Sins of commission and omission in anti-Israel reporting
Hugo Gurdon
A paragraph in a Wall Street Journal news story on Jan. 31 is symptomatic of the routine and casual anti-Israel bias in American reporting from the Middle East. Here it is in full:
“Mr. Blinken’s visit follows several bloody days in Israel. The attacks came after a military raid aimed at capturing militants Thursday at the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank left 10 Palestinians dead. The attacks were praised by the Palestinian leadership.”
There are several telling word choices here. The reference to “the attacks” is the first in the story. A reader might ask, “Attacks? What attacks? You haven’t mentioned any attacks.” The unpersuasive answer is they were glancingly alluded to in the previous sentence’s mention of “several bloody days.” But that is all. What attacks were these? What did they amount to? The two detail-free sentences let the story skip reporting explicitly in its 400 words that the attacks were perpetrated by Palestinians who deliberately murdered Israeli civilians.
BLINKEN VISITS ISRAEL AND PALESTINE AS VIOLENCE SPIKES
We are told the attacks “came after a military raid” on “militants” in the Jenin “refugee camp.” Again, the word choices are telling. “Refugee camp” conjures a mental image of rows of flimsy tents occupied by helpless victims. Jenin is technically a refugee camp, but in reality, it is a town developed for over 70 years and constructed just like other Middle Eastern towns — with substantial buildings of concrete and stucco sometimes several stories tall. The one targeted by the Israeli military was a two-level apartment block.
The “militants” in it were Palestinians whom Israel identified as “terror operatives” preparing “major attacks” against Jews inside Israel. “Militants” became a preferred euphemism during the two decades since American media, blinded by racial politics, went soft on terrorism after the Islamist terror attacks on New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001.
We learn from the Wall Street Journal story very clearly that the Israeli raid left 10 dead, and many news stories identified a 61-year-old woman looking out of her apartment window as one of the victims. Israel is investigating her death, as it conscientiously does when its military operations kill Palestinian civilians. But where is mention of the seven Palestinian gunmen killed in the raid, and the additional one arrested? Sorry, no room for those details either.
Back to those vague “attacks.” After the Israeli raid, which was to arrest the Jenin terrorists — it managed to do so in that single case — Palestinians went on freelance murder sprees. Most notably, a gunman shot 10 Israelis, killing seven, in a Jerusalem synagogue one day after the Jenin raid. Somehow, these numbers, the victims’ civilian status, the location of the attack, and the national identity of the killer are not mentioned.
The paragraph does mention that Palestinian leaders praised the attacks — surely another “Hey, what?” fact — so one can infer that the perp was a Palestinian and the victims were Israeli Jews. But why is it not stated explicitly, as with “left 10 Palestinians dead?”
The Palestinian Authority, which cut off cooperation with the Israeli Defense Forces after the raid, which it called a massacre, pays thousands of dollars to families of Palestinian killers if those killers die in their attacks. This is an incentive for continued murder, just as is the teaching of Jew-hatred to generations of Palestinian children. It can be no wonder that residents of Ramallah, the biggest city in the West Bank and Gaza, celebrated the synagogue murders by handing out candy in the streets and firing guns into the air.
To his credit and that of the Biden administration, Secretary of State Antony Blinken condemned the synagogue murders and other retaliatory killings as soon as he arrived in Israel for talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
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But Blinken’s main effort was to push back against the new government’s inclination to move on from decades of failed efforts to negotiate peace in exchange for recognition of a Palestinian state. This is not a policy position unique to Netanyahu’s conservative administration. In Israel, on this issue, there is now virtually no meaningful opposition to the view that the “two-state solution” is a futile prescription when faced with opposing leaders committed to the elimination of Israel as a nation and who literally dance a jig at the cold-blooded murder of its inhabitants.
An understanding of this should not be confined to conservative commentary pages. It should be at least discernable in news stories purporting to enlighten readers about what is going on.