was in fact created in the wake of the Holocaust,

it isn't that extraordinary that the two would be linked that way.

I have a problem with the idea of exploiting the link

and using those six million Jews almost, in my mind,

it's like saying Anne Frank would want the occupation to continue.

Miller: You know, the Jews have gone through

unspeakable historical trauma, right?

But the fact is that if you look at other reactionary

or right wing propagandas of various kinds,

nationalistic and so on, you see that what they

all kind of have in common is this view that

we are in danger, we are victims, they're trying to destroy us.

Benjamin Netanyahu: If history has taught the Jewish people anything,

it is that we must take calls for our destruction seriously.

We're a nation that rose from the ashes of the Holocaust.

When we say never again, we mean never again!

[applause]

Miller: You're the victim, so anything you do in self-defense is okay,

even though it has you acting like a monster, right?

Sen. Ted Cruz: A suggestion that Israel has

committed war crimes is particularly offensive

given that the Jewish people suffered under

the most horrific war crimes in the Holocaust.

Finkelstein: It's the argument that they always use, remember the Holocaust.

Always invoking the Holocaust in order to

justify Israel being held to a different

standard than everyone else is being held to.

Hass: I see a lot of manipulation here about the

victimhood of Israeli Jews, the sense of victimhood.

And I'm a child of survivors, Holocaust survivors,

so I'll be the last one to underestimate the importance of history

and the history of persecution of Jews in the Israeli-Palestinian context.

But does it mean that Jews now in Israel go

every day and think about Auschwitz?! doubt it.

Walt: Anyone who is critical of the special

relationship, criticizes the activities of the lobby,

or disagrees with the policies they recommend,

or is critical of Israel's conduct, is virtually certain to be attacked,

usually in very harsh ways by Israel's defenders.

There are watchdog groups that keep track of what

different media organizations publish or broadcast

and if they're not happy about it, they either publish

their own attacks, they organize consumer boycotts.

Rosenberg: Israelis and the lobby do not

think there's ever any problem with policy.

The problem is only the way it's covered,

which is why they have organizations like CAMERA,

which is, you know, Committee on Middle East Accuracy.

Accuracy means that you present the side that makes Israel look good.

The lobby and the Israelis believe that the

mainstream media in America is pro-Palestinian!

I mean, it's laughable.

Emerson: Consistently the Times has suppressed any

story that would portray Israel sympathetically.

And on the other hand has written dozens of stories

portraying the Palestinians sympathetically.

Cal Thomas: Israel is now portrayed in much of the

major media, especially CNN, the BBC, as the aggressor,

as the predator nation, and the poor Palestinians and Arabs as the victims.

Hart: It's one of the most profoundly successful tactics

of right wing media pressure and media criticism groups.

And they are going to argue that it's true in violation of all the facts.

CNN anchor: You're saying that because CNN has interviewed Palestinian families

and shown Palestinian children who have been wounded or killed

that somehow CNN is saying that Hamas is okay?

I don't think that those two are equivalent.

We're not allowed to show the civilians caught in the crossfire?

Ben Shapiro: Of course you're allowed to show civilians caught in the crossfire.

You should also mention all the restrictions that

Hamas puts on your reporting inside the Gaza Strip.

You should also mention all the context with

regard to Hamas putting children in harm's way.

You should also routinely mention the fact

that Hamas' Charter calls for the destruction

not only of the state of Israel but for the murder of Jews across the world.

Which of course, CNN does not.

CNN anchor: That's silly, Ben. We talk about that all the time.

We talk about the charter, the Hamas Charter

that says they want to obliterate Israel

and wipe Israel off the face of the map.

You're just not being fair. That's not true.

Shapiro: You mention it occasionally in the midst of vast swaths of imagery

about Israel using what you would term excessive force.

Hart: The media outlets don't see the pushback from the other side.

They don't see the upside to standing up for their own reporting.

So I think in most cases they cave.

Jhally: Look at the pressure that came down

on veteran NBC reporter Ayman Mohyeldin

when he was covering the 2014 Gaza invasion for NBC.

Mohyeldin was playing soccer on a beach with four Palestinian kids

just moments before they were killed by an Israeli rocket.

