Anticipatory Compliance

"The thing about Murdoch is that he very rarely issued directives or instructions to his senior executives or editors. Instead, by way of discussion he would make known his personal viewpoint on a certain matter. What was expected in return, at least from those seeking tenure of any length in the Murdoch Empire, was a sort of 'anticipatory compliance'. One didn't need to be instructed about what to do, one simply knew what was in one's long-term interests." (Rupert's Adventures in China: How Murdoch Lost a Fortune and Found a Wife, Bruce Dover, 2008, p 149)

Anticipatory compliance (or self-censorship) is a reflex all too familiar to those in the mainstream media who write about the Palestine/Israel conflict. Apart from those at News Limited who actually believe their own pro-Israel propaganda, whenever the subject of Israel's decades-long abuse of the Palestinian people arises, editors and journalists will do what they do in the certain knowledge that, should they breach the red lines laid down by Israel lobby spinmeisters, there will be consequences: angry phone calls, letters, emails, even meetings with management. Is this kind of heat worth it? they'll be asking themselves. Punches will be pulled and difficult questions avoided. The result will be that our understanding of the underlying dynamics of the conflict will be compromised. We'll relegate it to the too-hard basket and concentrate instead on other, clearer, safer crimes, such as Tibet and Zimbabwe. And the relentless, bloody process of wiping Palestine off the map, Palestinian by Palestinian, dunum by dunam, begun in earnest by the Zionist movement in 1948, will continue apace.

Veteran BBC journalist Tim Llewellyn put it thus: "This [unconscious pro-Israel bias] is also evident in insidious self-censorship, in which a reporter senses a way of pre-empting the anxiety of his bosses or the ire of the Israelis or both by crafting his story in a bland and therefore misleading manner: 'Land which the Palestinians say is occupied...'; 'disputed' instead of 'occupied' territories, a phrase that still crops up on the BBC, though the circumlocution is legally and morally indefensible; the misrepresentation of the numbers of Jewish settlers on the West Bank and in Jerusalem; the failure to get into the public British consciousness the nature of the vast Separation and Enclosure Wall Israel is building around and into Palestinian territory, dividing and isolating its people and further damaging their already enfeebled economy. This is still called by the BBC 'a security barrier', conjuring up in the viewer's or listener's mind the image of a temporary structure the local police might put up to fence off a crime scene or to deter football hooligans." (Introduction to Publish It Not: The Middle East cover-Up, Christopher Mayhew & Michael Adams, 2006)

A text book example of anticipatory compliance cropped up in The Australian of 26/4/08:-

Sian Powell's Gaza power play was a feature article on the staging (Belvoir St Theatre, May 14) of the play My Name is Rachel Corrie. Its eponymous subject was callously murdered by an Israeli army bulldozer driver in 2003 while trying to protect, along with fellow activists in the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a Palestinian home from demolition.

Right at the outset Powell feels compelled to play the faux balancing game: "Playwright Harold Pinter, among others, wrote to defend the play, while a website called Rachel Corrie Facts has been set up to correct the work's 'factual errors and myths'." Not even the qualifier 'alleged' is allowed to intrude on the fiction that RCF is anything more than just another tiresome pro-Israel propaganda site out to sow confusion. "The play has dipped into that most prickly subject," Powell writes, "Middle Eastern politics. Corrie drew derision and admiration during her short life: the play has had the same effect." "Derision" - whose derision? Powell dare not spell it out. The illusion that Corrie's detractors may have had a genuine reason for objecting to the play, as opposed to an axe to grind, is thus created. The play "is sure to draw fire," she adds.

But that's just for starters. Powell quotes an almost apologetic Shannon Murphy, director of the Sydney production: "I actually think it's been blown out of proportion... It's more a coming-of-age story." Although Murphy is described as being "so taken with the play," Powell says this is because it is "a play rather than as a political polemic."

In her gloss on Corrie's life, Powell notes that "as a college student she joined the International Solidarity Movement," parenthetically adding the words "dubbed a pro-Palestinian front." The identity and motives of the dubbers is left to the reader's imagination. Whoever they are, Powell must placate them. The vital and heroic work of the ISM is ignored and its integrity impugned.

