AIRO — Bahrain is as far from Ramallah as Bermuda is from ground zero. Yet it was a Palestinian flag that shrouded the body of Muhammad Jumaa, a Bahraini janitor felled by a policeman's plastic bullet in a protest at the American embassy, when he was buried last week. He was hailed as the latest martyr for Palestine.
Never, in a half century of Middle Eastern conflict, have ordinary Arabs so identified with the Palestinian tragedy as they do today. As network coverage of Vietnam shocked Americans with the immediacy of a far-off war, satellite television's insistent, graphic imagery of the intifada has taken its bloody drama into millions of Arab households.
Before Israel's reinvasion of the West Bank, neither its own leaders nor America's appear to have appreciated how the new power and reach of the Arab media could work against the Israelis. While other Arabs have always taken the Palestinians' side, the violent images are increasing the sense of personal interest in the conflict. When half a million Moroccans marched in a recent protest against Israel, many carried placards saying, "We are all Palestinians."
The perspective is different, of course, from that of Americans watching the televised war in Vietnam. Arabs see the current conflict through "Vietnamese" eyes — as the story of a kindred people fighting to rid their land of a brutal occupying army. The drama generates not weariness with war but a thirst for justice, for sacrifice and revenge.
Some may dismiss such passions as the product of propaganda, and it is true that the region's news media are hardly beyond reproach. Hezbollah runs a technically impressive and visually compelling satellite channel that beams nonstop incitement to attack "the Zionist enemy." Even Al Jazeera, the most editorially sophisticated of the Arab satellite channels, stoops to hyperbolic use of terms like genocide to describe Israel's iron-fisted methods. More often than not, Israeli losses are passed off lightly.
Stories of Palestinian casualties, by contrast, are textured with memory. Some have become household names from Morocco to Muscat: Muhammad al-Dura, the 12-year-old boy from Gaza whose father could not shield him from a hail of Israeli gunfire; or Wafa Idris and Ayat al-Akhras, the first female suicide bombers, who were the objects of a tribute by Egyptian movie stars during a charity performance at Cairo's opera house.
Yet Arab coverage of the conflict is not really much more one-sided than, say, America's gung-ho coverage of the Persian Gulf war. (Or, for that matter, Israeli reporting on the intifada: Most Tel Aviv editors seem to accept Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's view that the press's job is "to give the nation pride and hope.") The fact is that Arab television, radio, newspapers and magazines have come a long way in recent years. Gone is the time when Arabs had to turn for the truth to the BBC, as in the Six Day War of 1967, when Egyptians learned from London of a calamitous defeat even as Cairo trumpeted triumph.
In the heyday of Arab nationalism, in the 1960's, it was said that the sound of battle should drown all other voices — that there should be no dissent. Now that private satellite channels vie with state broadcasters and Arabic dailies published in London compete with local newspapers, there are multiple voices. Some, like Al Jazeera, rival and sometimes surpass Western models for the quality and timeliness of their reporting. It was Al Jazeera that broke the story of the April 7 ambush in Jenin in which Israel lost 14 men.
To an extent, it is the very modernity of today's Arab media that fuels passions. Television has a natural penchant for stripping events of their historical context, instead framing them as a sequence of climaxes under one dramatic heading, like "America's War on Terror." Yet it does not really require subtle manipulation to frame the ongoing tragedy as an epic struggle of the weak against the strong. The imagery saturating Arab screens, of tanks crushing ambulances and helicopters rocketing refugee camps, is, alas, all too real.
Max Rodenbeck is Middle East correspondent for The Economist and author of "Cairo: The City Victorious."