Channels of Resistance in Lebanon

Liberation Propaganda, Hezbollah and the Media

Zahera Harb

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781848851207
• eBook ISBN: 9780857732309
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

The South Lebanon conflict saw two decades of sustained resistance by the Lebanese to the Israeli occupation. The Lebanese media's role in achieving liberation over this period is significant, through campaigns conducted to unify the Lebanese people against their foreign occupier and in support of the Lebanese resistance in South Lebanon. This book investigates the culture and performance of Lebanese journalism in this setting. It is a story about journalism told by a journalist who is also using tools of scholarship and research to narrate her story and the story of her fellow journalists. Zahera Harb is also presenting here an alternative interpretation of propaganda under conditions of foreign occupation and the struggle against that occupation. She identifies the characteristics of 'liberation propaganda' through the coverage and experience of the two Lebanese TV stations Tele Liban and Al Manar within the historical, cultural, organisational and religious contexts in which they operated, and how these elements shaped their professional practice and their news values.

1

INTRODUCTION

On 18 April 1996, I was there.

Children, women and old people lay in dozens, beheaded and eviscerated. They thought that sheltering inside the United Nations headquarters in the village of Qana might save their lives from indiscriminate Israeli shelling over their villages, but it did not. One hundred and six innocent souls were crushed.

I remember how drastic and horrendous the scene was. I remember the villagers of Qana shouting at the camera, waving their hands in every direction, asking us to film and tell the world what the Israeli army had done to the innocents, to their loved ones. I remember standing among the scattered bodies of guiltless people paralysed by the horrors of what I was witnessing and the civil defence rescuers screaming at us to continue filming. I remember the UN soldier sitting in one corner and crying over a child he was playing football with before the Israeli bombs fell.

These strong memories have remained ever present in my mind, even today, years after the massacre took place. They are now part of a collective memory shared by most Lebanese citizens and journalists.

Israel occupied south Lebanon for over 22 years between 1978 and 2000.¹ In April 1996, Israel launched a massive assault on Lebanon, aimed at uprooting the Lebanese resistance, mainly from Hezbollah (‘Party of God’). The Israeli army caused massive destruction and committed massacres, killing and injuring hundreds of Lebanese civilians. For 16 days I was positioned in south Lebanon, reporting Israeli assaults on the villages and cities of the south for Lebanese state-run television, Tele Liban.

We journalists played an important role in bringing people together, uniting them behind their fellow citizens in the south and in support of the resistance fighters against the Israeli occupation forces. Broadcasting live images of the shattered, innocent bodies of the Qana victims brought solidarity among Lebanese people to a climax. It was only when the war ended that I realised how we journalists were perceived as ‘heroic’ in the Lebanese press and among the Lebanese people.

At the time I felt that I had simply fulfilled my duty as a journalist to report and inform the public about what was really happening in south Lebanon. The nationalism and patriotism in my reporting seemed to me and my colleagues to be part of our role as professional journalists, but later I realised that it was that patriotic and nationalistic approach that made our coverage of the events in the south seem ‘heroic’.

In the view of the Lebanese public, being ‘heroic’ was not inimical to the idea that our coverage was professional and it is still remembered as such. Roula Abdallah, of the daily Al Mustaqbal, wrote on 29 March 2007: ‘Zahera and her colleagues raised the audiences’ confidence in the Lebanese media to inform, [and] without the need to quote international agencies like Reuters or AFP’ (Abdallah 2007: 8).

What seemed to be the first national media campaign to have brought Lebanese people together in solidarity against a foreign occupation force was followed later by a more structured media campaign conducted by Al Manar TV, the television station affiliated to Hezbollah, the main armed resistance force in south Lebanon. Al Manar’s media campaign came to dominate the broadcasting environment of the country. They labelled themselves ‘the Resistance Channel’ and had one aim in mind: making liberation of south Lebanon from Israeli forces achievable.

The rationale of this book

Between April 1996 and May 2000, when the Israeli army withdrew from south Lebanon, public figures emphasised the positive role that Lebanese television stations played in achieving liberation.

Hassan Nasrallah, Secretary General of Hezbollah, told Al Manar journalists afterwards that, if it had not been for Al Manar, the resistance would not have achieved the liberation. The late Lebanese Prime Minister, Rafic Hariri, praised the role the Lebanese media played in leading the country towards liberation – and it was then that I felt the need to address questions about the role that we, the Lebanese journalists, played in achieving that liberation.

The most poignant question to me was whether our media campaigns – for that was how we, and other commentators later, saw them – could be labelled as propaganda, a term that is usually pejorative and can have sinister undertones.

If so, what kind of propaganda was it? Did it match up with models of twentieth-century propaganda discussed in the West? Did it meet all the same criteria, techniques and principles? If it was propaganda, then what defined ‘our propaganda’?

