On Wednesday 12 June, the Middle East Monitor launched Ibrahim Hewitt’s new book Memo to the Editor at the Frontline Club. The book is a compilation of letters addressed to the editors of major UK newspapers. It is a critique of how they have misreported major issues in the Israel-Palestine conflict from December 2009 to 2011.
“The purpose of writing the letters has a number of different focuses,” Hewitt explained, “We want to try and educate and inform people; provide a different perspective, an alternative view… I did actually tell the letters editor (of the Daily Telegraph) ‘I know you’re not going to publish this but I’m telling you anyway,’ and that’s the point, I think it is important that the media is aware that people read what they put forward.”
Ibrahim Hewitt
Hewitt was joined by Tim Llewellyn, a former BBC Middle East Correspondent, and David Hearst, the current foreign leader writer for the Guardian. The event was chaired by Mark McDonald, a human rights barrister and a founding member of Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East.
The panelists discussed the book but also broadened the discussion to include media bias in reporting on the Palestine-Israel conflict over the last ten years, particularly regarding coverage by the Guardian and the BBC. McDonald began by asking Llewellyn whether he believed the BBC to be biased in its reporting of the Israel-Palestine question. Llewellyn replied:
“Yes. Absolutely no question about it… After 2000 the Israelis geared up and put so much pressure on the BBC that now their reporting is absolutely bent… The way they question people, the way presenters interpret people, the number of times Israelis get on the air… It’s unbelievable how bent the BBC is at the moment.”
Answering the same question but on his own newspaper, Hearst argued the reason for the pressure was because:
“If you talk to the Israeli Press Attache, he says the enemies of Israel are the BBC and the Guardian.”
He continued that reporting on Israel:
“…is like kicking a wasp’s nest. You have to be prepared to get stung… You have to have an almost Rottweiler approach to the facts…”
It is for this reason that Hewitt’s book is so valuable. For Hearst it is an example of “exactly what we’ve all been doing.”
Discussing the nature of bias present in the media, Llewellyn explained about what he calls “corrective context:”
“When the Israelis bomb Gaza the BBC always says ‘in response to a Palestinian rocket.’ But you have to imagine that Palestinian rocket against their rocket. Nobody ever says that. You know it’s bad they shouldn’t do it, they’re idiots… The next thing is the Israelis are using the weapons of war against these people. The Palestinians are not an army and you know, I’m not pro-Palestinian, I’m looking at it from the human rights perspective. These people are being punished.”
On writing in the Guardian, Hearst explained that:
“When you have half the Israeli cabinet saying there shouldn’t be a two-state solution it seems unlikely there will be one. The peace process has been described as moribund, dead. I think it’s dead… But I can’t write a leader saying that… Because the Guardian is in favour of a two-state solution.”
Hewitt too argued that the BBC is biased:
“There are some sections of the BBC that are clearly biased… There are journalists not asking the questions they should be… Because they provoke uncomfortable answers.”
Listen and watch the full event here:
https://soundcloud.com/frontlineclub/critiquing-the-medias-approach
]]>https://soundcloud.com/frontlineclub/critiquing-the-medias-approach
This session is organised by Middle East Monitor (MEMO).
Book Launch of Memo to the Editor
A timely, revealing and important book, Memo to the Editor is a compilation of letters authored by Ibrahim Hewitt, the Middle East Monitor’s senior editor, and addressed to the editors of major newspapers on issues of the day.
‘Curated’ in forward chronological order and with a précis included, the letters which date from December 2009 deliver insightful and up-to-the-minute commentary and analysis on events of the Israel-Palestine Conflict as they occur. Woven into this is a shrewd, and frequently humorous, critique of the way these events are often misrepresented in mainstream media.
One of the author’s fundamental premises in writing these letters was to let journalists know that their work was under scrutiny. As such, the book also speaks to issues of freedom of the press and the space allowed to dissenting voices. The end result is a powerful and unique offering that provides the reader with a sustained argument and narrative from an alternative perspective. The quasi-conversational format that it employs also allows the incredulity and helpless horror at the injustices of the conflict felt by so many to be keenly articulated.
The author will be joined by former BBC Middle East Correspondent, Tim Llewellyn and foreign leader writer for the Guardian, David Hearst. They will be discussing media reporting on the Palestine-Israel conflict, looking at key events in the last decade and the way in which they were portrayed by Western media.
