Representing Palestine

Media and Journalism in Australia Since World War I

Peter Manning

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781838609023
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

After more than half a century, the Israel-Palestine conflict continues to dominate headlines. But how has the coverage of Palestinians by foreign media changed? How did foreign correspondents influence the perception of Palestine amongst their audiences? And why is understanding this so important?
Based on extensive original research in the archives of Australia's oldest newspaper, Peter Manning shows how the Sydney Morning Herald portrayed Palestine during three key periods - the end of World War I (1917-8); the Nakba and the creation of Israel (1947-8); and 9/11 and its aftermath (2000-2). In the process, he takes the reader on a unique journey from the moment information was gathered on the ground in Palestine, through to its final processing and publication. Crucially, when correspondents neglected to write about Palestinians, their perspective never made it to readers and a space emerged for stereotyping and misunderstanding.
Manning reveals how the newspaper reported on key events such as Australian troops in Palestine and the Holocaust, but also how the newspaper failed to cover massacres and forced migrations. Combining close textual analysis of more than 10, 000 articles with cutting-edge quantitative research methods, this book is important reading for anyone with an interest in how the print media has portrayed the conflict in Palestine - both in Australia and beyond.

CHAPTER 1

REPORTING PALESTINE IN WORLD WAR I

When Australian troops left their home shores on 21 October 1914, the largely enthusiastic recruits expected to end up in England. Nearly one in five had been born in Britain.¹ Most press attention had concentrated on the German threat; however, the Australians disembarked in Egypt. Turkey had joined the war while they were at sea and were threatening an Australian lifeline to Britain, the Suez Canal. As a result, the Australians’ first battles were at Gallipoli in Turkey, not Europe.

The now-famous war correspondent Charles Bean was aboard that first fleet in 1914. It was known to the officers that he was not only a correspondent and journalist, but would also maintain diaries to form the official history of the war.² Like the troops he was reporting on, he ‘cooled his heels’ in Cairo before heading off to Gallipoli. Only after the withdrawal from Gallipoli on 19 December 1915 did he begin his stint on the Western Front in France.

Bean was nothing if not prolific and dedicated to his task as historian. His 283 books of diary notes formed the basis for much of the myth about being an ‘Anzac’ and ‘an Australian’, and the diaries have themselves become the subjects of historical analysis.³

The Gallipoli (or Gelibolu, in Turkish) campaign is viewed today as an iconic event in Australian history and Anzac Cove is the subject of annual pilgrimage by young people, tourists, ex-soldiers and politicians. Equally, the battles of the Somme River on the Western Front in France occupy almost religious status.

A different group of Australian troops – the Light Horse – headed eastwards from Egypt after the withdrawal from Gallipoli and confronted the Turks again in late 1916 and early 1917 among the largely Arab and Muslim population of Palestine and Syria. They had no Australian correspondent with them, and their activities were to be reported by a British correspondent until August 1918 when an Australian, Henry Gullett, arrived.⁴

For troops and correspondents, this was unusual in several respects. They had expected to be fighting fellow Europeans on behalf of the British. In Gallipoli, they had been fighting a tough foe, but the foe was defending his own land. In Palestine and Syria, they were fighting, once again, the Turkish troops, but this time on land occupied by Arabic-speaking people of largely Muslim background. They were effectively destroying the Ottoman Empire, not just fighting Germans. This was a challenge of understanding not only for the generals and officers, who had to handle the logistics of fighting a foreign war on occupied territory, but for the ordinary soldiers and correspondents in day-to-day life.

Historical Context

Rising Arab nationalism, pre-World War I

For 30 years prior to World War I, Syrian intellectuals had been discussing the notion of an ‘Arab nation’. Butrus al-Bustani, a Christian from Beirut, promoted the idea of resistance to foreign intervention in Syria in the 1870s and 1880s, and spread the word through newspapers, schools, universities, libraries and public lectures.⁵ Later, nationalists such as Rashid Rida were not only talking about a nation state, but also about how to integrate Western notions of progress (democracy, equality and science) with Islam.⁶

British historian Albert Hourani has described the rich debates of Arab, Christian and Muslim thinkers during the late Ottoman period.⁷ The notion of a greater Arab state, forming the boundaries of what are today Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine, was also alive and well in a period of intense thought about nationalism worldwide.

