[MUSIC- Ben Allison: Disposable Genius]

News clip: Could this be 1968 all over again?

Micah Loewinger: Violent police raids on student protest encampments play out against the backdrop of a crucial presidential election.

Rick Perlstein: If every election is just like 1968, then no election is like 1968. Maybe this election is like 2024.

Micah Loewinger: On this week's On The Media, what the press are getting wrong about the campus protest.

Andrew Perez: I don't really think there's anything to indicate that these are AstroTurf. It's college students participating in this, it's college students getting arrested.

Micah Loewinger: Also, how are Israeli media reporting on US student activism?

Oren Persico: What you see as the fringe part of demonstrations in Israel, we focus on that, all these demonstrations are portrayed as pro-Hamas antisemitic protests.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.

 

Announcer: Listener-supported WYNC Studios.

Micah Loewinger: From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. Brooke Gladstone is out this week. I'm Micah Loewinger.

President Joe.Biden: Hatred of Jews didn't begin with the Holocaust. It didn't end with the Holocaust either.

Micah Loewinger: President Joe Biden speaking on Tuesday at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's Annual Days of Remembrance ceremony.

President Joe Biden: There's no place on any campus in America, any place in America for antisemitism or hate speech or threats of violence of any kind.

[applause]

Micah Loewinger: For weeks, the media's story about college campuses, Congress's story about college campuses has been one of hatred and chaos.

News clip: 90 protestors were arrested at Dartmouth violent clashes in Wisconsin, injured police and protestors, and in Los Angeles.--

News clip: They're spraying what appears to be pepper spray.

Micah Loewinger: At UCLA, according to multiple reports, pro-Israel counter-protestors attacked a pro-Palestine demonstration.

News clip: Bad. Oh, my goodness. You're hearing the cries of the people on campus right now, students.

News clip: Police in Southern California arrested at least 100 more pro-Palestinian protestors across two different campuses yesterday. Officials at UMass Amherst say more than a hundred people were arrested for refusing to leave a makeshift encampment. These latest flash points following weeks of clashes at roughly 75 campuses nationwide arrests now topping 2,400.

News clip: A pro-Israel, a Jewish student waved an Israeli flag. It immediately got ripped off him from pro-Palestine protestors at a university.

News clip: The DA's office confirming that an NYPD officer did fire a gun during the chaos on Columbia's campus. It happened while cops were clearing Hamilton Hall of demonstrators. The DA says it was accidental.

Danielle Brown: There is a plethora of headlines that are focusing on arrests of protestors, clashes with police flattening encampments.

Micah Loewinger: Danielle Brown is a professor of journalism at Michigan State University. She's been studying the recent coverage, which she says matches the press's general approach to covering social movements, what's known as the protest paradigm.

Danielle Brown: What the protest paradigm is founded on is this data that has shown that time and time again, protests are really confined to the disruption, the confrontation, and the spectacle. The problem with that is that the demands and the substance and the agendas that are really behind these protests don't really get seen or heard or understood by the general public.

Micah Loewinger: She and other researchers have observed a similar pattern with coverage of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, the indigenous-led protests of the Dakota Pipeline, and so on. Arrests and clashes with police become the story. Everything that came before, events that inspired the protestors, their grievances, and demands get sidelined.

Danielle Brown: I looked through about 25 different news organizations around the United States like CBS, ABC, NBC, and New York Times. Some of the biggest articles that are being shared by these mainstream news organizations are these live updates coverage. They'll have a timeline that are telling what's happening on that day with the play-by-play, like six students are here, police issue warning that they have to leave within a certain time. Those are all focused on actions and do not position the protesters' agendas and demands and substance in that space.

News clip: We're demanding the University Protect pro-Palestinian speech on campus, that they drop all charges against organizers and organizations, that they disclose investments and endowments, and divest from the Zionist entity. Our demands are very clear and tangible.

News clip: Over $2 billion of our tuition money goes to funding contracts with weapons, arms manufacturers like Boeing, BlackRock, Lockheed Martin, and many more.

Crowd: We're all Palestinians.

News clip: We demand divestment. We'll not be moved unless by force.

News clip: This is a movement, an anti-war movement.

Micah Loewinger: Instead, we hear a whole lot of language that suggests lawlessness has set in overnight.

News clip: Over the past few days, we've seen these massive protests erupting at US universities, coast to coast, really.

News clip: Anti-Israel protests spreading like wildfire.

News clip: The wave of protests against Israel's war on Gaza spreading with protests popping up on campuses in different states.

Danielle Brown: This didn't spontaneously happen in April.

Micah Loewinger: Danielle Brown.

Danielle Brown: Demonstrations have been happening for months before this. The students here at my university were rallying for support since October, and they lobbied in these board of trustee meetings every single month, and that didn't get the type of press attention that a protest would get.

