It’s difficult to see when you close your eyes
The superficial coverage of the demonstrations against Israel on US campuses is a direct continuation of the heavy handed censorship imposed by the Israeli media on coverage of events in the Gaza Strip
By Anat Saragusti • Translated by Sol Salbe
It’s been a long time indeed since we’ve seen as superficial coverage here as that devoted to protests on the campuses of prestigious universities in the United States.
On Channel 12 News, Yuna Leibzon, in a report broadcast yesterday (April 24), used vison documenting demonstrations outside the Columbia University campus, in which a handful of people called for Tel Aviv to be burnt down. She also displayed a sign of a single masked demonstrator with an antisemitic expression. Like the right-wing tweeter dregs who search for a lone Palestinian flag during demonstrations against the judicial coup in order to label the entire demonstration as being in support of terrorism.
Neria Kraus, a Channel 13 News correspondent in New York, reported yesterday on Channel 13’s various current affairs broadcasts from the campus of Columbia University. Kraus used three terms interchangeably in her reports: “pro-Palestinian demonstrations,” “anti-Israel demonstrations,” and “antisemitic demonstrations,” as if they were synonyms.
When Gil Tamari tried to explain to Udi Segal on Channel 13 News that these were not antisemitic demonstrations but anti-Israeli demonstrations, his remarks were cut short and the presenter moved on to talk about congressional approval of US military aid to Israel. In Raviv Drucker’s studio, on Channel 13’s “War Zone” program, Professor Rivka Carmi, former president of Ben-Gurion University, participated and added her bit to the framing of it being antisemitism. Again, without giving things context.
The interchanging of the terms creates the feeling that Jews are being persecuted in New York, and enthusiastic journalists were standing guard at the entrance to the campus in northwest Manhattan reporting from the heart of darkness as if they were on a national mission in the enemy’s rear.
This is the same media that has refrained for more than six months from doing its job and showing viewers, listeners and readers in Israel what is happening in Gaza. In the same way, only those who access media understand that this is a huge, swelling wave of pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel demonstrations. Not a weird outbbreak of antisemitism.
These two facts — the heavy-handed censorship applied by the Israeli media to coverage of the population in the Gaza Strip and the framing of pro-Palestinian demonstrations in the United States — are closely interlinked. Those who are not aware of what is happening in the Gaza Strip cannot comprehend the reaction to this by those who are.
We, the media consuming public in Israel, are not as a rule shown what is happening in Gaza as it happens. With the exception of readers of Haaretz and a few other subscribers to niche news outlets, most mainstream media consumers have not seen for six months what Israel has been doing in Gaza. They haven’t seen the humanitarian crisis, they haven’t seen the dead children, they haven’t seen the tens and thousands of bodies being recovered from under the rubble, they haven’t seen the thousands of orphans, they haven’t seen the famine, and the absence of medicine, water, and food.
In Israel, you get to see only what the military wants us to see, and only what won’t hurt the viewers’ feelings. Most of us — perhaps rightly so — are preoccupied with the October 7 massacre and the 133 abductees still languishing in the tunnels in Gaza. But the world sees other things. The world sees what we are not shown.
And against the background of the pictures that reach the news broadcasts all over the Western world and in general, people become angry and criticism of Israel develops. This is a legitimate criticism. It is legitimate to ask why so many children should be killed, even if it was not done intentionally.
It is legitimate to demand an end to the war. It is legitimate to call for an end to the Occupation, it is legitimate to demand the liberation of Palestine from the yoke of the military Occupation that has been going on for more than half a century.
Every one of those demands has been expressed here in Israel for decades in different formats, using different formulations, in slogans on the streets, in opinion pieces, in academic studies, in hundreds and thousands of articles in the media, in debates, among endless panels in television and radio studios.
There is not a thing that has not already been said here. And that wasn’t antisemitic. That was, and still is, legitimate criticism of the policies of successive Israeli governments for generations. By the way, even saying things against Zionism is a legitimate position that is protected by freedom of expression and freedom of protest. In Israel, too, there are those who define themselves as anti-Zionists. They are not part of the consensus, but holding those sorts of views is not a crime either.
The massacre carried out by Hamas put the Palestinian issue back on the global agenda. Israel is not coming out clean out of this discourse. Certainly not that Israel which is led by a series of messianic, annexation-driving right-wing ministers who are now promoting settlements in Gaza. This is the context within which these protests arise on US campuses.
We can avert our gaze and say, well, Smotrich is not the State of Israel. But he is. He is the Treasurer [Minister of Finance in the Israeli parlance], and Orit Strook is a minister in the Israeli government, and so is Itamar Ben-Gvir. So when students at Columbia University chant Free Palestine, it’s a legitimate call given that Palestine has been under occupation for more than half a century. There is nothing antisemitic about it.
And yes, there do exist some extremist slogans which are heard on the edges of these demonstrations, such as the call to burn Tel Aviv or destroy Israel. In Israel, too, we often hear the slogans “may your village be burnt out” or “Death to the Arabs” at demonstrations, protests or even during run-of-mill football matches throughout the country.
Therefore, portraying all student demonstrations on US campuses as a wave of antisemitism is not what serious journalists do. Serious journalism should have given context, serious journalism should have distinguished between antisemitism — which is unacceptable in all its forms — and anti-Israelism and criticism of Israel, legitimate criticism that is also heard in Israel.
Serious journalism should have given the overview and not get carried away yelling “antisemitism” at every call against the way the Israeli government is conducted.
Anat Saragusti (Hebrew: ענת סרגוסטי) is an Israeli journalist and a jurist. Saragusti is in charge of the freedom of the press at the Union of Journalists in Israel.
Translated by Sol Salbe, Middle East News Service
Hebrew original:
