The recent director of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights, Michael Ignatieff, proposed in the New York Times in May 2004 that we should give U.S. presidents the authority to preventively detain U.S. citizens and to engage in “coercive interrogations” should the United States experience another terrorist attack like 9/11. Ignatieff argued that “defeating terror requires violence” and “might also require coercion, secrecy, deception, even violation of rights.” “Sticking too firmly to the rule of law simply allows terrorists too much leeway to exploit our freedoms,” he said.[1]

 

In addition to Harvard’s top human rights academic arguing on behalf of “torture lite,” Harvard Law School‘s Alan Dershowitz supports “torture warrants” so that U.S. presidents can torture detainees in so-called “ticking bomb” cases. Harvard’s most prominent commentator on the Israel-Palestine conflict is also a bitter critic of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch when they criticize Israel‘s violations of international humanitarian law. Dershowitz is also a leading supporter of the current U.S.-Israeli effort to modify such law[2] (which protects civilians in armed conflict and belligerent occupation) “to reflect the new realities of fighting terrorism.”[3]

 

Most recently, Marvin Kalb, a Senior Fellow at the Shorenstein Center on the Press at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, has argued that the U.S. news media’s coverage of the Lebanon War in summer 2006 between Israel and Hezbollah was biased against Israel, and that it functioned as “a weapon of modern warfare” during its conflict with Hezbollah. Kalb claimed to show that Israel “is victimized by its own openness” while Hezbollah “can retain almost total control of the daily message of journalism and propaganda.” Kalb concluded that “in the war of information, news and propaganda, the battlefield central to Hezbollah’s strategy, Israel lost this war.”[4] He suggests a reconsideration of the concept of a legally open and free war-time news media.   

 

It is striking that Harvard University‘s most prominent public intellectuals have argued so casually for the abandonment of basic principles of democracy and the rule of law, in each case behind shabbily constructed facades of factual and legal analysis. Kalb’s report, “The Israel-Hezbollah War of 2006: The Media as a Weapon in Asymmetrical Conflict,” adds to the growing Harvard bibliography of such work.

 

Kalb begins his analysis with careless errors that characterize his report. He writes: “The war in Lebanon began on July 12, when Hezbollah launched a surprise attack across the Israeli border. In the attack, eight Israeli soldiers were killed and two were captured.” Neither of these sentences is factually accurate. Although the New York Times reported on its front page on July 13 that “The Lebanese guerrilla group Hezbollah surprised Israel with a bold daylight assault across the border on Wednesday, leading to fighting in which two Israeli soldiers were captured and at least eight killed,”[5] it printed a correction the following day:

 

A front-page caption yesterday about the Israeli military response to a cross-border raid into Israel by members of Lebanon‘s Hezbollah militia misstated the number of Israeli soldiers killed during the raid. It was three, not eight. Five Israeli soldiers were killed later when Israel sent ground forces into Lebanon .[6]

 

This factual error—that Hezbollah killed eight Israeli soldiers in its initial raid into northern Israel, which amplifies the magnitude of Hezbollah’s July 12 raid—is frequently repeated in the U.S. news media. For example, in a recent op-ed piece, the Times’ Thomas Friedman wrote: “On July 12, 2006, Hezbollah fighters directed by Mr. [Hassan] Nasrallah abducted two Israeli soldiers and killed eight others in an unprovoked attack across the Lebanon-Israel border, on the pretext of seeking a prisoner exchange.”[7]

 

Nor did the war in Lebanon begin with the Hezbollah raid into northern Israel, as Kalb and nearly every other major U.S. news organization claimed. Rather, it began with Israel‘s retaliatory airstrikes and ground incursions across Lebanon ‘s borders. The undue haste in which Israel responded militarily to the Hezbollah raid not only very quickly increased Israel’s fatalities from three soldiers to eight, it also marked the clear illegality of the armed reprisals by Israel, since it resorted to force against Lebanon without UN Security Council authorization as required under the circumstances by the UN Charter.[8] While Hezbollah was obviously responsible for its own reckless and illegal conduct when it raided northern Israel, killing and capturing Israeli soldiers, Israel was responsible for its own illegal and far more brutal response. Once again, Thomas Friedman helps confirm the overall attitude in the U.S. news media by concurring with Kalb (with sarcasm) that Hezbollah was responsible for the military and moral effects of Israel‘s decision to bomb Lebanon: “Mr. Nasrallah demonstrated a total failure to anticipate Israel‘s response to his raid. He assumed Israel would carry out the same limited retaliation it had with previous raids. Wrong.”[9]

