(November 19) - The Palestinian media have played an integral role in the 'al-Aksa intifada.'
In their daily task of monitoring Palestinian TV, radio and newspapers, Itamar Marcus and his colleagues at the Palestinian Media Watch say they saw the current uprising coming, long before Likud Chairman Ariel Sharon made his September 28 visit to the Temple Mount.
Marcus and his team first noticed a radical change back in the summer, when PA television started to alter its programming.
"We saw the media change months before the rioting broke out. It was clear to us that something was going to happen."
A PMW report published on September 11, which (mainly) reviewed official Palestine Broadcasting Corporation TV in July, August and early September, opened with the following prophetic sentence: "Broadcasts of violence and hate reached unprecedented levels this summer on Palestinian television, to a point where the atmosphere is one of the eve of outbreak of war."
The report gives examples: broadcasts of old and new footage, showing clashes between Palestinians and Israelis, grew from a daily standard of 15 minutes to 30 minutes, 45 minutes or one hour. The stridency of religious sermons against Israel and the Jews grew - reflecting, in PMW's analysis, a convergence of views between the Palestinian Authority-employed clergy and Hamas.
The report also cites the cultural program Panorama as showing clips from a fictional film portraying Israeli troops raping a Palestinian teenager and then killing her parents.
All this was beginning in the run-up to the Camp David talks, when US President Bill Clinton and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak were repeatedly assuring the world that whatever else might be lacking, they were convinced that Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat shared a sincere desire to make peace.
The PMW aims to report, rather than analyze, the content of PA media. However, Marcus feels that the huge contrast between what Arafat says to foreigners and what he says, through the media, to his own people, must be taken into account in any analysis of his policy.
"We were asking ourselves, 'why now?' You're talking about the summer, when there was no violence in the streets, everything was quiet, and yet if you were looking at the TV you'd think that we were already in the middle of the intifada." he says.
If there was an "eve of war" atmosphere back in July, the ambience now is one of total conflagration.
"The day the rioting broke out PA television stopped its normal broadcasting," Marcus said. "Since then it has started broadcasting each day two or three hours earlier than usual, four hours sometimes, and all day long you see violence. There are no children's programs, no cartoons. All day long it's just clips [of clashes] interspersed with news, and announcements from Fatah calling for escalation. There are religious lectures and sermons on TV where they openly call for killing; 'Kill them wherever you find them,' 'Kill the Jews,' 'kill Americans,' that kind of thing."
PALESTINIANS have access to a wide range of media. There are the PBC television and radio outlets, and the daily newspaper Al-Hayat al-Jadida, all of whose staff are hired and paid by the PA. They deny any formal system of prior censorship, but in practice regularly censor themselves.
"Nobody tells you in advance, don't write this or broadcast that, but you know full well that you're going to be in a mess if you go against Arafat's line of the day," a staff member at one of the PA's media outlets said. "The problem is knowing what the line of the day is, on any given day."
In addition to the official PA organs, there are private local broadcasters, a range of independent newspapers and magazines, neighboring Arab TV and radio stations and the satellite channels Al Jazira, MBC, and relative newcomer Abu Dhabi TV.
The latter three have a reputation for more free-wheeling and independent reporting than the government-run stations in the region, and are constantly gaining audience share in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Their reporting has repeatedly angered the PA and led the PBC to set up its own satellite channel.
Although not subject to the same restrictions as the official PA outlets, journalists working for the independents are part of the same broader Palestinian reality. It is doubtful whether, even if all official restrictions on freedom of speech were to disappear tomorrow, there would be a radical change in the tone of their reporting the dispute with Israel.
Although there is room for differences of opinion on internal affairs, and even a degree of criticism of institutionalized corruption, the impotence of the judiciary and the antics of the police, there is unity in one sphere of reporting. The official and independent media, local correspondents, and those sent in from other Arab countries are all united in the face of the common enemy - Israel. They are all subject to the major and minor humiliations of occupation, and this is reflected in their writing.
Many Israeli journalists and politicians find this either sad and puzzling or, in the case of those on the Right, confirmation of what they have long suspected, i.e. that the Palestinians in particular and the Arabs in general talk peace (particularly when Westerners are listening) but are actually plotting revenge.
To Palestinians, the Israeli interpretation lacks logic. While most people favor peace, they say that the occupier cannot expect normal neighborly relations while he is still the occupier, perpetrating daily injustices.
"Get out of our land and leave us alone, then we'll talk normalization," as one journalism student puts it, during a discussion in an east Jerusalem coffee shop. "Now is not the time, when the blood on the ground is not even dry yet."
GHASSAN Khatib, director of the Jerusalem Media and Communication Center, echoes that sentiment.
"Sometimes I feel amazed when people are asking why and how what is happening is happening. It's natural, [the Israelis] were so brutal to us - and still are - by all possible means: economic exploitation, land appropriation, or individual torturing."
He adds that if the Palestinian press is less than objective, that is also understandable.
"We still don't have a really long tradition of professional Palestinian media. It's really new. It used to be a media under occupation, under censorship, and it did not have the chance to develop to be a proper media or a strong media."
Khatib is more critical of the Israeli press, which he sees as having become more partisan as the conflict has heated up, with less historical justification.
"I would blame the Israeli journalists because we are talking about professional media with long experience. While I should be able to hold the Israeli media responsible for any lack of objectivity, I cannot equally do that to the Palestinian media, unfortunately."
In looking at the messages being broadcast to the Palestinian people, Khatib stresses the difference between official statements which encourage the continued uprising by popular means, and unofficial commentators calling for a return to armed struggle.
"You will not hear at all in the media statements by politicians calling for the use of firearms in the confrontations, you will not hear it, believe me," he insists.
"You don't hear the official media saying this and you don't hear it from the politicians. Sometimes you hear it from opposition forces, sometimes you here it from elements within Fatah who are not a majority, who are not representative."
While there can be differences of opinion regarding nuances and tactics, Khatib says that theirs is a broad consensus on core matters.
"On certain issues there is one voice. The issues of consensus are the need to continue the popular protests in as peaceful forms as possible and as massive forms as possible - forms that can carry a political message."
In this context, "peaceful" and "popular" mean confrontation through mass rallies, stoning attacks on soldiers and settlers, and barricading streets to prevent IDF pursuit.
SOME Israeli analysts cast doubt on official Palestinian casualty figures, saying that journalists, officials and medical workers sometimes collude in classifying someone who died of natural causes or in a road accident as a victim of the uprising - either from political motives, or so that bereaved relatives become eligible for the benefits provided to "martyrs of the intifada." Barak last week said that there were reasons to suppose that some Palestinians shot dead may have been killed by gunfire from their own side.
The number of dead quoted by JMCC for the period from September 29, up to and including November 13, is 182.
Khatib says that if there are grounds for doubt in any given case, then the circumstances should be investigated, to see if the facts as recorded are correct, or fabricated, or in some gray area in between, but that overall the accusation is not really relevant.
"We have enough cases of straightforward killing; I don't think the Palestinians need to lie on this," he says. "Anything that can be said about the atrocities carried out by the Israelis over the past 33 years cannot be exaggerated; what they did in reality is beyond the imagination."
While the Palestinian press as a whole is fully mobilized in the current battle, Itamar Marcus is still concentrating on the official PA media as a barometer of the Palestinian leadership's true intentions.
"When Arafat decides that he wants to stop the violence, we'll know about it before anyone else," says the PMW director. "Whatever he says in Washington doesn't matter. We'll sense it on TV, the moment he goes back to regular broadcasting. When we have children's programs, a movie, then we'll know he's made a decision to calm the street."