Battles Lines: The America Media and the Intifada.

• Author: Wallach, John P.

Five years from now, when the 1.7 million Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza have declared themselves independent and established their own mini-state along the Jordanian and Israeli borders, they will owe a debt of gratitude to the American media, particularly network television, for having "discovered" the intifada and promoted the sponrtaneous Palestinian uprising to the status of a major international crisis. In the process, Palestinians, who after 1948 had lived more or less quiescently under Jordanian occupation and since 1967 under Israeli occupation, traveled a road of self-discovery that gave them increasing pride in their sacrifices and, more important, a genuine sense of self-awareness or "peoplehood," as they were no longer caught in the vise between the Israelis and abject subsservience to the PLO. Risking their lives, they formulated their own demands, created their own incipient political leadership, and even imposed a brutal system of justice on those who dared to flout their orders. In the five years from 1987 to 1992, the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza became something that most of the world had denied them throughout the 44 years of Israel's existence: a nation.

Jim Lederman's superb study (*) at first appears to be yet another book bashing the press for having been unfair to Israel and for giving disproportionate coverage to a story that in any other country would have warranted at most a minute or two each week on the evening news. Indeed, in a press blurb from New Republic editor-in-chief Martin Peretz, the Harvard don lavishes unusual praise on this "seasoned and savvy newsman" (Lederman was the correspondent for National Public Radio in Israel for 14 years) for showing "how the American media misreports the Arab-Israeli conflict" and has "turned a complex historical problem into a simple morality play."

To Lederman's credit, he does much more. By depicting the Palestinian uprising as a struggle for national identity and independence that was waged as much against the external diktats of the PLO as the internal harshness of Israeli rule, he validates the story as one that deserved the attention it received. As he points out late in the book, the test that should be applied to media coverage of the intifada is one of "balance," not "fairness," because fairness is an emotional yardstick that will always be skewed in the eyes of each beholder. Lederman faults the television media for frequently being unbalanced in its coverage, but he is too sophisticated a newsman to blame the messenger for the message, however unpleasant it may be. Early in Battle Lines, he dispenses with one of the most widely held shibboleths, telling us: "Contrary to the complaints of many Israeli apologists that many or most foreign press corps members are inherently anti-semitic or anti-Israeli, a good number of the attitudes prevalent within the foreign press corps were shaped by the Israelis themselves." And later in the book, he points out that "whatever [journalists'] personal political beliefs, their loyalty at the tape machine or the film editing table was...