Cierra S. Bakhsh
When we see conversations about the Middle East on the news or in articles, the discussions are usually riddled with violence, terrorism, and fear. However, when we see Israel mentioned in the same broadcast content, we usually see positive reports, like business developments or diplomatic relations. Israel is at the heart of the Middle East, but why is its media attention and portrayal different than that of the rest of the Arab world?
This juxtaposition is illuminated in the American media during the Six-Day War, fought between Israel, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Major American newspaper outlets, like the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post glorified Israel for winning. While American viewers saw the new, powerful role of Israel as a champion of the Middle East, the Palestinians and Arabs in the surrounding area were not portrayed as strong and successful, rather, they were portrayed as poor refugees who would come to be dependent on Israel. How do we explain this phenomenon?
To do so, we must analyze how the American media portrayed Arabs and examine how these portrayals were possible. To do so, I will conduct a brief case study of articles from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post. I will analyze two newspaper articles from each outlet written between June 8, 1967 to June 15, 1967, and illuminate how each article “others” the Arab. Discussion of the “other” is crucial here because it allows us to further understand the complexity of the varying portrayals. The type of “othering” that I will refer to will be one of racial and cultural differences as produced by poverty knowledge, and Edward Said’s theory on orientalism. Focusing on how Arabs were framed as “others” indicates that in the face of global wealth and poverty, American media sides with the global force that is aligned with itself.
Historical Background
Although the Arab region surrounding British-mandate Palestine was rocked with instability, its shakiness intensified in 1948 when Israel was officially declared and recognized as a state. As a result, the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab conflicts emerged. The conflicts have manifested into three major wars: the War of Independence, also known as the Nakba (1948), the Six-Day War (1967), and the Yom Kippur War (1973). Of these three wars, the Six-Day War was the most detrimental for the conflict – especially in regards to Palestinians and the surrounding Arab countries. In a military feat, Israel managed to annex the Golan Heights, West Bank, and Sinai Desert, thus expanding the Jewish state while disrupting the Arab states. This expansion and disruption was heavily reported in American print media, but the way that the Israelis and Arabs were portrayed were massively different. For example, the Israeli Defense Forces did not win the war through military triumph, but won through a U.N.-mandated ceasefire, requiring all sides to stop the violence. Since the Arab army was well-trained and responded well to Israeli attacks, this Arab strength was not portrayed in American print media, rather, they were portrayed as weak, poor, and dependent.
Poverty Knowledge and Orientalism
The differing depictions of Israelis and Arabs in the American media are attributed through the phenomenon of the “other”, where this Arab “othering” can be explained through poverty knowledge and orientalism.
Coined by historian Alice O’Connor, poverty knowledge is an academic concept where characteristics and behavior of impoverished groups are measured, which became “a project of twentieth-century liberalism, dating from the 1960s and the Great Society, but more deeply rooted in the rise of the new liberalism that enveloped European-American political culture”. This “new liberalism” here refers to individual rights, such as free speech and religion, but the newest right here is: welfare. Studying the characteristics and behavior of the impoverished led poverty knowledge scientists to determine that welfare status was crucial in deciding what poverty was and how it could be measured. So when poverty scientists analyzed the groups that were on welfare and receiving assistance, they found that black Americans were the most dependent, giving poverty knowledge a racial component. O’Connor tells us that the “‘race problem’ within the black and white paradigm traced roots of racial inequality to a wide range of social and cultural disadvantages rooted in white prejudices, and embraced integration and assimilation as desirable social goals” – meaning that blacks were encouraged to assimilate into white society, but were unable to due to white cultural prejudices. Therefore, poverty knowledge is the study of poverty, but this study emphasizes that racial “others” are prone to being poor and dependent.
What is the connection between the American study of poverty knowledge and Israeli-Arab media portrayals? First, the American black experience is not comparable to the Arab experience in American media, as the two groups are completely different and endure their own types of biases and prejudices. However, what connects the two groups – especially in the American sense – is that they are labeled as the “other”. In her book, Epic Encounters, historian Melani McAlister indicates that the Arab and black “othering” is quite similar. She tells us that when the Middle East was being discussed more in American media, many reporters and Americans struggled to define what an Arab is. Were Arabs considered white? Were Arabs considered black due the Middle East being geographically in Africa? Could Americans associate black Muslims with Arab Muslims? Here, McAlister emphasizes the important yet ambiguous racial distinctions amongst Arabs and blacks, and that the struggle to effectively label Arabs made it easy for the American media to coin Arabs as another “other”, where the Arabs were a threat to Israeli wealth and success while blacks were a threat to American wealth and success. Therefore, McAlister emphasizes that the racial component of the “other” further allows for negative disparities to be made.
