The image makers

The Middle East horror underscores an essential truth about the media: Pictures trump context

by Dan Kennedy

It's no surprise that a pair of images -- one of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy dying in his father's arms, the other of an Israeli soldier's corpse being thrown from a window by an angry mob -- have come to define the horror that has consumed the Middle East. Even the gaping cavity in the side of the USS Cole is no competition, visually, for the terrible human drama captured in those two pictures.

But it's not just news value -- or even shock value -- that explains the media's fascination with those two moments. Yes, the images say much about what is actually happening on the ground. What gives them such staying power, however, is what they say about the media themselves.

Although the pictures tell vital truths, those truths are universal and obvious: that armed troops should not shoot so indiscriminately that 12-year-olds die, and that the fury of the mob is never so frightening as when it turns on apparently innocent outsiders who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Unable to illuminate questions of who's right, who's wrong, and where we go from here, the images are really less about the events they depict than about the forces behind the camera.

The visceral power of such images cannot be denied. Yet without context, without explanation, without understanding, they are empty, substituting the illusion of meaning for meaning

itself. Answer this: are Israeli soldiers seeking out and deliberately shooting 12-year-olds? Or are Palestinian authorities exploiting children for propaganda purposes by putting them in harm's way? Clearly, one's understanding of the image depends entirely one's interpretation of the events leading up to it.

As ABC News reporter John Donvan put it on Nightline last Friday: "The thing about pictures is that you know -- or at least you think you know -- that what you see is real. But the truth about pictures is that they don't necessarily tell the whole truth. And yet, in a place like the Middle East, a dramatic photo or a piece of video can take on a life of its own, and the results of that can range from the absurd to the ridiculous."

On one level, then, the Nightline program was a serious attempt to provide the context missing from those photos. On the other, it was an acknowledgment -- and a self-congratulatory one at that -- of the media's role in transforming reality into myth, and of how that myth, in turn, ends up transforming reality. After all, the Palestinians rode a wave of favorable public opinion following publication of the photo of Mohammed al Dura slumping, dead, next to his injured father during an Israeli-Palestinian firefight.

It wasn't until October 12, when the video of an Israeli soldier being lynched was played over and over, and blood-splattered thugs bellowed "God is great!" for the benefit of television cameras, that the battle over images swung Israel's way. And there's no question that the media-savvy Palestinian leadership knew exactly how powerful those images would be: according to the Jerusalem Post, Palestinian authorities confiscated videotapes from many of the photographers who had witnessed the terror. Fortunately, Italy's Cinque 5 Channel was able to spirit its tape out of Ramallah.

IF THE preoccupation with image over context feeds into the media's need to transform the story into a drama about themselves, it also leads to another phenomenon much beloved by the news business: moral equivalence. Each image, after all, depicts something awful. In one, Israelis do something terrible to Palestinians; in the other, Palestinians do something terrible to Israelis. In the hopelessly complex battle between Israelis and Palestinians, between Jews and Arabs -- a battle that goes back 50, 100, 1000 years -- the media take a deep breath and sigh in collective relief when they can portray both sides as equally violent, equally at fault, equally unreasonable, equally unfathomable. With much of American public opinion pretty firmly in the Israeli camp for reasons of culture, national interest, personal relationships, and family ties, moral equivalence also allows the media to proclaim their objectivity without delving too deeply into the issues.

To be sure, in such a charged environment, even moral equivalence can be controversial. In a piece written for National Review Online on the eve of the second presidential debate, Reagan-era defense strategist Frank Gaffney urged George W. Bush to reject the "moral equivalence" approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that he charged was a hallmark of the Clinton-Gore administration (see "TKSETH'S piece" page {TK}), and to adopt a more explicitly pro-Israel position. (Gaffney's advice was pretty rich, given that Al Gore has articulated a fairly strong pro-Israel stand, whereas Bush has urged better relations with the Arab states. Indeed, an important Arab-American organization endorsed Bush just this week. The current issue of the Economist includes an excellent piece on the growing clout of Arab-American voters.)