Palestine ‘notables’ and peasants

Various scholars have written of the long-held notion of ‘Palestine’ as a Benedict Anderson ‘imagined community’.⁸ One such is a study of the fatwas (meaning ‘legal opinions’) of a seventeenth-century al-Ramla mufti, Khayr al-din al-Ramli, which shows clear references among the people of Filastin (Palestine) to the notion of the geographical area of their country and of Palestine being ‘a (Muslim) holy land’.⁹

Hourani also describes the role of Palestinian urban intellectuals, merchants, politicians and Muslim leaders in nation formation in the late Ottoman Tanzimat period. Borrowing from Max Weber’s term ‘patriciate’, Hourani renames this elite Palestine’s ‘notables’.¹⁰ It was these ‘notables’ who formed the moderate base of Arab and Palestinian representatives in the parliament of the Ottoman Empire prior to the war. It was also they, the Abdul-Nabis, the Nashashibis and the Khalidis, who led the revolt against the Ottoman Young Turks when they tried to crush aspirations of Syrian and Palestinian nationalism in favour of Turkish nationalism immediately prior to the war. These Palestinian nationalists also had their own secret clubs and newspapers.

Zionist immigration to Palestine, 1880s–1914

Jews of the Mizrahihad had always been a part of the various Muslim empires of the Arab world;¹¹ however, rising Jewish immigration to Palestine ran alongside a growing interest in Palestine as ‘the Holy Land’ in nineteenth-century Europe. Jewish immigration also rose sharply after publication of Theodor Herzl’s famous book of 1896, The Jewish State, which called for a nation state for the Jews in the ancient land of Zion (northern Palestine).¹²

Immediately prior to World War I, however, immigration was running at extremely high levels and has been referred to in Hebrew as ‘the second aliya’.¹³ The feature of this period was the way in which Jewish settlements no longer employed Palestinian labour, using instead exclusively Jewish workers, and took on the status of a ‘state within a state’. Shafir sees this as the prelude to a new nation within Palestine prior to 1914, effectively competing with the Palestinians. Studies of Palestinian newspapers at the time show the Palestinians to be well aware of this clash of nationalisms prior to the onset of the War.¹⁴

The settlement of Richon near al-Ramla in central Palestine was one such ‘nation state’ project, specialising in a new type of ‘plantation’ agriculture, expressing ‘contempt’ towards local Palestinians’ rural methods and backed financially by Lord Rothschild of Britain since 1882.¹⁵

The secret Sykes – Picot Agreement of May 1916

At the beginning of the war, Britain had promised Sharif Hussein bin Ali of Mecca that if his Arab Bedouin troops discarded their religious affinities to the Ottoman Empire and rose in revolt against the Turks, Britain would support his demand for an Arab nation state upon which his four sons would rule in Iraq, Syria, Amman and Jerusalem.¹⁶

However, in 1916, having secured Hussein’s agreement, the British and the French met secretly and agreed to carve up the Middle East according to their own interests.¹⁷ France would get Syria and form a new, more Christian, state of Lebanon out of it. Britain would get Iraq and Palestine and carve a new state out of southern Syria (later called Jordan). A year later, Britain would also give Palestine to the Jews to be shared as their national home.

It took until late November 1917 before this making and unmaking of promises became public, when the Bolshevik rulers in Russia released all the secret correspondence with the previous government. It contained copies of the Sykes – Picot Agreement.¹⁸ By the end of the war, the grab for territory by Britain and France had become clear: French troops invaded Damascus and British troops had already taken Baghdad, Jerusalem and Cairo. A nationalist revolt in Cairo was suppressed in 1919, with the assistance of Australian troops.¹⁹

In all, these four factors illustrate the complexity of the region in 1916 when Australian troops returned from Gallipoli on the eve of a campaign through Palestine in 1917. British, Arab, Palestinian and Jewish interests were all intersecting in a variety of political, economic, religious and social ways. Unlike in Europe, where press coverage of German atrocities had begun to reach new heights and demonisation of ‘the Hun’ had become commonplace,²⁰ Palestine was alive with ambiguities. The SMH had to cope with a new and more complex scene in Palestine.

The SMH at War

Charles Bean’s terms of reference

Charles Bean was chosen to be Official War Correspondent by a ballot of journalists on request from the new Labor government of Prime M...