How the media falsely equate Israel and the terrorist groups it fights
Jack Elbaum
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After two days of fighting, Israel completed its counterterrorism operation in the West Bank city of Jenin on Wednesday. In the end, 12 Palestinian terrorists and zero noncombatants were killed. This is a miraculous feat when one considers how bloody urban warfare often is. That no noncombatants were killed is a testament to the Israel Defense Force’s precision and restraint.
But if one had heard only what the media had to say about the operation, one would assume that it was not only a massacre of children but also certainly worse than anything a Palestinian militant has done to Israelis.
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The reason for that assumption is straightforward: Too much of the media has decided to draw a moral equivalence between Israel and the terrorist groups it fights. The issue with the portrayal, though, is twofold. First, it just isn’t true. Second, the media must engage in blatant distortion to present it as true.
The most common, yet dishonest, tactic of the media here has been to simply list the number of armed militants killed by the IDF and then the number of innocent Israeli civilians killed in terror attacks, without differentiating between civilian and militant deaths, as if they are the same thing. But of course, killing a terrorist and a terrorist murdering random people are not at all the same thing. Moreover, terrorist attacks and military operations to stop terrorist attacks are in no way equivalent. This should be obvious.
Since the beginning of the year, for example, more than 130 Palestinians, the vast majority being militants, have been killed by the IDF. During that same period, 24 Israelis, all of whom were civilians, have been killed in Palestinian terror attacks. Absent context about who the people were, and under what circumstances they were killed, the average news consumer would have zero idea about what is actually happening. Unfortunately, this is precisely what prominent news outlets — most recently, the Associated Press, NPR, and PBS — regularly do.
In a similar way, many outlets have just reported that twelve Palestinians were killed in the Israeli operation without making any distinction between the number that were militants (all 12) and the number of uninvolved civilians (zero). One of the first things a journalist should do when reporting on sensitive conflicts is to make distinctions between, and report accurately on, the number of terrorist versus civilian deaths. By failing to do so, the media allows the reader’s imagination to wander, which is incredibly irresponsible when we know the facts. Over the past two days, the New York Times, NPR, and France 24 have all misled their readers using this strategy.
Some have gone even further than these deceptive reporting tactics, instead allowing what can only be described as a pathological and unhinged hatred for Israel to be infused in their coverage.
An anchor on BBC, for example, claimed that the IDF is “happy to kill children” because there were several people between the ages of 16 and 18 who were killed in the operation. But anybody who thinks about the issue for more than one second recognizes that once a 17-year-old picks up a gun, joins a terrorist group, and starts shooting, he is now rightly considered a terrorist and a legitimate target. In this case, it is not the IDF but those who funnel minors into terrorist groups who are committing war crimes.
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The way the media has begun to repeat the rhetoric of the terrorist groups in recent days is disturbing. I documented many examples of this occurring earlier this week. It serves no other purpose than to make Israel’s actions seem just as bad as the terrorists’ actions — even when nothing could be further from the truth.
Israel is not perfect. No country is. Nor are the emerging far-right elements of the Israeli government and society unworrisome. They certainly are.
But to equate the freest country in the Middle East, which likely has the most precise and restraint-focused military in the Western world, with terrorists who want to throw every last Jew in Israel into the sea is completely unjustified.
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Jack Elbaum is a summer 2023 Washington Examiner fellow.