Micah Loewinger: Another problem with the protest paradigm is that a focus on clashes with police paints a distorted picture of physical safety on campus. According to a report from ACLED, the Armed Conflict Location in Event Data project, the vast majority of campus protests have been nonviolent and vandalism-free.

Between the Columbia University police raid on April 18th and May 3rd, about 2% of campus demonstrations have seen protestors from either side behave violently. Protests where police got involved were more likely to be violent.

News clip: Many say today's demonstrations echo College protest movements of the past, including against the Vietnam War.

Micah Loewinger: Surely by now, you've heard such historical comparisons from pundits and from protestors themselves.

News clip: It's actually inspired by other historic protests on Columbia's campus, including demonstrations against the Vietnam War in the '60s.

News clip: Yes, just watching what happened at Columbia this week, I mean, amazing by the way that it was on the exact anniversary of the 1968 Columbia Takeover of Hamilton Hall.

President Joe Biden: To Columbia's administrators and trustees do not incite another Kent or Jackson state by bringing soldiers and police officers with weapons onto our campus. Students' blood will be on your hands.

News clip: Could this be 1968 all over again where protests on college campuses against the war in Vietnam, spread to the summer's Democratic convention in Chicago, and arguably led to the election of Richard Nixon?

Rick Perlstein: If every election is just like 1968, then you know no election is like 1968.

Micah Loewinger: Historian Rick Perlstein, a columnist for The American Prospect and author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, says, journalists should tap the brakes on these comparisons.

Rick Perlstein: The things that happened before certainly inform what happened now, but if you're just going out and saying, "Oh, they took over Hamilton Hall in 1968, they took over Hamilton Hall in 2024," you're going to be missing important things that happened in the interim. For example, the profoundly increased militarization of policing that saw cops in riot gear, cops with sniper rifles pointed at students, cops beating up professors happening almost immediately.

Micah Loewinger: You say that the provocations this time around were much more mild than they were back then.

Rick Perlstein: In 1968, the slogan of the people who took over Hamilton Hall was, and you're going to have to bleep it. "Up against them while [bleep]. This is a stickup." That was basically the spirit in which they took over the building. They said, "We are here to overthrow society, and if you don't like it, you can suck it."

They did things like they took a professor's lifetime research and put it on the lawn and burned it just to basically say, "We could and we're in charge." One kid jumped from a roof onto the back of a cop and paralyzed him. In Kent State, the students had burned down a building and when the firemen came to put out the fire, they cut the hoses.

Micah Loewinger: Let's focus on what you think is exceptional about the campus protests today. Students have reported concussions as well as being shot with rubber bullets, tasered, and pepper sprayed. What scenes have stood out to you?

Rick Perlstein: Oh, I think the assaults on professors. That's one thing you really would've been shocked to see in previous generations. The fact that one of the professors had been the head of Dartmouth's Jewish studies program.

65-year-old professor, Annelise Orleck was on the Dartmouth Green on May 1st when anti-war protestors clashed with police while trying to set up an encampment. The professor says she was trying to protect her students when she was knocked down and had her phone taken away from her.

Micah Loewinger: Or the example of a professor on campus at Washington University. He seemed to have been assaulted until he was limp, even though he was 65 years old, and my understanding, a Quaker, because he was filming the police plunging into a knot of protestors.

Micah Loewinger: I like this line in your piece where you say, "How many Jews have to pray peacefully in a pro-peace encampment, or alternatively to cite a scene witnessed outside Columbia University? How many black-hatted ultra-Orthodox Jews have to chant anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism for them to stop being an anti-Semitic mob?"

Rick Perlstein: Yes, you'd almost have to be a Talmudic scholar to puzzle that one out.

Micah Loewinger: [laughs]

Rick Perlstein: It was like a bad dad joke, right?

Micah Loewinger: I don't believe that political speech critical of Israel is inherently anti-Semitism, but I do think that in some of this discourse, it's easy to overlook real bigotry that might have contributed to a fear among some Jewish students, especially those whose support for Israel's closely tied to their religious identity.

In October, a Cornell student was arrested for his alleged posting on a fraternity message board saying he would bring a rifle to school to kill pig Jews. In February, the Harvard Crimson reported on anti-Semitic cartoon shared by two pro-Palestine student groups on Instagram. There was the Columbia University protest leader who in January said on Instagram that Zionists don't deserve to live. Have you encountered examples of this kind of violent speech and anti-Semitism that is beyond the pale?

Rick Perlstein: Sure. That's part of it. Punish that, criticize that, criticize that, but it doesn't license pointing sniper rifles at students. The fact that this is done in the name of something called "safety for Jewish students," the physical safety of Jewish students does not seem to too much be in question. There might be some examples of physical violence, but the main offense really does seem to be offensive slogans.

