The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is so multi-faceted that it is possible for anyone to convincingly argue a case for either side. It is an exercise of determining what truth is, and from what angle it is to be seen, much like the parable of the blind men and the elephant - with each man touching and describing a different part of the animal's body.

Truth however is a relative concept. What is perceived true by one party may be false to another. As an analogy, let us ask ourselves if grey should be seen as half black or half white? Bar in the context of empirical science, there is no such thing as absolute truth, much less in realpolitik.

In any case, taking a hard stand on one angle of the truth in the Palestinian issue is perhaps the easier part, but to be objective is more difficult. There are too many emotional elements in the stew clamouring for recognition and legitimacy to one version of truth, like deep-seated prejudices based on 'nationalism' and religious differences, to mention but two.

Many a clash-of-civilisations alarmist believes the Holy Land will be the flashpoint of Armageddon as prophesied, the restive region a dynamite waiting to ignite. Judging by the regular incidents of tit-for-tat killing reported, the powder keg has in fact exploded.

Claims and counter claims

The following sums up the conflicting scenarios, or the respective versions of truth to the warring parties.

The pro-Palestinian pitch is that the Arabs were dispossessed when Israel was carved - following the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire towards the end of World War I - from the sliver of land put under the Mandates System adopted by the League of Nations.

The pro-Israeli camp believes that Israel has a right to exist, contrary to the avowed determination of radical Arabs to cleanse the Middle-East of its thorn in the flesh - the small Jewish population. This view of that country's legitimacy is strengthened by the fact that its existence was signed, sealed and delivered by the United Nations (successor to the League of Nations) which in 1948 voted for the establishment of the state of Israel.

A Christian in any case will tell you that the Jews have been in Jerusalem since biblical times, it was they who sent Jesus to the cross. And that the Jews can trace an ancestral claim to the early kingdoms of Israel and Judaea.

Many would somehow contend that a Palestinian homeland is a precondition for world peace, and that the oppressive Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories goes against a slew of UN resolutions. But Palestinian suicide bombers blowing themselves up in buses, cafes and shopping malls in Israel, each time killing scores of innocent civilians, is not helping their cause.

Thus both the pro-Palestinians and Israelis have valid points. This binary merely hints at the grim complexity of the issue at hand. Truth is indeed relative: it is the classic question of looking at a glass of water as half empty or half full.

Emotive self-contradiction

In this article, we are not arguing for either side caught in the above vicious circle of violence. Any such attempt will render us the epicentre of a home-grown hysterical hate wave and bulls-eyes for target practice (note also that protesting in public against the Israelis is the rare exception where our riot police are reluctant to disperse the demonstrators).

Anyhow, we have neither of us been to the conflict area in question, a distant continent away, to be able to make any first-hand observations. Nor for that matter has any Malaysian ever visited Israel (not officially in any event) as that is the sole country in the world banned on our passports.

Our focus here is to highlight the fact that, in our own home turf, the Cronesian media has not been at all objective by presenting to the public the closest version of truth pertaining to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Instead, it has covered this issue with its usual pro-Arab slant, employing the familiar arsenal of half-truths, omissions and distortions, even outright denials.

Our contention is that the media's coverage is an extension of the government's foreign policy stance on the Palestine issue, and that is, to be unmitigatedly on the side of the Palestinians, who are Arabs and therefore mostly Muslims.

It is a media that has, until recently, refused to accord Israel its rightful name as a sovereign state, referring instead to "the Tel Aviv regime". Yet Israel had been recognised in the UN a decade before Malaya was formalised.

There is another unsettling anomaly in this adversarial attitude towards Israel. Bear in mind that when the American government launched its hunt for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, many Malaysians, especially Malay-Muslims, voiced their disgust over President George W Bush's unilateral initiative. They indicated a preference for the 'battle against terrorism' to be carried out under the aegis of the UN.

In a similar vein, when the American and Allied forces invaded Iraq, again the Malay-Muslims lamented that this was done outside the auspices of the UN.

On both accounts, the Malay-Muslims took the Americans to task for their virtual unilateral offensives and circumventing the UN. Yet they would not accord Israel - a creation of the UN - an element of respectability.

Rationale for domestic stance

The media's wholehearted pro-Palestine stance can be attributed to several factors, three of which are socio-political, historical, and theological. Each would require volumes of analyses in order to get into their basic premises. Our arguments herein would fall far short of any meaningful depth of study.

