The indoctrination is so deep that educated people think they’re being objective. – Noam Chomsky
Part 1
Breaking Narrative
News of the Sabra and Shatilla massacre struck like lightning around the world, prompting the return Multinational Force (MNF) to Lebanon. Under the U.S.-brokered truce that ended the invasion, Washington had pledged to guarantee the security of Palestinian civilians in the camps. However, the United States and its allies reneged on their promise, withdrawing the MNF prematurely on Sept. 11, 1982, leaving the refugees vulnerable. A day after the MNF’s departure, Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon charged without evidence that “2,000 terrorists” remained inside the Palestinian refugee camps following PLO’s departure in August.
In reality, the assault on the camps had been planned in advance: two days before his death, Gemayel had agreed with Sharon to “mop up” the camps.1
The invasion and the massacre - catalysts for a gradual change in media coverage - brought Israel worldwide criticism. The international media framed the slaughter of the Palestinian refugees as revenge for President elect Bashir Gemayel’s death, even though the plan for going into the camps was taken before the assassination.
Gemayel’s Phalange Party denied involvement. Israel denied any knowledge. But after local and Western media reported the Israeli presence around the camps, Israel denied responsibility.2 Its Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan blamed Phalange militiamen and indirectly the Lebanese army, and even the Americans.3 However, at a cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, Sharon, Eitan and General Amir Drori, the senior Israeli commander in Lebanon, acknowledged that the Israeli army had coordinated the storming of the camps by the Phalange militiamen.
“Initially, the Israelis were saying ‘oh we don’t know anything about that,’” recalled Stephen K. Hindy, who was in charge of the AP operation after bureau chief Tatro and the rest of the permanent Beirut staff left Lebanon on R&R after the cease-fire.
“Then we went to the observation post that the Israelis had set up around the camps, and you could see from these posts right into the camps. ... It was pretty easy to refute their claims that they didn’t know what was happening.”
The presence of Israeli and Israel-based journalists in the camps, added Hindy, may have allowed the coverage to reflect what had actually happened without giving credence to Israeli army denials.
This chapter is structured around four major developments — Sabra and Shatilla massacre, U.S. involvement in Lebanon, Israel’s occupation that led to the birth of Hezbollah (1982–1985), the Israeli Hasbara Project, and the 1996 Israel-Hezbollah war — to highlight the considerable shifts in AP coverage over more than a decade and illustrate how and why the agency’s impartiality eroded over this period.
The analyses draw on interviews with more than 25 AP journalists who were involved in the coverage, alongside extensive first-person narratives and my own on the ground reporting.
Israelis in camp during massacre
A couple of months after the massacre, the Israeli government, under domestic pressure, established the Kahan Commission to investigate the killings. Ahead of the findings, Tatro asked me to line up survivors so AP could get their immediate reactions when the report was released.
One survivor I found was Ektefa Shallah, whose husband was killed on the first afternoon of the massacre on September 16. Unaware of the significance of what she was revealing, she told me Israeli soldiers had accompanied the Phalange militiamen into the camps while the killings were taking place. The soldiers spoke to each other in Hebrew, a language Shallah learned as a child before she fled her home in Jaffa - now a suburb of Tel Aviv - during the 1948 war that led to the creation of the state of Israel. Her daughter, Jamila, who did not understand Hebrew, also spoke with an Israeli soldier, as did their neighbor, Amneh Khalifeh.
The revelation of Israeli presence in the camps during the massacre was a major scoop. I had Shallah repeat in Hebrew the words she said the soldiers had used, recorded them, and then telexed the phonetic rendering of those sounds to AP’s Tel Aviv office. They confirmed both the language and the meaning that Shallah had provided. The story, published on December 22, 1982, made a splash in newspapers around the world, and prominently in the U.S. AP promoted it as it did other exclusives and even picked it as the story of the month — something that would have been unthinkable during the 2006 war, as we shall see in Chapter 4, and certainly today.
The Kahan Commission released its findings on February 8, 1983. It did not hold any individual Israeli directly responsible, but concluded that Sharon bore “personal responsibility” for “not ordering appropriate measures for preventing or reducing the danger of massacre” before sending the Phalangists into the camps.4 It recommended that Prime Minister Menachem Begin remove him from office. Sharon resigned as defense minister but retained his cabinet position as minister without portfolio and, over the next 16 years, held four additional ministerial posts before becoming prime minister in February 2001.