 

Kalb’s assumption that Israel‘s retaliatory bombardment of Lebanon was appropriate is the basis of his claim of anti-Israel news coverage. Though Israel‘s air and artillery strikes inside Lebanon violated international law on several counts, Kalb used the news media’s identification of only one such violation—that Israel‘s reprisals were “disproportionate”—as evidence of this bias. Kalb wrote: “No theme resonated through the coverage of the Lebanese war more forcefully than the repeated assertion by Arab and Western reporters that Israel responded ‘disproportionately’ to Hezbollah’s initial provocation.” While the Israel-based Winograd Commission identified the strategic and tactical failures of the “hasty” and “impulsive” Israeli decision to bomb Lebanon in response to the Hezbollah raid,[10] no major U.S. news organization explored the basic legality of Israel‘s nearly immediate armed reprisals against Lebanon.

 

This was an important point, since a “disproportionate” use of military power can occur in the context of an otherwise legal or illegal resort to force. The fact that the U.S. news media may have cited the Israeli reprisals as “disproportionate” did not, therefore, address the first and most fundamental question of whether Israel had any right under international law to respond with force to the Hezbollah raid “hastily” and “impulsively.” Israel clearly had no such right. But Israel‘s “right” in this regard was never questioned—at least not by the U.S. news media. Thus, contrary to Kalb’s basic theme of an anti-Israel media bias, there was virtually no news media challenge to the fundamental question of Israel‘s right to attack Lebanon. In his report, Kalb simply assumed that Israel possessed a legal entitlement to bomb Lebanon in response to the Hezbollah raid. So did the U.S. news media.

 

The question of proportionality—whether Israel’s use of force involved excessive harm to civilians and civilian infrastructure in relation to Israel’s legitimate military aims—arose from the scale of Israel’s bombing campaign inside Lebanon. According to Amnesty International and Lebanon’s Higher Relief Council, Israel killed one thousand Lebanese civilians, including 300 children, destroyed 15,000 Lebanese homes, 900 commercial structures, including farms and factories, 400 miles of roads, 80 bridges, Lebanon’s international airport, and displaced over 900,000 Lebanese civilians.[11] If most news organizations reported that Israel‘s military reprisals were disproportionate, it was because that fact was unavoidably self-evident; Kalb, however, indicated that such reports were evidence of anti-Israel bias. Given also that Israel’s reprisals were described as “impulsively” initiated[12] and “unnecessary”[13] by the war’s end, one could argue persuasively that there was literally no military necessity under international law to justify any of the death and destruction in Lebanon at the hands of Israel . Once again, however, Kalb simply assumed that Israel‘s armed reprisals against Lebanon were proportionate (presumably within the framework of international law, though he ignores the international law implications of Israel‘s actions in his report.)

 

A related issue, also covered carelessly by Kalb, is whether Israel made any effort to distinguish between Lebanese civilians and combatants. For one thing, Kalb misreported the number of Lebanese civilian casualties. He wrote: “Lebanon‘s Higher Relief Council estimated that 845 Lebanese had been killed—743 civilians, 34 soldiers, and 69 Hezbollah fighters.” However, those figures were not reported by the Lebanese Higher Relief Council; rather, they were reported by the Associated Press in an AP report.[14] That same Associated Press report noted: “The Higher Relief Council put the overall death toll at 1,181 and said one-third were children and the majority were civilians.” Lebanon ‘s Higher Relief Council is widely regarded as the authoritative source for estimates of Lebanese casualties and infrastructure damage, and was cited as such by Amnesty International,[15] the United Nations,[16] and the U.S. government.[17] Kalb cited a low estimate of Lebanese civilian casualties while attributing that estimate to the Higher Relief Council, which did not issue the estimates that Kalb used.

