The Emergence of Pallywood.

DEFINITION

The term "Pallywood" refers to the staging of scenes by Palestinian journalists in order to present the Palestinians as hapless victims of Israeli aggression. They are able to succeed in this endeavor in large part due to the credulity and eagerness of the Western press to present these images, which reinforce the image of the Palestinian David struggling valiantly against the overpowering Israeli Goliath. Pallywood has led to astonishing lapses in Western journalistic standards in which badly staged scenes regularly appear on the news as "real events." This page attempts to outline how such lapses could have come about, producing the current situation.

MAJOR STAGES IN THE EMERGENCE OF PALLYWOOD
Life Magazine, June 12, 1970.

1982: Lebanon invasion

The earliest clear signs of an emerging Pallywood come from the Lebanese invasion of 1982. There, for the first time, the media seems to have embraced an openly hostile stance towards Israel, which led to a widely discussed article entitled "J'Accuse" (Commentary, September 1983), by Norman Podhoretz who charged America's leading journalists, newspapers and television networks with "anti-Semitism." The alleged hostility was characterized by the following incidents:

- Using Arafat's brother, Fathi Arafat, head of the Palestinian Red Crescent, Palestinian sources claimed 10,000 dead and 600,000 refugees from the Israeli onslaught. Without checking to see how many people lived in southern Lebanon (300,000), the media repeated these figures constantly (pp. 300-301), until they became widely accepted.

- Reporters comparing the siege of Beirut with the Nazi siege of Warsaw. Of all the sieges of cities in 20th century warfare, it would be harder to find a more inappropriate one, and yet the analogy between Israelis and Nazis seems to have had an almost irresistable lure to some journalists. Among the most aggressive reporters was Peter Jennings. For a discussion of his work, see here and here.

- The use of clearly false images by a press eager to believe the worst of the Israeli army, including images of areas devastated in the civil war between Palestinians and Lebanese, dead babies that were not dead, etc (pp. 353-389).

- Coverage of Sabra and Shatilla massacres that left many under the impression that Israeli soldiers had massacred Palestinian refugees, and failed to inform people of why the Phalange wanted to take vengeance. Everyone has heard of Sabra and Shatilla; Only recently have people started to hear of Darfur. The stark contrast between the hundreds of dead at Sabra and Shatilla and the over ten thousand dead at Hama, a town in the heart of Syria, the same year, illustrates both the medias penchant for reporting any Israeli misdeed no matter how removed direct culpability, and the power of intimidation and (no) access journalism to silence them on matters of Arab misdeeds (see Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalém, chap. 4.

- Use of streaming text below footage informing the viewer that the footage had been viewed by "Israeli military censors." No similar indication of the role of Palestinian "authorities" in controlling the images emanating from areas under their control ever appeared. For a discussion of the press's differential treatment of formal Israeli military censorship and informal but pervasive Palestinian censorship via intimidation and violence, (see pp. 353-387).

- Reluctance of the press - especially the "resident" reporters to reveal the extent of PLO brutality in the "state within a state" in southern Lebanon (see pp 219-278).

Given the eagerness of the Western press to report the worst of the Israelis, to avoid reporting on the worst of the Palestinians, their susceptibility to intimidation and the murder of journalists who displeased the PLO, and their remarkably shoddy standards in sifting real from confected evidence, Palestinians clearly understood that they had a valuable ally in the Western media based at the Commodore Hotel - "Chairman Yasser's Best Battalion" (Chafets, Double Vision, chap. 6).