Part of our Shattered Lens series on photo bias focused on how the wire services use bars in their images to promote the Palestinian narrative of suffering and the impression of Palestinians as “prisoners” of Israeli brutality.
The accompanying AFP / Getty photo in an opinion piece in Australia’s The Age looked very familiar:
In fact it was just this exact photo that served as an illustration of how wire agency photographers resort to using camera angles and staging techniques to present a distorted (and worse) picture of a given situation. We showed, using a sequence of photos from the scene, how these Palestinian children were positioned behind a gate in a pre-planned photo-op in Gaza to give the impression of a prison.
The photo was staged – see Shattered Lens: Putting Palestinians Behind Bars to see how it was done.
As for The Age’s op-ed, the author resorts to presenting Israel and the conflict with the Palestinians in racial terms, referring to Israel as a “state based on a pure race” and “the laws, weapons and propaganda that seek to safeguard the ”purity” of a Jewish-only state“.
Israel’s Jewish character is deemed to be a “model of racial division” while “road access is racially determined“. This, despite the fact that Israeli Arabs have the same rights to drive on roads in the West Bank as Jewish Israelis.
So we have a staged photo and accusations of racism meant to drive the apartheid analogy. The Age really has sunk pretty low.
