The Occupation of the American Mind

Narrator: On July 8, 2014, Israel launched a

devastating military attack on the Gaza Strip.

Narrator: Over the course of 51 days, the Israeli

military dropped nearly 20,000 tons of explosives on Gaza,

a densely populated area the size of Philadelphia,

killing over 2,000 Palestinians and wounding tens of thousands more.

The overwhelming majority of these casualties were civilians.

Television news montage: This strip of land is

being bombarded from the air, sea, and land...

Israel launched at least 160 strikes on the Gaza strip...

And there's one less hospital in Gaza now. Israel today flattened Wafa Hospital.

Narrator: The sheer scale of the attacks sparked

outrage and condemnation around the world.

News anchor: Israel's month-long pounding of

Gaza shocked many people around the world.

Mass demonstrations have been held in many of the world's major cities.

Narrator: But in the United States, the story was different.

Polls showed the American people holding firm in their support for Israel.

CNN anchor: This is the latest CNN-ORC poll of Americans...

shows 57% of those polled say Israel's action

in Gaza is justified, 34% say unjustified.

Narrator: These numbers were striking, but they weren't new.

Over the course of a conflict in which Palestinian

casualties have far outnumbered Israeli casualties,

the American people have consistently shown far

more sympathy for Israelis than for Palestinians.

Peter Hart: It's very difficult to divorce public opinion on any question

from the media coverage that people rely on to form opinions.

And I think the most prevalent lesson from looking at the coverage

is that the coverage tends to see this conflict from the Israeli side.

Sut Jhally: Study after study has demonstrated that Israeli perspectives

dominate American media coverage.

So by far the most common thing we've heard is that

everything comes down to Israel's right to defend itself.

Tzipi Livni: Israel is a state that implements

its right to defend itself and its citizens.

Yousef Munayyer: It is a talking point that is set from the top,

and by the top I mean from the highest officials, government officials, who are

commenting on this issue, which the media obsessively covers and repeats.

Benjamin Netanyahu: A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do,

and you say a country's gotta do what a country's gotta do.

We have to defend ourselves.

Munayyer: In the most recent war in 2014,

when we looked at mainstream media outlets,

almost by a margin of 3 to 1, Israeli spokespeople were

overrepresented compared to Palestinian spokespeople.

So almost every time you turned on the screen there

was an Israeli representative on the screen telling you

Israel is the one that's in a position of defense. It is being attacked.

Ron Prosor: And basically, Israel is saying:

hey, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand

that if rockets fly on your head, you're allowed to defend yourself.

Munayyer: Add to this the fact that you have American elected officials

also reinforcing Israel's right to defend itself.

President Barack Obama: As I've said many times,

Israel has a right to defend itself against rocket and tunnel attacks from Hamas.

Munayyer: And you hear some of the same

framing by anchors who reiterate and reinforce

many of the same talking points that the

Israeli official spokespeople are making.

CNN anchor: Israel has the right to defend itself against Hamas, of course -

a group that is firing rockets on Israel,

coming out of tunnels to attack Israelis.

Munayyer: That imbalance there was very significant in

shaping the way the public understood this conflict.

Rula Jebreal: I worked in the European media for a long time.

The coverage is the opposite.

There's Palestinian legislators,

Palestinian thinkers, Palestinian intellectuals,

pro-Palestinian thinkers. Many voices.

Hanan Ashwari: So let me say then very

frankly, it's very easy to blame the victim.

It's very easy to pull out the terrorist label.

Jebreal: You come to America and you think that you are an alien,

you're looking at a different world, or a different planet,

and I'm thinking, "What's going on here?"

Mark Crispin Miller: When a narrative is so dominant...

Michael Oren: Thousands of rockets...

Mark Crispin Miller: ...without any visible dissent or complication,

it's extremely difficult to make clear to people that it is -

it is basically a propaganda story.

John Kerry: Israel is under siege by a terrorist organization.

Miller: How do you make that clear

when the mainstream spectacle is so unrelenting and total?

Jhally: We hear over and over again that the conflict

comes down to Palestinian terrorism and Israeli security,

and what gets pushed out of the frame entirely

is the fact now that for almost 50 years,

Palestinians have been systematically dispossessed from

their land and denied their most basic human rights.

Newsreel narrator: Pioneers and refugees from

countries of the oppression, young and old,

they are going now to a land, which accepts them.

They will march to their work in the Jewish settlements:

To build roads. To quarry stones.

They will drill wells to restore to Palestine's

soil its long-neglected fruitfulness.