The “other” is almost always portrayed negatively by American media because they do not align with what an American is supposed to be – they are not how an American looks, acts, and works. Although blacks and Arabs do not fit the American image, Israelis do. It is crucial to note though that not all Israelis are Jews, and many Jews are also considered as “others”. The difference between the othering of Jews and Arabs is that Jews are consistently portrayed with the rich, business-domineering stereotype, while Arabs came to be portrayed with a poor, degenerate stereotype. The American media seemed to have associated Israeli identity with the common, yet misconstrued stereotype that Jews are rich and successful, and the media did so by latching on to Israeli cultural familiarity. American media felt comfortable reporting on Israel because Israeli culture and politics provided a sense of familiarity, while Arab politics and culture were completely foreign and “other”. Many Israelis spoke English, making it easier for Americans to report on Israeli news and politics, while the surrounding Arabs spoke Arabic, making it difficult for an English-speaking American reporter. Many Israelis even looked familiar to Americans – most of them have European heritage and look like a large component of Americans, while Arabs look different, with darker skin and hair, and features. Here, the racial component kicks in because not only are Arabs “others” for some Israelis, they are “others” for Americans.
The key term here is “familiarity”. Since Israelis were portrayed as familiar to Americans, it was easy to “other” the Arabs, but we can understand this lack of familiarity through Edward Said’s Orientalism. Said’s theory on orientalism states that orientalism is a way of seeing that distorts how the West understands and portrays the East, also known as the Orient. The east consists of the Middle East and Asia, and western cultures associate Oriental peoples as being exotic, backwards, and uncivilized, where this view has a long tradition of being the lens that the Middle East is seen through. Therefore, the common representation of Arabs was that although they looked and acted in a certain spectacular, exotic way, their looks and attitudes were attributed to their backwardness. This “backwards” association with Arabs immediately “others” them from the modern Israeli. Western cultures, like Israeli and American, associate backwardness with barbarity and dependency, and this dependency further emphasizes the racial and cultural differences between Arabs and Israelis. The unfamiliar, “other” Arab came to be dependent on the modern, innovative Israeli, thus depending on Israel to become more progressive. Essentially, orientalism confirms the view that since Arabs were seen as backwards, they were also seen as poor and dependent.
Therefore, this backwards association with Arabs – in conjunction with the understanding of poverty knowledge – allows us to see how simple it was for the American media to designate Arabs as poor and dependent. Arabs were historically viewed as uncivilized and backwards, and with the familiarity of Israeli culture to Americans, it was essentially easy for the American media to further push and adopt this portrayal, and we see this portrayal in newspaper articles from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post.
The “Other” Arab in American Newspaper Outlets
For this brief case study, I will demonstrate how these six articles, two each from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post respectively, display how Arabs were depicted as the “other” through poverty knowledge and orientalism. Of the two articles each from the three newspaper outlets, one article discusses the refugee problem caused by the Six-Day War and the other discusses how the Arabs lost the war. The articles discussing the refugee problem are a direct application of how poverty knowledge creates the poor, dependent, racially different Arab, and the articles discussing the Arab military loss exemplify orientalism’s contention of the backwards Arab.
The three articles dealing with the refugee problem are the NYT’s Arab Refugees Moving into Jordan by Dana Schmidt, the LAT’s Arab Refugees Stream into a Reluctant Jordan by Ray Moseley and Joseph Grigg, and the WP’s Refugee Relief. All three articles focus on the same problem, which is that Palestinians displaced from their homes amidst the Six-Day War have become refugees, where they moved quickly into Jordan. Each article indicates that Jordan was reluctant to accept these refugees, but each differs in how they describe aid to the refugees. In Schmidt’s NYT article, she indicates that although Jordanians were reluctant to accept refugees, the Israeli Defense Forces supplied buses to transport thousands of refugees into neighboring Jordan, or else they would have no other mode of transportation there. Therefore, Schmidt indicates that the refugees have become dependent on the IDF for movement – something that should be done freely, but the refugees were so poor and so lost that they needed external assistance.
