June 12, (Pal Telegraph - By Stephanie Doetzer) At a first glance it might seem that, this time at least, Arabic and Western media had the same view: both were distressed at the fact that people had died, both agreed that the raid took place in international waters, both reported on the world-wide criticism of the Israeli operation.

So far, so good. But behind the apparent agreement there were two very different stories being told. The division is no longer solely between Arabic media on the one side and Western media on the other. The front line in the media war often runs between different groups in the same country – and sometimes straight through a single newsroom.

All the same, there are ways of telling the story which are dominant in the West and which one will find less frequently in the Arab world – and vice versa. For example, the question of who attacked whom on the ship: for Western journalists, this was a central issue; for Arab journalists it was secondary. Their view of the attack begins somewhere else – at the latest with the start of Israel's blockade of the Gaza strip. The differences between the Arab media are found rather in their geo-political analysis: pro-Iranian media have a different view from that of the Saudi or Egyptian government.

Facts! Facts?

There is certainly agreement across the Arab world over how the Israeli attack should be described. Daily papers and television stations all use terms like "massacre," "piracy" or "crime against humanity". German papers from right to left all point out that it's "not yet clear what exactly happened," but, for Arabic media, the facts are clear, at least since the release of the passengers.

That could simply be a result of their basically critical attitude towards Israel. But there's also a fundamental difference in the way they deal with eye-witness reports. In Germany, the passengers on the Mavi Marmara are assumed to be anti-Israel, and their descriptions of what happened are seen as less credible than those of a neutral observer. The Welt newspaper on the right, and the taz on the left both argue similarly on this issue, even if their tone is different.

The two members of the German parliament who were travelling on the ship thus find themselves stuck in a category from which they cannot get out – and, at least in the German press, the Swedish novelist Henning Mankell seems like an eccentric agitator whom one doesn't have to take very seriously. In the Arabic media, however, the personal stories of the passengers are taken very seriously – oddly enough, the report of Inge Höger, one of the German members of parliament, is more thoroughly covered in Arabic than it is in German.

For Arab journalists, it's not the activists who are biased, it's the Israeli government spokespersons. There's an automatic assumption that they are trying to hide something, and so the reader or the viewer is more frequently reminded that it's the Israeli army which controls the pictures: without the army's captions, no-one can tell which of the black figures on the screen are soldiers and which are activists.

Suspicious passengers on the Mavi Marmara?

Neither in the Arabic nor in the Western media does one often read how varied the views of the 700 passengers on the flotilla were – they ranged from conservative Islamists to anti-Zionist Jews and anarchist atheists.

Arabic commentators described all the passengers on the Mavi Marmara, whatever their individual motivation, as selfless heroes. Western media distorted the situation in a different way: any journalist who wanted to be seen as "critical" had to look for "Islamist" connections and had to describe the organizers of the flotilla as "suspect."

Even within a single newsroom, there can be a struggle over who defines the issues. Sometimes this is even visible for the viewer, as one could see if one switched from Al Jazeera's Arabic service to the same station's English service.

Al Jazeera had eight people on board the boat, but the two language services had very different approaches to their coverage. On the Arabic service, the journalists who had been in Israeli detention with all the others told their personal stories at length, a Lebanese cameraman had his daughter on his knee, a Mauritian colleague told of his conversations with an old Palestinian in their prison cell.

The English service takes an entirely different approach. There are no personal stories, the presenters, who are largely influenced by Western media traditions, ask mostly technical questions: what actually happened in the raid? Were there weapons on board?

Al Jazeera English tries to walk a tightrope. One can scarcely count it among the Arabic media; its reporting is more like that of a left-wing station in Europe. Israeli military spokespersons often get more time than they would get on any other Middle Eastern station outside Israel. This could have the effect of leading viewers who are critical of Israel to switch over to Press TV from Tehran, which currently sees itself as the English-speaking voice of the pro-Palestinian scene.

Israel damages itself?

The more pro-Palestinian the station, the more it reports on the world-wide protests against the Israeli blockade of Gaza. But even in Western media, there seems to be an unusually high level of interest in the demonstrations in Paris, Vienna or London.

But this shared interest conceals very different approaches. Arab commentators like Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of the London-based newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi, or the journalists of Hezbollah television station Al-Manar, see the protests as a turning point and believe that the world has come over to their view.

Sometimes it seems as if the tragedy of the ships has turned into a triumph with the release of the passengers. From pro-Hamas media to the Saudi-funded Sharq Al-Awsat there's a consensus that "Israel has lost the PR war," in that it has – as the Egyptian Sayed Yassin put in Al Hayat – "not only put itself up against the Palestinians, but also against humanity."

Perhaps the Arab commentators haven't been looking closely enough at the Western press. They may agree that Israel is becoming increasingly isolated and that it has an image problem, but the consensus is that "Israel is damaging itself." The conclusion is, as Peter Münch put it in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, "A country which has so many enemies on all sides is urgently in need of friends." Scarcely anyone talks of putting political pressure on Israel – the website of the Welt newspaper simply suggests that "Israel should blockade Gaza more intelligently."

The logic of Arab victimization

The mainstream media in the West makes a point of steering a course which is critical but not too tough on Israel. Meanwhile the Arab media go overboard with emotion; they have adopted the logic of victimization, and they celebrate victories where there are none.

On both sides, important questions are ignored. How did it come about that, on the first day, the number of victims was reported worldwide as "at least fifteen", while the following day everyone agreed that the number had fallen to nine? And why is there no debate in the Arab media, for all the passionate support for Gaza, about which kinds of protest make sense and which ones do not?

Hamas representatives say that it's thanks to the "martyrs" that world attention has been focused on the blockade. That could well be true. Had there been no dead, the world would have continued to have as little interest in the Gaza blockade as it showed before. But still, it's a cynical point of view, which should make both Arabic and Western journalists think.

Stephanie Doetzer is a free-lance writer based in Qatar. Until recently she worked for Al Jazeera television. Before that she was a reporter with the German public broadcaster SWR.

Translated from the German by Michael Lawton

Editor: Lewis Gropp/Qantara.de