A case study in news media duplicity and anti-Israel bias
A CNN news story on Israel's Bedouin community provides a case study in anti-Israel reporting disguised as news. Here is an analysis of the tricks the media uses.
Israel’s heroic rescue of its Bedouin citizen hostage Kaid Farhan Elkadi from Hamas a few weeks ago undermined the mainstream news media’s narrative about Israel. The media soon hit back. Here is an analysis of one of those stories that highlights the duplicitous ways journalists smear the Jewish state and its people.
The Israel Defense Force’s (IDF) daring rescue of Elkadi showed that Israel cares about all of its citizens, not just Jews, and is not a monocultural mono-religious state, and in no way an apartheid one.
The media cannot abide this truth, or Israel being portrayed positively, or cope with evidence that its coverage of Israel is mostly propagandistic Palestinian fiction, so it was soon looking for ways to show Israel’s alleged wickedness.
CNN, a race-obsessed entertainment channel that poses as a news service, ran a story titled: “‘People are suffocating.’ Bedouins in Israel say Gaza war has worsened decades of marginalization”.
Other media outlets such as the Associated Press and Reuters predictably ran similar stories because groupthink dominates today’s newsrooms where original story ideas are as rare as the Sumatran rhinoceros.
I shall stick to the CNN story in this analysis because it displays all the tricks that journalists use to deceive their audience while maintaining the veneer of honest reporting.
First up, the story said that Bedouins have been marginalized in Israel for years, so why did they choose to write about it now? Presumably, their news editors would regurgitate some tripe about it being timely because the hostage rescued was a Bedouin and it was a chance to look at a broader issue.
I do not believe that. You should not either.
CNN published this story now because it wants to return to the narrative that Israel is a racist country that discriminates against non-Jews. It was like saying, “Sure, Israel rescued this one Bedouin, but look how they treat them the rest of the time.”
Underlying this framing is the liberal media’s peculiar obsession with race. They view Israeli society as essentially divided between Jews and Arabs. That is the least insightful and unimaginative way to think about the country. It could be thought of as having a secular-religious divide, a right-wing left-wing divide, or a hawk-dove divide, and, as a polyglot nation, some significant linguistic divisions, to name but a few.
Israeli demographics are vastly more complicated than a two-sided affair and, whatever divisions there might be, there is also a huge commonality in that Israel’s Jewish and Arab citizens are all Israelis. A 10-minute walk along the beach in Haifa would show this.
Israeli-Arabs, like Israel’s Jews, are not homogenous. There are Muslim Arabs, Christian Arabs, Druze, Bedouins, various others, and tribal and family allegiances that transcend race or ethnicity.
This diversity extends to politics. Bedouins cannot simply be seen as Arabs in the broader Arab-Israeli conflict. Bedouins fought on both sides in the First Arab-Israeli War (Israel’s War of Independence), and in the 1947-48 civil war in British Mandatory Palestine.
Some Bedouin groups have been fighting alongside Jews for Israel against other Arabs for a long time. Although doing national service is not required of them, Bedouins have long served in the IDF. This makes viewing them as Israelis (a modern nation state), rather than as Arabs (an ethnic group), the sensible way to see them.
The fact that Elkadi refused to lead his Hamas captors to Jews so Hamas could not murder them, even when they told him his family would be protected if he did so, shows his strong moral character and his patriotism towards Israel.
What makes Bedouins different from other Israelis, including other Israeli-Arabs, is that they are pastoral nomads, meaning they herd livestock and migrate with them seasonally to find pasturage for their flocks.1
This lifestyle has endowed Bedouins with a distinct culture, and tribal and family structures that often do not match modern national borders. There are Bedouins in Jordan, Syria, the Arabian Peninsula and much of the Maghreb.
Most of the Arabs in Mandatory Palestine lived this way until Zionism’s success brought waves of Arab immigrants from Egypt and Jordan looking to cash in on the boom.2 These immigrants, or their descendants, are the ones who call themselves Palestinians today.
This distinct way of living - and no one should look down on any way of life that has survived for thousands of years in harsh conditions - is at the heart of the Bedouin’s relative poverty and lack of integration into Israeli society. It is far more complex than the lazy labels of ethnicity and religion through which CNN views the world.
CNN devoted many paragraphs to poverty in Bedouin communities, to the way some villages are not connected to the electricity grid and water pipes, and not as well protected from missile attacks as other parts of Israel.
This is true. Living conditions in many Bedouin villages are substandard, and addressing this should be a priority. Yet, this is only half the story. Why this is the case matters.
The story implies that these problems are because of Israeli policy and leads readers to infer that Israeli policy is to neglect and discriminate against Bedouins. This is wrong. Missing from the story was Israel’s actual policies towards the Bedouins, and some key historical context.