News clip: We must act so that the anti-Semitism on college campuses stops immediately.

Micah Loewinger: New York Congressman, Mike Lawler, in late April making the case for an anti-Semitism bill that has since passed the house.

Congressman Mike Lawler: The House voted overwhelmingly to pass a measure targeting anti-Semitism on campus.

News clip: Their anti-Semitism Awareness Act directs the US Department of Education to use the definition developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance when enforcing federal anti-discrimination laws. Some of the heated rhetoric on college campuses would be included.

Congressman Mike Lawler: When you hear, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free-

Micah Loewinger: Mike Lawler.

Congressman Mike Lawler: -the reality is that is calling for the eradication of Jews and the state of Israel.

Micah Loewinger: Some Jewish groups point to the fact that the phrase can be found in Hamas' charter. Many Palestinians and their supporters, including other Jewish groups, disagree with this characterization and say they use it as a cry for liberation, not a call for Jewish genocide. Naturally, there's some disagreement in the pro-Palestine movement about its efficacy as a slogan.

Norman Finkelstein: I suspect some, and maybe a majority of you are familiar with my opinion.

Micah Loewinger: Here's Norman Finkelstein, a well-known political scientist and pro-Palestine activist speaking to students at the Columbia University encampment on April 21st.

Norman Finkelstein: I don't agree with the slogan, "From the river to the Sea, Palestine will be free." It's very easy to amend and just say, "From the river to the sea, Palestinians will be free." That simple amendment, that little amendment, you drastically reduce the possibility of being manipulatively misunderstood.

Micah Loewinger: After Finkelstein's 30-minute address, he handed off the mic to a young person in a Kethia who didn't miss a beat

News clip: From the river to the sea-

News clip: From the river to the sea-

News clip: -Palestine will be free.

News clip: -Palestine will be free.

From the sea to the--

Rick Perlstein: A slogan like, "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," or globalize the intifada, that is confusing language.

Micah Loewinger: Rick Perlstein.

Rick Perlstein: I would definitely say just as a matter of politics, you should not use language that terrifies people. Israel has a right to defend itself. Sounds pretty scary to someone whose entire family has been killed by the IDF, a bill limiting speech about Israel Armed Police on college campuses, academics hauled in front of Congress, all this following decades of a right-wing push to undermine faith in academia. A push led by lawmakers who, by the way, back a presidential candidate who invited a Holocaust denier into his home and called tiki torch Nazis very fine people. That's the head-spinning stuff. College students, they're behaving like college students.

College students, a lot of them are teenagers. A lot of them are barely out of childhood. A lot of them are countering critical ideas for the first time. This is not to say that they're not responsible for what they say or do. They are responsible for what they say or do. Someone showed up at Kent State in 1970 and said, "The first duty of every revolutionary is to kill their parents." Well, young people become adults. In fact, we didn't have an epidemic of people who went to college then killing their parents.

Micah Loewinger: Do we know about a relationship between radicalism of students of the '60s and how it pertains to their future politics?

Rick Perlstein: As a matter of fact, a radical 1960s activist who in fact was a professor at the time named Richard Flax, who was sufficiently radical that he would wear a ring that was produced from steel from a downed American plane that he got in a visit to North Vietnam, became a sociologist and wrote this wonderful book called The Sixties Generation Grows Up: Beyond the Barricades. He did a very careful sociological study in the '80s, and he found that most 1960s militants, including the most radical, became just ordinary social justice liberals. They did things like become social workers and social justice lawyers.

When he was fighting back at a discourse at the time that all the yuppies had become yuppies. The guy Jerry Rubin, who said the first duty of revolutionaries is to kill their parents, became a stockbroker [laughs].

[music]

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, conspiracy theories about outside agitators are not unique to this moment. This is On The Media.

This is On The Media. I'm Micah Loewinger. Rick Perlstein says we should use historical comparisons sparingly, but here's a parallel he is comfortable pointing out; the recurrence of a certain trope that of the outside agitator, nefarious characters who both mastermind and undermine protests from behind the scenes.

Rick Perlstein: It comes from time beyond time, the myths of history. You saw it in, for example, 19th-century labor strikes. The deployment of it almost universally was everything was fine until these outsiders came and stirred things up.

Speaker 20: When there were arrests two weeks ago and 108 were arrested, a large percentage of those were not students here at Columbia.

Micah Loewinger: Many reports like this one from CNN appear to rely on vague claims from the New York Police Department. More in-depth reporting has shown that many non-students who were arrested on April 18th weren't even on campus. A New York Times review found that the majority of the roughly four dozen people arrested in Hamilton Hall were current or former Columbia students or employees. Nine of the people arrested in Hamilton Hall had no apparent affiliations with the school. Student activists who spoke with the Times have denied that outsiders played a role in organizing or influencing the takeover.

