Journalist: The French ‘Understood Nothing’
Ha’aretz has a fascinating feature today about Annette Levy-Willard, a journalist with the Frency daily Liberation and author of a book about the second Lebanon war, Trente-trois Jour en Ete: Chroniques d’une Guerre Surprise (Summer Rain: A Reporter’s Diary of the 2006 War Between Israel and Hezbollah). Levy-Willard recounts:
“It was important for me to narrate this in an eye-witness style,” she says. “I understood that the French, who had been fascinated by the war in Lebanon, understood nothing about it.
“On the one hand, they saw the strong Israeli army and on the other, the poor Lebanese victims. But what was in between, what came between the two sides – Hezbollah – they did not see.”
Levy-Willard, who to a large extent balances this picture in her book, stresses that French radio and TV, not press, tilted the balance in favor of the Lebanese and against Israel.
“There is some logic to this,” she says. “The footage from Lebanon looked better than that of an empty Haifa. Especially since there were numerous pictures of bodies in Lebanon – something Israelis do not permit. And a body will always be more photogenic than a pool of blood on the ground.”
Levy-Willard says the State of Israel will always lose in the French media, and not merely because of the refusal to photograph bodies.
She recalls an interview with a soldier who had just left the battle in Bint Jbail and was shaking all over, clearly in a state of trauma. Next to her stood a reporter for French radio, who completely ignored the soldier’s plight and asked him: “Don’t you feel arrogant?”
“He in no way wanted to hear what the soldier had to say,” Levy-Willard says.
“To a large extent, to this day, De Gaulle’s well-known saying about the Israelis, that they are ‘a domineering nation that is full of itself,’ is still emblazoned on the minds of Frenchmen.”
Some members of the French press are also aware of this: A critique of her book in Le Monde stated that “Levy-Willard portrays what has never been seen in the European press – the mood of the Israelis. She allows them to speak. More than that, she listens to them.”
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