     

Kalb then sought to give good reason for the Israeli killing of Lebanese civilians—which he referred to as “victims” in quotation marks—by contesting the charge that Israel had committed war crimes against civilians in Lebanon:  

 

Because Hezbollah functioned as a quasi-military force within its populace, protecting it, feeding it, housing it, and in general caring for its needs, the Israelis were quickly accused of hitting civilian targets with an indiscriminate callousness amounting to war crimes. On August 3, Human Rights Watch specifically accused Israel of war crimes.

 

Given that Kalb mentioned the critically important August 3 report by Human Rights Watch,[18] which contains unambiguous evidence that Israel committed war crimes in Lebanon by targeting and killing Lebanese civilians, one might assume that Kalb read the HRW report. However, in his footnote, Kalb doesn’t cite the actual HRW report; instead, he cites a Washington Post article that barely mentions the HRW report.[19] Kalb also provided no evidence that he had read the August 3 HRW report. Likewise, Kalb never mentions the equally important August 23 report by Amnesty International on the Israeli bombing of civilian infrastructure in Lebanon.[20] These reports contain not only the most compelling evidence that Israel had deliberately targeted Lebanese civilians and infrastructure, they also present the most persuasive evidence that Israel attacked these civilian targets with no evidence of the presence or involvement of Hezbollah. While making numerous unsubstantiated representations that Hezbollah used Lebanese civilians as human shields, Kalb never bothered to review the most important evidence that undermines those claims.  

      

In a telling passage that illustrates Kalb’s ignorance or indifference to facts, he tried to explain the Israeli bombing of a three-story building in Qana on July 30 in southern Lebanon, which killed at least 28 people, including 16 children, as follows:

 

The Israelis apologized for the loss of life but explained that they were firing at a rocket site next to the building. The location of the rocket site put the Israelis in a difficult position—choosing either not to destroy the rocket site or to destroy it but also run the risk of killing civilians and thereby earning a blast of international condemnation.

 

The August 3 report by Human Rights Watch, which Kalb ignored, had already discredited this justification for the Qana massacre:

 

Human Rights Watch researchers visited Qana on July 31, the day after the attack, and did not find any destroyed military equipment in or near the home. None of the dozens of international journalists, rescue workers, and international observers who visited Qana on July 30 and 31 reported seeing any evidence of Hezbollah military presence in or around the home around the time it was hit. Rescue workers recovered no bodies of apparent Hezbollah fighters from in or near the building.[21]

 

HRW also reported:

 

On August 1, one of Israel‘s top military correspondents reported in the Israeli daily Ha’aretz that, while the Israeli Air Force investigation into the incident was ongoing, “questions have been raised over military accounts of the incident.” He elaborated that the IDF had changed its original story and that “it now appears that the military had no information on rockets launched from the site of the building [in Qana], or the presence of Hezbollah men at the time.”[22]   

  

Overall, Human Rights Watch concluded:

 

The Israeli government claims that it is taking all possible measures to minimize civilian harm, but the cases documented here reveal a systematic failure by the IDF to distinguish between combatants and civilians. Since the start of the conflict, Israeli forces have consistently launched artillery and air attacks with limited or dubious military gain but excessive civilian cost. In dozens of attacks, Israeli forces struck an area with no apparent military target. In some cases the timing and intensity of the attack, the absence of a military target, as well as return strikes on rescuers, suggest that Israeli forces deliberately targeted civilians.[23]

 

Similarly, Amnesty International’s August 23 report concluded:

 