Jim Jordan: We're looking at the money-

Micah Loewinger: Ohio Republican representative Jim Jordan this week as claims about outside agitators proliferated.

Jim Jordan: The money that from outside individuals encouraging these agitators to come to campus and do all this crazy radical stuff, we're looking at that.

Congresswoman Nicole Malliotakis: We don't know who is behind it.

Micah Loewinger: New York Congresswoman Nicole Malliotakis.

Congresswoman Nicole Malliotakis: I think that's certainly, it's agitators, whether it's George Soros or Communist China or Marxist anarchist organizations, I do believe that it is a coordinated effort.

Micah Loewinger: Last weekend, POLITICO reported that pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses are being backed by some of Biden's biggest donors. Among them, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and George Soros' Open Society Foundations. The POLITICO story focused on the Tides Foundation, a so-called Donor-Advised Fund, which means that it basically takes money from big donors and distributes it on their behalf. In 2022, Tides gave money to IfNotNow, and also Jewish Voice for Peace, which has organized some large ceasefire protests.

POLITICO claimed since those big Biden donors had dispensed funds to Tides, they were implicated in the campus pro-Palestinian demonstrations. The story quickly went viral and spread across conservative media. According to Andrew Perez, the senior politics editor at Rolling Stone, there were some glaring errors in the research, beginning with the claims about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and its relationship to Tides.

Andrew Perez: The real fundamental issue is that the Tides Foundation is massive. In 2022, the Tides Foundation reported something like $570 million in contribution revenue. Trying to pinpoint saying any one donor is responsible for the money coming out, $100,000 to these protest groups, $300,000 from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, it's ridiculous. You just have no idea unless the donor says, "This is where we're sending our money." When we reached out to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, they said, "No, we did not give money to JVP or to IfNotNow," and they had requested a correction from POLITICO.

The second problem is the Gates Foundation and actually all the foundations that they named, actually publish pretty detailed lists of their grant recipients. They don't just say, "We're giving to the Tides Foundation." They say, "We're giving to the Tides Foundation to give to this project."

In the case of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, it should have been obvious that they had not been giving to these protest groups because their money to Tides. They said it went to "Establish a social outcomes market that unlocks greater philanthropic capital." That is not pro-Palestine protest groups. There's just no way. They should have known.

Micah Loewinger: Why wouldn't a big foundation just bypass Tides and go straight to a recipient?

Andrew Perez: I think the reason that a lot of people use donor-advised funds is there are certain tax benefits to it. Then there's also an issue where with like if you're donating a lot of money to a cause to one nonprofit, it's actually somewhat easier to do it through a donor-advised fund because otherwise, you could actually end up taking the ultimate recipient of your cash and tipping it into private foundation status. It's a complicated thing that I don't have a great answer for you. I don't even know if this is going to make good radio.

Micah Loewinger: [laughs] That's okay. That's okay. It's mostly just for my own clarity. When you first read the story, you decided to fact-check the claims. What else did you find?

Andrew Perez: The Gates Foundation was the big glaring issue, but there was a piece in it that said, "The Rockefeller Brothers Fund has donated $300,000 to Tides Foundation." When you clicked through the link, it was actually the opposite happening. It was a tax return showing Tides donating to Rockefeller. Rockefeller has donated to the Tides Foundation and the Tides Center in the past, but not the year they said.

Then what I noticed is, again, the foundations that were flagged here, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Libra Foundation, which is tied to the Pritzkers family, George Soros' Open Society Foundation, they all actually disclosed their grant recipients

In the case of both Rockefeller and Soros' Open Society Foundation, they actually had just donated directly to JVP and I believe IfNotNow as well. There was literally no reason at all to rope Tides into this. Then talking about the Libra Foundation, the Pritzker family, they had not donated through Tides to JVP or to IfNotNow. Including them in the story just doesn't really fit the premise.

Micah Loewinger: You're basically saying that the reporter behind the piece could have made their argument better by acknowledging that the Open Society Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation had given money directly to some of these groups that are affiliated with the protests and yet they didn't.

Andrew Perez: Basically, yes. Two out of four instances are right-ish. They're right, but completely wrong on the details. The Gates Foundation, not involved, the Libra Foundation, not involved. Rockefeller and the Open Society Foundation, yes, they have funded JVP. I don't think they're hiding it. It's on their website.

I do think some element of this is designed to say that any money that is going to the Tides Foundation is actually affiliated Tide in some way with these pro-Palestine protests. I do think there's some effort to paint the Tides Foundation as you give to this you're giving to JVP, you're giving to IfNotNow. That's the only potential explanation for centering the reporting around them.

