Leading Israeli News Outlet Covers UK Media Watch Feature on Nabi Saleh Row

Cross posted at CAMERA’s UK Media Watch

On Sunday, we posted about the latest “Pallywood” production from the Palestinian town of Nabi Saleh “where photographers gather every Friday to document repetitious scenes of…activists clashing with Israeli soldiers” and where protesters place their children in danger to score propaganda points. (The term “Pallywood” refers to the staging of scenes by Palestinian journalists in order to present the Palestinians as hapless victims of Israeli aggression.) We noted that the most popular Pallywood child star, known as “Shirley Temper” (aka Ahed Tamimi), revived her role as the symbol of Palestinian “resistance” on Friday, when she was seen biting the hand of an Israeli soldier who had detained a young rock-thrower during protests.

However, unlike in previous productions, the British media wasn’t completely acquiescent to the desired Pallywood script. We noted that two major papers radically changed course and revised or deleted their initially sympathetic coverage. One other site known far and wide for their anti-Israel coverage, The Guardian, decided not to cover the story at all. This, we argued, represented an extremely significant development in the context of the extraordinarily biased coverage of the region in the UK media.

Today, our analysis of media coverage of the incident was featured in the Israeli paper Yedioth Ahronoth (the country’s second most popular newspaper).

Yedioth highlights our analysis, as well as the graphics we used showing the changing headline at The Daily Mail and the completely deleted story at The Telegraph.

Here’s a CAMERA translation of the first paragraph of the Yedioth article:

The international media sets a new trend: An altercation last Friday in Nabi Saleh north of Ramallah, between a Golani fighter who detained an 11-year-old boy suspected of throwing stones and female members of the boy’s family, resulted in highly problematic coverage for Israel’s image in the international media. But according to the pro-Israel site UK Media Watch, which monitors and analyzes coverage of Israel in the British media, coverage of the incident changed following claims that the Tamimi family, which was involved in the incident, and especially the girl who was photographed biting the soldier, is a known serial provocateur of Israeli soldiers for the benefit of journalists’ cameras.

Yedioth goes on to agree with our main take-away regarding The Daily Mail and Telegraph retreats, and Guardian non-coverage: that even the British media – at the forefront of delegitimization efforts against the Jewish state – may be tiring of the transparent efforts by Palestinian activists to manipulate their coverage of the region.