Many Boundaries and One Big One / Christoph Schult
In summer 2006, a few months after I became DER SPIEGEL’s correspondent in Jerusalem, I was approached within one week by two German readers of our magazine. The first told me that, since I’d become correspondent, DER SPIEGEL’s Middle East reporting had become very pro-Palestinian. Some days later, the other reader told me how pro-Israel the magazine had become with me being in charge.
I thought to myself: If the impressions are so contradictory, I must be doing a pretty good job. But how can it be that such different images arise? I think it is because of the readers’ own prejudices. Most of them tend to one or the other side of the conflict and when they see a story that conflicts with their view, they remember it more than all the other stories that are in line with their position. And some of the readers take this as proof that the media is against their view of the conflict.
Are there boundaries of free speech for a German correspondent who covers Israelis and Palestinians? First of all, there is one formal boundary: Every foreign journalist who gets registered with the Israeli Government Press Office, commits himself to the rules of the Israeli censor. But most of the time that does not limit the freedom of the press. Okay, one is not allowed to write where exactly a Katyusha rocket from Hizbollah fell down. But this is not an important piece of information for the reader and the censorship makes sense: No journalists wants to help Hizbollah improve their targeting.
Even in cases where the censor is completely suppressing any kind of reporting like in the case of the Israeli attack against a Syrian target in September 2007, the foreign press is in a lucky situation. We can write about it, especially when there is more than one author for a story. When my name appears next to others, the Israeli censor cannot distinguish which parts were written by whom.
More interesting are those boundaries of free speech which are imposed upon the media by the journalists themselves. For a German journalist, there is of course one outstanding sensitive issue: the Holocaust. Take for example the poor situation of many Holocaust survivors in Israel. It is a good story since it fulfills one central criteria of journalism: It is news for the German reader. But can a German paper publish such a story? In my view, it can and it must. Of course, the magazine’s editors who are responsible for the magazine’s public standing, are more careful with such a story. But in the end, it is the tone of the story which makes the music. I am convinced that you can publish any story if only the intonation is right.
In a lecture, Eldad Beck, Yediot Aharonot’s correspondent in Berlin, once said that the German correspondents in Israel have a complex with the Holocaust. And in order to downplay the cruelty of the Holocaust, the German correspondents in Israel overstress the suffering of the Palestinians at the hands of the Israelis. I think Beck is wrong. If there ever had been a tendency to stress the Palestinian suffering more than the Israeli suffering, this has changed significantly since Sep 11th. If you look at the reports about the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit or the start of the second Lebanon war, you can find a lot of sympathy towards Israel in the German media.
From my experience, something else is true: Because of the Holocaust, there is a certain expectation on the Israeli side that German correspondents write more favourably about Israel than the French or the British. The outgoing Israeli Ambassador in Berlin, Shimon Stein, once discussed Middle East reporting with a mixed group of Israeli and German journalists. Stein blamed us, the German colleagues, for not using the official term „targeted killings” which the Israeli government uses for the attacks on alleged terrorists in the Gaza strip. After a while, the Israeli colleagues came to our help. How can you demand that the German journalists use the government term, they asked, if not even we – the Israeli journalists – use this expression?
Another boundary of free speech is created by stereotypes. One example comes out of my own magazine: In 2002, DER SPIEGEL published a newspiece on the fact that more and more Israelis were applying for German citizenship. Next to it, the photo editors put a picture of ultra-orthodox Jews praying at the Western Wall. Is this antisemitic? No, it is silly. The photo editors were simply looking for a picture which the reader would immediately recognize as Israel: Jews at the Western Wall. But in publishing this photo DER SPIEGEL was conveying the wrong message. It isn’t ultra-orthodox Israelis who apply for German citizenship but secular ones. But luckily, this does not happen often in a high quality magazine with such a large number of experts on its staff.
The biggest boundary of speech in Middle East reporting in my view is lack of context. This is not due to state policies, but to the mere nature of Television and Hard News. Almost every Kassam rocket fired by Palestinian militants on Israel is reported in the news. Every meeting of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas is shown on TV. When any and every small thing happens, editors tend to publish it. The problem is that there is often only time for the event as such and not for the context. This is counterproductive. It leads the viewer to think that Israelis and Palestinians are crazy and irrational. As a consequence, they get tired of this region.