The revelations from survivors such as Ektefa Shallah and her neighbor Amneh Khalifeh required a methodical process to build a strong, indisputable news story. That meant recording Shallah’s words carefully, checking them with Hebrew speakers in the Tel Aviv bureau, and reconstructing Khalifeh’s ordeal in the stadium step by step, corroborating her movements with an AP colleague to ensure accuracy. That rigor was essential not only to establish the credibility of their testimony but also to guard against misrepresentation in a volatile and contested setting. It stood in sharp contrast to today’s tendency to take Israeli and Western government narratives at face value — or give them undue weight even when they are demonstrably false — and recycle them in real time.
These experiences underscore the logistical and ethical concerns reporters once took seriously and foreshadow the even greater difficulties encountered while reporting the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks bombings. They illustrate how frontline reporting, grounded in direct observation and rigorous verification, shaped immediate news coverage and ensured that witnesses’ accounts and facts on the ground were preserved as historical record against official denials.
By contrast, today even when rigorous, in-depth investigations are carried out — rarely so if they involve Israeli crimes —they usually appear weeks or months after mainstream media has already amplified government lies. By then, the public has moved on and the news cycle has shifted to more immediate events. Yet the initial falsehoods, embedded in archived reporting, remain available to be recycled and cited again as if they were established fact.
Israel’s Stain
The massacre briefly enabled U.S. media to report on Israeli actions with rare openness, leaving a deep scar on Israel’s image. “Something big happened during the massacre of Sabra and Shatilla which opened a space for more critical reporting of what Israel was doing in Lebanon,” said former ABC correspondent Charles Glass in an interview. “That window was opened for almost a year, I would say, and then closed again when Sabra and Shatilla was forgotten.”
If the massacre temporarily opened the door to more skeptical coverage, it also made Israel go to great lengths to reassert control of the narrative. Soon after storming West Beirut in September, soldiers began making unannounced visits to the AP office and the Commodore Hotel where the international press stayed.
“They kind of let their point be known,” recalled Tatro. “They were schmoozing and saying ‘did you notice this, did you notice that? This is what our policy is’ ... They started to politick [sic] the press in a very American sort of way.”
Hasbara
The massacre reverberated far beyond the refugee camps, shaking assumptions about Israel’s conduct and momentarily disrupting the shield of immunity that usually insulated it in the American media. For once, the prevailing narrative — Israel as a democracy forced to defend itself against irrational Arab violence — buckled under the sheer scale of the atrocity and the visceral global outrage it provoked. However, this fragile and brief shift was shaped less by a fundamental reconsideration of Palestinian humanity but rather from the shock of an event too large to ignore.
When the headlines and the shock faded, the older narratives that had long justified or excused Palestinian suffering returned - in part because the outrage did not challenge the deeper framework of dehumanization that, through years of labeling, had already marked Palestinians as less than human. Palestinians were once again reduced to the categories that had long denied their humanity — “terrorists,” “extremists,” a faceless threat rather than a people living under occupation, their land snatched from them. These labels had been entrenched in American discourse since at least the late 1960s, reinforced by dramatic incidents like the hijackings of the early 1970s and the Munich Olympics attack in 1972. Such episodes became shorthand for the Palestinian condition, eclipsing the daily realities of exile, dispossession, and brutal military occupation, turning acts of resistance — from survival itself to hijackings — into meaningless abstractions. When the labels returned, Palestinians once again became expendable.
As the Israeli writer Uri Avneri observed, once Palestinians are reduced to the label of “terrorists,” they can “be bombed, shelled, expelled, [and] denied their humanity.” Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua warned of the same corrosive effect when Israeli leaders described Palestinians as “two-legged beasts” — language that made soldiers’ atrocities seem unremarkable. Noam Chomsky pushed the point further, noting that this process of dehumanization extended well beyond Israel: the ideological support system in the United States relied on falsifying history, vilifying Palestinians, and ignoring their suffering, leaving them as “fair game for the atrocities that they have suffered, and will continue to suffer.” In such a climate, “nothing is easier than to shed responsibility, to condemn the crimes — often real — of someone else, while ignoring one’s own.” The result, Chomsky warned, was an enduring framework in which Palestinians could be endlessly blamed, endlessly punished, and endlessly erased.5
Indeed, U.S. Middle East policy has further reinforced these perceptions, contributing to a public view in which every Palestinian is treated as a potential terrorist or suicide bomber — even children — and therefore seen as deserving whatever punishment Israel chooses to mete out. The impact of such value-laden language is not abstract. Studies of news coverage, together with interviews with journalists, show how words shape perception, normalize violence, and obscure moral responsibility. We will return to these findings in more detail, with examples, later in the chapter.
