The University of Michigan at Dearborn is considered a stronghold of radical Islam in the US. About 100,000 Muslim immigrants live in the city, and it is the home of Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), who is known for her anti-Israel stances. It's no coincidence that Dr. Galit Benzur from the Department of Political Science at Bar-Ilan University chose to study that campus as part of her doctoral thesis, which is titled "In the Eye of the Beholder" and focuses on how perceptions of the media as hostile develop among US students who identify as pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli.
This is how Benzur describes Dearborn: "You drive through the streets, and all the signs are in Arabic. It wasn't easy to breach the walls of fear, suspicion, and hatred and get them to cooperate with the study."
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Her research focuses on pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli college students in the US. When studying the pro-Palestinian camp, Benzur took things to the very edge, and not only because of the place she had chosen to poll her 90 subjects.
She wanted to clarify whether or not radicalism was "passed on through genes" and whether "extremist positions on the [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict and hostility toward the media were passed on from parents to children from a young age." For the sake of her academic mission, she hid her Israeli identity and spoke with the pro-Palestinian students in Arabic, stressing her Iraqi heritage.
After two or three failed attempts, in which she also reached out to female student supporters of Iran and Hezbollah, she found enough students who were willing to fill out her questionnaires.
Benzur also found the 85 subjects who identified as "pro-Israeli" at the University of Michigan, and recruited them for her study via the local chapter of Hillel.
Extremism passed on from one generation to the next
Benzur's work, which is now being published, was conducted in 2015, a year that saw numerous terrorist attacks in Israel and the public as a whole was losing faith in the media. Benzur wanted to look into how hostility toward the media was generated and how it was expressed by the pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli students when they were shown various texts that reframed the conflict. Her work examined the relationship between the students' ideology and social activity at home and with their friends and how hostile they were to the media.
Among other things, Benzur discovered that students from both sides who were uninvolved in political activity saw the media as fairer and more objective than their more politically active cohort. Those who grew up in "political" homes and devoted time at college to the conflict saw the media as biased and hostile to their own positions.
Parents of pro-Israeli students, she found, had more political and social influence on their children's lives in the context of the conflict than parents of pro-Palestinian students. Parents of pro-Israeli students were also more strongly identified with political and ideological stances that had to do with their positions and were also more politically involved when it came to the conflict. Palestinian parents had much less influence on their children because of the identity crisis their children experienced as the children of Muslim immigrants, Benzur found.
Benzur discovered that the transfer of radical positions from parents to children ran deep and that political biases such as identification with specific parties and political ideologies develop from a young age and remain influential even as the children grow up.
About one-third of the pro-Palestinian students who disagreed with their parents' opinions about various aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict reported that they were more "extreme" than their parents (28%). More than half (62%) said they were more supportive of the Palestinians than their parents are. One notable issue for parents of pro-Palestinian students was the Arab world's approach to the conflict. The young generation, unlike their parents, identified with Iran and Hezbollah, whom they perceived as more active on behalf of the Palestinian side.
About half (49%) of the pro-Israeli students reported that they were more supportive of Israel and even more radical on the subject of Israel (44%) than their parents when it came to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The pro-Israeli students said they disagreed with their parents when it came to the two-state solution; Israel's settlements; and the rights of the Palestinian people. The positions of young pro-Israeli students aligned more closely with the Palestinians, despite the fact that they identified as pro-Israeli.
Coverage depends on the network
The research also looked at the students' attitude toward the media in two specific news events from 2015: the abduction and kidnapping of three Israeli teens by Hamas and the murder of a Palestinian teen by Israelis. Surprisingly, the pro-Palestinian students did not characterize the Qatari Al Jazeera America network (which used to broadcast in English and has since closed) as pro-Palestinian before it was pointed out that it was an Arab news network. Only after the network's identity was revealed did they define the reports as "pro-Palestinian." Nor did the pro-Israeli students identify any bias in the reporting by Al Jazeera America until the name of the network was revealed. Only when they were informed that the coverage they had watched was from an Arab channel did they define the reportage as biased against them.
When the students were asked to point out bias in coverage on Fox News, the picture was different. Both groups identified a clear pro-Israeli bias in the network's coverage of the stories, both when they knew that they were watching Fox News and when they were shown the reports without the source being identified.
The two groups of students originally cited The New York Times as a balanced and neutral news source. But when they were shown the Times' coverage about the abduction and murder of the Israeli teens and the murder of the Palestinian teen, they changed their opinions. The pro-Palestinian students claimed that the reporting on the teens' abduction and killing was hostile to their own positions, and saw the reports on the death of the Palestinian teen as objective. The pro-Israeli students claimed that the coverage of the Palestinian teen's murder was hostile toward them, but saw the coverage of the Israeli teens' murder as objective.
Benzur thinks that follow-up research, to be conducted in Israel and the Palestinian territories, is called for. She warns that "hostility toward the media and the perception that it is biased and hostile" could lead to a sense of political and social isolation and even a desire among activists to separate themselves from the "mainstream" through actions that border on violence.
Benzur also recommends that schools start educating students on media consumption. "For both sides to learn about the media's role in a democratic society, and to help them consume media better and be better critics of it, we need to dial down their hostility toward it, and help them understand its function as a supplier of information to the public," she says.
