Goliath the modern Jew

Press, 19 July 1988, Page 13

Goliath the modern Jew

Gas ... Once it was filtering through the dark walls of concentration camps killing men, women, children. Now it drifts drearily across another camp, choking men, women and children. The difference? Most of these victims will live to fight their fate. The gas does not make them die. Instead they cry, with anger, with hate. An uncomfortable comparison? Perhaps, but it is one that floats in the foreign press enough to cause Israel distress. Recriminations for the country’s handling of the “Palestinian problem” are tainted with references to a persecuted past. The news media has, in turn, been accused of bias, news distortion and pandering to the Palestinians. Israel’s answer has been to resort at times to banning the media from trouble-spots, blinding the world through news black-outs.

On the news media battlefield Israel is losing the war, says Dr Gabriel Weimann, a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Haifa. He puts this down to a poor public relations

job ... “It is very uncomfortable to be an Israeli right now.”

The nature of news selection is working against the country. “You can have a demonstration that will include 1000 demonstrators who will not be touched, the only one who will be attacked, who will be beaten, he will be reported. So the image is that everybody is getting beaten by violent Israeli soldiers.”

Such images are manipulated to create the image of David and Goliath, says Dr Weimann. “Only that we are now the Goliath.

“The fact in the occupied territories is that it is women and children who are sent out to throw stones. Why woman and children? Because the symbolic meaning of a child throwing stones and women getting beaten and harassed and shot at by Israeli soldiers will create the image they want for the media.” However, there are criticisms which can justifiably be levelled at the Israeli handling of the situation, says Dr Weimann.

He believes peace would be

closer today if Israel had not made serious mistakes in the past. “After the six-day war we were, how would you say? Drunk? High? On victory. We were fighting on several fronts at the same time and we beat them all.

“It was a great feeling of glory. You get drunk by power. You maybe lose some proportion of reality. You see yourself as strong enough to expect the others, the losing side, to come up and ask for some kind of deal. That was the mistake, the basic mistake.” Israel’s (then) Minister of Defence, Moshe Dayan, sat waiting for the phone to ring with the “losers” at the other end asking what could be arranged with the occupied territories. The phone never rang and a chance was lost. Dr Weimann is one of those who believes peace should still be negotiated with the Palestinians.

“I don’t mind them being terrorists. In a way I guess you make peace with enemies and not with friends.

“So, however nasty and cruel and a bloody record they have,

this is the enemy and this is the one you should sit down and discuss peace with. “If it was up to me I would have started in ’67. Right now, in ’BB, 20 years later, it is even worse in a way. The more we sit and wait the weaker we get. We would have been better off if we started 20 years ago — not now.”