Micah Loewinger: There's no evidence that Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gave money to these pro-Palestinian groups via the pass-through Foundation Tides or otherwise. You did find that George Soros' Open Society Foundation and the Rockefellers Brothers Fund did give directly to JVP. What does that mean for the protests? Are George Soros and the Rockefellers funding campus encampments demonstrations across the country?

Andrew Perez: When you look at the campus protests, I don't really think there's anything to indicate that these are like AstroTurf. It's college students participating in this. It's college students getting arrested. It's a legitimate line of inquiry to ask who's funding JVP, who's funding IfNotNow, just like it's a legitimate line of inquiry to ask who's funding any nonprofit. These are organizations that do not have to disclose their donors. Especially talking about social welfare nonprofits, a lot of them are overtly political.

A lot of charitable foundations are overtly ideological and attempting to secure ideological policies and changes in our society. It's very much a legitimate line of inquiry to ask who's funding these groups. I also think this story just wildly oversold a lot. I'm not sure that you can really say that JVP is responsible for student protests. I don't think that matches with the reality on the ground.

Micah Loewinger: To be clear, IfNotNow has said it's supporting the protests, though the group says it's not organizing them.

Andrew Perez: Yes, exactly. There was a lot in this piece that needed to get walked back, corralled in some way. Yes, that's part of the very lengthy correction appended to it.

Micah Loewinger: Even still, the notion that these billionaire Democrats are driving action on campuses persists. Fox News, Newsmax, Mike Johnson, Lara Trump, and others have floated the theory that George Soros is in fact behind the protests. This narrative that a Jewish puppet master is secretly pulling the strings behind civil unrest is an old anti-Semitic trope and one that right-wing media have applied to past protests like the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and Ferguson.

Andrew Perez: Yes, it's a sticky situation. George Soros does fund a lot of liberal causes, but I think it's very difficult to say that Soros has funded JVP so the campus protest or the protest against Biden are AstroTurf.

That's something that we saw John Federman literally say using this POLITICO story. Then Donald Trump touted it too. Despite the lengthy correction, his campaign emailed the piece out on Monday, either he or someone posted it on Truth Social. Then after his appearance in criminal court where he was having to sit through Stormy Daniels relay a story about their sex to the court, he comes out of the court and starts talking about this story.

Donald Trump: I think our government ought to find out who they are, where they're from, and treat them the same way as they do the J6 hostages.

Micah Loewinger: He's saying, you threw the book at my supporters. It would be a double standard if you didn't do it to these protesters.

Andrew Perez: Yes. Pretty much

Micah Loewinger: Beyond George Soros, the idea that so-called outside agitators are the real forces behind the activism that we're seeing right now can be found going way back to the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam anti-war protests. In the wake of George Floyd's death, Donald Trump tweeted about what he called professionally managed protestors.

Andrew Perez: Yes. I'll add some examples here. New York Mayor Eric Adams said the same thing about how there were outside agitators occupying the Columbia student encampment.

Mayor Eric Adams: Outside agitators were on their grounds training and really co-opt in this movement.

Andrew Perez: A top New York, NYPD official went on Morning Joe and made the same claim holding up a bike lock.

News clip: This is not what students bring to school. Okay. This is what-

News clip: Don't think so.

News clip:: -professionals bring to campuses and universities. These are heavy industrial chains that were locked with bike locks. This is what we encountered on every door inside of Hamilton Hall.

Andrew Perez: Claiming that this was evidence. The takeover was done by professionals. Even though you could buy the bike lock and chain if you were a student at Columbia from the University Public Safety Department.

Micah Loewinger: We heard a similar conspiratorial theory from NYPD, deputy Commissioner Katz Daughtry on Fox 5.

Deputy Commissioner Katz Daughtry: Look at the tents. They all were the same color, they all were the same type of tents. The same ones that we saw on NYU, the same ones that we see in Columbia. To me, I think somebody's funding this.

Micah Loewinger: Where did they all get them from? The same place, the same person. Someone is behind this and we're going to find out who it is [laughs].

Andrew Perez: I think I saw online that the tents they were using looked like the cheapest version you could buy on Amazon.

Micah Loewinger: That's right, yes. Hell Gate local New York publication looked into it and found that these are just $40 tents that can be bought at a local retailer or online and then basically thrown away.

Andrew Perez: We're really seeing the book thrown at these protestors. I'll just bring up one example because it was funny to me. I saw Jake Sherman from Punchbowl talk about how at the GWU encampment, George Washington University, my own alma mater, that the encampment was causing a rat problem and protestors were having to spray for rats around the camp.

Anyone who's been to DC to the Foggy Bottom area knows it is infested with rats. I don't live in DC anymore. I never see rats, man. I used to see them all the time in DC just walking around. Crazy.