Perhaps because their job is to reduce the most complex issues to easily understood caricatures, editorial cartoonists have been at the forefront of moral equivalence. Witness the Los Angeles Times' Michael Ramirez, whose depiction of a Jew and a Muslim worshipping at a wall labeled "Hate" sparked a flurry of protests -- including a march by approximately 100 Jews against Vermont's Rutland Herald, which reprinted the offending cartoon. Interestingly, the language of moral equivalence was used both to defend and condemn the cartoon. In a note published on the Times' Web site, Ramirez defended his work by saying, "It is unfortunate that the most recent events simply reinforce my view that extreme elements on both sides are the cause for this escalation." But the Times' "reader's representative," Narda Zacchino, noting that the paper had received about 1000 complaints, wrote, "To reduce the complex, enduring and seemingly intractable problems of Israel and Palestine to a simple matter of religious fanaticism mocks the history of the region."

Ramirez's cartoon was unusual only in its use of religious symbols and, thus, the flurry of protests it attracted. But he was hardly the only one to invoke moral equivalence as a convenient way to comment on the violence. This past Monday, the Boston Globe's Dan Wasserman depicted Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak sawing off the limb of a tree on which they were both sitting, thinking, "I'll show him!" And Pat Oliphant, in the current U.S. News & World Report, shows two babies, one depicting Israel and the other the Palestinians, crying at a distracted Bill Clinton, "Hey! Our diapers need changing again!!"

The problem is that there is a fundamental intellectual laziness to moral equivalence. Although it's certainly reasonable to argue that Israel has used far too much force in suppressing what is essentially a rag-tag band of rock-throwing youths, it seems eminently clear, based on solid reporting, that Arafat touched off this wave of violence himself -- to pressure Barak into the negotiations formerly known as the peace process, to protect himself from radicals in his own camp, or both. You can't help but be moved by an October 4 New York Times op-ed piece by Avraham Burg, the pro-peace speaker of the Knesset, who wrote of his despair over the Palestinians' rejection of peace on generous terms last July, followed by the violence touched off by Likud leader Ariel Sharon's provocative but perfectly legal visit to the Temple Mount on September 28.

"Now, at the home stretch of long, drawn-out and heated negotiations over a lasting peace agreement," Burg wrote, "we who advocated peace are facing an enormous crisis of confidence. The events of the past couple of days make us ask ourselves: Do we really understand what is going on? After everything was given, there are still demands on the other side."

THERE IS another, different, higher sort of moral equivalence at work in the Middle East, and the media -- at their best -- have been able to capture some of that, sometimes through intelligent analysis, sometimes simply by letting other voices be heard.

A particularly moving and eloquent example of the latter appeared on Sunday, in the Washington Post, in the form of a long essay by Muhanned Tull, an official in the Palestinian Ministry of Labor. Tull challenged the conventional view that Barak's July offer -- Palestinian control of some 92 percent of the West Bank, plus a resolution of who would govern Jerusalem that should have been acceptable to both sides -- was as good as Arafat ever should have expected. "What the Western media were describing as broad concessions by the Israeli prime minister were far short of Palestinian expectations -- and, most important, far short of what the UN resolutions demanded," Tull wrote. "The final proposal at Camp David would have given us a helpless and disconnected state, scattered across less than half the territory we believe should be ours. It offered nothing to Palestinian refugees and continued to postpone the issue of Jerusalem -- giving Israel time to change the demographics and nature of the whole city."

The pieces by Burg and Tull define a moral equivalence not of two sides too blinded by hate and religious primitivism to stop fighting each other but, rather, of two oppressed peoples with a claim to the same land -- a dispute that, ultimately, may be beyond settling except through the use of force. Israel refuses to retreat all the way back to its pre-1967 borders, arguing -- persuasively -- that those borders cannot be readily defended. The Palestinian leadership -- or powerful elements of that leadership that may or may not include Arafat -- want not just the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, but all of Palestine. Neither position is unreasonable, but they are absolutely irreconcilable. And, of course, only one position allows for Israel's continued existence. That's why moral equivalence may work as a cheap journalistic device, or even as a way of understanding each side's grievances, but not as a way to craft a permanent peace. As Johanna McGeary wrote in a particularly perceptive profile of Arafat in this week's Time: "Right now ordinary Palestinians seem further than ever from realizing their legitimate aspirations. Boys in the streets talk wildly of `war' and `victory,' but war is suicide when one side has stones and the other Stingers, and the victory they crave is total ownership of a land they can only share."

It's undeniable that the Palestinians have suffered greatly in the recent violence. More than 100 Palestinians have died, as opposed to just a handful of Israelis. Those numbers have led to accusations of bias, mainly from critics who are more sympathetic to the Palestinians.