We would touch, however cursorily, on the socio-political and historical perspectives. We are purposely refraining from looking at it from the theological angle, if only because religion has always been an item of exceptional sensitivity to Malaysians, especially to Malay-Muslims.

But as there is a thin line between theology, and history and human social interactions, we have to mention some religious tenets to underscore any relevant points.

Suffice it for us to state that Islam has declared Jews (together with pagans) the enemy of Muslims as written in Surah 5:82 of the Quran. It says "Strongest among men in enmity to the Believers wilt thou find the Jews and pagans".

Thus, in his country, there is only one accepted viewpoint pertaining to the conflict - to be solidly and squarely on the side of the Arab, in this case the Palestinian, world. The reason is that the Arabs are Muslims, and being so, they are members of the Ummah - the Muslim Brotherhood.

Media taking sides

This partisan support is total and permeates to the other side of the picture: the Jewish side of the story is to be condemned in the strongest possible way, or even suppressed. Put in another way, the Arab-Muslim world is Right all the time, and the Jews Wrong all the time. It is a winner-takes-all case of 'as I am right then you must be wrong'.

The Cronesian media would amplify this simplistic approach, that the Arabs are very right, and therefore, the Jews very wrong. It is an example of the Law of Excluded Middle at work.

Hence we have the former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad who (in)famously dismissed the death of six million Jews in half a sentence before the last Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) gathering in Putrajaya, and used 'George Soros' as his personal shorthand for 'international Zionist conspiracy'. Or Berita Harian claiming that the Holocaust was a figment of the Jewish imagination, that it never happened.

Nor does the Cronesian media do much to refute the oblique, residual sentiment - however demented - that the Jews are 'candidates for extermination'. To quote Clive James writing in The Sunday Times (March 28, 2004), "Several of the Arab leaders saw nothing wrong with Hitler's determination that as many potential colonists (of the state of Israel) as possible should be dealt with at source. One of them, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, spent time in Berlin urging Hitler to get on with it."

It is a media that proffers a mediated truth to its public, a media that socialises its readership and viewership to this country's dominant ideology pertaining to the issue. Here, no alternative view - thereby injecting objectivity - is permitted.

Blackout as usual

The Cronesian media is one that does not publish any countervailing opinions like this one by James, that "[t]here is enough oil money in the Arab nations to give every (Palestinian) refugee a hotel suite with 24-hour room service. Instead, they have been obliged to remain in camps that are really display cases, so that they can testify with their desperation to Jewish inhumanity."

Or this one: Paul Garwood and Maggie Michael of the Associated Press (AP) reported on Dec 31, 2003 that "the Arab media, particularly state-run newspapers, constantly denounce Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, but the refugees say it doesn't give them any concrete help."

The two reporters quoted UNHCR regional representative in Cairo, Ana Liria-Franch, as saying: "All the Arab countries want to keep this problem looking like an open wound" to keep world attention focused on Israel's occupation of Palestinian land. They also quoted prominent Palestinian writer Mureed al-Barghouti as saying: "It is an evil hypocrisy. The language of the (Arab) governments and media is in one direction and the real practices on the ground are totally the opposite."

Demonising the Jews

Just as contemptible as the lacuna in alternative views is the Cronesian media's systematic attempt to dehumanise the Israelis. While newspaper pages are invariably plastered with images of the Palestinians as victims, we are shown none of the Israeli mothers grieving when their children are blown to bits at a bar mitzvah or for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The Israelis, let us not forget, are humans too. They have the same anxieties of a people living under siege, much like the Palestinians have.

What the Cronesian media shows is the collateral damage, in this instance, literally - the charred remnants of a bus or building bombed in Israel by the martyrs. No human face is given to the Jewish suffering, and this is done almost deliberately, we think. It is, in journalism parlance, called 'agenda setting'. The media is an apparatus, wielded by its owners to 'set' or foster a certain point of view.

The media's refusal to present other possible angles of truth has led to a very cloistered mental frame. All of us have been fed this one-sided view, and therefore have inherited all the subjective contentions and connotations that go with it.

The result has been that Malaysians see the highly complex issue in a narrow, shallow and single-tracked dimension. We can never be objective about it. This is particularly sad, and dire, as it is tantamount to our eyes being blindfolded by the 'accepted' or 'authorised' version of events.