Micah Loewinger: This is an age-old and lazy trope of protest coverage when after the protest is over, you see reporters and TV crews fixate on the garbage that's left behind.

Andrew Perez: [laughs]

Micah Loewinger: Why do you think the outside agitator theory is gaining so much traffic, and who does it benefit?

Andrew Perez: It's a good way to rationalize beating the [bleep] out of kids. Otherwise, does that really look or feel good watching videos of students getting wrecked by police for participating in protected free speech?

Okay, fine. Maybe you're not supposed to take over a hall or a lawn, but there's such a history of this. I think for a lot of people, it is easier to look at things that way than to say maybe a lot of people are actually really concerned, angry, motivated by what's happening in Gaza right now. It's like looking for an explanation outside of the most obvious one.

Micah Loewinger: Andrew, thank you very much.

Andrew Perez: Thank you. This was great.

Micah Loewinger: Andrew Perez is the senior politics editor at Rolling Stone. He recently wrote a piece titled '‘Politico’ Misses Mark in Story on Who’s Funding Pro-Palestine Protests Against Biden.

We reached out to POLITICO for comment, but didn't hear back from them in time for this broadcast, but you can read their correction to the original article on our website onthemedia.org.

[music]

Coming up how are the campus protests playing out in Israeli media? This is On the Media.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger. For a time, the wall-to-wall coverage of college campuses obscured the issues at the heart of the protests, but that changed this week when the war in Gaza was front-page news once again.

News clip: Hamas says it agrees to a ceasefire with Israel.

News clip: Earlier today, Israel strongly rejected a deal agreed to by Hamas as it moved forward with the controversial military operation in the city of Rafah.

News clip: The main stumbling block appears to be this issue of the 33 hostages who were set to be released. They essentially are saying that some of those hostages could be returned dead.

Micah Loewinger: The deal would also require Israel to pull out of Gaza permanently.

News clip: Again, Israel saying that it cannot possibly commit to that.

News clip: After rejecting Hamas' truce offer, Israel's military moved into Rafah.

News clip: People really feel that nowhere is safe in the city.

Micah Loewinger: Exacerbating the situation. Rafah was a major crossing point for humanitarian aid. That's now closed. President Joe Biden meanwhile--

News clip: Tonight in a stinging rebuke of a close American ally, President Biden halting a weapon shipment of 3,500 bombs to Israel. Just as Israeli troops are targeting Hamas in Rafah.

President Joe Biden: They go into Rafah. They haven't gone to Rafah yet. If they are going to Rafah, I'm not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah.

Micah Loewinger: Oren Persico is a staff writer at The Seventh Eye, an independent investigative magazine focused on media and freedom of speech in Israel. We spoke at the beginning of the year and I wanted to catch up with him again to see if anything in the Israeli media landscape has shifted. Oren, welcome back to the show.

Oren Persico: Hi. Good to be here again.

Micah Loewinger: Over the last three weeks in the US, there has just been wall-to-wall coverage around pro-Palestine student protests on college campuses, the encampments, congressional hearings, police raids, it's been all-consuming here. How are Israeli media covering these protests?

Oren Persico: Well, there have been very prominent in Israeli media, but I think what you see as the fringe part of demonstrations in Israel, we focus on that, all these sit-ins and demonstrations are portrayed as really pro-Hamas, antisemitic protests.

There's a lot of footage of demonstrators who are waving Hamas flags and saying that Israel has no right to exist, and it's not seen as a humanitarian cause, stop the war or help the Palestinians who are trapped inside Gaza survive, but more of a threat to Israel's security and very option that it can continue to exist.

Micah Loewinger: It's interesting to me that you use the word fringe, because that suggests that you have perhaps a more nuanced take yourself on the protests.

Oren Persico: Well, I try to read what's going on in the world from international media, and I got the sense that it's like a upside-down world. I haven't been to Columbia Campus. I don't know what's going on and what's the real proportionality between the two camps that I described, but I can understand that it's more complex than it is shown in Israeli media.

Micah Loewinger: When you see some of the most radical speech on college campuses as an Israeli, how does it make you feel?

Oren Persico: Very bad, obviously. In the radical parts, I see genuine hate and threats of violence. I'm just trying to remind myself that that's not the whole picture and that doesn't represent the entire movement against the war in Gaza.

Micah Loewinger: Last weekend, Israel closed one of the main crossing points for humanitarian aid to enter Gaza after Hamas fired rockets at a military base in southern Israel near the site killing three soldiers.

Isaac Herzog, president of Israel tweeted "Hamas attack humanitarian aid because they don't care for humanity." How has the issue of humanitarian aid getting into Gaza been covered by your colleagues in the Israeli press?

