One of the things that most fascinates, and disturbs, me about popular attention on the Middle East is that the vast majority of it focuses on a tiny sliver of land in the southwestern Levant and north of the Sinai Peninsula: namely, Israel and the Palestinian territories.
There are legitimate reasons for this. Modern Israel is home to locations that are holy and important to Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Jesus' family was from Nazareth and he was born in Bethlehem - the former is in Israel proper and the latter is in the West Bank, just south of Jerusalem. Jesus preached throughout what is modern-day Israel and was crucified in Jerusalem. Christians descended upon the Middle East to wrest the Holy Land from Muslims in the Middle Ages. Young men fought their way through Anatolia and southern Europe to secure Jerusalem for Christendom. This is all rather mind-boggling to modern sensibilities, so we say that religion could not possibly have been the motivating factor for the Crusaders: it was greed for territory and for treasures, it was a genocidal hatred for the Muslims. While there were individual crusaders who did set out for land and wealth, and hatred for Muslims certainly did exist, these were not the main motivating factors for the Crusades. The reason was very simple: Jerusalem was holy and by right it belonged to the Christians. It also surely helped that Pope Urban II announced that any Crusaders who died fighting for Jerusalem would receive automatic salvation from God. Westerners have long been fixated on the Holy Land, in other words.
For Muslims, Jerusalem is the third holiest city. It was their original qibla (direction of prayer) and they did much to restore the city, and particularly the Temple Mount, upon their conquest in 638. The Christians, in utter contempt, were using the site of the destroyed Temple as a garbage dump. The Muslims, under Caliph Umar, cleaned this up. In 692, the magnificent Dome of the Rock was constructed at this very spot under the orders of Abd al-Malik, the Umayyad Caliph, whose court was in Damascus. Much of the aesthetically beautiful calligraphy in this shrine is dedicated to sneering at Christianity's notion of the Trinity. The much bandied-about Al-Aqsa Mosque was completed in 705. "Al Aqsa" means "the farther" or "the farthest" in Arabic, and it refers to a Quranic verse, specifically 17:1, which refers to Muhammad's Night Journey: "Blessed is He who took His servant [Muhammad] by night from al-Masjid al-Haram to al-Masjid al-Aqsa..." "Masjid" simply means "Mosque." Al-Masjid al-Haram is the mosque that surrounds the Kaaba in Mecca. The meaning of "Al-Masjid al-Aqsa" ("the farthest mosque") was a bit more cryptic. The Quran does not identify this location with Jerusalem or even with Palestine. This identification came later, with the Umayyads, who were the rulers of the roost in Syria. "Syria" at the time encompassed a much greater land mass than the modern state with that name, and Palestine was the southern part of it. The Umayyads sanctified Jerusalem for political reasons: to divert the Muslim hajj (pilgrimage) from Mecca to Jerusalem, which would bring in tax revenues and provide the Umayyads with political legitimacy. The mosque built on the Temple Mount was named "Al-Aqsa" to give retroactive consecration to Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. The Night Journey story in the Quran was interpreted to refer to the Temple Mount: it is there from which Muhammad ascended to Heaven. The importance of Jerusalem to Muslims has waxed and waned throughout history, with significant increase when the city belongs to someone else. Hence, the importance ascribed to the city during the Crusades and now, under Israeli rule.
Palestinians have also been profoundly adept at getting the world's attention to their plight: Yasser Arafat was singularly successful in this goal. While the Palestinians' struggle with Israel was, and is, all over world headlines, struggles in other parts of the globe have been relegated either to the back pages or not noted at all. This is, of course, a function of the importance of the region in Western and Islamic tradition. That was certainly helpful to Arafat's cause.
But there is also something a bit more sinister going on here. Israel is internationally vilified in a unique way. The UN has an unhealthy obsession with the Jewish state, going after it with much more frequency and hostility than any other member nation. The EU only agreed to designate Hezbollah as a terrorist group this past summer, and this only concerns the organization's "militant wing". The Europeans like to deceive themselves that groups like Hezbollah and Hamas have different "wings": militant, economic, social, political, etc. This is a fiction.
