Published: 12 November 2016
Last updated: 4 March 2024
Directed by Martin Himel, an award-winning filmmaker whose credits include Jenin: Massacring Truth, the documentary is a mélange of archival footage from the war, IDF and Hamas propaganda clips and talking heads, including Hamas and Israeli representatives as well as several reporters who covered the war.
They are assembled together in a largely successful bid to prove that Hamas pulls the puppet strings of the media so that its narrative focuses on Israel’s aggression rather than Hamas’s nihilism.
Matti Friedman, a former reporter for the Associated Press, who is among Magid’s main proponents in the documentary, reveals that staff in the AP’s Gaza bureau never reported a rocket they witnessed being launched outside their office for fear of retribution. Moreover, he claims armed Hamas terrorists burst into the AP’s office to threaten them over a photo an AP photographer had taken; this too went unreported.
“Not only does Hamas know that it can successfully intimidate reporters into reporting the picture that Hamas wants,” he says. “It knows that reporters will not report their own intimidation.”
Further, he notes that most of the media work in Gaza is done by local Palestinian stringers who “quite understandably won’t cross Hamas” because they know they’ll probably pay with their lives if they do.
The net result, he says, is that the public fails to understand the extent to which Hamas is filtering the news.
Curiously, for a documentary about the 2014 war in Gaza, no mention is made of its initial casus belli: the kidnapping of three Israeli boys by Hamas terrorists, which unleashed a chain of events culminating in ‘Operation Protective Edge’.
Neither is there any mention of the postscript of the war: Hamas was crushed militarily by the IDF, but was not defeated and it seems only a matter of time before the next showdown in Hamastan.
To its credit though, the documentary shows plenty of footage of suburbs in Gaza that the narrator explains were ‘pulverised in Israeli bombardments’.
It also shows how Hamas hid rocket launchers inside populated areas, using civilians as human shields. “Hamas resistance fighters were running all around, in between the houses,” one Gazan woman confesses.
Footage is shown from a French TV crew who are on-air next to a school run by the United Nations Relief & Works Agency as a rocket is fired by Hamas.
In other footage, an Indian TV crew witnesses Hamas members setting up a tent from which rockets are fired next door to their hotel. The footage was only aired once the reporters had left Gaza.
Harry Fear, a reporter for RTV, says he was expelled from Gaza for tweeting that Hamas was firing rockets from a civilian area.
“I don’t think there’s any foreign correspondent who covered that summer conflict who didn’t see prima facie war crimes committed by Palestinian militant groups,” he says.
Eyeless in Gaza also does a fair job of explaining the internecine Hamas-Fatah war among the Palestinians, and shows footage of what is believed to be Fatah supporters being thrown off roofs, dragged through the streets and wearing hoods before their executions.
The main problem, however, is that Magid – the owner and publisher of the Australian Jewish News for the last decade – does not apply the same basic journalistic principles he expects of the media he is scrutinising.
He accuses the world’s media of ‘Groupthink’, with barely a caveat. “They went on an all-out offensive against Israel,” says the narrator, describing the response of the ‘world media’ to the war. Even Rupert Murdoch’s media empire – including the pro-Zionist newspaper The Australian and the propagandistic US Fox News network, for example – is denied a nod for any “balanced” coverage of the war.
This short-changes the viewer, who might conclude that the entire world’s media is anti-Israel. True, Magid’s over-arching thesis is correct, and he proves how distorted the bulk of the coverage is, and indeed why it is. But by failing to show some of the media’s more accurate and balanced coverage, he commits a similar sin to that he accuses them of.
And while he uses reams of TV news footage and photographs to substantiate his claims, barely a single newspaper headline – print or online – features in a documentary about the media’s coverage of the war.
Towards the end, Eyeless in Gaza – the title of the 1936 Aldous Huxley novel in which Samson is captured by the Philistines, has his eyes burned out and is taken to Gaza – veers off its narrative course. An interview with Lauren Booth, ex-British PM Tony Blair’s sister-in-law, has no relationship with the media’s coverage of the war, save perhaps for her preposterous remark that the BBC’s editorial policy “is actually made at the Israeli embassy”.
It’s hard to fathom why such a marginal figure making such a ludicrously false remark would be given a platform. Similarly, Ahmad Bahar, of the Palestinian Legislative Council, adds nothing about the media’s coverage, simply damning the Jews for being “malicious and cunning” and concluding that “it’s either us or them [the Jews].”
The justification appears to be that we are told the media never quotes the Hamas charter but these examples seem to suggest Magid – credited as executive producer, producer and co-writer with Himel – couldn’t resist the opportunity to prove how much the Jews are despised, inside and outside Palestine.
The concluding line of narration is arguably the most telling: “The media is siding with Hamas terrorism rather than the promotion of a peaceful compromise that would bring a real solution for Palestinians.”
This seems to reveal Magid’s misunderstanding of the true role of the Fourth Estate – to seek the truth and report it without fear or favour. Instead, he appears to suggest the media’s role is somehow to contribute to a peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians.
On balance, Eyeless in Gaza argues a fair case that “the media is being played by Hamas like a violin”, as Magid was quoted as saying in his own newspaper. But his thesis is too one-sided, and will probably end up preaching mainly to the converted.
Eyeless in Gaza is screening again as part of the Jewish International Film Festival on November 13 and 14 at the Classic Cinema in Melbourne.
Full disclosure: The writer was editor of the Australian Jewish News under Robert Magid’s predecessor, and left the newspaper shortly after Magid took over.
This The Jewish Independent article may be republished if acknowledged thus: ‘Reprinted with permission from www.thejewishindependent.com.au ’
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