Israeli government spokespeople have insisted that they were targeting Hizbullah positions and support facilities, and that damage to civilian infrastructure was incidental or resulted from Hizbullah using the civilian population as a “human shield”. However, the pattern and scope of the attacks, as well as the number of civilian casualties and the amount of damage sustained, makes the justification ring hollow. The evidence strongly suggests that the extensive destruction of public works, power systems, civilian homes and industry was deliberate and an integral part of the military strategy, rather than “collateral damage”—incidental damage to civilians or civilian property resulting from targeting military objectives.[24]

 

Finally, according to the August 23 report, “Israel conducted attacks throughout Lebanon from land, sea and air, killing some 1,000 civilians,” while “Hizbullah launched thousands of rockets on northern Israel , killing some 40 civilians.”[25] This means that more Lebanese civilians died than Israeli civilians by a ratio of 25 to 1. Given this fact, one might consider how a news organization could cover a conflict “objectively” when one side so disproportionately suffers casualties. Kalb looks at this issue by criticizing an Arabic-language newspaper for over-reporting Lebanese casualties:

 

From July 13 to August 16, the paper [Asharq Al-Awsat based in London] ran 24 photographs related to the war on the front page; all but two of them showed the death and destruction in Lebanon caused by Israeli attacks. The Arab reader of this paper could have drawn only one conclusion—that Israel was guilty of converting Lebanon into a “killing field.” Only once, July 31, did Asharq Al-Awsat show a photograph of the destruction that Hezbollah rockets were causing in Israel. This imbalance, 22 to 1, could hardly be defined by a Western yardstick as “objective journalism,” but it could still be explained in the context of Middle East journalism, where many Arab reporters feel a nationalistic, religious or cultural prejudice against Israel.

 

Given that Lebanese civilian casualties were higher than Israeli civilian casualties by a ratio of 25 to 1, would a 22 to 1 ratio of photographs depicting Lebanese civilian casualties disproportionately represent those casualties? Would it be more objective or accurate to publish a 1 to 1 photographic representation of the casualties? If Americans suffered a 25 to 1 ratio of casualties in a war against Canada, would Kalb object to a 22 to 1 photographic depiction of American casualties in the U.S. news media? I doubt it. In any event, Kalb neither asks nor answers these questions. Instead, he wrote: “Asharq Al-Awsat was only doing what came naturally—it was playing to the prejudices of its readers, who felt sympathy for their Arab brethren under Israeli fire. Asharq Al-Awsat was selling papers.”

 

In brief, Kalb’s report provided no evidence of U.S. news media bias against Israel. In addition to ignoring key reports by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, while also ignoring the actual estimates of casualties reported by the Lebanese Higher Relief Council, Kalb also ignored a report issued by the Anti-Defamation League on the U.S. news media’s coverage of the Lebanon war. The ADL survey of the 33 largest circulation daily newspapers in the United States reinforced the obvious facts about U.S. news media coverage of Israel: “In the aftermath of Hezbollah’s kidnapping of Israeli soldiers on July 12 and its shelling of Israeli towns and cities, political cartoonists and U.S. newspapers overwhelmingly supported Israel’s right to defend itself against Hezbollah’s acts of aggression.”[26]

 

The ADL’s report disturbingly revealed that the U.S. news media still has not demonstrated any editorial inclination to oppose the illegal use of force by the United States and its chief ally in the Middle East, Israel .[27] Thus, the 33 newspapers surveyed upheld an American news media tradition that has been in place since at least the U.S. war in Vietnam. And Kalb’s report showed that the most prominent public intellectuals in the United States, including those at Harvard, will say and write just about anything to help ensure that the tradition continues.     

 

 

Howard Friel is coauthor with Richard Falk of Israel-Palestine on Record: How The New York Times Misreports Conflict in the Middle East (Verso, June 1) and with Falk of The Record of the Paper: How The New York Times Misreports US Foreign Policy (Verso, 2004).  

[1] Michael Ignatieff, “Lesser Evils,” New York Times, May 2, 2004.

[2] See, for example, “AJ Congress Applauds House Approval of ‘Human Shields’ Bill,” American Jewish Congress, April 25, 2007; “Rabbis: Israel Too Worried Over Civilian Deaths,” Forward, August 25, 2006.

