IsraCampus.Org.il

Jamal's agenda is apparent everywhere in the book in his choices of rhetoric. The secondary title of the book is "Media Space and Cultural Resistance." The book overflows with bias and anti-Israel bile. With no sense of his own self-contradiction, Jamal insists that Israel is obsessed with control of the Arab media, with surveillance over it, and also with ignoring Arab opinion and the Arabic media altogether. He sees the media in general not as institutions that reflect public opinion, but rather as those that control thinking and opinion. He uses the term "hegemonial" with obsessive regularity. Israel has a "ferocious military government" (p.47), engaged in "cultural imperialism" (p. 96) via its "media policy" against its "Palestinian" minority.

(From the summer 2011 Middle East Quarterly)

Review of Amal Jamal, "The Arab Public Sphere in Israel: Media Space and Cultural Resistance," Indiana University Press, 2009, 182 pages

Reviewed by Steven Plaut, University of Haifa
Summer 2011

My guess is that the only reason that the folks over at Indiana University Press even published this book is that they were so excited by the novelty of any book about Israeli Arabs written in English by a tenured Israeli academic claiming to be an Arab. The author, Amal Jamal, is in fact an Israeli Druse, although one of the minority of Druse intellectuals who claim that the Druse are themselves Arab Palestinians.

The problems with this book begin with the title: "The Arab Public Sphere in Israel." The book is not at all about the Arab public sphere. It is a superficial review of the differences between the Hebrew and Arabic media operating in Israel and of those consumers who make use of them.

Jamal is essentially a young groupie of the fringe ideas of Leninist Michel Foucault and the German Jurgen Habermas, the latter someone who thinks that nice talking can solve all the world's conflicts. Habermas refers to such nice talking as "communicative action," a term showing up obsessively throughout Jamal's book.

A Druse from the Galilee village of Yarka, Jamal is today a radical anti-Israel ideologue. He studied at the Hebrew University and later got a PhD from the "Free University of Berlin." He is today a tenured member of the political science department at Tel Aviv University and is serving as department chairman. Many of his publications appear in the "Journal of Palestine Studies" and similar ideological magazines and venues, including the radical Mada al-Karmel Center. He is involved with some leftist groups like the "New Israel Fund," on whose board he sits.

The main part of the book, the only part even remotely "academic," is the middle section, in which the results of two surveys about the use of media venues by Arabs are presented. Neither of the two surveys was particularly scientific, neither scientifically representative of the population. The first consisted of interviewing 594 Arab "participants." The second consisted of interviewing 229 Arab politicians, professors and public figures, whom Jamal decided speak for the Israeli Arab population. One would have expected the survey methodology to be regarded as an embarrassment even if it were to form the basis of an undergraduate seminar paper at Tel Aviv University.

The results of the surveys essentially show that Arabs read and listen to the Hebrew media less than do Jews, who in turn listen to and follow the Arabic media less than do Arabs. This conclusion is not only trivial but teaches nothing at all useful about Israeli society. No doubt few Canadian English speakers read and listen to the French media in Canada, and fewer Anglos in Florida read the Spanish press.

But Jamal is not content with printing a few tables and statistics taken from his surveys. His real aim throughout the book is to twist things obsessively to conform to his conspiracist take on Israeli society, according to which Israel is plotting to control the minds of its Arab citizens (referred to throughout the book by Jamal as "Israeli Palestinians") and to subjugate them by means of media control. Pity the poor reader who does not realize that Israel does not control any of the country's Arabic media.

Now the book is most notable for what it is attempting to hide. As it turns out, Israel is the only place in the Middle East where Arabs enjoy a free press, so free it is often openly seditious. The Israeli media, except for a TV station and some radio stations, is all private sector. There IS no "media policy" in Israel at all, and the private-sector Israeli Hebrew media are predominantly leftist. And if the free Arabic press in Israel is not free enough for Jamal's tastes, the explosion of internet technology and countless Arab blogs make his conspiracist pseudo-academic nonsense about "control of the media" and "mind control through the media" simply laughable.

Jamal's book is an ideological assault against Israel disguised as an academic exploration of the Arabic media inside Israel. By hiding from his readers that Israel's Arabic media are the only Arabic media in the Middle East that are NOT controlled by the regime, he does his readers an injustice and makes a mockery of his academic pretensions.

Nowhere in his book can one find references to the fact that Arabs and Druse inside Israel are themselves beneficiaries of numerous affirmative action preferences. One can only see possible evidence of affirmative action in the decision by Indiana University Press to publish this book in the first place and in the decision of Tel Aviv University to grant Jamal tenure.