Middle Eastern exchange rates: Why Israel is winning the PR war

By Richard Collie

The recently finalised prisoner/ body exchange between Israel and its Lebanese and Palestinian neighbours is as good a case study as I can remember of the mainstream media's tainted portrayal of the strife ridden conflict zone.

It underlines why Israel is winning the 'public relations war', why it continues to garner so much international support in spite of its frequent disregard for human rights and international law.

The terms for the negotiation were as follows: Israel were to hand over five Lebanese prisoners and the remains of 199 Palestinian and Lebanese in exchange for the bodies of the two Israeli soldiers, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, who had been captured by Hezebollah in 2006.

The imbalance of the exchange is clear. On the surface, Lebanon and Hezebollah are the clear 'winners' in this deal, gaining five 'live' prisoners in addition, somewhat grimly, to a superior number in the coffin count. Indeed, the Israeli government came under fire from their own people for agreeing to an exchange that granted so much to their enemies for so little in return. Hezebollah chief Hassan Nasrallah referred to the exchange as a 'humiliation' for Israel.
 

He would be wrong in assuming the deal marked a resounding defeat for Israel. The lengthy saga has dealt a hammer blow to Hezebollah's reputation that will linger long after the scenes of jubilation on the streets of Sout Beirut have died down.

And it highlights how sophisticated the media is in its pro-Israeli bias, how it subtly spins the conflict to focus on isolated, tangible incidents to distract attention and conceal greater injustices.

The key issue is this: The incident has enabled Israel to portray itself as the 'victim', yet again, despite its overwhelming military superiority (over $100billion US military aid to date) and its persistent, brutal and reckless use of force in Lebanon and the occupied Palestinian territories.
 

The images were clear, somber Israelis mourn the deaths of their fallen soldiers while wild, jubilant mobs hail the return of a convicted child killer across the border in Lebanon. It is hard not to be moved by the comparison, or to avoid stripping the debate down to on the one hand, peaceful civilised human beings and on the other, hardened, religious fanatics. It is this simplified view of the situation that we are encouraged to accept, which goes a long way toward explaining the generally appalling level of understanding amongst observers outside of the Middle East.

I will use the BBC (a publicly funded and supposedly unbiased news organisation) coverage of the saga as a case in point. Throughout the daily news updates on the subject, there were three names that came up in virtually every article: Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, the dead Israeli soldiers, and Samir Qantar, the convicted Lebanese murderer, who were all used as bargaining chips in the exchange negotiations. These were the only 'named' characters involved in the swap that we are able to attain a tangible image of. Now consider the implications: the two named Israelis were victims of the 2006 war. We were confronted with images of Goldwasser's tearful young widow and widespread scenes of mourning across Israel. And what of the one 'named' Lebanese, Samir Qantar? He is a convicted murderer, accused of crushing a 4-year old girl's head with the butt of his rifle as well as murdering her father and an Israeli policeman.

These are the images that stay with us, real characters with names and human faces. Numbers are cold and lifeless, they don't sell newspapers. Yet if the figures are anlaysed the 'victim' image is exposed as a fallacy that doesn't stand up to any form of logical analysis. Well over 1,000 Lebanese civilians lost their lives during the 2006 war, roughly 30% of whom were children, while many more lives remain at risk due to the reckless use of cluster munitions during that war. Israel has admitted dropping roughly one million cluster bombs in Southern Lebanon and The UN's mine disposal agency estimates that around 40% of those failed to detonate, yet retain a risk of mutilating innocent civilians. Although these figures do occasionally occur in the mainstream media, what they always lack is a human face; a tangible example that we can relate to, something that lives in the mind longer than the latest body count.

Did we learn the names of any of the 199 Lebanese and Palestinian corpses, or indeed the other four live prisoners involved in the exchange? No, it is the child killer alone who is put forward as the sole representative of the Arab side of the deal.

The repellent image of Samir Qantar, coupled with the much publicised scenes of mass jubilation in the suburbs of Beirut implies that the Lebanese people were ecstatic to have a convicted child killer back in their midst. Clearly this was not the basis for their celebrations. The scenes of joy were not confined to Hezebollah militants and in fact transcended the deep sectarian divisions within Lebanese politics. Their sense of victory came not from winning Qantar's freedom, rather they saw the exchange as a culmination of their ‘victory’ or expulsion of the Israeli Defence Force's offensive in the 2006 war. As Nasrallah stated in his rare public appearance last week, "The age of defeats is gone, and the age of victories has come. This people, this nation gave a great and clear image today to its friends and enemies that it cannot be defeated."

It is preposterous to ignore this context in justifying the motivations behind the celebrations, yet from my own analysis the connection was not made in any of the articles I read on the BBC, Sky News, CNN or Fox News. This can lead a reader who lacks a firm grasp of the situation in the Middle East to draw conclusions without any kind of logical basis.

There was something else implicit in the exchange that in my mind makes this a valid microcosm for the entire Israeli Arab conflict, something that is in its essence so simple yet not one of the reports I read came close to picking up on its symbolic value. Again it relates to the numbers. Consider them again: two Israeli bodied for almost two hundred Palestinian/ Lebanese bodies. If we are to take this as the current ‘exchange rate’ of blood in the conflict, then one Israeli is worth the lives of one hundred Arabs. One of the strongest criticisms directed at the IDF is that its valuation of the lives of its Arab neighbors in defense of its own people appears shockingly low. What this exchange provides is a quantitative representation of this theory.

The fact that the media have failed to make this simple analogy should not come as a surprise as it would in effect boil down to accusing Israel of war crimes.

So instead they opt for another angle. Instead we learn of the noble, courageous Israeli government who will pay any price to ‘bring home’ their fallen sons. Perhaps I would be more willing to share in this praise if these same Israeli leaders showed the same regard for all human life, regardless of colour, culture or religion.