And he talked about this on social media and shared

video of the heartbroken reactions of the kids' parents.

[screams and cries]

And what did NBC do? They responded by pulling Mohyeldin from Gaza.

And of course there's no greater weapon in the attack arsenal

than equating critical coverage of Israel's policies with anti-Semitism.

Bill O'Reilly: Any fair-mind person who follows Al

Jazeera knows it's anti-American and anti-Semitic.

- You're a Jewish man, correct? - Yes I am.

O'Reilly: It doesn't come more anti-Semitic

than Al Jazeera. They would do violence to you.

Alan Colmes: Who? A journalist at Al Jazeera?

O'Reilly: The people who run that network. They would do violence to you.

Colmes: I hardly think so.

Chomsky: Abba Eban wrote an article in which he

explained to American Jews what their task was.

Their task is to show that anyone who's a critic of Zionism,

by which he means a critic of the policies of the state of Israel,

must be either an anti-Semite or a neurotic self-hating Jew.

That covers 100% of possible criticism.

Stewart: We'll start tonight in the Middle East, where Israel...

- What! Israel isn't supposed to defend itself?

- If Mexico bombed Texas would we exercise the same right?

- What other country is held to the same standard as Israel?

[inaudible]

- Self-hating Jew!

[laughter]

Rosenberg: So it used to be I was always called a self-hating Jew,

and everybody like me was called a self-hating Jew

I am now not only a self-hating Jew, but they also call me an anti-Semite.

How I, with my four Jewish grandparents, I'm still an anti-Semite.

My wife was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany and I'm an anti-Semite.

Munayyer: They have for a very long time been

able to effectively defend the indefensible

to the American public

through miseducation and misinformation

campaigns, through effective talking points,

through smearing individuals on the opposite side of things -

labeling them all kinds of things, sympathizers with terrorism.

I've done dozens of interviews, which begin from the terrorism departure point.

But when given an opportunity to actually

speak and present a different perspective,

that can dissolve rather quickly.

Hannity: Is Hamas a terrorist organization?

Munayyer: Do I get to actually speak now?

Hannity: You get to answer the question. It's a simple yes or no question.

Munayyer: Sir, you invited me on here...

Hannity: Is Hamas, whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel,

is that a terrorist organization? That's a yes or no question.

Munayyer: Thank you for your question.

Munayyer: It's very telling to me, and it should

be telling to your viewers as well, by the way,

that the moment you have a Palestinian voice on your program

who begins to explain the legitimate grievances of Palestinians on the ground...

Sir, let me finish.

Hannity: What part of this can't you get through

your thick head? Is Hamas a terrorist organization?

Yes or no?

Munayyer: The only thing that you're going to say is what we want you to say,

and if you don't say it, we're not going to let you speak.

Jhally: So you end up with reporting that gives way more priority and weight

to the official Israeli perspective than to the Palestinian one.

Look at how American media covered Israel's 2014 attack on Gaza.

A keyword search of all the major networks showed

that over the course of the 51-day assault,

Israel's ongoing military siege and blockade of Gaza were barely mentioned

compared to the thousands of times Hamas rocket attacks on Israel were mentioned.

CNN anchor: Why is Hamas launching missiles into population centers of Israel?

Jhally: The basic propaganda frame is built into

the very assumptions journalists bring to the table.

CNN anchor: Since Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005,

8,000 rockets have been fired from Gaza into Israel.

Jhally: This is how propaganda works.

It works by getting your words in the mouths of other people,

especially the mouths of supposedly objective media commentators.

NBC anchor: I'm wondering, though, whether

you're outraged by the conduct of Hamas,

starting the conflict by firing rockets,

building tunnels to kill and kidnap Israelis,

being more than willing to sacrifice Palestinian

lives by embedding them into their own kind of arsenal

and using them, as Israel contends, as human shields.

Do you have a level of outrage at Hamas itself?

Jhally: It doesn't seem like propaganda at all. It just seems like news.

And this goes across all the major media, including the supposedly most liberal.

Look at Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, who's known as the

leading progressive voice on mainstream television.

She did only four segments on the war.

