‘Pallywood’ and the Art of Anti-Jewish Propaganda
Even before October 7th, the mainstream media have consistently shown blatant bias against Israel. But ever since, there has been an explosion of anti-Israel reporting. Richard Landes explains why.
Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.
This is a guest essay written by Dena Tauber, a New York-based attorney who discovered a passion for Israel and Zionism following October 7th.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
If you are Jewish, or Jewish adjacent, or just care about truth in reporting, you may be at your wit’s end trying to make sense of the mainstream media’s aggressively anti-Jewish and anti-Israel biases in their coverage of October 7th and the resulting war.
Anyone who didn’t know better would almost certainly believe that Israel was randomly waging a genocidal war against the people of Gaza.
There is hardly any mention of Hamas and the savage attack on civilians that precipitated Israel’s military response. There is virtually no mention of the hostages held now for 470-plus days by brutal terrorists, where their treatment at the hands of their captors is the subject of morbid speculation. There is no mention of the near daily rocket attacks that Israelis have been made to endure.
In the 2022 book, “Can ‘The Whole World’ Be Wrong?: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad,” historian Richard Landes confronts this phenomenon in an in-depth, well-sourced assessment of how we got to this place.
Even before October 7th, the mainstream media have consistently shown blatant bias against Israel. But ever since, there has been an explosion of anti-Israel reporting. Consider this headline in The Washington Post after Israel’s daring rescue of hostages Noa Argamani, Almog Meir, Andrey Kozlov, and Shlomi Ziv by a team of Israeli special forces from civilian homes in Gaza: “More than 200 Palestinians killed in Israeli hostage raid in Gaza.”
That was the headline after Hamas slaughtered 1,200 people in Israel, stole 250 more back to Gaza, hid them in civilian homes — and, when the rescue team retrieved the hostages, Hamas operatives opened fire on the rescue team and the hostages and threw grenades at them. They did this even though they were in a crowded residential neighborhood packed with civilians.
How do we address all of the accusations based on “evidence” of Israel’s criminal conduct by way of highly flawed reports by the United Nations, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch, which are assumed to be wholly objective and their words accepted as truth?
Compound this with the war against Israel by the mainstream media, whose incendiary headlines and selective reporting produce a narrative that aligns with the story the Palestinians want to tell, paying little attention to what the Israelis say unless it can be used against them.
We know with every fiber of our being that the smear campaign against Israel is garbage, but this raises a question: If we are right, then how is it that the UN, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and countless foreign governments all agree that Israel is the aggressor in this war?
The Muhammad al-Durrah Case
Richard Landes opens the discussion by describing a modern-day blood libel by way of the Muhammad al-Durrah case, which occurred on September 30, 2000.
On that date, Charles Enderlin, senior Middle East Correspondent for France, broadcast footage from his Palestinian cameraman, accompanied by the cameraman’s “eyewitness” account of the killing of a 12-year old Palestinian boy, Muhammad al-Durrah, in the arms of his father, supposedly by Israeli gunfire.
Enderlin was not present at the time of the incident but narrated the footage as if he was, reporting that the bullets which killed the boy came from “the Israeli position.” The cameraman stated under oath that he had seen the Israelis kill the boy “in cold blood” (a statement he later denied making). The mainstream media immediately ran with the story without investigation. Sound familiar?
The footage became the global symbol of Palestinian suffering at the hand of Israeli cruelty, triggering an outpouring of violence against Jews in Israel and Europe.
The footage is also said to have precipitated the savage murder, occurring 11 days after the broadcast, of two Israelis who, upon becoming lost and entering the Palestinian city of Ramallah, had been taken into custody by Palestinian Authority police. After the Israelis were beaten to death, the bodies were thrown out the window, mutilated, and paraded around in the street.
This is the incident that inspired the bloody red hand symbol that celebrities in the U.S. are so fond of wearing, to mimic the bloody hands of one of the murderers as he displayed them in triumph from a window of the police station. While basking in the glory of the murder, they proclaimed “Revenge for the blood of Muhammad al-Durrah.”
Osama bin Laden announced that the murder of al-Durrah “at the hands of the Jews” must be avenged. The deadly terrorist attack on 9/11 occurred less than a year later.
The narrative followed the typical pattern of a blood libel: The footage, “as seen by the whole world,” demonstrated the murderous nature of the Jews and justified Muslim violence against them.
