From 2002: David Bedein-- Why the Palestinians Are Winning the Media War

From an interview David Bedein did in the Reform Judaism magazine. [hat tip: Doc's Talk]

...When did these Palestinian P.R. professionals first come onto the scene?

Back in March 1984, Ramonda Tawill, a media professional (who six years later would become Yasser Arafat's mother-in-law), helped the PLO establish the Palestinian Press Service (PPS) to provide assistance to visiting journalists and conduct training seminars in media relations. The PPS then joined forces with the Palestine Human Rights Information Center (PHRIC) to change the image of the PLO from that of a sixties-style liberation movement to an organization fighting to protect the victims of Israeli human rights abuses. PHRIC seminars instructed their "students" to steer every media interview to the same themes--Israeli occupation, illegal settlements, human rights abuses, and the right of the Palestinian refugees to go home. Regardless of the question, these themes were to be repeated over and over again. I know this firsthand, because our agency made it a policy to assign our journalist interns to take Tawill's courses.

One of her great "accomplishments" came in May 1985, after Israel released more than a thousand convicted PLO terrorists in exchange for seven Israeli soldiers. As a way of diverting media attention from their crimes, Tawill coached these freed terrorists to stress that they were tortured in Israel jails for "political activism" and "support of Palestinian nationalism." I learned about this tactic from several of Tawill's students in a media course I took in May 1986. They explained that by monopolizing the reporters' time with stories of torture, the journalists would invariably have to complete the interview before they had time to ask the terrorists about the actions that had led to their capture and imprisonment. At the time, Israeli intelligence did not allow reporters to look at the prison files of security detainees, so the crimes of these terrorists went virtually unreported.

Not much seems to have changed in 6 years. Not much at all:

... How have the Israelis countered this Palestinian strategy of portraying them as human rights violators?

The Israelis constantly find themselves on the defensive. They can't seem to get out of the box into which the Palestinians have put them. By framing the conflict as a human rights issue, the Palestinians have succeeded in convincing many journalists, on some level at least, that every act of terrorism against Israeli civilians is not a crime, but a legitimate response to human rights abuses.

Read the whole thing.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Hasbarah and David Bedein.