PMWATCH -- December 30, 2008 -- Coverage by the US media of Israel'sattacks on Gaza has been grossly biased and dismally uninformative.The US mainstream media as a whole is failing to communicate somevery basic facts and is heavily relying almost to the letter on thenarrative emanating official Israeli spokespeople.
Please reach out to your newspaper and your favorite media outlet andraise the following points:
(1) The outbreak of violence in Gaza has been the top story in themainstream media here in the United States for three days in a rownow, and yet one is hard pressed to find a single news item from anyof the major newspapers or television news outlets that mentions thetotal number of Israelis killed by Hamas's Qassam rockets since theofficial collapse of the cease fire on December 19th. Mention ismade of one Israeli man killed this week and half a dozen wounded,and all articles state that at least 110 Qassam rockets have beenlaunched into Israel since Saturday morning, with some quoting theIDF putting the figure at 300 rockets for the past week. But notonce is the total of Israelis killed given. why not? Why is thisvery basic fact missing? How can anyone observing the conflict drawany meaningful conclusions about whether accusations against Israeliactions are indeed an aggression against a whole people rather thanan act of self defense, as Israel and the United States claim?[1]
(2) This round of attacks and counter attacks started on November4th, when Israel decided to cross into the Gaza Strip to destroy whatthe army claimed was a tunnel dug by Hamas.[2] Up to then, the ceasefire had been holding up reasonably well, notwithstanding Israel'scontinuing strangulation of Gaza. The Israelu breach into Gaza wasfollowed by further violence from Israel when the Israeli governmentthe next day to sealed off all ways into and out of Gaza. As aresult, according to Oxfam International, between November 5th andNovember 30th, only 23 trucks were allowed into Gaza (down from anaverage of 3,000 trucks per month), which represents about 6 percent of the traffic needed to sustain the starving Palestinianpopulation of 1.5 millions in the tiny strip.[3a] Instead, thenarrative deployed by the US media continues to be the usual safe andlazy one where Israel is simply defending itself and "retaliating"against the aggression of terrorists. Little room or credence isgiven to the open declarations of the Palestinians that the violencewas started and deliberately sustained by Israel, that thePalestinians have several times asserted that they "would onlyrespond to Israeli aggression,"[3b] and that it was Israel that "hadbreached agreements by imposing a painful economic blockade on Gaza,staging military strikes into the densely populated coastal strip andcontinuing to hunt down Hamas operatives in the West Bank."[4]
(3) The Gaza strip is 25 miles long and 4 to 7.5 miles wide, where1.5 million people live in desperate conditions. Gaza is completelysealed off by a land barrier erected by Israel, with Israelcontrolling both the air space over the strip and the maritime borderwith the Mediterranean. These very basic facts are usually leftunmentioned.
(4) It is a fact that Hamas was democratically elected when it won bylarge majorities (76 of the 132 parliamentary seats) in both Gaza andthe West Bank in the internationally monitored PalestinianAuthority's parliamentary elections in early 2006[6], and thatimmediately upon winning those elections, the United States andIsrael, caught completely off guard and backtracking at once on theirup to then vociferous rhetoric that what would cure the ills ofPalestine would be free, open and democratic elections, declared thatthey would not deal with Hamas, in spite of clear signs from theHamas leadership that there was plenty of room to engage in aconstructive engagement.[7]
(5) The context of internal Israeli politics is rarely evermentioned. It would be helpful for a reader, for instance, to knowthat elections to choose a successor to disgraced Prime Minister EhudOlmert are only 6 weeks away, and that both Defense Minister EhudBarak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni are positioning themselves and their parties (Kadima and Labor, respectively) against Likud's Benjamin Netanyahu, who currentlyleads in the poll.[8] "Crushing" Hamas and highlighting a contrastbetween them and the outgoing Prime minister and his disastrousadventure in Lebanon two years ago is key, they believe, to having achance against the more hawkish Likud.
(6) Would it be too much to expect the US media to remember that inApril 1996, then interim Prime Minister Shimon Peres (Yitzhak Rabinhad been assassinated five months earlier) , running for the post ofPrime Minister for the fourth time (he had lost the previous threetimes) and desperately trying to bolster his weak militarycredentials in anticipation of the upcoming elections in May, engagedin a sixteen-day military blitz against Lebanon in the name of endingthe shelling of Northern Israel by Hezbollah. The campaignaccomplished nothing except the killing of Lebanese civilians, 118 ofwhom were massacred in Qana while they sought refuge in a UNcompound. Labor's Peres lost those elections to Likud's Netanyahuand in May 2000 Israel withdrew from the strip of Lebanon it had beenoccupying for nearly 20 years.
(7) The Israeli press is far more informative and challenges theIsraeli government far more aggressively than the US press. Why?See for instance the following articles from Haaretz.[10]
(8) It is high time that the absurd narrative of little Israelfighting for its survival against murderous Arabs is set aside onceand for all. Instead, let us remember the basics of the situationwhenever we try to understand the events in Palestine and Israel: amighty nuclear power is occupying and punishing a dispossessed peoplesimply because it does not have the political imagination, will, andcourage to sit down and make the difficult decisions necessary toreach a lasting solution.
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NOTES:
[1] "30 % Rise in Qassam Rocket Fire," IDF Annual Report 2007,December 31, 2007. http://dover.idf.il/IDF/English/2007/3106.htm
[2] "Israel-Hamas cease-fire in peril as violence rises," JoelGreenberg, The Chicago Tribue, November 17, 2008.http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-israel-gaza_greenbergnov17,0,7989972.story
[3a] "If Gaza Falls," Sara Roy, The London Review of Books, January2009 issue. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n01/roy_01_.html
[3b] "Agreement in Hamas: Cease-fire to end Friday," Avi Issacharoffand Amos Harel, Haaretz, December 12, 2008.http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1046923.html
[4] "Hamas renounces cease-fire with Israel," The Associated Press,December 19, 2008.http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/19/mideast/mideast.php
[5] "Israel strikes Hamas targets in Gaza, 271 dead," RichardBoudreaux and Rushdi abu Alouf, The Los Angeles Times, December 28,2008.http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-gaza28-2008dec28,0,427782.story
[6] "Hamas Sweeps Palestinian Elections, Complicating Peace Effortsin Mideast," Scott Wilson, January 27, 2006.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/26/AR2006012600372.html
[7] "Siegman: U.S., Israel and EU Must Deal With Hamas If it DropsHarsh Policies Toward Israel," council on Foreign Relations, january27, 2006. http://www.cfr.org/publication/9693/siegman.html
[8] "Israel strikes Hamas targets in Gaza, 271 dead," RichardBoudreaux and Rushdi abu Alouf, The Los Angeles Times, December 28,2008.http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-gaza28-2008dec28,0,427782.story
[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Grapes_of_Wrath
[10] "Uncertainty and bombing keep Gazans awake and fearful of whowill be next," Amira Hass, Haaretz, December 30, 2008.http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1051022.html
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