The UN Human Rights Council will be releasing its report on Operation Protective Edge any day now.
Fallout from the William Schabas report could reach the International Criminal Court, where Palestinians are already pushing to put Israeli leaders on trial. Repercussions may reach the UN, where a French initiative on Palestinian statehood will top the agenda after the June 30 deadline on Iranian nuclear talks.
The worst case scenario? A chain reaction of headlines demonizing Israel while the report undermines its moral standing and its ability to fight terror. Should the report make Palestinian victimhood more resonant. efforts to isolate Israel would increase.
Here are three media angles to beware ahead of the Schabas report’s release.
1. The Halo Effect
The halo effect refers to the ability of our impression of people, institutions, or brands to influence our feelings and thoughts about their character. This applies to reporters too, who report what they hear from respectable personalities, government officials, or international organizations without question or independent verification. Will reporters paint the UNHRC and its investigators as apolitical and unbiased?
If journalists would pierce the Council’s veil, they would have to:
A) Acknowledge the UNHRC is made up of human rights abusers who are in no position to judge Israel, such as China, Cuba, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela.
B) Make transparent the UN’s reliance on unreliable Palestinian sources and non-governmental organizations for disputed facts like a basic casualty count and breakdowns between civilians and combatants.
C) Acknowledge Schabas’s own expressed biases, and how — despite his resignation — those biases influence the commission’s own internal dynamics, including the real authors of the UNHRC report.
This is all the background for why Israel refused to cooperate with the Schabas inquiry.
Will the mainstream media coverage take in the halo and its aura of infallibility? Or will reporters skeptically scrutinize the Schabas report?
2. Disproportionate Force
More Palestinians died during the war than Israelis, a point reinforced by a steady stream of context-free daily infographics. But does that mean the IDF fought disproportionately?
Col. Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, explained in an interview what proportionality means on the battlefield, why people are misled by the abused term and draw faulty conclusions about it:
The principle of proportionality is a concept in the law of armed conflict defined in the Geneva Convention. It doesn’t relate in any way to “you’ve got 2,000 Palestinians dead and 100 Israelis dead.” That doesn’t even come into it.
If you’ve got a rocket launcher and there’s a group of 10 people around it, or 20 people or whatever it might be, if I hit that rocket launcher, then 20 people might die. If I don’t hit it, then the rocket will launch and it will fly towards Israel. Now it might be knocked out of the sky by Iron Dome, but you can’t assume. You’ve got to assume it won’t be. You’ve got to assume it’s going to go into a school room and kill 30 people, or even 10 people, or 5 people. And therefore, by attacking that, that’s proportionate. It’s proportionate to the risk that would be presented if you didn’t attack. That’s the proportionality principle.
And as retired Australian Major-General Jim Molan pointed out in The Australian (click via Google News):
Many do not understand it is not illegal to kill civilians in war as long as that is not the purpose of your actions, hence the appalling term “collateral damage”.
3. Moral Equivalence
Hamas and Israel fought a war with each other. Both sides had domestic and international audiences to account for, both sides had spokespeople making their cases in the media, and both sides had dead to bury and wounds to lick. But that’s where superficial parallels end.
The war began with the kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers, escalated under barrages of rockets, and continued despite repeated cease fire offers to Hamas.
The IDF fought to protect Israeli citizens while Hamas fought to make martyrs of Palestinian citizens. Hamas placed its rocket launchers, weapons dumps, sniper nests, tunnel entrances, and command centers in and around schools, hospitals, mosques and UN facilities, while the IDF warned civilians ahead of attacks, called off airstrikes due to the presence of women and children, setting what some experts in the laws of warfare said are “an unreasonable precedent for other democratic countries” in wartime.
One year after Operation Protective Edge, Israel released its official report on the war. There are no signs of any parallel Palestinian inquiry.
There’s no equivalence between Israel and Hamas.
* * *
Much of what the world knows about Operation Protective Edge comes from foreign reporters who flocked to Gaza during the crisis. Unfortunately, the shortcomings of the war correspondents earned them the 2014 Dishonest Reporting Award.
Whether by intent or ignorance, a great many of these journalists fueled Hamas’s narrative through a combination of factors: naive “parachute journalism,” Hamas intimidation of reporters, contentious casualty counts that were used as a twisted moral barometer, and a lack of transparency.
The Schabas report remains to be seen. Just be careful of some of the media spin games.
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Featured image: CC BY-NC flickr/Israel Defense Forces and Schabas via YouTube/RobertHJacksonCenter with modifications CC BY-SA HonestReporting