To be sure, there are those who detect an anti-Israel bias in the press as well. For instance, on CNN's Reliable Sources last weekend, the LA Times' Doyle McManus and the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz (the show's cohost) decried the lead headline in the October 13 Post -- ISRAEL STRIKES PALESTINIAN SITES -- because it made no mention of the fact that Israel was retaliating for the lynching of its soldiers. Kurtz said that "there's been criticism that this headline by itself made it seem too much like Israel was simply committing an act of aggression." Agreed McManus: "Yes, it was probably a bad call. But I don't think there was any ideological bias to it." Well, no, of course not, and to be blunt, the entire exchange was inane.

Far more serious is the brief submitted by media critic Eric Alterman in the current issue of the Nation (which features a surprisingly restrained, if unsurprisingly anti-Israel, meditation on the Oslo agreement by Edward Said, last seen throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers in the West Bank.) I expected to be appalled by Alterman's argument that the US media are hopelessly biased against the Palestinians; instead, I came away impressed by the strength of the facts he had marshaled, though hardly convinced. The essentials of Alterman's critique: that the American press has largely overlooked the Israelis' use of deadly force, a practice that recently resulted in condemnation in the UN; that media outlets such as the Washington Post, Newsweek, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page have legitimized the "war criminal" Ariel Sharon (a characterization that is difficult to dismiss, given Sharon's record in Lebanon in the early 1980s); and that the Oslo framework falls well short of meeting the Palestinians' needs.

"True, Ehud Barak has taken massive political risks by offering concessions that go well beyond the Israeli consensus," Alterman writes. "But given the magnitude of the physical, psychological and sociological costs of the Palestinian `catastrophe,' Barak's best is simply not good enough. The only chance for lasting peace will come when Israel agrees to share Jerusalem with a full Palestinian partner, granting equal rights to citizens of both nations; with Israeli rule in the West and Palestinian rule in the East."

The problem with Alterman's argument is not that it's wrong, but that it's incomplete. In fact, until the lynching of the Israeli soldiers, it was the Palestinians who were winning the propaganda war -- and the loss of life, especially among the young, was turning American public opinion against Israel. Indeed, a number of analysts have claimed, with some credibility, that civilian casualties are an important part of the Palestinians' strategy. As the Boston Globe's Charles Sennott (among others) has reported, the rock-throwing youths have, on some occasions at least, taken their orders directly from Palestinian officials. Alterman also overlooks some of the truly outstanding analysis that has appeared in the elite press (some of which appeared after his deadline). There was, for instance, last Friday's Wall Street Journal package on the Middle East, anchored by Neil King and Gerald Seib's article documenting the United States' waning influence. Or Jane Perlez's analysis on the front of Sunday's New York Times, in which she painstakingly documented how Clinton and Barak pushed for a comprehensive settlement last July for their own domestic political reasons, ignoring clear signals that Arafat wasn't ready to deliver. In other words, the July summit's failure was entirely predictable, and the disastrous after-effects of that failure have been just as predictable.

But though such journalism may reach opinion makers, they lack the power of the clear, simple, unambiguous image.

ON OCTOBER 10, Nightline broadcast a town meeting from Jerusalem that brought together all sides in the conflict -- a follow-up to a similar session the program had hosted in 1988, in the midst of the intifada. This time, the show almost didn't come off: two Israeli officials arrived with armed guards, and the Palestinians threatened to walk out if the guns weren't left behind.

It was a classic television moment. Arguments. Tension. The hint of violence. And, squarely in the middle, Nightline host Ted Koppel, who brokered a compromise under which the Israelis would leave their guns outside if everyone else were to leave the building and re-enter through a metal detector. "I made a proposal which has been accepted, and I think we have a solution," Koppel announced, as the audience applauded.

The reality was that an important dialogue could take place, led by one of television's finest journalists. But the virtual reality communicated a different, cruder, simpler message: the image of a media star, stepping in and resolving a dispute between inscrutable foreign adversaries.

No doubt the last thing Koppel intended was to turn this moment into yet another image -- produced by, and ultimately about, the media. But it's inescapable. Because, in the end, the images are what stand out: a dying boy, a terrible lynching, a revered broadcaster -- the Walter Cronkite of his day -- calming an angry crowd.

The problem with these images is that they mean everything and nothing simultaneously. They enable us to see the horror, yet fail to help us understand it. They make us feel, not think.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com.