Inside Israel, however, criticism of the Sabra and Shatila massacre was even sharper than abroad. Some 400,000 Israelis — out of a population of four million — filled the streets of Tel Aviv on September 25, 1982, in what was then the largest anti-government demonstration in the country’s history.6 Peace activist Naomi Kies, watching footage of a small Palestinian boy being pulled from the rubble with his hand raised, likened the image to “a Holocaust picture we wanted to forget.”7 For many, the massacre tore at the myth of Israel’s moral exceptionalism.
But that moment of reckoning proved fleeting. Israeli society has since moved steadily to the right, embracing permanent occupation and the routine oppression of Palestinians as normalized policy. What was once contested is now widely accepted. Today, this trajectory is laid bare in the overwhelming majority support among Israelis for the ongoing genocide in Gaza.8 The Israeli polling firm Geocartography found in March 2025 that 82% of Jewish Israelis supported the mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza and 56% also supported expelling Palestinian citizens of Israel. Even more alarmingly, a significant number of people supported genocide against the Palestinians, with almost half of those surveyed agreeing that the Israeli military should re-enact the story of the Israelites’ capture of Jericho. The survey question referred to the biblical story when Joshua’s army was said to have killed every man, woman and child after capturing the city.9
A poll conducted by Hebrew University in March 2024, found that 64% of Israelis believed there were “no innocents in Gaza.” Among government supporters, the figure rose to 87%.10 And Pew Research found (June 2025) that only 21% of Israelis believed peaceful coexistence with a Palestinian state was possible — the lowest figure ever recorded. A majority support indefinite Israeli control over Gaza after the war.11
Marines as a story
For The Associated Press, Lebanon in late 1982 produced multiple, parallel storylines. The massacre was one; another was the return of Western forces — a development that fit neatly into AP’s editorial practice of highlighting events involving American forces.
In the wake of the massacre, U.S. Marines, French paratroopers and the Italian Bersaglieri troops returned to Lebanon, landing in Beirut again on September 24, 1982, joined shortly afterward by a small contingent of a British armored reconnaissance regiment.
The 1,800 Marine force was deployed at the airport and along the perimeter to its immediate south in Khalde; they patrolled the Shia Muslim areas of Beirut’s southern suburbs surrounding it: Hayy el-Sellom, Burj el-Barajneh, Ghobeiry and Shiyah, as well as Ouzai.12
The French patrolled the commercial center of West Beirut, while the Italians operated in Shatilla, Bourj el-Barajneh and the adjacent Shia districts. Offshore, the Americans maintained Sixth Fleet aircraft.
Meanwhile, the Israelis pulled back only 10 kilometers from West Beirut, returning to the frontlines they held during the siege of Beirut. The Syrian army controlled the coastline, about 30 kilometers north of Beirut; along the summit of Mount Lebanon to Sofar on the Beirut-Damascus highway, and east across the Bekaa Valley. The Shouf Mountain area, occupied by Druze and Israeli-allied Maronite militias of the Phalange and Lebanese Forces (the latter brought by the Israelis), were in a state of semi-war. Also, there were up to 10,000 Palestinian guerrillas in the eastern Bekaa and in and around the northern port city of Tripoli.
The presence of several hundred newly arrived Iranian Revolutionary Guards in the Bekaa’s ancient city of Baalbek was with the acquiescence of the Syrians. The Amal militia was the most prominent of Shia groups, although a more religious splintered faction (Islamic Amal) that had fought the Israelis drew its inspiration from Iran.
Further south, the Israeli occupation forces were fighting against an armed Lebanese resistance that was growing more deadly by the day.
It was against this backdrop that the MNF, which had no UN mandate, operated. Initially, the troops were in Lebanon essentially as peacekeepers and were very popular — most of all the Italians, adored by Palestinian children who learned to cheer them with “ciao,” and even picked up bits of Italian. The French, tasked with the “dirty work” of clearing mines, had little interaction with the population.
The U.S. Marines were warmly welcomed in the Shia slums of Beirut and among the Palestinians, who saw them as protection against the Israelis and the Phalange Christians. The Marines were not even allowed to load bullets into their guns. For a time, they mingled relatively freely in West Beirut and a few even dated Lebanese women. Their reputation soared after a February 25, 1983, incident when a Marine captain blocked three Israeli tanks that had breached his position, jumping on one and shouting, “You'll have to kill me” if they passed. The local media seized on the story, portraying the American captain as a hero.13 U.S.-Israeli tensions were further strained by Reagan administration’s reports to Congress on Israel’s use of U.S.-supplied aircraft, armor, and artillery in offensive missions in Lebanon.