She quotes Corrie, mere days before her death, saying, "I feel like I'm witnessing the systematic destruction of a people's ability to survive... Sometimes I sit down to dinner with people and I realise there is a massive military machine surrounding us, trying to kill the people I'm having dinner with." But this chilling insight into the dark heart of the matter is subverted when Powell goes on to quote Murphy (still in apologetic mode): "'Up until she died she was still trying to grasp what was happening between the Israelis and the Palestinians'... adding that Corrie was angrier with US foreign policy than she was with Israel." (But of course, who in their right mind could possibly blame Israel?)

"Trying to grasp what was happening between the Israelis and the Palestinians"? Really? Corrie knew exactly what was happening. A military machine, the IDF, Jabotinsky's implacable "iron wall of Jewish bayonets," was all around her, destroying Palestinian lives and livelihoods on a daily basis, and had been since 1947-8. To suggest that Corrie wasn't quite up to speed on this is either not to understand her words - or else an exercise in anticipatory compliance.

Powell can't even concede that Corrie was murdered: "She was killed in hotly disputed circumstances. It is certain, though, that Corrie was trying to prevent an armoured Israeli D9 bulldozer from working in Rafah... where she believed Palestinian houses were at risk. She was killed either by the bulldozer's blade or by rubble and debris moved by the machine."

So Corrie's death was an accident! An Israeli bulldozer (no human agency is indicated) was quietly working away minding its own business when Corrie, who only "believed" that some houses (whose houses?) were at risk, simply got in the way. Now where could she have gotten the idea that Palestinian homes were at risk? She couldn't possibly have gone to Gaza knowing that over 3,000 Palestinian homes had been toppled in the previous 2 years, or to Rafah knowing that the Israelis were busy bulldozing a 400m corridor separating Gaza and Egypt through people's homes, now could she? Let us hope that the silly girl didn't traumatise the poor driver too much.

And anyway, "an Israeli Defence Force investigation found that Corrie had not been run over by the dozer and that the driver probably had not been able to see her." Well, that's that then. End of story. The Israelis wouldn't lie now, would they? And this in spite of Powell's earlier claim that the circumstances of her death were"hotly disputed."

As if that wasn't enough to keep the Zionist media pack from the door, "Murphy believes Corrie's death was accidental... 'She slipped and she was trying to scramble up, and it crushed her. It was an accident... No charges have been laid, that's for sure'." This, if correctly reported, is bizarre. Here we have Murphy, described as "so taken" with the play and Corrie's story, apparently unaware of the eyewitness testimony of Corrie's fellow activist, Joe Smith: "Rachel [dressed incidentally in a bright orange jacket with reflective stripes] was kneeling 20 metres in front of the bulldozer on flat ground. There was no way she could not have been seen. We only maintain positions that are clearly visible. She had been doing this all day but this time the driver did not stop. Once she had fallen under the bulldozer, the driver stopped when she was under its middle section and reversed." (Israeli report clears troops over US death, The Guardian, 14/4/03)

Unaware too, it seems, of the words of ISM spokesman, Tom Wallace: "The conclusions are outrageous. If they found that the driver was not culpable what did they find to explain this? How could they find a driver who had run someone over in a slow and deliberate manner in no way responsible?" (TG, 14/4/03)

Anticipatory compliance. Anything to avoid drawing fire from you-know-who.

Rachel Corrie knew exactly what was going on around her and could have had no illusions whatever about the dangers of standing up to the uniformed thugs of the IDF. Whether shooting, shelling, firing missiles or bulldozing, she would have known that the Israeli military is committed to one thing and one thing only - the ethnic cleansing of Palestine - and that nobody, not even a white American woman, would be allowed to stand between it and its historic mission. Rachel Corrie may have been born in the US, but she was murdered in Palestine as a Palestinian.