[3] Alan Dershowitz, Why Terrorism Works: Understanding the Threat, Responding to the Challenge (Yale: 2002), p. 221.

[4] Marvin Kalb, “The Israeli-Hezbollah War of 2006: the Media as a Weapon in Asymmetrical Conflict,” John F. Kennedy School of Government, February 2007.

[5] Greg Myre and Stephen Erlanger, “Turmoil in the Middle East: Escalation; Clashes Spread to Lebanon as Hezbollah Raids Israel ,” New York Times, July 13, 2006.

[6] Correction, New York Times, July 14, 2006.

[7] Thomas Friedman, “The Arab Commission,” New York Times, May 9, 2007.

[8] See Howard Friel, “The Winograd Report v. The New York Times,” Common Dreams, May 3, 2007, for a brief discussion of the illegality of Israel‘s reprisals against Lebanon under UN Charter article 2(4).

[9]  Thomas Friedman, “The Arab Commission,” New York Times, May 9, 2007.

[10] See “The Inquiry Commission into the military campaign held in Lebanon in summer 2006,” April 30, 2007, at http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa.

[11] “Israel/Lebanon: Deliberate Destruction or ‘Collateral Damage’? Israeli Attacks on Civilian Infrastructure,” Amnesty International, August 23, 2006; See also the detailed report by the Lebanese Higher Relief Council at http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900SID/EKOI-6ST5ZM?OpenDocument.

[12] “The Inquiry Commission into the military campaign held in Lebanon in summer 2006,” April 30, 2007, at http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa.

[13] “One Month Later in Lebanon ,” New York Times, August 12, 2006.

[14] ” Mideast War, By the Numbers,” Associated Press, August 17, 2006.

[15] See “Israel/Lebanon: Deliberate Destruction or ‘Collateral Damage’? Israeli Attacks on Civilian Infrastructure,” Amnesty International, August 23, 2006. This report noted “an estimated 1,183 fatalities, about one third of whom have been children, 4,054 people injured and 970,000Lebanese people displaced.” The Amnesty report cited “Middle East Crisis UNICEF Situation Report No. 26” and “Figures from Lebanese Higher Relief Council.”

[16] See “Humanitarian Fact Sheet on Lebanon : Press Release,” Department of Public Information, News and Media Divisions, New York , United Nations, August 11, 2006. This press release stated: “According to the Lebanese Higher Relief Council, 1,056 Lebanese have been killed and 3,600 wounded.”

[17] ” United States Government Situation Report: Lebanon Humanitarian Emergency,” USG Humanitarian Situation Report #18, Fiscal Year (FY) 2006, August 13, 2006. This report noted: “The GOL [Government of Lebanon] Higher Relief Council (HRC) reports that 1,071 people have been killed and 3,628 people have been injured.” 

[18] “Fatal Strikes: Israel‘s Indiscriminate Attacks Against Civilians in Lebanon ,” Human Rights Watch, August 3, 2006.

[19] Deborah Howell, “A War of Images and Perceptions,” Washington Post, August 13, 2006.

[20] “Israel/Lebanon: Deliberate Destruction or ‘Collateral Damage’? Israeli Attacks on Civilian Infrastructure,” Amnesty International, August 23, 2006.

[21] “Fatal Strikes: Israel‘s Indiscriminate Attacks Against Civilians in Lebanon ,” Human Rights Watch, August 3, 2006.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid.

[24] “Israel/Lebanon: Deliberate Destruction or ‘Collateral Damage’? Israeli Attacks on Civilian Infrastructure,” Amnesty International, August 23, 2006.

[25] Ibid.

[26] “Survey: Political Cartoonists and U.S. Newspapers Support Israel , See Hezbollah as a Terrorist Group,” Anti-Defamation League, August 29, 2006.

[27] See Howard Friel and Richard Falk, The Record of the Paper: How The New York Times Misreports US Foreign Policy (Verso, 2004), and Israel-Palestine on Record: How The New York Times Misreports Conflict in the Middle East (Verso, 2007).

 

 

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