Media pullout won’t calm Middle East

The withdrawal from the Gaza Strip is a study in power dynamics. Between the Israelis and Palestinians? No, between the modern military and the modern media.

So who’s winning this military-media struggle? Turn on your TV – there’s your answer. The mighty Israel Defense Forces could easily have crushed the Palestinians, but instead the IDF supervised the evacuation of fellow Jews as the gleefully triumphant Palestinians advanced. The worldwide media and its close companion, world public opinion, prevailed over Israeli territorial ambitions.

For Israel, the burden of defending 8,500 Jews sandwiched in among 1.3 million hostile Palestinians proved to be too much. Seventeen Israeli soldiers have died in recent years, for example, defending the isolated Gaza settlement of Netzarim.

Of course, the Israelis could have used their vast arsenal against the Palestinians, creating a no-man’s-land, or a graveyard, out of all the Arab areas. Indeed, ruthless ethnic cleansing, sometimes including genocide, was once the standard practice of nation-builders – even for the “good guys,” as surviving American Indians can attest. But the Israeli national conscience, prodded by international law and mediated by world opinion, recoiled at the prospect of a mass relocation, let alone a mass extermination.

Instead, the Israelis tried to protect the Gaza settlements using meager police tactics. Israeli soldiers manned checkpoints and rode around in armored vehicles, from which they were occasionally picked off by Palestinian snipers and bombers. Yet, for all their bravery and sophistication – many IDF soldiers speak Arabic – the Israelis couldn’t keep the Gaza settlers safe at a manageable cost.

After all, the Palestinians were brave, too – suicidally brave, as they launched suicide attacks against Israelis, whom they regarded as intruding colonialists. Once again, the media helped shift the balance of power. The Arab media stoked up passions, giving the Palestinians the feeling they could win. In a media-rich environment, nobody is passive; everybody is an activist for the cameras.

For its part, Palestinian political leadership has made no concessions to the withdrawing Israelis. On good days, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas says nice things about Israel, but on the many bad days he still insists on the Palestinian “right of return” into Israel and his government lauds suicide bombers as “martyrs.” And of course, Hamas, which might yet take power throughout the Palestinian zone, is even more open in its advocacy of Israel’s destruction.

Yet, whenever the IDF retaliated against the Palestinians in the wake of attacks, using relatively small dollops of force, the unfolding story played like “overdog vs. underdog” on worldwide TV. That’s the paradox of technology: Modern militaries have never been more powerful, but neither has modern media. In this battle between tanks and cameras, the cameras won; Israel concluded that the Gaza Strip wasn’t worth forever fighting for.

On the other hand, the Israelis view the West Bank, or at least parts of it, as vital. So they are building a huge wall across it, aimed at separating Jews from Arabs. The land on their side of the wall, they seem to be saying, is theirs forever.

The Palestinians claim that same land, too, and decry the wall as illegal. Which is to say, there’s more strife ahead. But the Israelis figure that walled-off separation is the best of bad alternatives. What they don’t want is an endless cycle of tit-for-tat violence playing out on the world stage; they hope the wall will stop that. And they figure that the same cameras that are fixated on street action are likely to ignore nontelegenic post-wall disputes over land titles and water rights.

Lack of media attention won’t necessarily lead to true peace between Israelis and Palestinians. But after decades of fighting in those bloodied territories, the Israelis will settle for a dull cold war.