The psychopathological mindset she was up against becomes clear when one reads the testimony of Moshe Nissim, the driver of one of the bulldozers that flattened the Jenin refugee camp in April 2002: "Do you know how I held out for 75 hours? I didn't get off the tractor. I had no problem of fatigue, because I drink whisky all the time. I had a bottle in the tractor at all times... For 75 hours I didn't think about my life at home, about all the problems. Everything was erased. Sometimes images of terror attacks in Jerusalem crossed my mind. I witnessed some of them. For 3 days, I just destroyed and destroyed. The whole area. Any house that they fired from came down. And to knock it down, I tore down some more. They were warned by loudspeaker to get out of the house before I come, but I gave no one a chance. I didn't wait. I didn't give one blow, and wait for them to come out. I would just ram the house with full power, to bring it down as fast as possible. I wanted to get to the other houses. To get as many as possible... Others may have restrained themselves, or so they say. Who are they kidding?...I didn't give a damn about the Palestinians, but I didn't just ruin with no reason. It was all under orders." (Quoted in Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948, Tanya Reinhart, 2003, pp 163-164)

It's time the media - and the rest of us - stood up to the Israel lobby's bulldozing of honest reporting and freedom of expression. Acts of anticipatory compliance only reward the bully and diminish us as human beings. Rachel Corrie's courage, and that of her fellow activists in the ISM, is an example to us all.

'Confused & Confounded': David Hardaker Takes His Leave

"I think it's fair to say," intoned presenter, Elizabeth Jackson, on Radio National's Correspondents Report, "that some of the best material that has aired on this program has been written and delivered by the ABC's Middle East correspondent, David Hardaker. After nearly 3 years, David is leaving Jerusalem and returning to Sydney to await the arrival of his second child. So, what was he thinking as he packed his bags and headed home?"

On came the familiar voice of David Hardaker. What he had to say left me shaking my head:-

He began by musing on the theme of justice. A friend had "ventured the view that what happened to Hamas after it won the Palestinian elections seemed so unjust. Unjust. She was, of course, talking about the international effort to make it impossible for Hamas to govern, given that they're defined as a terrorist group, even though they won the election. But the word 'unjust', suddenly it seemed to be an alien concept. I don't think I've lost my moral compass completely - it's only that, in the ME, words like 'just', 'unjust', 'justice' seem to have no meaning. " By way of illustration, he talked about Egypt(!), "where I lived for 18 months," and asked, "What's just about studying as hard as you can and doing the best you can, but being denied a job because your family doesn't have any connections?"

Yes, quite unjust, but how, I thought, can being denied the job of your choice be up there with the nonexistent prospects of a typical resident of Gaza who has had both his country and his life stolen (or even taken), just as his father's life, and his grandfather's, right back to the Catastrophe of 1948, had been stolen, and who now finds himself under siege (and undernourished) in the world's largest open-air prison? Another irrelevant story followed, about a wealthy Cairene friend whose light-fingered chauffeur had died in police custody.

The moral? "By the time I got to Jerusalem 'justice' as a concept was on its last legs. I know they say you need moral outrage to be a good journalist. I'm not sure that's the case when it comes to covering the ME. In fact, I think you can end up being outraged all the time, and in the process miss what's going on."

Here was a man who couldn't see the wood for the trees, one who could rattle off one case of personal injustice after the other to the point where he's convinced that the Middle East is a place apart, a morality-free zone. One can see him sipping his lattes in Sydney in the coming months, and telling the old joke about the frog and the scorpion: how the scorpion persuades the frog to carry him across the Red Sea on his back after first promising him that he will not sting him to death, which would mean suicide for them both. Halfway across, the scorpion stings the frog. 'Why did you do that?' asks the frog. 'Now we're both going to die!' 'This is the Middle East', replies the scorpion, as they both descend to a watery grave. Hardaker may not "miss what's going on" on the surface, but he appears to miss an understanding of the underlying dynamics at work in Israel's unrelenting, decades long, no-holds-barred project of wresting Palestine from its indigenous Arab population.

There were cliches: "In the end there's power, and how you can use it to your advantage. There's a great phrase to capture the strange alliances that form in the Middle East, it's 'the best of enemies'. How else to explain a secular government like Syria hosting the leaders of the Islamic Hamas movement, especially when not too many years ago, then president, Hafez al-Assad ordered an operation which killed something like 20,000 members of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas' fellow travellers, just to teach them a lesson. Or how else to explain the sudden transformation of the Palestinian Fatah movement from a group of so-called 'terrorists' to best friends of the US Government? The rise of Hamas has made them the best of enemies."

