By Steve Babcock

A panel of five journalists from the Israeli, Palestinian and American presses told a packed Raytheon Amphitheatre Wednesday that media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lacks a historical context that, according to two of the panelists, gives way to more hostility on either side.

The panel, which was organized by Bernard A. Stotsky and Northeastern professor James Ross, included New York Times editorial page editor Ethan Bronner, Palestinian media analyst Rhami Khouri, Arabic Media Internet Network founder Daoud Kuttab, Israeli columnist and NU visiting professor Tom Segev and former Iraq-embedded reporter of the Jerusalem Post Janine Zacharia.

For close to three hours, panelists discussed the role that the art of simple reporting plays in a conflict that has long been plagued with such words as “terrorists,” “suicide bombers” and “martyrs,” terms that are in themselves indicative of the conflict.

Bronner, who was in the disputed region for The Boston Globe in the early 1990’s, said that many words decided to be used by the press are somehow “loaded” with a meaning that shows favoritism toward either side.

“When you have used one set of words and not the other, there is this perception that you have fed one beast or the other,” he said.

Bronner used the example of a Palestinian law he covered in 1995 that made it punishable by death for Palestinians to sell land to Jews. He said that, in that instance, journalists had the challenge of not conveying an opinion, but rather educating the reader.

“You have to try to help people understand where [the reasoning for the law] is coming from, other than just pure evil,” he said. “With the conflict the way it is, selling land to a Jew is considered treason. And treason is grounds for the death penalty. Many people can’t get past the seemingly radical death penalty part.”

Zacharia, who was in the region before moving to her embedment, said that attempting to balance account with historical context is a “challenge” in reporting an event where both sides have different perceptions of what happened.

“Most of the time,” she said, “you give both versions, which is a clumsy way to go about [reporting].”

Khouri, who edits the neutral Arab paper, The Daily Star, said that it was important for journalists to provide the “wider context” of the conflicts of which there are two sides.

“There are issues of incitement in Holocaust denial for Israelis, but there are equally big sticker prices for the Palestinians,” he said. “I think the media has to do more to provide that [there are two sides to every story]. You can’t do it in news columns so much, but in opinion and interview columns where the Israeli and Palestinian press won’t accuse so much.”

The panelists also said that many media outlets are responsible for incitement due to their lack of attempts to explain why events happen.

Segev, who writes a column and edits the Israeli paper Ha’aretz, said that some Israeli papers often aim toward “emotional” accounts.

“We emphasize victims of terrorism. Many times the papers look like posters with letters in blood like ‘murdered,'” he said. “They had not been doing that before the present Infitada. We used to say victims were killed; now we say they are murdered.”

Kuttab said that the way to bridge over from this type of partiality would be to give attention to issues other than suicide bombings in both the region and entire Arab world.

“Seventy to 80 percent of the front page of any Arab newspaper is the conflict,” he said. “For Arab countries, the Palestinian conflict has become an escape issue because they don’t want to deal with their own problems. If we agree that the media should reflect what is going on [in a society], then the public needs to give more attention to human rights rather than just deaths.”

But Khouri also disagreed with Segev and Kuttab that incitement was done mainly by the media, letting his Palestinian side show with the same word choice of “occupation” that Bronner said was problematic.

“Incitement is a process that is done much more by the Israeli occupation than anyone in the media,” he said.

Khouri’s statement brought out the idea of letting opinions get involved too much in the analysis of the coverage that Ross, the moderator, said was a challenge going in.

After the discussion, though, Ross said he was pleased with the amount of talk about media issues.

“There were a few times I had to pull them back,” he said of the panel. “But, overall, it was a good discussion about the coverage.”