Oren Persico: I'll give you an example from Israel Hayom, Israel Today, which is the most popular newspaper in Israel. A couple of weeks ago, the headline said, Hunger? Gaza has an Abundance of Food. This story by Ariel Kahana, the diplomatic correspondent of srael Hayom, stated that an Israeli official said that "There is no lack of food in Gaza and there was no lack of food in Gaza. The stores are full, the markets are bustling with produce, fruits, vegetables, shawarma, pita, you have everything. Do you know why they do not loot the convoys anymore? Because there is no lack of food."

This is a bit of an extreme example of the way the humanitarian crisis is covered in Israeli media. Usually, there's just a lack of coverage. No details, no numbers, no humane stories about the situation in Gaza. When I talk like that about the Israeli media, I have to put aside outlets and some other left-leaning journalists in Israel. I'm talking about mainstream Israeli press, Israeli media outlets. They just don't cover it.

Micah Loewinger: If I understand it correctly, one narrative that we've seen in Israeli press is that Israeli officials need to allow more aid into Gaza because American officials require this as a necessity in order to continue financially supporting the war.

Oren Persico: Yes, absolutely. There's no real sense of empathy towards Palestinians living in Gaza, and hence there's no real positive coverage of humanitarian aid entering Gaza. It's all about the military operation, and the logic is that we have to continue the military operation. If the terms that the US states is that we have to allow humanitarian aid to enter Gaza, we'll do that, but not because they need it or because the situation is so severe there, just because that will allow us to continue the military operation.

There are demonstrations in Israel against allowing humanitarian aid entering Gaza. They are covered as regular news item, not as an act against humanity. Even, you can see positive coverage of the demonstrators because the logic here is that this aid goes to Hamas and this aid allows Hamas to continue its rule in Gaza.

Micah Loewinger: When you said demonstrations, you're referring to crowds of people who, in some cases, have stood in front of trucks at border crossings.

Oren Persico: Yes. They have blocked the road at border crossings and even before the trucks reach the border, they know where the convoy is going and they actively try to stop it, and they are encouraged by right-wing politicians and right-wing media outlets.

Micah Loewinger: Earlier this week, Hamas says it accepted a three-phase ceasefire proposal presented by Egypt and Qatar. Israel did not send a delegate to Cairo to negotiate this deal, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected it. Hamas seems to have offered to exchange prisoners and hostages in exchange for a permanent ceasefire. Israel appears to only want a temporary stop to the exchange of prisoners and hostages.

This week, protestors have gathered in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and other cities demanding that Netanyahu accept the ceasefire agreement and begin bringing home Israeli hostages. How has Israeli media been covering this ceasefire proposal?

Oren Persico: Israeli media in general has gone back to October 6th, so to say. Before the war started, Israeli media and Israeli society was parted between pro-Netanyahu and anti-Netanyahu. Almost every subject in Israel was viewed through this perspective. After October 7th, there were a few weeks, maybe a month of solidarity inside the Israeli Jewish Society, but that has long ended.

The demonstrators, some of them family members of hostages in Gaza are referred to as traitors and people who cooperate with Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas military arm in Gaza.

Micah Loewinger: Who's saying that?

Oren Persico: Right-wing media personalities. One of the most influential and loud supporters of Netanyahu and Israeli in the media, [unintelligible 00:40:58], during the memorial day for the Holocaust that we just had in Israel a few days ago, said that now he understands the Jewish couples in Nazi Germany. Those are the Jewish people who cooperated with the Nazi regime. He said, "Now I understand how Jews can turn against Jews."

Micah Loewinger: Last weekend, Israeli authorities shut down the local offices of Al Jazeera hours after a government vote to use new laws to close the outlets operations in the country. Israeli officials said the move was justified because Al Jazeera was a threat to national security. Prime Minister Netanyahu has called it a terror channel. You were the only journalist who sat in on a courtroom hearing on Tuesday regarding Al Jazeera's closure. What did you hear?

Oren Persico: What I heard was unfortunately only the part that was with opened doors. They had a concealed part of the discussion where very mysterious-looking individuals entered the courtroom and presented, I guess, evidence that Al Jazeera is more than just inciting terrorism and violence.

What they did show in open court was, for example, a video that aired in Al Jazeera a few weeks ago, Al Jazeera Arabic, where the presenter showed a model of an Israeli tank and for roughly seven minutes, went into details about how the tank is operated, where are the vulnerability points of the tank, and what would you want to do if you want to destroy it and kill all the soldiers inside the tank.

The judge really pressed the attorneys of Al Jazeera at this point and said to them, "During a war, how can you justify showing a video like that that specifies the vulnerability points of an Israeli tank and really encourages military personnel to destroy it and kill Israeli soldiers?"