Moseley and Grigg’s LAT article mirrors the same concern as Schmidt where Jordanians were reluctant to accept refugees, but the two indicate that the IDF have been air-lifting food and water to Palestinian refugees and surrounding Arab communities affected by the war. The two also emphasize that “Uncle Sam will pay most of the bills since the Arab refugee relief work is handled by the U.S.-financed U.N. Relief and Works Agency”, telling us that not only do these Arab refugees depend on the IDF for necessities, they depend on the U.S. and U.N. funding to cover their costs – insinuating a type of welfare-based relationship.
The welfare-based relationship between the U.S. and the refugees is also discussed in the WP’s Refugee Relief. The unnamed author states that “The immediate welfare of the refugees is a problem of a quite different magnitude from their eventual settlement” and that “Washington must treat its relief contributions as a temporary palliative and not a permanent role”. Here, the author tells us that although Washington must provide welfare to Arab refugees, this welfare must not be a permanent endeavor, as permanent welfare could encourage further dependency.
In each of these articles, the theme of the dependent Arab is prevalent. In the NYT piece, we are told that the refugees depended on the IDF for buses to travel to Jordan, in the LAT piece, we see that the U.S. is obligated to support the refugees, and in the WP piece, American welfare to the refugees is required but must not be extended. All three articles highlight the trope of the poor, dependent Arab who needed external forces like the IDF and the U.S. to function. It is significant to note that in each article, the refugees are referred to as Arab refugees although they are clear Palestinian refugees. The journalists in each of these pieces did not differentiate between Palestinian and Arab, and compiled the various Palestinian refugees into one general Arab refugee group. This simplifying of the refugees generalizes the wider Arab refugee group, which comprises Syrians, Egyptians, and Jordanians, and associates the wider group with being poor and dependent, thus expanding the portrayal of the poor, dependent Arab. Therefore, not only are Palestinian refugees viewed as dependent, the wider Arab refugee group is viewed the same way. Here, poverty knowledge’s welfare and racial component is evident and cooperative because Arab refugees, racially different than IDF soldiers and American aid providers, were dependent on these groups.
In the remaining articles, orientalist attitudes are apparent. These articles are NYT’s Why Israel Prevailed: Her Spirit and Modern Organization are Contrasted with Arab Feudalism by Hanson Baldwin, LAT’s Israel Insists She Will Win the War, and the WP’s Israel to Hold Sinai Until It’s Assured of No Blockades. These three articles discuss Israel’s military feat in the Six-Day War while emphasizing that their military prowess overpowered the backwards, old-fashioned Arab armies. In each article, we not only see poverty knowledge’s making of the poor, dependent Arab but we see orientalism’s confirmation of the backwards Arab. In Baldwin’s NYT article, he outlines the military triumph of the Israeli army over the Arab army. He explains that the Israeli army is modern and well-organized, which led to their win, while the Arab army was stuck on feudalism and disorganization. He makes the effort to explain that when the Egyptian army was British-trained in the 1940’s, it was strong and powerful, but when Nasser claimed presidency in the 1950’s and instituted socialism, the Egyptian military went downhill, thus giving the Israeli military the upper hand. Here, Baldwin demonstrates that the aggressor is the Egyptian military which was stuck on “feudalism”. Feudalism is a system of land ownership where a king, or in this case, Nasser, controlled all of the land, but dispersed it to those who fought for him, a.k.a., the Egyptian military. Baldwin’s referral to Nasser’s Egyptian army as feudalistic degrades the Egyptian army, pushing it back into the middle ages while the Israeli army soared as a modern archetype. Here, orientalism is evident because the Egyptians and wider Arab army are spoken about as backwards and weak, and dependent on the Israeli military as a new model.
The LAT article reflects the same idea of the backwards Arab. In this article, by an unnamed author, it is emphasized that the Six-Day War was strictly for Israelis to claim and enforce their new rule in the Middle East. The article states that the war was fought so that the surrounding Arabs could “…recognize Israel’s permanent existence…[and enforce] security against the Arab guerilla raids that helped bring about the war”. Here, the article illuminates the Arab refusal to accept Israel as a new state, assuming that Arabs needed to attack and wage a war to fight against this new, emerging power. Although it is not as overt as the previous article, traces of orientalism are present here because the article contends that Arabs cannot fight against or accept the new direction that the Middle East is headed in terms of Israeli politics and culture. Since Arabs cannot accept this move forward, they are stuck in the past – fighting a war to ensure their place in the past is untouched.
