Kiwis for Balanced Reporting on the Middle East

Kiwis for Balanced Reporting On The Mideast New Zealand Media bias

October 28, 2009

The Herald fires a double-barrelled blast at Israel

Two articles appeared in the New Zealand Herald today. ‘Israelis deny Palestinians water’ focussed on controversial accusations levelled against Israel about water shortages in the Palestinian Authority, ignoring the four year drought that the region has suffered and the Palestinian Authority's refusal to abide by the commitments it made in the Oslo Accord about water and sewage treatment. ‘Rabbis’ ban elevated to include even kosher lifts" was about rabbis debating the use of elevators on the Sabbath. One can only wonder why, in a world of political conflicts, natural disasters, medical breakthroughs and scientific discoveries, the NZ Herald considered this story newsworthy. The stories prompted a flood of letters from KBRM members:

  • Your article ‘Israelis deny Palestinians water’ is a model of unbalanced journalism. Israel's water authority has issued a point-by-point refutation of the claims made by Amnesty (which clearly didn't bother to seek Israeli views before publishing its report) and identifies numerous abuses of water and sewerage rights on the Palestinian side. This was dismissed in a few lines of a lengthy article.

    The fact that your source — the UK Independent — chose to publish only one side of the story doesn't free the Herald from responsibility for carrying out normal journalistic checks. Even a cursory search of published sources would have revealed the whole truth.

Example of what can be found by ‘a cursory search’ include:

  • The Israeli Foreign Minister rejected the Amnesty International report, stating that Israel has ‘extensively surpassed the obligatory quantity’ of water supplied to the Palestinians, while the Palestinians have ‘significantly violated their commitments under the water agreement’ by neglecting the construction of sewage treatment plants despite ‘foreign funding earmarked for this purpose’, as well as drilling over 250 unauthorized wells.

    According to an article published by Israeli National News, the amount of water available to PA Arabs since the Six-Day War in 1967 has gone up while Israelis have suffered a 70 percent drop in their resources. Uri Shore, spokesman for the Israeli Water Authority explained ‘The Amnesty report is selective and incorrect, to make an understatement. ... The amount of natural water, including underground aquifers, the amount of water available annually to every Israeli before 1967 was 500 cubic meters a year. ... Today the figure is 149 cubic meters, while water available to PA Arabs actually has increased by 22 percent, from 87 cubic meters to 105 cubic meters a year per capital’. [www.israelnationalnews.com/ ]

  • Yet again the New Zealand Herald clutters up its pages with another unbalanced, anti-Israel piece by Donald Macintyre. Macintyre's article is based entirely upon accusations made in a report by Amnesty International, an NGO that is well known for its anti-Israel bias.
    Why is Amnesty International spending its donations on investigating water use in Israel rather than working to free political prisoners like Israeli Gilad Shalit who has been held prisoner by Hamas for years, without a single humanitarian visit?
    It could also be asked, considering all the international aid monies being channelled to Palestinian organisations, why Israel is expected to provide infrastructure and supply water to people living in disputed territories, who consistently call for the destruction of the Jewish state and the murder of the Jewish people?
    Buried in Macintyre's article is the fact that Syria, Lebanon and Jordan all draw water from the over-exploited Jordan River, yet only Israel is accused of ‘denying water’ to Palestinian Arabs in the NZ Herald headline.
    Macintyre's article, built on disputed and unsubstantiated ‘accusations’, ‘claims’ and ‘suggestions’ is not news; it is propaganda, and should be treated as such.

  • Why was the article ‘Rabbis' ban elevated to include even kosher lifts’ included as news (Oct 28)? Granted it may be an offbeat 'human interest' story, but it gives a completely false picture of what mainstream Israel is like. Every culture has its fringe groups, but even most Orthodox Jews find this story a bit outlandish.
    My concern is that stories like this become part of a media tendency to portray Israel and Israelis as eccentric, aggressive, strange, ‘others’, rather than portraying them as ordinary people who happen to be living in an extraordinarily difficult situation, and have been for 61 years.
    When read alongside the other Middle East story in the Herald that day, ‘Israelis Deny Palestinians Water’, and alongside other articles about Israel in recent months (Gaza, Goldstone report, etc.) it adds up to a picture of a state that is decidedly ‘out of step’ with the rest of the world, something that may be true of many Muslim countries, but is certainly not true of Israel. This troubles me and causes me to ask, ‘why?’

  • The article about ‘kosher elevators’ (Oct 28) is a NON-news event. The vast majority of Orthodox Jews in Israel — of whom I am one, having emigrated from Auckland in 1991 — have dismissed it as nonsense. The fact that you feel compelled to reprint it speaks volumes about your agenda. You generally refuse to publish positive news about Israel (medical discoveries. etc.), but have no difficulty in printing this rubbish. One does not need to be a rocket scientist to see that the process of ridicule, deligitimisation and accusations (the ‘water’ article on the same day being an example) is a drip-feed process to influence the public to see Israel and Jews as not a normal State/people. This is the same tactic used by the Nazis in the 1930's with great success. That the media and other groups have climbed on this bandwagon is a sobering reminder that history does repeat itself.