Under+the+Spotlight

I- There are reporters everywhere in Israel a. Israeli Major General Amram Mitzna, commander of Israel’s central front had an experience once that demonstrated the sheer numbers of the foreign correspondents and the effect that they had. 1. About fifty Palestinian teenagers “had erected a barricade of burning tires, broken car fenders, and boulders in the middle of the highway and were lobbing rocks and insults at ten Israeli soldiers standing in the road some 75 yards away” (Friedman 425). 2. Seeing that the commander was about to take action reporters quickly swooped in to get the story and in doing so surrounded the soldiers separating the commander from his men. 3. Mitzna later commented, “‘I am the supreme commander in the West Bank and I had to argue my way past journalists to get to a battle’” (Friedman 426). b. “ Israel, in quiet times, plays host to one of the largest foreign press contingents in the world, with some 350 permanently accredited news organizations” (Friedman 426). c. The Palestinian uprisings of 1987-1988 brought about 700 journalists to the country in addition to those already residing there bringing the number up to about 1 foreign correspondent for every 6,100 Israelis (Friedman 426).

The question then arises, “How can a tiny country with the population of greater Chicago and the size of the state of Delaware occupy as much news space as the Soviet Union, if not more?" (Friedman 427).

II. Western Fascination with the Holy Land a. The West likes to hear about Israel because it is familiar and relevant to us. b. Reality is “always filtered through certain cultural and historical lenses before being painted on our minds” (Friedman 427). c. The bible is “the main lens through which Western man looks at himself and at the world” (Friedman 428). d. Israel is so prominent in Western news “because the characters, the geography, and the themes involved are so familiar” (Friedman 428). e. “News from modern Israel is not only intuitively familiar to the Western ear, it is also intuitively relevant” (Friedman 429). f. The fact that Israel is back on the scene again makes its news interesting to the West because it makes the old stories of the bible modern and once again relevant (Friedman 430-431).

III. High Expectations for Israel a. Friedman noticed that there must be some other factor that makes Israel so attractive to the media when he read an article in the Herald Tribune. b. The front page news story was about an “Israeli soldier not beating, not killing, but grabbing a Palestinian” (Friedman 431-432). c. Friedman said to himself, “Let’s see, there are 155 countries in the world today. Say five people grabbed other people in each country; that makes 775 similar incidents worldwide. Why was it that this grab was the only one to be photographed and treated as front-page news?” (Friedman 432). d. The answer is that “what the West expected from the Jews of the past, it expects from Israel today” (432). e. Since Jews historically introduced the Ten Commandments “modern Israel is expected to reflect a certain level of justice and morality in its actions” (Friedman 433). f. They are also expected to live up to their status as a symbol of optimism of hope (Friedman 433). g. Thus all news about Israel is sensationalized. 1. “‘When the Syrians kill people it is a story about Syria,’ observed Yaron Ezrahi. ‘When the Jews kill, it somehow becomes a story about mankind’” (Friedman 434).

IV. Israel also solicited attention a. Israel felt that it had to “seize the ears of the world” because the Jewish people were not yet a majority in their country and they “demanded that the world take heed of its uniqueness and judge it with a different yardstick from other nation-states” (Friedman 438). b. Israel had an innate insecurity that when coupled with “Israel’s near-total economic dependence on the United States, it becomes easy to understand why Israel is obsessed with how it is portrayed in the Western media in general and the American media in particular” (Friedman 440). c. “In Jerusalem, the Government Press Office makes sure that foreign correspondents are kept abreast of all the news, both pro and anti-government, by providing daily English translations of the main articles and editorials in all the Israeli newspapers” (Friedman 441).

V. Effects of such an Intense Spotlight a. Television and print media magnifies things so that they seem to have a greater impact than they do in reality (Friedman 442). b. “What the cameras usually did not show was that while Israeli troops were clashing with stone-throwers in one village, Palestinians in most other villages in the West Bank were going to work in Israel… thousands of Israelis were going to the Tel Aviv fairgrounds every evening to ride Ferris wheels, eat cotton candy, and visit all the booths at the exposition marking Israel’s fortieth anniversary of independence” (Friedman 442-443). c. “The blessing for the Palestinians is that because their enemy happens to be the Jew, and their battlefield the holy land, both of which loom so large in Western eyes, the Palestinians have received more attention and visibility than any other refugee community or national liberation movement in the world…while other defeated nations, who didn’t have the Jews for enemies were ignored” (Friedman 443). The world tends not to rallly in the defense of those groups less powerful if their voice is unheared and thier actions unseen. d. The presence of the soldiers often dictated events (Friedman 444). e. The West only truly feels for the Jew. “It can be extremely frustrating to think that the world is talking about you but not feeling you but not feeling for you” (Friedman 445). f. “The spotlight on Israel has been a curse for Palestinians in another way as well. It has given them a grossly exaggerated sense of their real strength and convinced their leaders that time is somehow on their side” (Friedman 447). g. “Because Israelis constantly felt that they were under a spotlight and were being judged by the whole world, their spokesmen and leaders spent more time and energy thinking up ways to explain why they were treating the Palestinians as they were than dealing with the underlying political causes of the uprising” (Friedman 448). h. Israeli’s often use the Holocaust to shield them from “the piercing gaze of the West” (Friedman 449). i. “When Israeli repression is no longer viewed as news, it means that the West no longer expects anything exceptional of itself” (Friedman 450).