And during these few segments, she never

once mentioned Israel's ongoing occupation

of the West Bank or its siege and blockade of Gaza,

and never once mentioned the fact that the

US has armed Israel with the very weapons

that were being used against a defenseless civilian population.

Instead choosing to frame the invasion as part of a

senseless cycle of violence perpetrated by both sides.

Maddow: It's been a constant cycle of fighting between

Israel and Hamas for the past several years in Gaza.

And the fighting and the cause of the fighting feel

terribly familiar because this is basically a recurring war.

And if it feels like deja vu, if it feels, ugh, I've heard all of this before,

you are right because this really does keep happening, over and over again.

Jebreal: Rachel Maddow, the most important woman

on MSNBC, the leader when it comes to politics.

In six weeks of war, never mentioned the word

blockade, occupation, illegal settlements.

Never mentioned the support that Congress have for Israel,

unconditional amount of money, billions of dollars.

What is that? What a disappointment!

Our media operations - national media - is a scandal when it comes to Israel.

I look at the UK, with all its deficit, and there's real debate.

For example, there's this anchor, called Jon Snow, Channel 4 in the UK,

and he interviewed Mark Regev, and he grilled him with questions. Grilled him.

Snow: Mark Regev, how does killing children

on a beach contribute to that purpose?

What was the point of bombing the El-Wafa hospital, for goodness sake?

There are grave uncertainties about whether you are acting within the law.

Regev: I disagree.

Snow: You are deliberately targeting neighborhoods

in which you know there are women and children.

You've tried everything with Gaza. You've besieged it for seven years.

The people live an intolerable and ghastly

life, and you know that better than anybody.

Why don't you try one other thing? Talking? Why not talk?

Why not be brave and talk directly with them? Why not?

Jebreal: I can never see this in America. I've

never seen anything like this in the United States.

Jhally: There have been occasional examples of American journalists

who've had the courage to challenge the official Israeli line.

Back in the 50s, CBS's Mike Wallace didn't back

down from grilling Israeli Ambassador Abba Eban

about Israel's illegal takeover of Arab land.

Mike Wallace: The fact remains that Israel benefitted

territorially from a war, from armed violence.

As a member of the Judaic faith, which cherishes social justice and morality,

do you believe that any country should profit territorially from violence?

Jhally: And years later, Wallace didn't shy away from

comparing the terrorist tactics of Palestinian militants

with the terrorist tactics of Jewish militants in the 1940s.

Wallace: The fact is that innocent people

die from terror, whoever the terrorists.

The Jewish independence fighters, trying to

hasten the exit of the British from Palestine

and to intimidate the Arab population there,

bombed bus stops and office buildings, railroad trains and shopping crowds.

The fighters of Stern and Irgun took a toll of

innocent victims that ran into the hundreds.

Jhally: More recently, in 2012, during a 60 Minutes

piece, the late Bob Simon dared to report on what

day-to-day life is like for Palestinian

Christians who live under Israeli occupation.

Bob Simon: Israel has occupied the West Bank for 45 years,

turning the little town where Christ was born

into what its residents call an open-air prison.

Kristy Anastis lives with her mother Clair,

her father, brother, and sister, in this house,

which is surrounded on three sides by the wall.

- How do you live with this?

Jhally: Simon's report was seen as so unusual, and so incendiary,

that Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren actually tried to spike it - censor it -

leading Simon to directly confront him on camera.

Michael Oren: When I heard that you were going

to do a story about Christians in the Holy Land,

and my assump... and had, I believe, information about the nature of it,

and it's been confirmed by this interview today...

Simon: Nothing has been confirmed by the interview, Mr. Ambassador!

Because you don't know what's going to be put on air.

Oren: Okay, I don't. True.

Simon: Mr. Ambassador, I've been doing this a longtime,

and I've received lots of reactions from

just about everyone I've done stories about.

But I've never gotten a reaction before

from a story that hasn't been broadcast yet.

Oren: Well, there's a first time for everything, Bob.

Jhally: These are examples of exceptional reporting, but they are the exception.

And there's a reason for that.

In each of these cases, these journalists were

mercilessly attacked and labeled anti-Semitic.

It didn't matter that they were both Jewish.

That's how the climate of intimidation works.

Khalidi: It's almost impossible to get any view that isn't one way or another

shaped by an Israeli perspective, almost impossible.

