Adios Lebanon
After years of war and lawlessness, Lebanon was barely functioning. Electricity came on for only a few hours a day. Water was scarce. Garbage piled up on street corners, attracting rats and flies, and the stench choked the air.
The breakdown seeped into the AP bureau. Gunmen strolled in and out. With no proper leader, the staff was exhausted and demoralized. I requested a transfer and moved to Cyprus at the end of August 1985. By then, the Western hostages in Lebanon dominated AP’s coverage — even though far more non-Westerners had been kidnapped. Twenty-three Westerners had been kidnapped, most of them journalists, diplomats, or teachers. Nine were American, including Anderson, who would spend more than six years in captivity before his release in December 1991. Some, like ABC’s Charles Glass and Reuters’ Jonathan Wright, escaped captivity. Seven, including CIA station chief William Buckley and French researcher Michel Seurat, died in captivity.
The hostage crisis reshaped U.S.-Iran relations, already severed since the 1979 embassy takeover in Tehran. For years afterward, I reported on Iran’s shifting demands for the hostages’ release — demands Iran publicly disavowed, even denying any link to the Lebanese captors. The denials were never convincing, but they were laid bare in 1986, when I broke the story that President Reagan had secretly sent planeloads of arms and spare parts to Iran in hopes of securing the release of Americans held in Lebanon by pro-Iranian groups.1
The clandestine effort soon unraveled into the Iran-Contra Affair, one of the biggest scandals of Reagan’s presidency. The revelation exposed that senior U.S. officials had violated an arms embargo on Tehran, diverted profits from the sales to the Contras — a right-wing insurgency fighting to overthrow the left-wing Sandinista government in Nicaragua — and misled Congress and the public. The fallout was explosive: multiple investigations and criminal convictions for top Reagan aides.
Subtle Shifts, Lasting Impact
I left the Middle East toward the end of 1987 and did not return as a journalist until the fall of 1995, when I resumed work for AP based in Jerusalem in the aftermath of the Oslo Accords, the U.S.-brokered agreements that established mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO and promised limited Palestinian self-rule in parts of occupied Palestine.
Upon my return, I almost immediately noticed coverage had taken on a slant — especially when it came to Israel. It was subtle, almost invisible, yet perceptible, impossible to ignore. The framing of stories leaned more toward the Israeli perspective; not always, but often enough to stand out. Crucial events that might have clarified the situation on the ground were sometimes left out, while value-laden language crept into copy — small choices that cumulatively carved out more space and legitimacy for Israel’s position without necessarily justifying its actions. Framing is inevitable in journalism, but when it consistently tilts toward one side, it does more than narrate events; it shapes how they are understood.
At the same time and with frequency, I had the freedom not to follow the prevailing pattern of coverage, and so did my colleagues if they chose to. Some did; others didn’t. The bureau chief, Nick Tatro — my first boss who hired me in Beirut — along with news editor Karin Laub, encouraged me to pursue exposés on controversial and often damaging actions and policies of both Israel and the Palestinian Authority. I did so on numerous occasions. In fact, most of my stories challenged authority and unsettled the prevailing narratives. The incremental, subtle shifts I observed in 1995-96 would become more pronounced in the years that followed.
Then came the April 1996 war on Hezbollah that Israel dubbed Operation Grapes of Wrath and Hezbollah codenamed Harb Nissan, which literally means the April War. I went to the border area of Metulla and Kiryat Shmona along the border with Lebanon to report firsthand on the impact on civilians caught between Israeli bombardments and Hezbollah rocket fire. The coverage offered a stark example of how the framing of events would shape Western public perception.
Take the April 8, 1996 death of a Lebanese boy by a land mine that the UN and local Lebanese residents said Israel had planted. The following day Hezbollah fired Katyusha rockets into northern Israel and the Israeli-occupied border strip in south Lebanon. Two days later, on April 11, Israel launched strikes on Lebanon that continued until April 27, killing mostly civilians and destroying water systems, power plants and roads.2 Later that same day, a high-ranking Israeli officer in Metulla told me, in response to my question about why his army was striking civilian sites, that the objective was to destroy Lebanon’s economic infrastructure — not necessarily Hezbollah’s.
The war’s defining moment came on April 18 with the Israeli shelling of a UN base in the village of Qana, a protected zone under international law. One hundred and six civilians were killed, more than half of them children, after seeking refuge there on Israeli instructions to leave their homes in surrounding areas. Israel and the United States immediately shifted blame to Hezbollah, claiming — without evidence — that the group had used civilians as human shields. Under pressure from U.S. President Bill Clinton’s administration, the UN Security Council refused to condemn Israel’s Qana massacre. Washington also tried unsuccessfully to block UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali from releasing a report that blamed Israel; a watered-down version was eventually published, but even its muted conclusions provoked U.S. retaliation. Washington announced it would veto Boutros-Ghali’s re-election.3 AP accepted Washington’s charge at face value.4
On April 26, the U.S. brokered a truce under which both Hezbollah and Israel agreed, as they had in 1993, to refrain from attacking civilians.5
Earlier on April 18, I asked Prime Minister Shimon Peres at a news conference in Tel Aviv why Israel was killing so many civilians if the war was only with Hezbollah. Peres repeated the familiar line that Hezbollah used civilians as human shields. Then, with practiced solemnity — brows furrowed, lips pressed into a pout — he said: “I am pained by every person, every woman, every child, who is being killed. But Israel was left with no choice but to defend its citizens.” He even denied that Israel was aware civilians had taken shelter at the UN base in Qana, blaming Lebanon and Syria for failing to prevent Hezbollah from operating near populated areas. “Hezbollah will bring a disaster upon Lebanon,” he said.
