Dear Dr Bellut, Berlin, 24.12.2018
dear Dr Frey,
it was with some incomprehension that we, the members of the WerteInitiative – jüdisch-deutsche Positionen e.V., read the ZDF review of the year on Israel:
https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/heute/jahresrueckblich-israel-es-kann-nur-besser-werden-102.html
In our view the piece contains a number of items of misinformation and questionable assessments. We ask you to have the text taken down from ZDF’s website and to explain to us how it was evidently able to go into the programme unedited.
On the errors of substance:
- “Civil-society groups” call in March for “peaceful demonstrations”: unlike in Germany or in Israel, it is not possible for civil-society groups in Gaza to express an opinion without the express promotion and support of the terrorist organisations Hamas and Islamic Jihad. To imply that a kind of peace movement had set off towards the border in Gaza we consider naive, if not indeed deliberately misleading. What also remains unmentioned are burning kites and balloons that were sent into Israel and caused considerable damage there, as well as hundreds of rockets that were fired at settlements in Israel.
- To describe Hamas as a “Palestinian organisation” does not correspond to the actual circumstances. Hamas proceeds murderously against opponents within its own population, disregards every principle of the free formation of opinion and has inscribed the destruction of Israel on its banners.
- “As the year draws to a close, attacks by Palestinians on Jewish settlers and soldiers are once again shaking the region”: what is presumably meant are Kim Levengrond and Ziv Hagbi, who were murdered. They were, however, neither settlers nor soldiers.
- Your correspondent lists the influence of the USA on policy in the Middle East and criticises it. What is passed over in silence, however, is the influence of Iran, above all Tehran’s support for Hezbollah. Not a word is said, for example, about the four Hezbollah terror tunnels that were dug from Lebanon in the direction of Israel with the aim of smuggling terror commandos into Israel. Why this one-sidedness?
- According to your correspondent, the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel stands for a “change in US Middle East policy”: yet former US President Barack Obama had already stated, “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided. I have no illusions that this will be easy.” Please note that the US embassy was moved to West Jerusalem, which is also the seat of the Knesset. Should ZDF take the view that West Jerusalem does not belong to Israel and that it may therefore maintain no authorities there, we could not describe your organisation’s stance as anything other than anti-Israeli.
In our view, opinion pieces such as this one do not serve a qualified engagement in Germany with what is happening in the Middle East. We are convinced that even within the brevity required in electronic media it is possible to report more objectively and more informatively.
On the WerteInitiative:
The WerteInitiative has established itself as a civil-society Jewish voice in Germany since 2014. It is a non-profit association. We work to strengthen the values of the free democratic basic order from Jewish perspectives. We do this by promoting values-based political, social and media discourse, civic Jewish engagement in Germany and the German-Israeli relationship. We are active in social media, hold background talks and organise discussion rounds as well as political salons.
Yours sincerely
Dr Elio Adler
Chairman of the BoardDear Dr Adler,
thank you very much for your letter of 24 December, in which you raise the review of the year by our Middle East correspondent Nicola Albrecht. Your message was forwarded to me as the person responsible. I should like to reply to you herewith.
Let me say at the outset that, as a public-service broadcaster, we regard it as our foremost journalistic task to engage with topics objectively and critically. It is our aspiration to report in a balanced and truthful manner in our programmes, online and in social media.
In the article in question, our correspondent gave a brief overview of important events that took place in Israel and the Palestinian territories in 2018. You criticise „one-sided misinformation“ and „questionable assessments“ in the text. I regret that you gained this impression. On your points of criticism:
You raise the demonstrations in Gaza and criticise the fact that support by Hamas is not sufficiently mentioned. The so-called „Great March of Return“ is not an „invention of Hamas“: the protest movement was originally initiated by a Palestinian professor who had called for a peaceful march in order to draw attention to the fate of the Palestinians. He later distanced himself from it when Hamas took over the protests. Nicola Albrecht was on the ground during this period and reported several times on the protests and their consequences on both sides of the fence, including the incendiary balloons and the rocket fire you describe. She has been travelling regularly to the Gaza Strip since 2010 and knows the power structures on the ground.
I have forwarded your criticism regarding the attacks that you raise in your letter to our correspondent, whose assessment is as follows:
The attacks took place in December in the West Bank occupied by Israel, near the settlement of Ofra and Givat Assaf. I was not referring to the attack in Barkan in October. Naming the place or context of an attack implies no justification of the violence, but helps in placing the events in context.
