Foreign reporters kept on Israeli side of divide

JERUSALEM - Three times in recent days, a small group of foreign correspondents was told to appear at the border crossing to Gaza. The reporters were to be permitted in to cover firsthand the Israeli war on Hamas in keeping with a supreme court ruling against the two-month-old Israeli ban on foreign journalists entering Gaza.

Each time, they were turned back on security grounds, even as relief workers and foreign nationals were permitted to cross. Yesterday, the reporters were told not even to bother coming.

And so for an 11th day of Israel's war in Gaza, the several hundred journalists here to cover it wait in clusters away from direct contact with any fighting or Palestinian suffering, but with full access to Israeli political and military commentators eager to show them around southern Israel, where Hamas rockets have been terrorizing civilians. Private groups financed mostly by Americans are helping guide the media around Israel.

Like all wars, this one is partly about public relations. But unlike any war in Israel's history, in this one, the government is seeking to control entirely the message and narrative - for reasons both of politics and military strategy.

"This is the result of what happened in the 2006 Lebanon war against Hezbollah," noted Nachman Shai, a former army spokesman who is writing a doctoral dissertation on Israel's public diplomacy. "Then, the media were everywhere. Their cameras and tapes picked up discussions between commanders. People talked on live television. It helped the enemy and confused and destabilized the home front. Today Israel is trying to control the information much more closely." He and others, including the post-Lebanon war investigation commissioned by the government, said that the army found that when reporters were allowed onto the battlefield in Lebanon, they got in the way of military operations by posing risks and asking questions.

As Major Avital Leibovich, an army spokeswoman, said, "If a journalist gets injured or killed, then it is Central Command's responsibility." She said the military is trying to protect Israel from rocket fire and "not deal with the media."

Beyond such tactical considerations, there is a political one. Daniel Seaman, director of Israel's Government Press Office, said that "any journalist who enters Gaza becomes a fig leaf and front for the Hamas terror organization, and I see no reason why we should help that."

Foreign reporters deny that their work in Gaza has been subject to Hamas censorship or control. It seems that many Israelis accept Seaman's assessment and shed no tears over the lack of media access to the conflict.

The Foreign Press Association of Israel has been fighting for weeks to get its members into Gaza, first appealing to senior government officials and ultimately taking its case to the country's highest court. Last Wednesday, the justices worked out an arrangement with the organization allowing small groups into Gaza when it was deemed safe enough for the crossings to be opened for other reasons. But so far, every time the border has been opened, journalists have not been permitted to go in.

Yesterday, the press association released a statement saying, "the unprecedented denial of access to Gaza for the world's media amounts to a severe violation of press freedom and puts the state of Israel in the company of a handful of regimes around the world which regularly keep journalists from doing their jobs."

Israelis say the war is being reduced on television screens around the world to a simplistic story; US-backed country with awesome military machine fighting a Third-World guerrilla force leading to a handful of Israelis dead versus 600 Gazans dead.

Israel and its supporters feel that shallow descriptions fail to explain the vital context of what has been happening - years of terrorist rocket fire on civilians have gone largely unanswered and a message had to be sent to Israel's enemies that this would go on no longer, they say. The issue of proportionality, they add, is a false construct because comparing death tolls offers no help in measuring justice and legitimacy. There are other ways to construe the context of this conflict. But no matter what, Israel's diplomats know that if journalists are given a choice between covering death and covering context, death wins. So in a war that they consider necessary but poorly understood, they have decided to keep the media far away from the death.