It cannot get in without facing a firestorm of pit-bull

attacks to make sure that the line is followed.

Blumenthal: Everyone who's trying to tell the

American public a different side of the story,

an alternative view of the conflict that's reality-based,

has already crossed a barrier of fear, and

I think they've already told themselves,

well, I'm going to pay for this, but I'm ready to pay the price.

[music]

Narrator: Over just the past few years, the

proliferation of social media and Internet news sources

has made it increasingly difficult for the

Israeli government and pro-Israel groups in the US

to manage American perceptions of the conflict.

Video footage and reporting from the ground

bearing witness to the reality of the occupation

are now more accessible than ever on the Internet.

In addition, over the past few years a number of high-profile documentaries -

made by Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers alike -

have trained a harsh light on current Israeli

policy and the repression of Palestinian rights.

Narrator: At the same time, a powerful new

boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement

has been gaining momentum and raising awareness of the occupation -

while activists from the Black Lives Matter

movement have been making explicit connections

between police violence against African Americans and

the Israeli mi itary's repression of Palestinians.

Marc Lamont Hill: We stand next to people who continue

to courageously struggle and resist the occupation,

people who continue to dream and fight for freedom.

From Ferguson to Palestine, the struggle for freedom continues.

Narrator: And all of these developments seem to be having an effect.

Polls now show that while sympathy for Israel

remains at all-time highs among older Americans,

it has been hemorrhaging among young people.

Jhally: Despite the efforts of the lobby,

something really striking is taking place.

Lots of young people are abandoning the mainstream

media and turning instead to other independent sources.

So they have a totally different way of making sense of what's happening -

an unfiltered view of Israel's repression.

And pro-Israel operatives like Frank Luntz are in a panic.

In his latest report, he calls what's happening with young people a "disaster"

and demands that Israel's supporters respond.

And people have answered the call.

You have powerful right-wing billionaires like Sheldon

Adelson, a major donor to Republican candidates,

bankrolling a campaign to silence and intimidate

student-activists on college campuses.

But it's not working.

Groups like Students for Justice in Palestine,

who see what's happening to Palestinians as a civil

rights issue, have refused to be intimidated -

they're refusing to back down even though they're being

labeled as anti-Semitic and terrorist sympathizers -

and their numbers are growing.

Protesters: The seize of Gaza's got to go!

Munayyer: As the discourse begins to open, more people

are starting to understand this as a rights-based issue.

Not an issue of radicalism.

This is a movement for the rights of people who's rights are being denied -

who are living under occupation, who want to live

in their country freely just like anybody else.

Khalidi: You can see just so many video clips of kids

having their hands smashed by soldiers with batons.

You can see just so many pictures of thousands

of people being killed as happened in Gaza.

And at a certain point there's a cognitive dissonance.

You realize that what you're being told is a pack of lies.

Miller: Let's just get away from mythologies and talk about the reality.

And then maybe be able to persuade people that they

should not any longer give their unwavering support

to a nation that is engaged in a policy that's not

just inhumane and brutal but ultimately suicidal.

Walt: Given the central role that the United States plays in backing Israel,

it seems to me Americans, all Americans, have a

right to question particular Israeli policies,

and in particular the prolonged occupation -

the fact that the Palestinian people have been kept without a state

and without any political rights for decades now.

Bennis: For us in the United States, I think,

the issue has to be what is our government doing?

How is our government allowing, enabling,

supporting, arming, defending Israeli violations?

Jhally: In the end, this comes down to a

battle for the minds of the American people.

A battle over the stories they're told to make

sense of this conflict. A battle over perception.

The more Americans are able to see the reality of occupation with their own eyes,

to see images of routine daily violence,

of the repression and humiliation that never make their way into mainstream news,

the more they'll question the image of Israel as this

tiny little David up against a bullying Arab Goliath

and start to wonder if it's actually the outgunned

Palestinians who might be the real Davids here.

When that starts becoming the dominant

perception here in the US, all bets are off.

It all comes down to American public perception.

Chomsky: That's the one way to change anything.

Changing perception and understanding here leading to a change of policy here.

As long as the United States supports Israel nothing is going to happen.