A Balcony Over Jerusalem by John Lyons

Author:John Lyons
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2017-06-29T04:00:00+00:00

The Guardian’s Chris McGreal agreed that some journalists provided a flattering portrayal of Israel because they did not want to have to defend tougher reporting. ‘I think there are newspapers which steer clear of controversy on Israel. I think that has less to do with the reporters on the ground who see the situation for themselves than senior editors trying to avoid controversy. It’s evidence that the harassment can work if not resisted.’

The pressures on a journalist, said Crispian Balmer, meant that reporting could become ‘unbelievably dull, a ping-pong of “he said, she said”. Every fact is disputed and there is a binary narrative like train tracks that never meet. There is no simple story that you can write in a fluid and fluent fashion because every other line is “But the other side says no.” There’s a danger that people working here do stick to certain formula[e] because they know it’s gone through before and they know they can defend it.’

I also noticed a pattern where Israel would delay any confirmation of serious allegations until the media lost interest. If it is reported without official confirmation, only those who are staunchly anti-Israel will believe it. One case I became aware of was in Gaza during the 2009 war. Doctors there were saying, ‘People are coming into our hospitals and we believe that they have been exposed to white phosphorus.’ White phosphorus can be used in the desert to highlight army targets but also burns the skin, and it is considered a war crime to drop it onto a populated area. I rang the IDF’s spokeswoman Avital Leibovich to get her response to that and she said, ‘How dare you accuse us of doing something like that! It’s offensive and outrageous that you would buy that sort of propaganda.’ Several months later, the army quietly admitted that it had used ‘limited’ white phosphorus. By then, though, no one wanted to follow it up.

Uffe Taudal from Berlingske, a conservative Danish newspaper supportive of Israel, said every word in Israel was politicised, ‘so if you write Jerusalem [as the capital] it means you accept the annexation, if you write “Israelis think” then 20 per cent of the population – Palestinians living in Israel as Israeli citizens – are excluded from the political life.’

Most correspondents I knew in Israel said that pressure came from self-appointed pro-Israel groups rather than the Israeli Government. I believe the government effectively ‘outsources’ that pressure, which allows it to maintain workable relations with correspondents on the spot while the pressure is applied on the journalist’s editors. This was certainly what I found with the Australian pro-Israel lobby.

Journalists based in Israel often faced a backlash back home. ‘I did not get many complaints from the Israeli Government, very few actually, but a fair lot from pressure groups outside Israel,’ says Philippe Agret, who believes the aim was partly to exhaust journalists.

‘The biggest message you’ll get from me,’ said Jodi Rudoren, ‘is that all of this noise and activism is

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