The al-Durrah story had a similar effect in Europe, especially in France and England, where the incident inspired comparisons to the Nazis. The media reporting of the incident resulted in violent outbursts against the Jews by Moslems in France cheering on the intifada and holding violent demonstrations, where they were joined by militant leftists, as well as inflammatory rhetoric proclaiming that Israel kills children. Hence the term “lethal journalism.”
From the outset, however, there were numerous irregularities with the footage which cast doubt that it represented what Enderlin and his camera man said happened. These concerns were ignored by every mainstream media outlet that reported on the story. After an investigation, it was revealed by a ballistics analysis that the fire could not have come from the Israeli position without “taking a 90-degree turn”; there was no blood where the boy was said to have been killed; and the boy was sitting behind a barrel and was shielded by his father.
It was not until 2003 when a series of investigations revealed that the entire scene had been staged. Landes obtained first-hand knowledge of the unfolding of the story, having watched the raw uncut footage with Charles Enderlin himself.
“In scene after scene,” wrote Landes, “Palestinians staged scenes of battle, injury, ambulance evacuation, panicked flight, which the cameraman deliberately filmed. There were even signs of makeup men, producers, and directors at work.”
There was no footage of the boy dying which Enderlin says he had cut. In fact, the boy was still alive at the end of the film.
‘Pallywood’
It was then that Richard Landes coined the term “Pallywood,” a phrase which captures the practice, with the complicity of the mainstream media, of shooting fake scenes to back up claims against Israel. As one Jordanian editor put it: “Fake news has a long and distinguished pedigree in the Arab world.”
Palestinians and Western journalists defend this practice as “artistic expression … [that] serves to convey the truth,” as Landes described it. In other words, the fake footage is an authentic symbol of the so-called “Israeli occupation.”
An investigative article by James Fallows published in the Atlantic Monthly concluded that al-Durrah could not have been shot dead by Israeli soldiers. He wrote:
“It now appears that the boy cannot have died in the way reported by most of the world’s media and fervently believed throughout the Islamic world. Whatever happened to him, he was not shot by the Israeli soldiers who were known to be involved in the day’s fighting … The truth about this case will probably never be determined.”
Other case studies are dissected in the book, such as the incident in the Jenin refugee camp in 2002. In response to repeated suicide bombings killing hundreds of Israeli civilians during the Second Intifada, the IDF raided the Jenin refugee camp which was the epicenter of Palestinian terrorism at the time.
The IDF went house to house looking for the terrorists in order to minimize civilian casualties rather than bombing from the air. As a result, 23 IDF soldiers lost their lives. The press accepted the claim of Palestinians that “hundreds” of Palestinians were killed by the IDF, with zero physical evidence. (One reporter observed that they could not see any dead people but “we could smell them.”)
When the hospitals turned out to be empty of injured and dead Palestinians, the press concluded that the dead must have been buried somewhere (similar to baseless assertions of large numbers of Gazan civilians being “buried underneath the rubble”).
After an investigation, when it was discovered that a total of 52-to-56 Palestinians were killed, 40 of whom were combatants. Some journalists retracted their reporting but several doubled down, including Andrea Koppel and Janine di Giovanni, who are among the most respected reporters in the field.
Progressivism, Liberalism, Anti-Imperialism, and Anti-Colonialism
Modern journalism and academia tend towards liberalism.
Richard Landes employs game theory to understand liberalism. Liberal thinking posits that, by introducing “positive-sum” dynamics in interactions with cultures which operate according to a “zero-sum” mentality, we can change their attitudes and behavior.
In a positive-sum society, adversaries work cooperatively to the benefit of both sides. Thus, the belief that “war doesn’t solve anything.” The “peace process” with the Palestinians was predicated on the rational positive-sum assumption that, offered the state they claimed to want, Palestinians would forego killing Israelis and abandon their zero-sum ideology whereby Israel’s destruction is the end-game, trumping even their own economic and civic well-being.
But what actually happens in the case of Western liberal interaction with Islamist domination ideology, is that the latter exploits the good intentions of the former. Since liberals are eager to see the best in “other” cultures, they become pawns of the Islamist demagogues. Eventually, refusing to judge human nature as good or bad caused liberal thinkers to misinterpret signs that the culture was endemically belligerent to the West and no amount of good will can change that.
Accordingly, they blame Westerners for provoking the violent behavior of the Islamist extremists. A case in point was a riot in Afghanistan which resulted in the murder of seven UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan workers, two of whom were beheaded, in response to a copy of the Qur’an being burned in Florida. This incident was described by a senior official as “understandable passions.”