Israel’s armed forces chief, Lt. Gen. Amnon Shahak, echoed the claim, accusing Hezbollah — but provided no evidence — of firing two Katyusha rockets from about 350 yards away from the UN compound, supposedly drawing Israeli artillery fire. He defended the shelling, insisting his soldiers had acted under orders and had not erred in judgment. “We told the UN we plan to fire (back). The U.N. knows the minute people fire from around them … incoming (fire) is on its way and they take shelter,” Shahak said.
Yet AP did not appear to have sought UN confirmation of Israel’s claim that it had warned them of their imminent attack on their base.
Israel justified the April 1996 war on Lebanon as an effort to stop Hezbollah rocket attacks on the occupation forces in southern Lebanon and on northern Israel. The Associated Press rarely challenged this rationale — just as it had not in 1982, when Israel falsely claimed its invasion was to stop PLO cross-border shelling.
A search of the agency’s online archives shows that its stories omitted another crucial detail in reporting the 1996 war: Hezbollah’s rocket fire had been a direct retaliation for the killing of a Lebanese teenager on April 8.
According to UN and Lebanese residents, the boy was killed by an Israeli mine.6 The following day, Hezbollah fired Katyusha rockets in retaliation into the Israeli-occupied border strip in south Lebanon and northern Israel. On April 11, the Israeli military launched strikes on Lebanon that lasted until April 27, claiming they were in response to Hezbollah attacks.
Days earlier, the UN had confirmed that Israeli soldiers had planted a roadside explosive inside a UN-controlled area that was outside the Israeli-occupied zone in southern Lebanon, killing the Lebanese teenager and wounding three others. A British newspaper reported that after the Israeli bombardment ended, Israeli officers handed UN ordnance officers detailed maps of the explosives they had planted.7 Despite these revelations, AP’s timeline of the 16-day war — both during and after — continued to omit that the chain of events began with an Israeli mine blast.
It was mentioned only once, buried in the timeline of the fighting, that a “Lebanese boy was killed by a land mine in southern Lebanon, with local residents accusing Israel of planting the mine.” Yet by then the UN had already verified Israel’s responsibility. Despite the significance of this finding, the detail never appeared in any of the 20 AP news stories examined — stories in which timelines were otherwise central.
According to a local AP staffer in Beirut, the mine incident was added to the chronology only after he personally pressed the editor compiling it. The timeline had originally opened with Hezbollah’s rocket attacks.
In the April 9 chronology, AP reported that in response to the boy’s death, Hezbollah guerrillas began “firing Katyusha rockets into northern Israel daily.” The chronology then noted that on April 10, Hezbollah fighters killed an Israeli soldier and wounded two others in attacks on “Israel’s self-declared ‘security zone’ in south Lebanon.” This sequencing effectively shifted the starting point of the conflict away from Israel’s mine blast and onto Hezbollah’s retaliation, thereby recasting the sequence of events and implicitly framing Hezbollah as the initial aggressor.
Read Chapter Two, Part 6 in the next post.
Scheherezade Faramarzi, AP, “Sources say McFarlane’s May trip accompanied by 20 planeloads of arms,” November 29, 1986. https://apnews.com/4a8273859bff3c3e5147d37ed61af870
A high-ranking Israeli officer in Kiryat Shmona in 1996, in response to my query as to why his army was attacking civilian sites, said they wanted to destroy Lebanon’s — not Hezbollah’s — economic infrastructure.
Eric Rouleau, Le Monde diplomatique, “Why Washington wants rid of Mr. Boutros-Ghali,” November 1996 -http://mondediplo.com/1996/11/un
AP published in Arizona Daily Wildcat, “Israeli attack kills 75 UN refugees,” April 19, 1996. http:// wc.arizona.edu/papers/89/141/01_2_m.html. See also: Robert H. Reid, AP archives, “Israel’s Artillery Commander Denies UN Camp was Targeted,” May 6, 1996. http://www.apnewsarchive.com/1996/Israel- s- Artillery-Commander-Denies-U-N-Camp-Was-Targeted/id-b31cdd71ba2242d2a6dd1d903f864bf3
Augustus Richard Norton, Hezbollah: A Short History (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2007). Petran, Tabitha, The Struggle Over Lebanon (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987).
Chronology of Recent Fighting, AP archives, April 19, 1996.http://www.apnewsarchive.com/1996/ Chronology-of-Recent-Fighting/id-7608f3ed94a7e12aca9de9e540bddcba?SearchText=lebanon%20April %201996%20hezbollah%20israel%20;Display_
Robert Fisk, The Independent, “The Deadly Secret that Led to Bloodbath at Qana,” June 1, 1996. http:// www.independent.co.uk/news/world/the-deadly-secret-that-led-to-bloodbath-at- qana-1334867.html