Lies trump the truth

Editorial

Wonderful news: Muhammad al-Dura is alive!

Hearts were rended when the devastating footage flashed worldwide of a cowering child being shielded by his father in the early days of the intifada, only to be killed by Zionist bullets. The footage is among the definitive iconography of the battle against Israel and has been held up for eight years as evidence of Zionist cold-bloodedness. Now, thanks to a French court, the authenticity of this footage has been discredited. But will it matter?

Across the Arab League, Oct. 1 is al-Dura Day, when time stands still to commemorate the children lost to Zionist brutality. How awkward to find the martyr alive.

Well, this may not be quite accurate. Coverage after last week's court decision (debunking may be a more appropriate term) did not conclusively determine that al-Dura is alive. There is a circumstantial disconnect in the reporting still. While it appears the al-Dura tape was part of a larger, systemic pageant of staged violence and death, no one has yet conclusively proved that the boy in the film, who would now be a 20-year-old man, is alive and well. Shortly after the incident in 2000, forensic studies suggested that, if anyone were to blame, the bullets that reportedly killed al-Dura would more likely have been Palestinian. No media yet seems to be asking the question, Just how authentic was the staging of al-Dura's death? In the process of filming the propaganda piece, did the child actually die? Surely this question will arise in coming days.

When the world media gets it wrong, as it apparently did in 2000 with al-Dura and, later, with the "Jenin massacre" and the Gaza Beach libel and the deceptively reported details around the death of Rachael Corrie, the lies remain in the public realm, often eclipsing the truth even after thorough discrediting.

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth gets its pants on in the morning, Winston Churchill said before the days when the Internet made it easier for truth and lies to be given equal standing. If past experience is anything to go by, for the foreseeable future, if you type "al-Dura" into a web browser, you will be as likely to find the myth as the fact. The Internet aggregates all this material, giving no context to veracity, clarifications or corrections to stories.

This case brings up the systemic problem of reporting from Palestine and demands that we consider the position of Palestinian "journalists" who provide overseas media, like France-2, with the footage that makes up their coverage. While reporting from Israel is largely safe and conventional, reporting from the Palestinian territories is dangerous and thorny. To broadcast news that sheds ill light on Israel is to be part of the free market of ideas. To depict the Palestinian cause in negative ways is to risk death. In the al-Dura case, the French reporter responsible for the coverage received the footage as a finished product from a Palestinian "freelancer." When additional footage was summoned by the French court, it depicted the backstage direction of young Palestinians complicit in faking injury and death. And there remain long stretches of the film that have never been viewed, allegedly because young Muhammad's "dying" moments would be simply too wrenching for the world to see.

As the French court decision fades into memory – after all, it is hardly as memorable as the footage itself – the al-Dura case will go down as just another of those stories that are contested in a broader narrative of contested history. For whatever truth is out there, there will be those who continue to attest to the veracity of the debunked account. Those who have exploited the al-Dura case and others like it will simply declare that nobody really knows what happened and leave it at that.

When truth comes out, as it sometimes does, Israel's enemies respond predictably: Israel may not be guilt of this specific atrocity, but they are guilty of equal or worse. Facts matter little in this conflict. Those who are predetermined to see Zionist culpability as the exclusive cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will always find "evidence" to support their position. When one "atrocity" is exposed as a libelous deception, they will simply make up another one.

This case, and the myriad others like it, are worrying not only because they perpetuate the myth of Israeli soldiers (and Israeli society) as cavalier about the lives of Palestinian children. They are all the more disturbing because the perpetrators know – and now we do, too, if we needed more evidence – that the world is prepared to accept at face value the most bloodthirsty allegations against Jews without even a trace of skepticism or disbelief.

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