Ill wind: Israel has brought all the current bad press on itself
Don’t muzzle the media
“Blaming the messenger” is usually reserved for those who either have little appreciation of the media or are uncomfortable with the information it conveys. On the basis of his article Media stoke up anger against Israel I would place Benjamin Pogrund in the latter category.
Public opinion has overwhelmingly swung behind the just cause of Palestine. This is akin to a catastrophe for Israel. Pogrund hopes to reverse this trend and contain the fallout from Israel’s savagery against Palestinians.
His article positions Pogrund in the camp of Israeli propaganda. Having spent three weeks in South Africa in the midst of a powerful campaign protesting against Israeli barbarism, Pogrund is evidently shocked to witness so many people acting in solidarity with Palestine.
He refuses to accept that the majority of political groupings, trade unions, religious groups, human rights activists and ordinary people support Palestine, so he resorts to an attack on the media.
He calls Jane Duncan a Stalinist: “Duncan’s view is not new. It was the hallmark of the former Soviet Union. Those who did not accept Stalin-decreed ‘truth’ were murdered or shipped to labour camps.”
But he too would like to silence those he disagrees with. He accuses Steven Friedman of peddling “nutcase stuff” for disputing Israel’s narrative on Hamas and rockets. “Why didn’t anyone challenge Friedman about his obvious nonsense?” asks Pogrund. “Why is he given a platform?”
Really? Are we to censor any voices Pogrund and Israel disapprove of? What next? Ban all critical views of Israel in the media?
Pogrund takes issue with Kieran Legg’s interview with Palestinian diplomat Tamer Almassri, in which Almassri says: “We will not give up until we have our historical land again.” Pogrund attacks Legg for this. It’s crazy for a man immersed in journalism for 55 years not to acknowledge that the media have a duty to reflect the views of society.
Pogrund’s next target is Allister Sparks. Accusing Sparks of “sanitising” Hamas, Pogrund gives vent to his own prejudice by labelling Hamas as “undemocratic and hate-filled”. He does not dispute Sparks’s assertion that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has never recognised the right of a Palestinian state to exist. Instead, he says Sparks lacks an understanding of Middle East politics.
Note that Pogrund has just published a book, Drawing Fire: Investigating the Accusations of Apartheid in Israel. The timing of its release in South Africa is clearly not ideal. Pogrund’s propaganda mission has flopped badly. Turning his missiles on the media and blaming it for “so much anger against Israel” is evidence of this. – Iqbal Jassat, Media Review Network, Johannesburg
• Pogrund’s response to my article on Gaza and the tasks of journalism peddles propaganda in the guise of facts. He takes issue with my argument that Israel was founded on the displacement and dispossession of Palestinians, and accuses me of ignorance of the “tangled events of 1948 after the United Nations decided to partition the then Palestine”. According to the UN special commission on Palestine’s own report, which preceded the UN General Assembly’s partition recommendation, Arabs constituted the majority of inhabitants in Palestine at the time. Jews owned less than 7% of the land. To achieve a partition plan that gave Israelis more than half this territory, it stood to reason that Israel had to displace large numbers of Palestinians, which it did. Israel then expanded into more Palestinian territory.
Therefore, it is accurate to say that Israel was built on the displacement and dispossession of Palestinians.
The Israelis accepted partition and the Arabs rejected it. But, as Jeremy R Hammond persuasively argues, the UN recommended partition but had no legal mandate to enforce it. It had and has no powers to take land away from one country and give it to another without the consent of both. The reaction to partition showed that there was no consent.
Also, the Global South was underrepresented in the UN at the time, so it is unsurprising that the recommendation vote went the way it did.
The UN system did not create Israel. Israel created Israel, by a unilateral declaration of statehood.
Can Pogrund know so little about this particular history and the powers and functions of the UN?
The reason why so many people are critical of Israel is not because they are ignorant but because they see through Israeli state propaganda and its narrative of victimhood. More people recognise that Israel is the aggressor. – Professor Jane Duncan, University of Johannesburg
• How can Pogrund deny that Palestinians were “dispossessed”? Understandably, they rejected the 1947 UN partition plan and attacked Jews living in Palestine.
When Israel declared its statehood in 1948, war broke out between Israel and most of the neighbouring Arab states. By the time of the 1949 ceasefire, about 700 000 Palestinians (out of about 800 000) had fled, largely out of fear of attack. Israel would not allow them back, and still doesn’t – despite UN calls.
Most of the Palestinian villages were razed; Israel’s “absentee law” allowed it to appropriate their land and houses for Israeli Jews.
How is this not dispossession? – Miles Seward, Cape Town
• I commend the Mail & Guardian for publishing one of the few sane articles about the Gaza war to appear in the local press. As Pogrund points out, the shocking bias, bigotry and substandard commentary during the past weeks has been both depressing and alarming.
The M&G – no friend of Israel – chose the right pictures, too, to accompany Pogrund’s article: photographs of the funeral of an Israeli soldier and of a wall bearing the names of Israeli soldiers killed in the campaign. How thoughtful and how apt. If only we could rely on a continuation of this balance in future. – Victor Gordon, Pretoria