“Israel Threatens to Defend Itself”: The Depiction of Israel in the Media

In 2003, an opinion poll conducted on behalf of the EU Commission yielded one very remarkable result: 59 percent of Europeans saw Israel as the greatest threat to world peace. Not North Korea, not Iran, not Russia, but Israel. The number in Germany was even higher: Here 65 percent, almost two thirds of those questioned, singled out Israel as the greatest threat to the world.1 In 2008, 40 percent of Germans approved of the statement: “What Israel today does to the Palestinians is not substantially different from what the Nazis during the Third Reich did to the Jews.” In an opinion poll two years later, 57 percent of Germans approved of the claim “Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians.”2 And according to another opinion poll, conducted in 2016, 40 percent of Germans agreed with the statement: “Given how Israel treats the Palestinians, I can easily understand why one is against the Jews.”3 All these statements have one thing in common: They are grotesque distortions of what Israel is and what Israel does. If we want to understand how distorted opinions like these are formed, we have to take a close look at the way the media reports on Israel and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Since most Europeans get all their information about the Jewish State from the media, the way Israel is depicted in the media’s reporting exerts a tremendous influence on Europeans’ attitude toward Israel. The analysis of Austrian media that Mena Watch has conducted since 2011 clearly shows that in their coverage of Israel, journalists time and again do not adhere to basic journalistic standards. They often draw a picture of Israel that is based on imbalanced and misleading reporting; the selective omission of facts; the application of double standards when judging Israeli behavior com-