In a conversation had by Landes with a colleague about suicide bombings in Israel, the colleague asked, rhetorically, “What choice do they have?” As if the Palestinians had not just been offered a Palestinian state in 96 percent of the West Bank with a portion of Israeli territories to make up for the 4 percent where Jews were living, the Gaza Strip, and with their capital in East Jerusalem. This was flatly rejected by the Palestinians’ then-leader Yasser Arafat, who promptly kicked off the Second Intifada.1
Landes calls this “humanitarian racism whereby Muslims should not be subject to moral expectations.”
Related to the “positive-sum” mentality is the “post-modern” and “post-colonial” viewpoint that came to dominate leftist thinking in the late 20th century in response to imperialism by Western society which was thought to destroy other “weaker” cultures.
This way of thinking rejects the view that Western standards are superior to any other. Eager to distance themselves from Western imperialism and the guilt they feel, they maintain that all cultures have equal value.
Thus, when Palestinians commit acts of terror that should horrify any civilized person, the leftist thinking does not accept that there is something wrong within that culture and immediately assumes that Israel must have done something equally awful to provoke it.
‘Lethal Journalism’
News consumers rightly expect reporting to reflect objective facts, and not the opinion of the reporter.
So, when an unsuspecting consumer reads a narrative in not one but many mainstream media publications, that consumer will assume the reported facts are true. Until the 21st century, no one had reason to believe that reporters would unquestioningly accept testimony from biased sources (i.e. Palestinian civilians) without other corroborating evidence, or report staged scenes as reflecting actual events because of some nebulous concept of artistic license as reflective of truth.
Since October 7, 2023, the mainstream media has followed the playbook Richard Landes describes to such an extent that it is hard to believe his book was published in 2022.
As we have seen in the al-Durrah and Jenin cases, the mainstream media engages in a practice of reporting only the Palestinian side as fact; and when reporting the Israeli side, all claims are couched as suspect (i.e. “Israeli authorities claim that…”). Landes describes the failures of the mainstream media as:
“… reporting what suits a preconceived story intended to manipulate the news consumer’s opinion and advance an agenda, rather than following the evidence, critically judging the accuracy and relevance of the data received and allowing the news consumers … to make up their own minds.”
Instances of selective reporting about Israel’s war against Hamas abound.
A good example is described by retired United States Air Force general and former Deputy Commander of United States European Command, General Charles Wald, and other authors in their article: “Correcting the Record on the IDF and Lethal Targeting.” They analyzed a New York Times article that suggested the IDF loosened its own guidelines in order to increase civilian casualties in its war against Hamas, in violation of the Laws of Armed Conflict.
However, they point out that the New York Times compared a single instance of a high civilian casualty operation against a Hamas commander to operations that occurred pre-October 7th when the landscape was entirely different. The New York Times article also did not take note of or attempt to reconcile this dubious conclusion with the many military experts who have opined that “the IDF has carried out its mission to eliminate the Hamas threat with operational and tactical excellence ... despite encountering a complex urban and subterranean battlefield…”
Why do the mainstream media engage in these practices?
One reason is that the Left-leaning news media which identifies as “progressive” do not want to be accused of racism by appearing to be pro-Israel and not supportive of the “oppressed” class (i.e. the Palestinians).
For example, in the reporting of the lynching of the two unarmed off-duty Israeli soldiers in Ramallah in October 2000, reporters Greg Philo and Mike Berry objected to negative language used to describe the event such as “murder” and “lynch mob” when the same terms were not used to describe IDF killing Palestinians, ignoring the fact that the Palestinians were killed accidentally during military operations, not even remotely resembling the level of savagery displayed in Ramallah against unarmed soldiers in custody.
This type of moral equivalence confuses news consumers who are influenced to believe that, when IDF soldiers kill Palestinians as a consequence of urban warfare, it is the same as when Palestinians intentionally kill civilians.
There is a romance to this “David and Goliath” storyline that encourages its adoption by the mainstream media. It permits the Palestinians, who could not possibly win on the battlefield against a military like the IDF, to exploit their own weakness as a tool in the fight to destroy Israel.
Mainstream media journalists support this fairytale by reporting Palestinian claims as credible, while treating Israel’s counterclaims as dubious, omitting key facts about Palestinian extremism, downplaying mistakes in reporting, and slow-walking their corrections because many of them believe Israel as the “Goliath occupier” deserves it.
Journalists believe they are leveling the playing field by promoting the Palestinian side. In so doing, they have substituted their own judgment for the truth. This is the definition of misinformation and extraordinary malfeasance.
