By Leyna Krow, Assistant Editor, JTNews
Itamar Marcus, director of Palestinian Media Watch, has spent the last 11 years scrutinizing Palestinian TV, radio, newspapers and textbooks to assess the messages the Palestinian people receive regarding Israel. The news, he says, is not good.
Marcus paints an Orwellian picture of Palestinians bombarded by an almost constant stream of information that portrays Israel as an enemy occupying force and anyone who takes it upon himself to harm Israelis should be hailed as a national hero.
According to Marcus, these messages come to Palestinians through all manner of media, including children’s TV shows, school materials and even the clues of crossword puzzles that appear in Palestinian newspapers (i.e., clue: The Jewish trait, answer: Treachery, Al Quds, Dec. 20, 2000).
A resident of Efrat, Israel, Marcus frequently tours the U.S. and Europe to share his findings. On Monday, Nov. 19, Marcus spoke at an event at Herzl-Ner Tamid Conservative Congregation sponsored by StandWithUs Northwest, a pro-Israel advocacy organization. JTNews met with Marcus shortly after he arrived in Seattle.
JTNews: What will your talk on Monday focus on?
Itamar Marcus: One of the themes that I’ve been focusing on a lot lately is the Palestinian transferring of the conflict from a nationalistic conflict to a religious one. This appears in the new schoolbooks that were just published this year by Fatah educators. What we’re seeing is a gradual shift, a closing of the gap between the ideologies of Fatah and Hamas in the direction of Hamas.
JTNews: Is this a change from the content that’s been seen in previous editions of Palestinian schoolbooks?
Marcus: It’s just that it’s more prominent. Now there is a whole section of the new schoolbooks for grade 12 that just came out for this year’s class that defines the conflict as a ribat, as a kind of jihad. And they say this ribat will go on until resurrection, until the end of time. So it’s giving the child a sense of an Islamic destiny to destroy Israel. And this is very tragic because what they’re telling the child is that you have a choice: you can accept your religion or you can accept Israel as a neighbor, but you can’t have both.
JTNews: What can be done about this?
Marcus: Very simply, the United States, as well as the Europeans, are the driving force right now behind Palestinian demands for the recognition of a Palestinian state. Any political future that the Palestinians will have is dependent on American and European aid. What we’re telling American and European leaders is use that leverage that you have to demand change. And we’re not talking about superficial. We’re talking about a major change in the way [Palestinians] see the world. In the latest polls in the Palestinian Authority that asked what percentage of people recognized Israel’s right to exist, of the youngest age group, age 18-25, 88 percent said “no.” The older generation, people ages 55-60, was the largest group in favor of Israel’s right to exist. So we see a generation 15 years into a peace process that has less recognition of Israel than people who didn’t have a peace process. This is what has to be undone so we can get on with real peace.
JTNews: How do you respond to critics who say that you are misinterpreting what is being taught in Palestinian schools or are exaggerating the power of the message?
Marcus: I never heard a critic say that we are misinterpreting Palestinian schoolbooks. Anyone who has read these schoolbooks will see exactly the issues that we’ve talked about.
A large component of these books is building a world without Israel and it can be seen in every single map where the word Palestine is written all over Israel with no marcation of Israel. Israel is referred to in a number of places, generally when talking about how the “Zionist gang” stole Palestine and created the state of Israel. But other than that, Palestine is described as a state that has water access to the Red Sea and the Mediterranean.
JTNews: In several of your reporters for PMW, you describe the information the Palestinian Authority is disseminating as tantamount to child abuse. Could you elaborate on that?
Marcus: One of the prominent messages Palestinian kids are receiving is that it’s a good to become a Shahid– that it’s good to become a martyr. What they often say is that it’s sweet to become a martyr for Palestine. Here’s an example from Palestinian TV: These are three 15-year-old boys. They went on a suicide mission and were all killed and Palestinian TV had a whole hour-long item glorifying these three boys. The message that’s being sent here, instead of saying, “these children killed themselves, they’re not around anymore, don’t do what they did,” is exactly the opposite. They are literally described as role models. So this is child abuse — turning children into soldiers. If you want to fight Israel, send soldiers out there. But don’t send children out there to die and then when they die, turn them into heroes.
JTNews: What do you think a Palestinian researcher doing the same work that you do would have to say about the Israeli media?
Marcus: He’d be amazed and he’d close up shop in a few minutes because, were he to publicize it, he’d just be doing Israeli propaganda. Israeli TV news is constantly having human-interest stories about Palestinian suffering. There was actually a group called Israel Media Watch that did a study of the editorial and human-interest section of Ha’aretz, and they studied it over a one-year period during the height of the terror war, the [second] Intifada. They wanted to see how many times families of victims were interviewed to create sympathy for the family. It was three-to-one Palestinians over Israelis. So like I said, they would be very surprised. In fact, there were many people [in Israel], left, right, center, who very prominently canceled their subscriptions. I did also. I just couldn’t read the paper. There was a war going on and this paper was constantly expressing sympathy with the people who were blowing up our own people. So this shows that the Israeli media is a totally free media. They’re very interested in showing a balance.