You also raise the official recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel by the US government and the relocation of the embassy. The relocation is regarded as highly controversial, not least because earlier agreements had laid down that the Jerusalem question should be settled bilaterally between Palestinians and Israelis at the end of peace negotiations. Trump’s decision caused unrest and bloodshed in 2018.
Just like the influence of the USA on policy in the Middle East, Israel’s military activities against Iran and its proxies in Syria are an interesting aspect too. In view of the limited length of the article and the requirement to concentrate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, however, this subject was not touched upon.
In a review of the year such as the one you raise it is unfortunately not possible to take up every single detail once again. Our Middle East correspondent therefore made a selection and summarised the most important events.
In the hope of having dispelled your concerns with my remarks, I should be pleased if you were to remain an interested and indeed critical viewer of ZDF’s programming.
Yours sincerely
Dr Peter FreyDear Dr Frey,
thank you very much for your reply of 27.12.2018, in which you address our concerns regarding the piece „Israel: es kann nur besser werden“.
We ourselves understand very well that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs has a long, complex history and that it can be viewed from several perspectives, which also contain legitimate demands.
The reason for our letter, however, is not that we think the report lacks a perspective. Our intervention has two other reasons: firstly, facts necessary for a minimal understanding are missing, and secondly, we consider the choice of this subject for a review of the year to be problematic.
On the facts: in order to be able to understand the year 2018 in Israel and the Palestinian autonomous territories, it is necessary to mention that Iran deliberately supports enemies of Israel, against which Israel – like any other state in its position – has to defend itself: Hezbollah in the north, Hamas in the autonomous territories and Islamic Jihad in the south. Iran does therefore play a decisive role for Israel and for the conflict. In this context one can likewise mention that these very organisations want to murder as many Jews as possible and to destroy Israel. It is not without reason that they are listed as terrorist organisations by the EU and the USA.
You write that Trump’s decision to relocate the embassy to Jerusalem caused unrest and bloodshed. We should like to remind you that it was not Trump’s decision but that of the US Congress of 23 October 1995. Trump merely carried it out. In saying this you also imply a quasi-automatism which assumes that Palestinian Arabs simply could not do otherwise than react with violence, that is, that they had no freedom of decision. The consequences of the embassy relocation in the region show that most Arab countries have long since understood that it is not little Israel but quite other forces that constitute the problem in the region. But that evidently did not fit the intended and contrived picture of the piece.
In your reply to our letter you explain that the „march“ was initially planned as peaceful. Yet the one responsible for the terrible images was precisely not the Palestinian professor, but Hamas, with what it made of it. Unfortunately you also did not address our second point: to describe Hamas as a „Palestinian organisation“ is, in this lack of differentiation, misleading. In doing so you do justice neither to the violence emanating from this organisation, nor do you create enough distance between Hamas and those organisations, likewise present among the Palestinian Arabs, that act without violence.
Precisely nowadays, balance is particularly important for the understanding of controversial content. In this piece, the passages we have named did not contain even a minimum of the balanced context necessary for understanding. This gives us the impression that this was not the author’s intention at all.
In times of antisemitism emerging ever more openly in our society, ZDF as a German public-service broadcaster should deal with this subject with particular sensitivity. The way in which German media report on Israel and the Middle East conflict unfortunately has an indirect influence on how safe Jews in Germany can feel. For public reporting frequently determines what mood prevails about Israel and thus often about us Jews in Germany as well. Your broadcaster and Ms Albrecht therefore also bear a particular responsibility not to present Israel, in the context of the Middle East conflict, in a one-sidedly and tendentiously negative weighting of reporting and thereby – even if unintentionally – to contribute to an anti-Israeli mood which in the end very often becomes an anti-Jewish mood.
There would have been quite a bit to report from Israel apart from the conflict as well, in a review of the year. Israel has for some time been recording new tourism records every year and has enormous population growth. The small country is innovative like hardly any other and, above all with its medical innovations, saves lives all over the world – in 2018, for example, those of people suffering from war in Syria – to name but a few examples. We hope that you understand our concern and will reconsider revising the piece in the respective passages.
We are also happy to be available to you for a personal conversation.
Yours sincerely