On Planet Middle East, politics is all about Power, while here in the Real World it's all about Principle, right? And Religion is sooo important that an alliance between Syria and Hamas is inexplicable, even though Israel is breathing down both their necks, right? And that, "not too many years ago" - if Hardaker had done his homework, he'd have known that while Assad was tangling with the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas had yet to be born. As for the Fatah-US alliance, what's so "sudden" about that? Arafat and Fatah had been pinning his hopes on the Dishonest Broker for well over a decade. What did I say about the wood and the trees?

There was homey wisdom: "A Canadian colleague of mine believes 3 years is enough to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He knows a guy who snapped at the start of his fourth year, he says, because of the lies. An American newspaper couple...is heading out of town after 5 years, feeling tired from it all. Why? 'The lies, the lies, the lies', Craig says. Personally, I don't find all the lying, coming from both sides, to be the problem. For me the difficulty is grappling with the various truths, the multitude of various Palestinian and Israeli groups who are certain that their vision of this land - its past and its future - is the right vision. The big picture of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and indeed the whole Middle East, can be confusing and confounding."

It's all just too hard, isn't it? But is it? Only if your premise, like Hardaker's, is a false equivalence between the two sides. Only if you can't see who's doing the hammering and who's being hammered. Only if you can't see the wood for the trees.

There were platitudes: "There was the time Israeli border guards killed a 10 year-old Palestinian girl who happened to be near a demonstration...Her father just happened to be a former militant, a man who once carried a gun, but gave it up to work for peace with a joint Israeli-Palestinian group. It was, as the cliche has it, a cruel irony. But here's what's wonderful: despite what happened, that man swore that the death of his little girl would only make him work harder for peace."

The assumptions, the assumptions! As a "former militant," the Palestinian was once ipso facto a warmongering fanatic, and so, an enemy of peace. Only by giving up the gun could he become a peacemaker. Israelis, of course, are never warmongering militants, they're border guards or soldiers or armed settlers, peacekeepers in fact, and hence peacemakers. What's more, these trigger-happy (but peacekeeping) folk not only get to keep their guns, but can even shoot the children of reformed Palestinian militants without running the risk of being seen as warmongering militarist bullies by the 'confused and confounded' Hardakers of the international media.

That the Palestinians have little option but recourse to violence seems far from obvious to Hardaker. Given that they are up against a ruthless enemy who will only get off their case if they give up their rights and pack their bags, they will, as Canadian philosopher, Michael Neumann, correctly points out, "continue to choose, sometimes violence, sometimes nonviolence, most often a mixture of the two. They will presumably base their choices, as they have always done, on their assessment of the political realities. It is a sort of insolent naivete to suppose that, in their weakness, they should defy the lessons of history and cut off half their options. The notion that a people (in any sense of the word) can free itself literally by allowing their captors to walk all over them is in historical terms a fantasy. In short, the Palestinians had to use violence of some sort: it might not work, but there was at least some historical precedent for it working." [The Case Against Israel, p 135]

When one listens to hacks such as Hardaker, it is well to recall the words of veteran BBC correspondent, Tim Llewellyn: "Since the Palestinians began their armed uprising against Israel's military occupation three years and eight months ago, British television and radio's reporting of it has been, in the main, dishonest - in concept, approach and execution. In my judgement as a journalist and Middle East specialist, the broadcasters' language favours the occupying soldiers over the occupied Arabs, depicting the latter, essentially, as alien tribes threatening the survival of Israel, rather than vice versa. The struggle between Israel and the Palestinians is shown, most especially on mainstream bulletins, as a battle between two 'forces', possessed equally of right and wrong and responsibility. It is the tyranny of spurious equivalence." [The Observer, 20/6/04]

For what it's worth (not very much in my opinion, obviously), Hardaker's farewell to this can of worms may be found at: http://www.abc.net.au/correspondents/content/2008/s2152829.htm