Since the 1982 war in Lebanon, Israel has been transformed in mainstream media from the role of David fighting Goliath to the role of Goliath punishing David. In part, this is a symptom of the rise of Israeli and Jewish revisionist historians (Avi Shlaim, Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, etc.) who began to publish their works in the 1980s; the increasing anti-Israeli biases in most Middle Eastern Studies departments at respected universities; Israel’s failure to present a concise narrative to combat the claims of their opponents; and laziness on the part of many mainstream reporters.
          A core problem is that it has become fashionable to publicly bash Israel and draw a moral equivalency between Israeli military strikes against known terrorists and the homicidal terrorists who seek to kill the maximum amount of civilians by strapping on bombs packed with nails. With the growing anti-Israel sentiment in the mainstream media, Americans who support Israel, value America’s security, and understand that there is a global war on political Islam that must be waged and won, will not likely be armed with enough facts to counter absurd claims in Western media and on Western campuses.
         

          The trend in the mainstream press is to publish rumors in a 50-point font and later publish half-hearted, 9-point font retractions long after the damage has been done. This was the case during Israel’s Operation Defensive Shield in Jenin in 2002 where a so-called massacre was not only reported by the world press, but also echoed in the statements of UN envoys such as Terje Roed-Larsen. This was a case where the media’s apparent preference was for Israel to do nothing after 30 Israelis were slaughtered by a Palestinian suicide bomber during Passover. Their preference, it appeared, was that Israel should not act on hard intelligence that demonstrated that Jenin was an Islamic Jihad stronghold. In this operation, Israel decided to use ground forces rather than drop 500 lbs bombs from the air in order to spare Palestinian civilians. Nevertheless, the media rushed to disseminate as fact the false Palestinian accusations that Israel had engaged in a massacre.
          During the 2006 war in Lebanon Hizballah moved corpses from site to site to augment their dramatic presentations. In Hizballah’s equation, the more civilian casualties the better as it serves to enrage the Middle East masses. They staged several emergencies reported by CNN’s Nic Robertson on 24 July 2006. It essentially provided a terrorist organization with an uncritical forum to advertise their propaganda. The correction only came later, in the little watched show, “Reliable Sources.” Again, the mainstream media’s irresponsible reporting only made a half-hearted attempt to correct the record after the damage was already done.
          When changing words and biases in media reports is not enough, captions under photos have been falsified such as the 2000 case of Tuvia Grossman’s AP photo carried in the New York Times. Not only did the newspaper’s caption convert an Israeli Jew to a Palestinian Muslim and change the role of the soldier pictured from a protecting hero to a harassing villain, but they also managed to change its location from the Arab neighborhood of Wadi al-Joz to the Temple Mount. (Click here for the story behind that picture as told by Tuvia Grossman himself)
          This was at the same time that the mainstream media falsely affixed responsibility for Muhammad al-Dura’s death on Israel, creating a potent Palestinian symbol and fueling the fire at the start of the latest war of attrition in 2000. Tunisia went so far as to create a postage stamp in honor of the farce.
          When facts get in the way of photo captions and news reports, doctored photos have become more common in mainstream media, such as the photoshopped picture taken by Reuters of a single plume of smoke rising over Lebanon in 2006, multiplied and cloned over the photograph for maximum propagandistic value.
          Israel needs to reclaim certain words in order to begin to change their problematic image in the media. Start by countering the Palestinian rhetoric of “It’s the occupation,” by saying, “It’s our existence.” Israel also cannot afford to let certain words and concepts go misused repeatedly in the press and then be late in formulating responses. An example: Since 29 September 2000, the world has called the Palestinian-Israeli war of attrition the Intifada. This word is full of meaning in Arabic (“to cast off”) and carries implications in the West. What happened in the late 1980s was an Intifada as the Palestinians themselves named it. It was rocks and Molotov cocktails against tanks and gunfire (as presented in the media), and carried out by the average Palestinian on the street. It was a popular attempt at a revolution – something Arabs have called a Thawra (revolution) for centuries before distinguishing the Palestinian revolt as an Intifada.
          Israel should never have allowed the word Intifada to be appended to “Second” and "The Al-Aqsa" in 2000. This was not a popular revolt but a well organized and planned Palestinian war launched against Israel during peace negotiations with the purpose of gaining Israeli concessions both politically and in world opinion. By allowing this current war to be labeled The Second Intifada or The Al-Aqsa Intifada, Israel has allowed Palestinian militants to be the subject and definition – it became about Palestinian demands and Israeli responses.
          Israel should have called it a war from the outset and continued to call it a war no matter how anyone in the media defined it. Israeli officials should make this correction during interviews by saying that the situation should be called what it is: an organized and planned war launched by the Palestinian leadership against Israeli civilians and Israel – whose existence they do not accept – using human bombs. It is a war, or a war of attrition because Israel tries to avoid civilian casualties, which results in the low-intensity warfare seen today.
          When Israel begins to focus on winning the battle of words and terminology it will become easier to tell a better-developed and concise narrative to the media. The Israeli government also has a responsibility to keep the MFA informed and they failed to do so during the 2006 Lebanon War. There are several other helpful steps that could be taken but it begins with a fundamental shift in their media relations theories and strategies.