Covering troops on the ground is probably as old as war reporting itself. The American correspondent Ernest Taylor Pyle, whose World War II dispatches on ordinary soldiers won lasting recognition, told it as it really was, not as distant generals claimed. In Beirut, AP did much the same: recounting the daily lives, risks, and small routines of Marines alongside the larger story of the war.
AP’s coverage of the Marines, with its focus on daily activities, human interest vignettes, and occasional lighter stories, exemplified what media scholar Daniel Hallin described as the routines of war reporting that often prioritize the soldiers’ experiences that have “no significant value as information of the war.”14
One routine reporting was to call the Marine base every day for a fresh angle in the morning cycle.15 On quiet days, Marines would joke, “I washed my armpit” or “brushed my teeth,” and such quips sometimes made it into stories on quiet news days. Since AP served many U.S. newspapers with readers who had sons or husbands in the Marine Corps in Beirut, every soldier mentioned in a story was identified by full name, age, and hometown.
Beyond the hometown stories, AP covered Lebanese militias firing at the Marines, Marines firing back, Marine casualties, and U.S. Navy strikes on militia outposts in the mountains.
I spent a great deal of time at their airport base. They took us on truck tours of their areas of operation and helicopter rides to ships off the Mediterranean coast. They held volleyball matches with journalists, invited us to barbecues, and even had senior officers join our 1983 New Year's Eve celebration at the Commodore Hotel. Many became friends; they were my age or younger, polite, fun, and painfully innocent.
Unlike the Israelis, the Marines gave the media — Lebanese as well as foreign — regular access without censorship or spin. The slick media staging that would come to define U.S. military operations in Iraq two decades later was absent in Lebanon: Marine officers showed up without Hollywood-style maps or rehearsed talking points, offering a far less managed version of their mission.
More than any other journalist, AP photographer Don Mell, who was in his early 20s, spent time with the Marines, most of whom were not much younger than him. They spoke intimately to him of their fears and hopes. They were somewhat naive about their surroundings, recalled Mell. “The general consensus was, ‘We’re here doing the right thing. Everybody agrees that we should be here, so there’s no need for us to take an aggressive stand.’ Obviously, they learned the hard way that that was not necessarily the case.”
Mell noticed that Shia militias generally tolerated the Marines because they provided them a kind of protection, especially at the beginning when the Israelis were still at the end of the airport perimeter — where that first confrontation between the Israelis and the Americans occurred.
Mell spent the mornings going back and forth between the Marines and the Shia militiamen of the Amal movement positioned only 100 feet away on the airport perimeter. About half a dozen 18-year-old Marines, sitting in their foxholes, would shout Arabic insults they had picked up - slurs about mothers and sisters. “All typical soldier trash talk,” said Mell, who understood Lebanon and its culture more than any foreigner. He warned them, and even told Marine commander, Gen. Timothy Geraghty, that such behavior was angering Amal and risked escalation. “The officers understood Lebanon to a degree, but the young soldiers didn’t know the environment, the culture, or how to act within it,” said Mell, who also told Amal commanders that he had warned the Marines to stop that kind of behavior.
Unlike the rest of the U.S. military, the Marines — an expeditionary, rapid-deployment corps not structured for occupation — were soon dragged into protecting the Christian Lebanese militia, then at war with the Druze and Shia factions. Mell recalled Marines voicing unease about involvement. That entanglement deepened as Washington aligned openly with President Amin Gemayel’s Phalange-dominated government. Druze and Shia militias increasingly saw the Marines as enemies. When hostilities broke out, the Marines’ vulnerability on low ground became evident, and confusion reigned. As one 32-year-old staff sergeant told a New York Times reporter, “I can’t figure out who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.” As U.S. forces shelled Shia and Druze positions, mistrust hardened into outright belligerence. Within seventeen months, the Western force collapsed, leaving behind irreparable consequences.
AP’s Eileen Alt Powell, who arrived in Lebanon in the fall of 1983 to join her husband, GG Labelle, the new AP news editor, was initially unfamiliar with Middle East politics, but she was knowledgeable about the U.S. military. On one of her first tours with the Marines, she accompanied a Public Information Officer (PIO) to Checkpoint 76, a sandbagged bunker overlooking Beirut airport where firefights with militias often occurred. During the tour, the Marines came under fire, and the PIO called in backup. Powell noted the presence of howitzers, which impressed the officer and led to a close working relationship. She was subsequently assigned as AP’s permanent journalist covering the Marines.