Micah Loewinger: What do you make of that argument?

Oren Persico: It is a very difficult situation. There is obviously a network that supports the active enemy of the Israeli state, and is a megaphone for their messages and incites violence against Israel. If you look at the EU, they banned Russia today after Russia invaded Ukraine, and they don't even have a direct war with Russia. On the one hand, I would say the EU has gone further than Israel. On the other side, I think the Israeli law against Al Jazeera is more dangerous because there's more danger of a slippery slope.

Micah Loewinger: Al Jazeera does also do legitimate journalism. It's not strictly speaking state media. It's kind of a thorn in the side of many of the Gulf states because of some of the investigative reporting it's done.

Oren Persico: Yes, but you should remember there's a big difference between Al Jazeera in English and Al Jazeera in Arabic. They have different points of views and different journalistic standards.

Micah Loewinger: Let me ask you about that slippery slope. The law that the government is using to shut down Al Jazeera, could it conceivably be used to shut down other domestic media, other international media?

Oren Persico: Well, right now the law is only against international media who hurt the security of Israel. It's not against Israeli domestic media outlets, but the right-wing parliament members who discussed this law in the Knesset wanted it to be also against Israeli media. They wanted it to allow shutting down media outlets for an entire year, not just 45 days like it's now.

They wanted to shut down media outlets without having to go to court within 72 hours to approve the warrants. They wanted a much more draconian law, but the head of the committee that prepared the bill before it became a law told them at the end, "Listen, let's vote for this right now and we'll have a foot in the door." In that sense, I do feel that it's a potential risk.

Micah Loewinger: The last time we spoke, Oren, back in January, we talked about how the Israeli public is living under a dome of disconnection with Israelis increasingly feeling isolated from a world they feel doesn't understand their pain after October 7th and their fear of Hamas. You argued that Israeli media contributed to that feeling, that after October 7th, Israeli television journalists were covering the conflict in ways that would lift the morale of the army and the public, but that they also hid the destruction in Gaza being caused by Israeli bombardments and the human toll.

Four months have passed since we last spoke. The approximate death toll in Gaza is now over 34,000 people. The press is still not really reckoning with this.

Oren Persico: No, that hasn't changed at all, and it's not just the TV that won't show it. A lot of people get their news these days from social networks, and the algorithm of the social network wants you to stay on the social network, and so they won't show you things that you do not want to see. There are a lot of content that is pro-Israel, and that emphasizes the human cost.

On the Israeli side, there are still soldiers getting killed every day. There are hundreds of thousands of people who are still evacuated from their homes around Gaza and on the northern border. There is a lot to see. It's very easy to stay inside this storm of ignorance.

Micah Loewinger: You've been quite critical of the Israeli media. It is your beat, of course. What change or new approach to journalism and media in Israel right now do you think could help deescalate this war and lay the groundwork for peace?

Oren Persico: One of the biggest changes that is needed is the way the military reporters report about the actions of the IDF. They are completely dependent on the IDF for information, and so it's very difficult for them to grow a backbone and be independent and critical. It's vital that they do that so Israelis would get more real, complex, and relevant worldview about what's going on around them, and in this conflict specifically.

Micah Loewinger: What do you wish American audiences understood about life in Israel at this moment? Is there something that you think we're missing?

Oren Persico: Well, I try to remind myself that not all of Palestinians are Hamas. That's a very widespread notion in Israel society in Israeli media that there are no innocent Palestinians in Gaza because they are either Hamas fighters or Hamas supporters or they voted for Hamas in the last election, or they did not rebel against Hamas. I try to remind myself there are just people wanting to live their lives like most people.

It's like when Donald Trump was the president of the United States, not all Americans were Trump. What he said and the way he acted didn't represent the entire population of the US. Like that, Israelis are not all Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing supporters in the government. A lot of them do support Netanyahu and do support the war, but there are sociological historical reasons for the dominance of militant ideology in Israel.

If you look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you see that generation after generation, more suffering and more violence begets even more suffering and more violence. This vicious circle is trapping both of the societies and turning them into even more militant and unempathic of the other side. There are internal disagreements about the way ahead and what should be done. As much as I try to remind myself about people on the other side of the border, people outside Israel should remind themselves the reasons that Israelis are acting like they are.

Micah Loewinger: Oren, thank you very much.

Oren Persico: Thank you very much for having me. Thanks.

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Micah Loewinger: Oren Persico is a staff writer at the Seventh Eye, an independent investigative magazine focused on media and freedom of speech in Israel.

That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondiau, Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang, with help from Shaan Merchant, OTM's longest-tenured intern who leaves us this week as he graduates J-School. Congrats and thank you so much, Shaan. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer this week was Brendan Dalton. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Micah Loewinger.

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