The aim of our media campaigns – both Tele Liban and Al Manar – was to help in achieving liberation of our land from a foreign occupation force. Thus the propaganda we conducted, if shown, was propaganda with the aim of liberation and could be given the name ‘liberation propaganda’.

Alongside our unease that we might be accused of producing ‘propaganda’, there emerged a clear sense that we, the journalists, were deeply proud of the ‘objective coverage’ we delivered between 11 April 1996 and 25 May 2000, Liberation Day. Nonetheless, what kind of objectivity were we adhering to? How do journalism’s norms and values fit with certain kinds – or any kind – of propaganda? Does objectivity apply in a propaganda campaign and what kind of objectivity would it be?

This book seeks to address these questions by exploring Lebanese media coverage, using the following as case studies:

1. How Tele Liban covered the events of April 1996, by close examination of prime-time news programmes.

2. How Al Manar covered major military incursions and encounters between the resistance and the Israeli occupation forces in south Lebanon between October 1997 and May 2000.

3. What press commentaries said about the above coverage.

As well as the case studies themselves, there are interviews with journalists, heads of news, editors and chairmen involved in the coverage during those five years.

This study is a qualitative investigation into Lebanese journalism’s culture and its performance in relation to the Israeli forces’ aggression against Lebanon and their encounters with the Lebanese resistance. Necessarily, the tale of how Lebanese journalists did their job is narrative and retrospective. Because this concerns a culture under threat, this study also uses the methodologies of ethnography to examine that aspect. The framework is a story about journalism told by a journalist, yet one who is using academic tools to tell it; this study is therefore self-critical and reflective.

Conceptually and politically, this study extends to questions that reporters face all over the world, because I examine Lebanese journalism culture and performance within the framework of war propaganda. As stated later, the objective here is to restore propaganda as a distinct generic entity (O’Shaughnessy 2004) and to claim a new understanding for it in the context of two conditions: foreign occupation and the struggle against that occupation.

To identify the characteristics of a more positive interpretation of propaganda, this study explores the historical, cultural, organisational and religious contexts in which the Lebanese television outlets and journalists studied here operated and how these contexts shaped their news values. This involves looking at particular genres of journalism, but as positive forms of propaganda. The study will also briefly draw upon examples from the July 2006 war, during which similar contexts existed.

This book suggests a definition, a set of characteristics and an understanding of liberation propaganda. What makes it original in the field of propaganda is that no other academic literature has been found on media campaigns operating in the same context: foreign military occupation and the struggle against that occupation.

2

PROPAGANDA: DEFINITIONS AND TECHNIQUES

Propaganda must be defined by reference to its aims.

(Bartlett 1942: 6)

Barlett’s approach to propaganda hardly matches the way other scholars define what propaganda is or how we can identify it (see Ellul 1965; Taithe and Thornton 1999; White 1939; Jowett and O’Donnell 1999). As this chapter aims to demonstrate, as long as propaganda has existed, people have seen it in various quite different terms, with some positive but mostly negative connotations attached to it. No one could claim to give a definitive description.

By looking at the work of prominent scholars on the issue, I want to illustrate how propaganda takes different definitions and forms in different political, social and cultural circumstances. I do not claim to cover here all that has ever been written on the issue, but I present and analyse the history, definitions and principles of different notions of propaganda as seen by scholars throughout the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first. I particularly wish to think about the meaning of the word and its connotations, both negative and positive, historically and in the literature. Using various researchers’ approaches, my aim is to develop an understanding of different kinds of propaganda, especially in liberation contexts.

There are clearly different kinds of liberation movements. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, around the world, there have been insurgencies self-consciously aiming to resist or throw off a dominant foreign power (Hungary, Vietnam), liberation movements targeting imperial or colonial rule (Algeria, South Africa), indigenous liberation movements against nation-state formations (Native Americans in the USA and Mexico, ethnic groups in the Balkans) and of course nation-states resisting invasion.

However, although my discussion of propaganda is informed by the whole variety of liberation contexts, it is the Lebanese situation I am interested in and working towards. A wider understanding allows us to explore whether the media campaigns in Lebanon (against the Israeli occupation of part of its southern territories) match any of the concepts of propaganda illustrated here – and, if they do, how far and in what way.

History and definitions

There is a tendency to think of propaganda as a relatively recent development and to associate it with the appearance of modern media, yet it has an extremely long history. Thousands of years before the invention of mass media in the modern sense, ancient civilisations could use the communication channels of their own era with skill and effect (Thomson 1999: 1). Hatem (1974: 54) went further, saying that propaganda has been with us in one form or another throughout recorded time.