Chaired by Mark McDonald, a human rights barrister and the director and principle founder of the London Innocence Project. He has lectured extensively on US death penalty litigation and constitutional law. He is a founding member of Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East.
The panel:
Ibrahim Hewitt, senior editor for the Middle East Monitor.
Tim Llewellyn, former BBC Middle East Correspondent.
David Hearst, foreign leader writer for the Guardian.
Anyone familiar with the Middle East knows that Ashdod is Israel’s biggest port, nearly a quarter of a million people some 40 miles north of the Gaza Strip. What he or she will be less likely to know—and it is no accident—is that until October 1948, when the combined forces of the Israeli army and accompanying Zionist terrorists arrived, this place was a Palestinian town called Isdud. Its 5,000 Palestinian Arabs were duly driven out (apart from those murdered on the spot), and made their way south to Gaza, where to this day they and their myriad descendants remain in poverty and apparent hopelessness as registered refugees, victims and prisoners of the Israeli military occupation and Western bias and ignorance.
Abdel Bari Atwan, author of A Country of Words: a Palestinian Journey from the Refugee Camp to the Front Page is the famous son of one of these dirt-poor Isdud families, born two years after the nakba, or catastrophe, that overtook his people when Israel was created. When he revisited his family’s original home a few years ago, his North African Jewish driver had no idea there had ever been a place called Isdud. When Bari (as he insists his non-Arab friends call him), treading through the stinking ruins of a former Palestinian site, Café Gaben, bumped into a Jewish settler, the man said to him, pointing at the ancient detritus: “…that is the past.” “No,” Bari said, “it is also the future.”
It is this kind of fierce determination and will to survive that characterises Gaza and the Gazans. It is also why I described Gazan hopelessness, in my first paragraph, as “apparent”. Anyone who has been to what is now a virtual concentration camp will know that Gazans do not buckle under. The Abdel Bari Atwan story is an epic version of the Gazan refugees’ refusal to accept the overwhelming, demeaning, life-threatening odds that Israel and the West have imposed upon them, the Arab states also doing their bit in this saga of criminal international politics.
Bari fought and harried his way – with his family’s typically Palestinian, almost sacrificial help – from the penury and oppression of Deir al Balah and later Rafah camps through a series of joe-jobs and secondary education in Jordan then Egypt, university in Cairo and progression up the rickety journalistic ladder in Libya, Saudi Arabia and London’s vibrant Arabic media to become editor, in 1989, of Al-Quds al-Arabi (Arab Jerusalem). This is his own newspaper, his own radical mouthpiece and unique, outspoken reflection of the inequities, crimes and joys of the Middle East. He is probably, following the deaths of Yasser Arafat, Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish, the best-known living Palestinian. His newspaper is so popular that it is banned in as many Arab countries as he himself is – Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt and Jordan among them.
Al-Quds al-Arabi is no one’s mouthpiece. Bari lists his many differences with Yasser Arafat and most other Arab politicians, and his inside knowledge of Islamic leaders whom our media and politicians demonise is a useful reality check. One of his Islamist interlocutors spells out how Tony Blair made the British an international target for terrorists (cf, the recent Mumbai outrage).
For all his valid criticisms of the British, for what they did to his Palestine, and of the Americans and the Israelis, Abdel Bari makes clear that for the honest Arab journalist his own governments, secret services and often inane fellow citizens pose his greatest threats. He also gives salutary space to the BBC’s record of pusillanimity in the face of Blairite and Israeli pressures on the Palestinian issue.
If this is a cheering, proud and opinionated tale of human determination, humour and iconoclasm, it also portrays the unique sadness of the Palestinians. While most emigrants cherish the knowledge of an original home available for revisit or return, the Palestinian Arab has no such grounding. “I feel,” writes Bari, “that my cultural identity has become blurred with time and that to some extent I have lost my roots…I wonder if history has condemned us [Palestinians] to a permanent state of psychological exile.” A Jew would know exactly what he means—or would have, once.
As our own British Government joins and intensifies the persecution and isolation of the Gazan people, partly because in democratic elections nearly three years ago they voted for a party Britain does not–or is told not to—approve, Abdel Bari’s book is the perfect guidebook to what has happened, why, and how it goes on and on and on.
Reviewed by Tim Llewellyn, a former BBC Middle East Correspondent. A Country of Words: a Palestinian Journey from the Refugee Camp to the Front Page by Abdel Bari Atwan is published by Saqi Books £20