According to Daniel Pipes, the pro-Israel commentator, media reporting on the Marines was distorted because U.S. audiences care more about Americans than foreigners. International issue, he said, became “domesticated.”16 But Pipes’ critique did not fully apply to AP. While the agency covered the Marines extensively in the 1980s, it also produced some of the broadest, most hands-on and comprehensive coverage of other news in Lebanon. Journalists investigated massacres and rumor, avoided reliance on official statements, and sought direct interaction with sources. With phone lines often down, we traveled to see the Marines at their base or on patrol, politicians at their offices, and militia leaders face to face — ultimately obtaining far more than a simple quote.
AP on the ground
Field reporting was AP’s strength. Staffers braved shelling, air raids, snipers, and the risk of kidnapping, and our safety depended on deep local knowledge. More important than simply telling what was happening was our own curiosity to understand it. Unlike in Iraq, Afghanistan, or even Bosnia, where journalists were posted temporarily and kept homes elsewhere, we lived in Lebanon. Survival meant adapting to daily life there, not retreating to hotels between assignments. Except for a few well-known TV reporters, celebrity culture had not yet permeated our ranks in Lebanon — at least not noticeably — and journalists did not typically return to their home countries and give lectures on the war. Years later, a few days or weeks of reporting in Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, often gave journalists the confidence to appear on talk shows analyzing conflicts they barely knew. Of course, there were a few adrenaline-seeking reporters in Beirut in the 1980s too.
Unlike with the 2006 war or the Iraq invasion, AP reporters spent substantial time with civilians rather than relying on brief encounters. While a reporter was with the Marines, another was in the mountains reporting on the militia war, another in Tripoli in the north covering PLO factional fighting, and yet another documenting resistance to the Israeli occupation in the south.
And unlike today where foreign correspondents largely depend on translators and fixers to do their work, journalists then often operated on their own, sometimes tagging along with local colleagues from wire services, benefiting not only from their Arabic but from their familiarity with the political landscape and access to the population that they could not have if they traveled on their own.
Read Chapter Two, Part 2 in the next post.
Benny Morris, “The Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict,” 1881-1999 (New York: A. Knopf, 1999) p. 540.
Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Ya'ari, “Israel's Lebanon War” (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), p. 251.
Amnon Kapeliouk, “Sabra & Shatilla: Inquiry into a Massacre,” translated from French by Khalil Jahshan (Belmont, MA: Association of Arab-American University Graduates,1984), pp. 49-50.
Jewish Virtual Library, “First Lebanon War: The Kahan Commission of Inquiry,” p. 104, Feb. 8, 1983- http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/kahan.html
Falsifications of history are not random errors but part of a system that shapes how the U.S. public sees Palestinians — often as deserving victims. Narratives have long celebrated Israel’s “miraculous birth” in 1948 while omitting or denying the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians. Textbooks and media accounts frequently said Palestinians “fled voluntarily,” erasing the fact of forced expulsions. Dominant U.S. narratives of the 1967 Arab-Israeli cast Israel as facing an “existential threat” and fighting only in self-defense, though evidence — including Israeli sources — shows Israel struck first and never doubted its survival. During the First Intifada (1987–93), stone-throwing Palestinians were often branded as “terrorists,” while little attention went to the reality that they were rising up against decades-long military occupation.
Marcus Eliason, AP accessed through LexisNexus, Sept. 25, 2006.
James Feron, New York Times, “West Beirut siege is affecting Israelis’ self image,” August 23, 1982 - http://www.nytimes.com/1982/08/23/world/west-beirut-seige-is-affecting-israelis-self-image.html
'Our Genocide': How do Israelis feel about the war in Gaza? /www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIjbHb0ks0c
https://www.defenddemocracy.press/poll-overwhelming-majority-of-jewish-israelis-back-expulsion-of-palestinians-from-gaza/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/64-of-israelis-believe-there-are-no-innocents-in-gaza-poll/3594355?utm_source=chatgpt.com
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/06/03/israeli-public-is-increasingly-skeptical-about-lasting-peace/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Hayy el-Sellom, one of the largest Shia neighborhoods, was home to many families displaced from the south by Israeli bombardments; Burj el-Barajneh lay adjacent to the Palestinian camp of the same name; Ghobeiry and Shiyah were older Shia quarters heavily damaged during the civil war and the Israeli invasion; and Ouzai was a densely populated, impoverished coastal district near the airport.
Robert Fisk, “Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon” (UK: Andre Deutsch, 1990).
Daniel C. Hallin, The "Uncensored War": The Media and Vietnam,” (California: University of California Press, 1989)
The target of PMs cycle was the afternoon papers in America.
Daniel Pipes, New Republic, “Lebanon Eyewitness,” Aug. 2, 1982 - http://www.danielpipes.org/166/the- media-and-the-middle-east