Narrator: Zionism, the nationalist movement

that emerged in Europe in the late 1800s,

was dedicated to the idea that the Jewish people,

after centuries of living as persecuted minorities within other countries,

were entitled to a state in historic Palestine,

the biblical homeland of the Jews more than 3,000 years before.

But there was a basic problem with the choice from the start.

Palestine was already home to hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs,

who had been living in Palestine for centuries -

first under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, and since

World War I under the control of the British Empire -

and for decades had aspirations of their

own for an independent state in Palestine.

Tensions steadily escalated during the 1930s,

placing more and more pressure on the British colonial government

to reconcile the competing interests of both sides.

After World War II and the Holocaust, the situation reached a breakpoint.

Ultimately the British colonial government made the decision to withdraw

and to pass the problem on to the newly created United Nations.

In 1947, UN Resolution 181 recommended that Palestine be split into two parts.

Jews, who were a third of the population, would receive 56% of the land.

Palestinians, who were two-thirds of the population

and possessed more than 90% of historic Palestine,

would receive 44%.

These terms were immediately rejected by Arab leaders as unfair.

But in the spring of 1948, Zionist leaders declared

Israel a state along the proposed borders anyway,

triggering the first Arab-Israeli war.

Archival newsreel: Arab armies set out to destroy

the newly born nation, and suffered repeated defeats.

Narrator: After winning a crushing victory,

Israel took possession of even more land.

By the time armistice was declared in 1949,

Israel controlled 78% of historic Palestine.

The creation of the new state would be celebrated by Israelis as a triumph.

But to this day, it is commemorated by Palestinians as "The Nakba" -

the Arabic term for "The Catastrophe" -

in memory of the hundreds of thousands of

Palestinians who were driven from their homes

to make way for the new Jewish state.

All told, approximately 700,000 people, more than

half of Palestine's native population, were uprooted.

Yousef Munayyer: There's a lot of sympathy

that can be generated, and I think rightly so,

for what Jewish people as a whole have dealt with in Western societies,

and globally, because of anti-Semitism.

The question then becomes: what is the proper response to that?

The Zionist answer is, of course, statehood,

and there's many people who would sympathize

with that if it was in fact done in a vacuum,

and if it was, in fact, done for a people

without a land in a land without people.

The reality is that's just not the way that it happened.

There were people here.

They lost their homes, their livelihood, their nation, their everything.

Rami Khouri: This was a land, in 1910, that was

93% Palestinian Arab and six, seven percent Jewish.

How did it suddenly become 80% Jewish and 20% Palestinian?

This was not a normal demographic transition.

This was a consequence of Israel's desire to create a Jewish state,

and to do that it had to get rid of as many Palestinians as possible.

There's other more complex factors, but that's

cutting it to its bare bones as we see it.

Rashid Khalidi: That is, I think in a certain sense, the core of the conflict.

The Palestinians have suffered inordinately

as a result of the creation of Israel.

The creation of a Jewish state, in a country that had an Arab majority,

necessarily and inevitably caused them irreparable harm.

Phyllis Bennis: The Palestinians use the term

catastrophe to speak of the 1948 consequences,

when they lost their land the first time around.

In '67, it was another Nakba, another catastrophe.

Narrator: In June of 1967, Israel won what

was perceived as a stunning underdog victory

over much larger Arab armies during the Six Day War.

With victory, in addition to taking land from Egypt and Syria,

Israel began to militarily occupy all remaining Palestinian territory

in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem.

Bennis: Suddenly all of Palestine is now lost.

We now had no Palestinian land left under Palestinian control.

You had a huge Palestinian population living

as refugees or living under occupation.

Palestinians are governed under military law. They are essentially prisoners.

They are treated as if they were all prisoners of war. They have no rights.

Narrator: In the immediate aftermath of the '67 war, the

United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 242.

Citing international law forbidding the takeover of territory by war,

242 explicitly called for Israel to withdraw its armed forces.

But to this day, Israel has largely failed to comply -

not only holding Palestinian territory, but confiscating additional land

and building massive Jewish settlement blocks in the West Bank and East Jerusalem

in direct violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention,

which expressly forbids states from transferring

civilian populations into territory it occupies.

In addition, Israel has established an entire matrix of security control

on Palestinian land to secure these settlements,

including checkpoints that prevent Palestinians

from traveling freely within their own land,

and a 440-mile security wall along the Israeli

border that cuts into Palestinian territory.

Munayyer: We're talking about massive denial

of human rights, for millions of people.

At the most basic level, the government that is ruling over these people