Ancient and mediaeval understandings of the term were very different from those of today (Taithe and Thornton 1999), leaning towards the idea of proselytisation. In its strictest definition, propaganda meant the activities of a papal body, the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (ibid: 1). Indeed, the term ‘propaganda’ did not exist until 1622. In this context, it simply meant ‘extension, increase or enlargement’ (Currey, quoted in ibid: 63).

Bartlett, Kontler, Doob and White

Political propaganda in the twentieth century was generally first developed by the state, within its own borders, for its own inhabitants. Nevertheless, external propaganda soon gained similar importance; and its neglect, as Bartlett (1942: 7) argued, might run any such group into serious danger. Bartlett was writing when Nazi propaganda was at its climax during the Second World War. This was the time when Goebbels, the mastermind of Nazi propaganda, made it clear that ‘objectivity has nothing in common with propaganda, nothing in common with truth’ (quoted in Thomson 1999: 4). Goebbels’ statement dismisses any form of propaganda that is not related to deception. Such a negative model of propaganda is not appropriate to this book, which seeks to focus on the more positive definitions of propaganda.

As I have mentioned, the term propaganda did not see widespread use until the early twentieth century, when it was used to describe the persuasion tactics employed during the First World War and those later used by the ‘totalitarian regimes’. In this context, Laszlo Kontler charted early uses of a negative understanding of propaganda, defining it as the attempted supremacy of an overpowering ideology (in Taithe and Thornton 1999: 14). This is also important to my argument here. I want below to differentiate good and bad, defensive as opposed to offensive, and integrative rather than subversive, forms of propaganda.

Propaganda came to be defined as the dissemination of biased ideas and opinions, often through the use of lies and deception. However, as scholars began to study the topic in more detail, many came to realise that propaganda was not the sole property of ‘evil’ and totalitarian regimes, and that it often consists of more than just clever deceptions. Leonard W. Doob was one scholar who revisited his own definition of propaganda and rejected any clear-cut definitions:

Leonard W. Doob, who defined propaganda in 1948 as ‘the attempt to affect the personalities and to control the behaviour of individuals towards ends considered unscientific or of doubtful value in a society at a particular time’ (p. 390), said in a 1989 essay ‘a clear-cut definition of propaganda is neither possible nor desirable’ (p. 375). Doob rejected a contemporary definition of propaganda because of the complexity of the issues related to behaviour in society and differences in times and cultures.

(Jowett and O’Donnell 1999: 4)

The word propaganda has changed to mean mass suggestion or influence through the manipulation of symbols and the psychology of the individual. As Pratkanis and Aronson put it, propaganda has become:

The communication of a point of view with the ultimate goal of having the recipient of the appeal come to ‘voluntarily’ accept this position as if it were his or her own.

(Pratkanis and Aronson 1991: 9)

In 1939, A.B. White explained that political propaganda had (during the 1920s and 1930s) become the chief internal weapon of governments, employed not only to persuade a sufficient number of people that a particular course of action was expedient or right, ‘but to keep whole populations in a complete, and, it is apparently hoped, a perpetual emotional subjection’ (White 1939: 11). Thus, as White described, the object of the propaganda carried on by many governments in that period was to induce great masses of people to think alike and in the way desired by those governments (White 1939: 23).

By 1942, F.C. Bartlett adopted almost the same definition of political propaganda – as a process that aims, either wittingly or unwittingly, at producing whole nation groups in which all individuals think, act and feel alike – ‘which has profound consequences’. However, Bartlett (1942: 14) went further by asserting that propaganda could only achieve its purposes in tandem with censorship:

The propaganda that Bartlett identified appeals to a particular pride in a group or race, to the emotions and sentiments attached to strong symbols, to fear and anxiety, to the urge for dominance or submission, to greed and envy, or to what passes as legitimate social and political ambitions.

(Bartlett 1942: 24)

Ellul

In his famous book Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (1965/1973), Jacques Ellul speaks of several kinds of propaganda. He first divides propaganda into two kinds: political propaganda and sociological propaganda. For Ellul, the first involves techniques of influence employed by a government, a party, an administration or a pressure group, with a view to changing the behaviour of the public.

The choice of methods used is deliberate and calculated; the desired goals are clearly distinguished and quite precise, though generally limited. Political propaganda can be either strategic or tactical. The former establishes the general line, the array of arguments, the staggering of the campaigns; the latter seeks to obtain immediate results within that framework (such as wartime pamp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Propaganda: Definitions and Techniques
• 3 Ethnography and Journalism Culture
• 4 Overview of the Arab–Israeli Conflict
• 5 The Media in Lebanon
• 6 Tele Liban Coverage, April 1996: Grapes of Unity Facing Grapes of Wrath
• 7 Liberation Media: Hezbollah and Al Manar, 1997–2000
• Reflection: Achieving Liberation Propaganda
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index