Anti-Zionist Jews
One of the most fascinating parts of Richard Landes’ treatise is the discussion of anti-Zionist Jews.
Jews have a long history of self-criticism. This is a positive character trait and has served Jews well in many endeavors. But Landes notes a mutation that has developed among Jews on the subject of Israel’s conflict with its neighbors. It is based on the (false) assumption that “we” are entirely to blame for everything bad that happens to us and if only we “fix” ourselves, the world will respond positively.
In the context of Israel’s dispute with the Palestinians, the mantra goes: “If only we Jews were nicer, more forgiving, more understanding, more generous then the Palestinians wouldn’t hate us so much.” This masochistic mindset can be suicidal. Landes quotes Israeli author and playwright Aharon Megged who observed:
“Since the Six-Day War2 … and at an increasing pace, we have witnessed a phenomenon which probably has no parallel in history … an emotional and moral identification by the majority of Israel’s intelligentsia with people openly committed to our annihilation.”
By the 2000s, after the mainstream media began its campaign against Israel, Jews who identify as liberals have turned to “virtue-signaling” by putting distance between themselves and Israel. This mindset encourages liberal Jews to criticize the “Right-wing” government of Israel — as if world opinion about Israel would change if only the “extremist” Netanyahu government was not in power and if only there were no Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank).
But these sentiments ignore the fact that the Second Intifada (from 2000 to 2005) occurred when the Israeli government was run by a Left-wing coalition which had offered the Palestinians a state in exchange for peace.
In Israel, there arose a movement of “new historians” comprised of Jews like Ilan Pappe and Avi Shalem who fully adopted the progressive policy of accepting everything the Palestinians say as true. Like a sick person who suffers from anorexia, these Jews experience Israel as a body whose inevitable imperfections — magnified by the news media — humiliate, shame, and disgust them, leading them to join in the most extreme accusations against Israel, such as racism, Nazism, and genocide.
In order to be accepted by the liberal camp, these Jews feel that they must accept comparisons of Israel to Nazis and claims of apartheid, or be dismissed as a Zionist attempting to silence “criticism” of Israel. Rather than examine claims that Palestinians have genocidal ambitions towards the Jews, it is more comfortable to rely on the default mode of self-criticism; in other words, if only the Israelis could be good liberal Jews, the Palestinians would simply make peace.
Just like Jews are blamed for the actions of the Israeli government, Israel is blamed for things it does not do. But when the media accuses Israel of shooting Palestinian children “as an idle game,” as Chris Hedges did in Harper’s Magazine, it does not matter how false the claim; it’s a damning picture in a major publication.
In acceding to the mainstream media’s demonization of Israel, anti-Zionist Jews, caught like deer in the headlights, cease all critical thinking to adopt the view that provides some short-term emotional comfort in appeasing their liberal comrades.
Conclusion
This review is only a summary of certain features of Richard Landes’ work and is by no means comprehensive; Landes explores many topics and subtopics and delves into the history of anti-Israel thinking.
Accordingly, this book is not a quick and easy read. It is a detailed, academically driven discourse on the confluence of factors that have resulted in the media war against Israel, which is as perplexing as it is terrifying.
Since this is a complex academic work, it needs to be processed before trying to respond to anti-Israel propaganda. I recommend tackling only a few chapters at a time in order to avoid becoming overwhelmed.
If you stay the course, you will come to understand the travesty of mainstream media reporting on Israel, which boils down to the fact that the world does not like Jews very much — and with the founding of the modern State of Israel, this antipathy has found a socially acceptable, even laudable, mode of expression.
A major violent uprising by Palestinians against Israel, including approximately 138 suicide bombings carried out by Palestinian militants, mainly targeting Israeli civilians
Fought between Israel and a coalition of Arab states, primarily Egypt, Syria, and Jordan from June 5 to June 10, 1967
 | A guest post by
|
Excellent article about an amazing book! I agree with everything.
My concern is that Israel knows it is moral and is inhabitated by a lot of very smart, intellectuals, who are all about the law. On the other side, you have a death cult, with lying to further its religious and political goals built into society.
As much as I wish everyone would read Landes' book, most people are moved by emotion not intellectual exposé. TikTok videos seen to be more effective at influencing beliefs. I hope, one day, the Israelis figure this out and fight fire with fire.
Absolutely fantastic analysis. I have come to loathe the MSM for its scurrilous reporting, to the point where I think that the goal is to deliberately provoke people into hating Israel.