Bedouins’ traditional pastoral nomadic lifestyles never required them to own the land the way people do in agricultural, industrial, and now post-industrial societies. This is why the Israeli Government does not recognize many Bedouin villages’ legality or their ownership of it. It is not because they are Arabs, or Muslims, but because they were pastoral nomads with a different relationship to the land.
Privately owned Arab land makes up about 3.5 three percent of Israel, which is roughly the same as Jewish privately held land, despite Arabs being only 20 percent of the population. So, it is hard to argue coherently that Israeli-Arabs lack property rights. More than 80 percent of Israel is state land.
Neglecting or impoverishing Bedouins is not Israel’s policy. Jerusalem wants the Bedouins to move into legal settlements fully connected to state infrastructure. This would make providing them electricity, water, medical services, educational and employment opportunities (including learning Hebrew), and the military defense of these people, easier.
This policy aims to improve Bedouins’ lives and opportunities in modern Israel, and it is disingenuous to claim otherwise. Some Bedouins, however, do not want to move. This is understandable given how closely their culture is tied to their semi-nomadic lifestyle and their traditional pastoral lands and routes. It is a conflict between a traditional way of life and modernity.
Israel is a modern nation state in which some citizens want to live a traditional or quasi-traditional lifestyle, or are weaning off it. This is a genuine issue, and one not unique to Israel. In Mongolia, for example, the government offers cash incentives for people to trade in their saddles and move into urban areas to work in mines and factories as Mongolia modernizes and Chinese investment transforms the country.
CNN devoted many column inches to Israel’s policy of bulldozing illegal Bedouin houses and, again, reported only half the story to make Israel look bad. As always with news, what is left out of a story is just as important as what is included.
Bulldozing is something of which the Israeli Government is inordinately fond. It bulldozes terrorists’ houses as a punishment and a deterrent, and it bulldozes illegal houses and settlements. What CNN failed to mention was that Israel also bulldozes illegal Jewish settlements. This changes the framing greatly.
The IDF has destroyed illegal Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, such as Sde Yonatan, an illegal outpost near the Ofra settlement, and most recently, Yitzhar. Famously, Israel destroyed 21 Jewish settlements when it pulled out of Gaza in 2005 and forcibly removed 8,000 Jews.
It is true that Israel at times treats some minorities more harshly than its Jewish citizens in the application of some laws and policies, and that this extends to destroying illegal houses and settlements. However, there is a fundamental difference between laws being applied unjustly and the laws themselves being unjust and their intentions malignant.
By not detailing, or at least outlining, Israeli policy towards Bedouin villages, the story made no attempt at this distinction. Clearly, this was to feed the Israel-is-racist narrative to which the mainstream media is maniacally wedded.
CNN included a line that it has reached out to Israel’s Land Authority, presumably to show it had given the Israeli Government a chance to comment. Such comment would have been good. However, CNN did not need to speak to the Land Authority to explain Israel’s policies.
Israel’s laws and policies are publicly available on almost all matters, barring those pertaining to national security. The local media covers this issue, the positives and the negatives, exhaustively, in English, Hebrew, and Arabic press. CNN’s decision not to explain Israel’s policy properly was an editorial choice; not the result of its failure to secure a comment from the Land Authority.
Living conditions for Bedouins need to improve drastically, as does their lack of access to the education and skills training needed to thrive in a modern state. Maybe Israel’s policies, or how they are applied, need to change.
However, CNN’s story makes this conversation a non-starter because it does not explain what the current policies are or how they might need to change.
CNN shot itself in the foot with an Uzi 9 milimeter here. It is impossible to criticize Israeli policy credibly without explaining the policy. By not detailing it, or at least outlining it, the story fails to connect Israel’s policies to outcomes in Bedouins settlements. Writing that the Bedouin are “marginalized” is a description that explains nothing.
It is more than poor journalism. It is a hit job on Israel masquerading as a news story looking at a real issue. This was clearly the story’s goal from its inception.
Juris Zarins (1992) "Pastoral Nomadism in Arabia: Ethnoarchaeology and the Archaeological Record," in O. Bar-Yosef and A. Khazanov, eds. "Pastoralism in the Levant"
Dov Friedlander and Calvin Goldschneider, The Population of Israel (NY: Columbia Press, 1979)
Thanks for sharing this analysis. I think you're making two important points. The bias is not only in the Bedouin story itself, but also in why they chose to put this story together at all at this time, which is a much more difficult bias to demonstrate or to speak out about.
Thanks for the great Bedouin explainer. I did not know Israel owned 80%. That might be an article on its own - history etc. Thank you for educating me.
No surprise re CNN. The whole of mainstream media is so shallow one doesn't even need galoshes to walk through the lot of them.