The WP’s Israel to Hold Sinai Until It’s Assured of No Blockades combines the concerns of the NYT and LAT articles while managing to uphold the trope of the backwards Arab. In this article, with an unnamed author, Arab military actions are highlighted. In regards to the Arab military, the article makes sure to emphasize that during the war, members of the Syrian army shelled down Palestinian villages in the West Bank, where the Syrian army was ruthless enough to attack their own fellow Arabs – emphasizing the uncivil Arab. The article tells us that some Arabs donated blood and raised funds for the IDF, while the IDF ensured that all Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, holding refugee status or not, was being supplied well with aid and proper food – also emphasizing the backwards Arab because these Palestinians were so out of touch with the new reality, that they depended on the IDF and UN aid for help, which also emphasizes poverty knowledge’s dependency creation. This article’s two contentions of the backwards Arab, whether we look at how the Syrian army attacked Palestinian villages or how Palestinian refugees and non-refugees accepted western aid, displays how easily Arabs are framed as backwards and un-modern.
Clearly, each of these articles accentuates how Arabs were portrayed as backwards and uncivil. Baldwin’s NYT article blatantly calls the Egyptian army “feudal”, indicating that they were so backwards that their military strategies were medieval, the LAT article emphasizes how Arabs were reluctant to accept the new direction of the Middle East, and the WP article affirms the Arab army’s uncivil belligerency and dependence on Israelis and other western aid. It is crucial to note that in each of these articles, the IDF or Israelis were never to blame for the war. Each article confirms the Arab as the violent aggressor while the IDF fought back to maintain their country’s safety, although Israel’s national agenda was to expand. Essentially, it was easy for the American media to pin the Arab as the aggressor because since they were already traditionally viewed as backwards, uncivil, and sometimes barbaric, it was impossible to portray the modern, American-associated Israeli as the aggressor.
Conclusion
This phenomenon of the Arab “other” in American media did not end with the Six-Day War though, rather – the negative portrayals just began. The decades after the Six-Day War marked turmoil in the Middle East, with the Yom Kippur War (1973), Gulf War (1990), and most recently, the War on Terror (2001). With continued unrest in the Middle East, American media, such as news broadcasts and popular media, like television shows and movies, continued to propagate twisted views of Arabs. For example, when Saudi Arabia was developing its oil refineries and establishing itself as one of the richest countries in the world, documentaries were premiered that showcased Saudis, especially Saudi women, as poor, veiled, and oppressed – instilling feelings of fear about Saudi Arabia to lessen its appeal to Americans. Instilling fear in American audiences continued with television shows, like Looney Tunes’ Ali Baba Bunny, where Bugs Bunny escapes from a barrel of boiling oil owned by an Arab sultan. This cartoon short indicates that oil-money Arabs are vile, doing whatever it takes for one to not steal their riches. Essentially, the negative news media allowed popular media to adopt the same trope of the “other”, and now violent Arab, and popular media reached a far wider audience, further perpetuating this view. Therefore, this continued cynical portrayal of Arabs tells us that in relation to wealth and poverty, the American media will degrade other national identities and their strengths in order to uphold America’s image as the world’s richest, most powerful nation – although that may not be the case.
Through O’Connor’s poverty knowledge and applying Said’s theory of orientalism, we see how Arabs were designated as the “other” through racial, cultural, and historical lenses, and these lenses indicate that American media portrayals usually have complex racial elements. Race in American media is used as a separator and distinguisher, and when race is combined with cultural and economic facets, the three help perpetuate the victimized, “other” aggressor.
Ultimately, from 1967 onward, the American media’s juxtaposed portrayal of Israelis and Arabs was detrimental. Israel’s achievements were always highlighted, while Arab achievements like military development and developing oil refineries, were pushed under the rug. It seems as if the American media sought to ensure to Americans that Arabs were backwards and not aligned with America’s forward, modern mentality. Therefore, American media’s sharp distinction between Israeli and Arab portrayals succeeded through “othering” the Arab. The concept of the “other” is a complicated, complex one, but for the purposes of this blog, it is crucial to analyze and understand how racial and cultural components work together to convey a sense of otherness in order to maintain a public image.
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