Images of Palestinians in US media

[Brad DeLong]

>DAWN - Opinion
>
>03 September 2001 Monday 14 Jamadi-us-Saani 1422
>
>Images of Palestinians in US media
>
>By Edward W. Said
>
>...What for the past few months Israel has successfully wanted to prove to the
>world is that it is an innocent victim of Palestinian violence and terror,
>and that Arabs and Muslims have no other reason to be in conflict with
>Israel except for an irreducibly irrational hatred of Jews. Nothing more or
>less. And what has made this campaign so effective is a long-standing sense
>of western guilt for anti-Semitism.
>
>What could be more efficient than to displace that guilt on to another
>people, the Arabs, and thereby feel not only justified but positively
>assuaged that something good has been done for a much-maligned and harmed
>people? To defend Israel at all costs - even though it is in military
>occupation of Palestinian land, has a powerful military, and has been
>killing and wounding Palestinians in a ratio of 4 or 5 to one - is the goal
>of propaganda. That plus going on with what it does, but seeming to be a
>victim just the same.
>
>Without any doubt, however, the extraordinary success of this unparalleled
>and immoral effort has been in large part due not only to the campaign's
>carefully planned and executed detail, but to the fact that the Arab side
>has been practically non-existent. When our historians look back to the
>first fifty years of Israel's existence, an enormous historical
>responsibility shall rest damningly on the shoulders of the Arab leaders who
>have criminally - yes, criminally - allowed this to go on without even the
>most meagre and half-hearted response...

I think Said underestimates the long-run effect of the hijackings of 
the early 1970s: the images of hijacked airplanes in the Jordanian 
desert, the murder of the Israeli Olympic athletes at the Munich 
airport in 1972, Entebbe--these are very powerful images that have 
shaped the international response to the Palestinian cause, images 
that return to the mind's eye of everyone who passes through an 
airport metal detector.

I suspect that when historians look back, they will find these 
episodes of "propaganda of the deed" to have been decisive in shaping 
at least the American view of the conflict.

Brad DeLong