The view indoctrinated in us by the Cronesian media has caused the Palestinian viewpoint to become internalised as our truth. Holding staunchly to this stance comes at the expense of being able to see, conceptually at least, that propaganda blacks out the other side of the equation.

Bizarre denial

As a consequence, the Malaysian mentality is unable to accept that the Jews, at some points in history, can be 'right'. So in real life situations when the Jews are 'right', the Muslim-Malaysian mind cannot accept this possibility.

What happens then? A rejection mechanism takes hold.

To illustrate, we take the case of the genocide against Jews committed during the Third Reich in the last century. Six million Jews met with their death for no other reason but that they were born of a particular and persecuted race.

Irrefutably, this mass murder has gone into the annals of human history and lies heavily on the conscience of Western civilisation. Many Nazi perpetrators have been put to trial. There are records, photographs, accounts by survivors, forensic evidence. The concentration camps where many Jews were killed testify to this massacre.

And how does the Cronesian media react to this situation when the Jews were victims; on the 'right' side of history? By denying it ever happened!

Witness this: The genocide could not have occurred, proclaimed Berita Harian (Jan 28, 2004) incredibly in a feature Bukan semua percaya Jerman bunuh Yahudi (Not all believe Germans had killed Jews), referring to the Holocaust. It is an article collating a patchwork of discredited sources, lunatic fringe views and a selective reading of facts.

This denial is as unbelievable as it is bizarre, hinting that the Holocaust was an elaborate hoax concocted by the Jewish people to garner international sympathy.

Roots of prejudice

We probe a little into the history of this blind hatred of the Jews as reflected in the Cronesian media. It might have something to do with the troubled Muslim-Jewish relationship in history. Here we have to stress the fact that we will be treading a little into the realm of religion, which we have indicated earlier poses a great deal of sensitivity for some. We do appeal for understanding and tolerance as we are merely articulating events occurring in the historical past to the followers of Islam and Judaism.

Our religious teacher tells us that the Jews are the bitter foes of Islam. Apparently during the time of Prophet Muhammad, the Jews at first supported him in his efforts to establish the nascent religion. But later they withdrew their support, and for this about-turn, they are never to be forgiven.

Arab-Jewish militant encounters have since then been a regular order. One of the earliest reprisals recorded was in April 627, following the Battle of the Trench when Prophet Muhammad captured the stronghold of the Jewish tribe of Korayza/Qurayzah. In the market place and in the Prophet's presence, more than 700 Jewish captives were beheaded. The women and children were sold as slaves.

The succeeding Muslim caliphates successfully scourged Arabia of all pre-existing faiths and today's democratic Israel (and its state religion of Judaism) is the singular aberration in the sea of pan-Arabic, Muslim monarchies.

Need for balance

Back to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. What we find thoroughly disturbing is that the Malaysian public is not better served by greater objectivity to this issue. Then we would be getting fair reporting, which will in turn allow us to mull over the matter, and make our evaluation accordingly.

We can still be pro-Palestine, or pro-Arab, or pro-Islam. But when we are objective about it, we will hold our particular stance with greater knowledge as well as with a greater awareness of the issue. If we are able to conceptualise over it, intellectualise over it, we can take our stance with a pair of eyes wide open.

At present though, while the more discerning critics target the policies of aggression of Ariel Sharon's hardline Likud government, others scapegoat the nebulous concept of 'Zionist' expansionism. Yet, for far too many, the all-encompassing object of hatred is the Jewish race per se.

This extension of culpability - blaming the entire Jewry for the sins of Israeli hawks - is nothing new. Hence some Muslim-Malaysians still think that the Sept 11 attack on the World Trade Center was instigated by the Jews, or of this same attack on New York as aimed at the symbol of purported Jewish control over world trade and finances.

The inevitable lemming-like response of this segment of Jew haters against anything and everything Jewish - like a crowd gathering to burn a book they have not personally read - seems hardly rational, or reasonable.

We aver that the Cronesian media has a lot to answer for in fomenting this blind adherence to an age-old bigotry.

AB SULAIMAN is an observer of human traits and foibles, especially within the context of religion and culture. As a liberal, he marvels at the way orthodoxy fights to maintain its credibility in a devilishly fast-changing world. In his free time, he loves to read, travel and play golf (although his game could be better).

Z SUNDAY is a Joe Public who reads the local print media for its unfunny and unintentional imitation of black and gallows humour. The truth may be out there but he doesn't expect to extract it from the Malaysia Boleh chaff in local newspapers.