Amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict, Vice News on Wednesday released Inside the Battle for Jerusalem, a documentary that purportedly portrays the events in eastern Jerusalem over the last three weeks. Within 24 hours, the video garnered over a million views on YouTube. While Vice promoted it as “one of the most comprehensive reports from [the eastern Jerusalem neighborhood of] Sheikh Jarrah and Al Aqsa,” this couldn’t be further from the truth.
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Almost every other sentence uttered by Vice‘s reporter on the ground, Hind Hassan (formerly of Al Jazeera), is missing crucial facts and context or contains falsehoods. Below, HonestReporting dissects Vice‘s three most blatant breaches of journalistic standards:
1. Turning a Blind Eye to Palestinian Violence
Who’s to blame for the escalation in Jerusalem? After watching the Vice documentary, an uninformed viewer could be forgiven for thinking that Israeli police on May 8 attacked innocent Muslim worshippers at Al-Aqsa Mosque. Without providing any context, Vice opens the documentary with claims like: “The Israeli police has been arresting loads of Palestinian children. Palestinians are retaliating because so many young men have been taken away by the police.”
In reality, the tensions in the city had already intensified around the start of the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan, and Israel was not the instigator. On April 15, a Palestinian man attacked two ultra-orthodox Israeli boys on the Jerusalem light rail. The footage of the unprovoked attack went viral on the video-sharing app TikTok. In the days that followed, more and more clips of attacks on unsuspecting Israeli civilians started appearing on the platform.
Further Reading:
Simultaneously, young Palestinians staged violent protests at the Old City’s Damascus Gate. Hundreds of rioters, some of them hurling fireworks, rocks, and petrol bombs, clashed with Israeli police for nights on end. The riots left dozens of police officers and innocent Israeli civilians injured. On April 23 and 24, Gaza-based terrorists further fanned the flames of conflict by firing dozens of rockets into the Jewish state.
Tensions in Jerusalem culminated during the last days of Ramadan. The Al-Aqsa compound on the Temple Mount saw thousands of Palestinians chanting battle cries like “Ya Qassam, Ya Habib, bomb, bomb, Tel Aviv,” while waving Hamas flags. Yet even though Vice‘s Hind Hassan was present at the Al-Aqsa compound when mobs attacked Israeli riot police with large stones, fireworks, glass bottles, and other weapons, wounding 17 officers, her “comprehensive report” fails to include this significant development.
Further Reading:
Instead, Inside the Battle for Jerusalem chose to turn its camera on only when Israeli security forces tried to restore order. “It’s nighttime prayers for Palestinian Muslims, and this year, Israeli forces showed up unannounced,” Hassan falsely claims. “There is Israeli police actually inside, in the grounds of Al-Aqsa. That’s what triggered the protest and the anger today.”
However, as has been the case over the last few weeks, this is a narrative that has perpetuated the notion that Israel is at fault for taking defensive action. Vice took this glaring falsehood a step further and ignored virtually all footage of Palestinian violence. Only at the end of the video, and for a fleeting few seconds, does the documentary show clips of rock-hurling Palestinians. A classic case of selective omission.
2. A Total Lack of Context
Clearly, Israel didn’t just “storm Al-Aqsa” and arrest random, peace-loving Palestinians. But that’s just one example of Hind Hassan’s refusal to follow basic journalistic norms. Important context surrounding the conflict is also withheld from Vice‘s audience, with the most important omission being how the internal Palestinian Authority (PA) power struggle influenced the decision by Palestinian factions to escalate the situation.
PA President Mahmoud Abbas in April canceled legislative elections, originally scheduled for May. Since then, tensions have been rising between Abbas’ Fatah faction, which essentially governs the West Bank by fiat, and Hamas. In response, Gaza’s rulers have increased their incitement against the Jewish state in what many analysts construe as an attempt to bolster its credentials by demonstrating its anti-Israel bona fides.
Further Reading:
As the Ramallah-based opinion pollster Khalil Shikaki put it: “Hamas leaders want to show that they are the real defenders of Jerusalem, and that Abbas is just a tool of the other side.” This assessment was widely shared in the international press, and both Israeli and foreign experts pointed to the intra-Palestinian conflict as being the key to understanding why Hamas chose to escalate when it did. Yet, Vice‘s viewers are left in the dark.
Similarly, context is missing about the property dispute in the eastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah / Shimon HaTzadik. At 3:27, Hind Hassan merely states that “Israel claims Jews historically owned this land,” without mentioning that the Palestinian residents have actually acknowledged that a Jewish organization is in fact the legal owner and that the current tenants are simply refusing to pay rent.
3. Delegitimizing Israel’s Anti-terror Op
In the last two minutes of the video, Vice finally focuses on violent acts committed by Palestinians, but does so by saying that the “militant group” Hamas fired rockets at Israel “in retaliation for the storming of Al-Aqsa.” In doing so, Hassan effectively parrots the Hamas propaganda line, opting to once again ignore the weeks-long unrest and internal Palestinian strife that had preceded the current hostilities.
Vice then shift gears, from blaming the victim to vilifying Jerusalem for responding with a “disproportionate show of force” and “leveling apartment buildings and newsrooms.” As HonestReporting has pointed out again and again (see for example here, here, and here), these allegations are patently false. Even as Hamas and other Gazan terrorist groups are putting civilians -including Palestinians – in the line of fire, Israel is carrying out the most surgically precise campaign in the history of counterterrorism.
Related Reading: AP, Al Jazeera Cry Foul After Setting Up Shop in Alleged Hamas Military Site Destroyed by IDF (with VIDEO)
In another attempt to delegitimize Israel’s operation in the Gaza Strip, Hassan claims that the Palestinian enclave is “one of the most densely populated places on earth.” This is only partly true. While the narrow land strip is indeed crowded, Gaza’s largest city isn’t even in the top 50 most densely populated cities in the world. According to 2014 data, the population density of Gaza (some 13,000 people per square mile) roughly equals that of Boston. Meanwhile, New York City is twice as densely populated.
Notably, the Israeli cities of Bnei Brak (75,000 per sq. miles) and Givatayim (49,000 per sq. miles) are far more overcrowded than Gaza. Yet, Hassan disregards that Hamas fired countless rockets at these Israeli population centers over the last ten days, endangering hundreds and thousands of civilians. Apparently, the data aren’t that interesting if they can’t be weaponized against the Jewish state.
When one-sided propaganda is advertised as objective journalism, this fuels intolerance and hatred towards Israel and Jews. In the comment section of Vice‘s documentary, remarks can be found claiming that there would be “no problem now” if Germany got its “mission done in 1945,” amongst other antisemitic comments. At a time when Jew-hatred is on the rise around the world, Vice should take its journalistic responsibility to report the truth and provide proper context more seriously.
