However the headline is always 'refuses to condemn', with the implication that they view the alleged atrocities as justified or secretly approve. Hacks must be schooled on asking this 'gotcha' question, and particularly in who to ask it of - ie: never those in the real positions of power, whose atrocities dwarf those of tiny guerilla resistance orgs.
I found this academic paper looking at examples of Israeli journalists posing the question aggressively to Israeli Arabs. The jargon is heavy, but the point about this being a loyalty test, with the threat of being banished from society always hovering behind it was well made:
'Calls to condemn as rituals of loyalty in political interviews
During a panel discussion on Channel 2, Jewish-Israeli journalist Sivan Rahav-Meir identified a “recurrent ritual in Israeli news interviews with Arab-Israeli representatives. According to Rahav, following a violent action inflicted by Palestinians against Israelis or provocative statements made by an Arab-Israeli representative, there is “a kind of amusing practice in which an interviewer tells himself he will be the one who is going to educate the (Arab-Israeli) interviewee (by asking)‘Do you condemn the terrorist attacks?’” (July 19, 2006, Channel 2).
The call for condemnation serves in this case as a pivotal action around which a ritual of loyalty to the nation is constructed. The ritual is opened with an assertive yes/no "do you condemn” question (Clayman and Heritage 2002a), which in the context of the ethnic identities of the two participants can be interpreted as a demand to choose between one of the two components of the Arab-Israeli identity: civic affiliation (resulting from citizenship in the State of Israel) or national sentiment (Arab-Israeli affinity to the Palestinian people who are not citizens of Israel) (see Al-Haj 2000). In the second part of the ritual, interviewees face an avoidance dilemma (Bavelas, Black, Chovil, and Mullett 1990) since they must choose between one of two untoward alternatives: to condemn the act and thereby publicly adhere to the normative model of the Jewish-Israeli political community while ignoring national Palestinian sentiment, or conversely, to refuse to condemn and thereby distance themselves from what is constructed as consensual by the interviewers while aligning with the national Palestinian sentiment. As happens in most cases in which interviewees face an avoidance dilemma, a third option, that of equivocation by means of indirect answer design, is also plausible (Bavelas, Black, Chovil, and Mullett 1990; Bull 1998). If the call to condemn is rejected by interviewees, the ritual continues with a negotiation over the non-normative stance taken by them or by discussing the equivocal answer in order to make it less ambiguous (Blum-Kulka and Weizman 2003).
The call to condemn and its respective answer serves as a resource for self-and-other positioning at both the interactional and social levels (Blum-Kulka, Liebes, and Kampf 2003; Harré and Moghaddam 2003; Weizman 2008).
At the interactional level, the various options for responding to the direct question – ranging between direct yes/no to indirect answers – represent a struggle over interactional power and a negotiation over the level of freedom allowed in responding to an assertive question (Clayman and Heritage 2002b). At the social level, in calling to condemn a previous act, Jewish-Israeli interviewers pose the threat to discursively exclude their interviewees from their mutual civic community. The call requires interviewees to conform to the political script the interviewers envision as binding so as to regain a moral status and membership rights in the national community. Thus, in responding to the call, Arab-Israeli interviewees have a range of options to position themselves in relative proximity to the Jewish-Israeli political community and the Palestinian one.' - https://www.academia.edu/49359472/_Do_You_Condemn_Negotiating_Power_Relations_through_In_Direct_Questions_and_Answers_Design_in_Ethno_political_Interviews
None of the responses by Arab Israelis cited seemed particularly effective, though they are in the difficult immediate situation of subjugation, so the consequences of appearing to justify are much more severe.
It would be nice to have a magic bullet response to this question! I'm reminded of the quote from a Jewish resistance fighter (I forget his name, sorry): 'When the oppressor gives me two choices i always take the third'.
cheers,
I
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