There is almost a sense of glee in reporting on Israeli misdeeds, whether real, exaggerated, or entirely fabricated. Hence the media orgy over the death of Muhammad al-Dura or the Jenin "massacre," both of which occurred during the Second Intifada. The same with the war against Hezbollah in 2006 and Operation Cast Lead - there was a sense that the press was salivating. I highly doubt this would be the case if there were renewed fighting between India and Pakistan in Kashmir.
Not to repeat myself, but I do, again, want to give the benefit of the doubt and point out Israel's religious importance. Americans and Europeans are familiar with names like Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Hebron, and Jericho in a way they are not with names like Srinagar, Kigali, Sarajevo, or South Ossetia. However, even with this benefit of the doubt, and with the understanding that Israel/Palestine will be under a stronger microscope, it does not explain the bias with which the conflict is reported. It does not explain why the fixation is on Israel's wrongdoings and not the Palestinians'. I could give reams and reams of examples. Just this morning I read about a disturbing rise in honor killings in the West Bank. The Reuters reporter did not hesitate to lead the analysis with this: "Some activists believe the rise in honour killings indicates social and economic problems are mounting in the territories, where Palestinians exercise limited self-rule but Israel holds ultimate sovereignty, including over commerce." Of course there are "some activists" who would say this, but come on. This is right after the author had just written of honor killings being a "social menace that occurs throughout the Middle East" and had examined the phenomenon in Jordan, which is decidedly not under Israeli occupation. But, yeah, it's still Israel's fault. The Palestinians are not wholly responsible. Even something that is a broader cultural phenomenon and has nothing to do with the conflict is still blamed on Israel. I can see arguments that the Palestinian economy is not as healthy as it could be because of the security barrier. I can also see, but argue the exact converse of, the notion that Palestinian violence is a consequence of Israel's occupation. But what I have just quoted is ridiculous. It just goes to show how determined many in the media are to slip in anything, anything, detrimental to Israel.
Similarly, last month there was another Reuters article whose headline and lede read that Israelis had killed a Palestinian in the aftermath of John Kerry's statements that, if the peace talks fail, there very well could be a third intifada. Clearly, if one was just browsing, the indication would be that the Israelis had shot some random guy because of their anger at Kerry's remarks. In reality, the man had run at them with a knife. This was absent from the headline and the lede (please note that the article to which I've linked has been updated and its lede is much less biased, and headline less misguiding, than was originally the case). This was a conscious decision that someone made, and the intent is pretty obvious.
So why the fixation? I think there are several reasons. In no particular order of importance:
1) The importance of what is present-day Israel to global religious traditions.
2) The Palestinian success in garnering world attention, beginning with Arafat and continuing full force. The Palestinians have legitimately suffered, but their suffering has been so fetishized as to elevate it from the (worse) suffering of other peoples in the world. While a lot of it is propaganda, there is also legitimate concern about Palestinian well-being.
3) The Schadenfreude at seeing Jews having the upper hand and using force. This has often been combined with outright distortion to make Israel look even worse. This helps to expiate the guilt that many Europeans feel about the Holocaust, which was planned and primarily perpetrated by the Germans but could not have been carried out without wider European collaboration. "You see, the Jews aren't any better!" To quote psychiatrist Zvi Rex: "Germany will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz."You can substitute "Europe" for "Germany" and it's just as true.
4) The idea that the conflict is racial. Westerners like their conflicts racial because (they think) it makes them easier to understand. Many Americans think they understand the conflict because of our own awful history of segregation. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is territorial, religious, and ethnic, but not racial. If you put an Israeli and Palestinian side by side, with no indicative markers of their identity, you would often not be able to tell them apart.
5) Anti-Semitism. Let's be real here. In modern parlance, "anti-Zionism" is simply an alibi for anti-Semitism. What anti-Zionists say about Zionists is literally indistinguishable from what anti-Semites say about Jews. The "Zionist lobby" controls our politicians and the media, for example. This is the same thing thought and said about Jews. You never hear of other lobbies (Armenian, Greek, Tibetan, etc) "controlling" Congress or the media. You never hear of other small nations "controlling" American foreign policy. Hmm, I wonder why.
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