Keshev's research team has analyzed media coverage of Israel's disengagement from Gaza during the weeks preceding implementation of the plan and as it was being carried out. We reviewed all reports on the major newscasts on television channels 1,2, and 10, and in the three major daily newspapers, Ha'aretz, Yediot Ahronot, and Ma’ariv, during the period from August 1, 2005 through August 24, 2005.
A total of more than 2,000 news items was analyzed.
Our analysis indicates a number of salient patterns of coverage and editing:
Overstating the threat posed by those opposed to disengagement and emphasizing extreme scenarios:
Throughout the weeks before the disengagement, and during the evacuation itself, the Israeli media repeatedly warned of potential violent confrontation between settlers and security forces. These scenarios, which never materialized, took over the headlines. Over 1,000 news items dealt with settlers' protests against the disengagement. More than 600 of these actually included important information mitigating the extreme forecasts. However, these were systematically relegated to back pages and buried deep in the newscasts, often under misleading headlines. The 500 items that reiterated extreme scenarios received major headlines. While reporters did send in information about moderate tendencies before and during disengagement, editorial practices assigned it lesser importance, delivering instead one dominant, ominous message: THE POLICE DECLARES HIGH ALERT STARTING TOMORROW, ALMOST LIKE A STATE OF WAR (Channel 1 News, main headline, August 14, 2005). The discrepancy between the relatively calm reality emerging from in most stories and the overall picture reflected in the headlines is evident in every aspect of the disengagement story: in the suppression of information about the voluntary collection of weapons held by the settlers in the Gaza Strip; in reporting exaggerated numbers of right-wing protesters who infiltrated the Strip before the evacuation; in misrepresentation of the purpose of settler protest (which was an exercise in public relations, not a true attempt to thwart the disengagement plan); and in playing down coordinated efforts between the Israeli security forces and the settlers.
The price for misrepresentation was paid, at least in part, by the settlers, whose public image was radicalized unjustifiably. When it finally emerged that the evacuation had been completed with no violent confrontation between Jews, general anxiety gave way to a proud sense of unity, as if Israeli society had proven to itself, as Ma’ariv's editor Amnon Dankner wrote, that “we went through this together”. Instead of examining how it got caught up in horror scenarios, the media chose to give Israeli society, and especially its security forces, a pat on the back.
Magnification of the National Trauma
The sense of anxiety transmitted by the media was compounded by an additional, equally dramatic element. All the media portrayed disengagement as a traumatic event on a national scale. The settlers were being traumatized, the evacuating forces were being traumatized, and the Israeli public at large was experiencing the trauma along with them. From the beginning of August until the end of the evacuation, more than 1,200 news items recreated the heart-breaking story of pain and emotional hardship experienced by all those involved. The media was full of melodramatic headlines such as FINAL EMBRACE; FAREWELL TO GAZA; TEARFULLY; and even DADDY, HOW DO YOU PACK THE SEA? Large photos showed images of tears and suffering - settlers' tears for a paradise lost (IT'S ONLY THE SPIRIT; SEPARATION PANGS; THE BLOOD WILL REMAIN HERE FOREVER), as well as the hardship experienced by the evacuating troops. Head of Southern Command Major-General Dan Harel expressed this feeling well on the front page of Ha'aretz on August 15, 2005, with the epic statement: THE IDF HAS BEEN CHOSEN AS THE TOOL FOR THIS TRAGEDY.
Against the backdrop of this well-publicized tragedy, correspondents reported bits and pieces of information reflecting a more complex reality that hardly ever made it to the headlines. For instance, reports about settlers who expressed optimism about their new location were marginalized, and the advantages of alternative housing provided for them were hardly discussed. Moreover, during the entire month the media rarely dealt with the comparison begging to be made between the settlers' plight and the suffering experienced by other groups in Israeli society. Similarly, the media's preoccupation with the soldiers' predicament hardly mentioned the large number of soldiers wounded and killed over the years while protecting Gaza's settlements.
The obsessive preoccupation with the settlers' plight must be considered against the media's almost complete dismissal of the protracted suffering that the settlements caused Gaza's Palestinian residents. Very rarely did the media engage in realistic, complex discussion of the settlements' history and their role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Dismissal of the Palestinian Side of the Story
The framing of the disengagement as an internal Israeli tragedy also meant that the Palestinians hardly figured as part of the coverage of the evacuation. The Israeli media, for example, consistently ignored the Palestinian Authority's effective security arrangements during and after the disengagement, most of which had been coordinated with the IDF. Throughout the period, many senior sources in the Israeli defense establishment pointed out that the Palestinians had acted in an impressive way, and that their operations had played a central role in speeding up the evacuation. Some of them spoke openly of “Palestinian restraint”. But although assessments by “security sources” typically almost automatically make headlines, in this case they were systematically marginalized. 96 of the 102 reports on this topic were buried inside larger stories, reports and supplements. Only six such reports made headlines.
The Palestinians “earned” headlines mainly under negative circumstances. Positive evaluations of their deployment were played down, but when one negative evaluation (which was eventually proven wrong) was printed, it made a front-page headline in Ma’ariv: SECURITY SOURCES: TERROR MIGHT DELAY EVACUATION (Ma’ariv, August 4, 2005). It should be noted that on page 4 of that very same issue, a report mentioned that “during the past days there has been considerable improvement in the level of coordination between the IDF and the Palestinian security forces”. But after the withdrawal, when thousands of Palestinians entered the evacuated settlements, they suddenly appeared on all the newspapers' front pages and newscast headlines. These told of rioting, burning and looting: THE PALESTINIANS DID NOT WAIT TILL DAWN […] TO BURN, LOOT AND BE MERRY; THE PALESTINIANS CELEBRATED ON THE SETTLEMENTS' RUINS, TOOK ANYTHING THEY COULD FIND, AND WRECKED THE SYNAGOGUES; THE PALESTINIANS ARE TAKING OVER GAZA AND BURNING SYNAGOGUES. This story was also presented in a one-sided manner: while correspondents reported on people collecting garbage and leftover items from abandoned buildings, as well as on the PA policemen's attempt to protect facilities in the settlements, the headlines told of general looting and rioting.
Suppression of the Disengagement's Goals and Implications
Until completion of the disengagement, the newspapers and newscasts presented it as a necessary step, calling for no explanation or criticism. The media's support of the plan was severely criticized by the political right. At the same time, the media tacitly adopted the disengagement's planners' explicit assumption that there was “no partner” on the other side for a coordinated diplomatic effort. They presented the story as a one-sided affair, an internal experience affecting only Israeli society. An entire set of questions never appeared in the coverage: What would the status of the Gaza Strip be after the withdrawal? What about the passage between Gaza and the West Bank? Had Israel coordinated this move as well as the future situation in Gaza with the PA? What was the diplomatic significance of the disengagement? During this period, such questions appeared 63 times on the op-ed pages, but only 25 times on the news pages – mostly without headlines. A few reporters mentioned disagreements within the Israeli establishment regarding the “day after” disengagement. The editors chose not to highlight the issue. Similarly, Prime Minister Sharon's future plans and their implications were not properly discussed during and after disengagement. Real public discussion about the diplomatic significance of the disengagement never took place. In its coverage, the media disconnected the event from the overall context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, presenting it as an episode within a restricted present, detached from the past and from future diplomatic implications, an event occurring within an Israeli society torn between violent and hurt settlers and heroic evacuators unrelated to any of the other parties, most conspicuously the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. The coverage reflected and magnified those components of the narrative imposed by the establishment, abandoning its role in terms of critique, complexity and scope.
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