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Letters to Media Home |
Letter in The Times Argus, August 2, 2002 In a letter of July 29 concerning a Times Argus editorial of July 25 that had criticized Israel for dropping a heavy bomb on Gaza City, Walter Carpenter states that the Times Argus and the news media in general have paid insufficient attention to the mayhem and death inflicted on Israelis by periodic Palestinian suicide bombings. In a certain way, he's right. These suicide-murders, inflicted randomly on Israeli civilians of all ages, are absolute atrocities, and to the extent that we have the heart and stomach to pay attention, we can never hear too much about them. That said, I would like to register my own complaint that it has in fact been the vastly greater mayhem inflicted on Palestinians by the Israeli armed forces since September, 2000 that has gone under-reported in the US media. Israel's main grievance, the horror of the suicide bombings, counts heavily with our media. The grievances of the Palestinians, however much greater they may be, do not. To make some important comparisons: between September, 2000 and July 19, 2002, Palestinian deaths resulting from the conflict have been three times more numerous than Israeli deaths (1,656 to 576), and Palestinian injuries have been over four times more numerous (19,776 Palestinians injured and 4,122 Israelis injured). Even more dramatic than the disproportion in casualties is the disproportionate amount of destruction of Palestinian property and disruption of Palestinian civil life. In contrast with Israel where daily life can proceed despite the intermittent suicide bombings and the anxiety they engender, the Occupied Territories of Palestine have become a vast, sweltering prison camp, which the Israeli army, the fifth most powerful in the world, patrols freely. It is only in Palestine, never in Israel, that foreign tanks roll through the streets, and helicopter gunships clatter over the housetops, firing at whatever they choose...with destructive consequences that the world is now beginning to see. It is on Palestinian soil that the greatest weight of the war has come down. The suicide bombings in Israel, brutal and awful as they are, have not ravaged the land of Israel as the Israeli military occupation has ravaged the Palestinian territories. And yet, somehow, it is Israeli grief and Israeli outrage that dominate the news from the Mideast. A stranger examining our media's responses to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict might infer that we instinctively regard Israelis as "our kind of people," whose sufferings are bound to register more keenly with us, while Palestinians are "other," distant, and inherently suspect. Until recent months, casualties inflicted on Israelis were far more likely to be reported in moving detail in the opening paragraphs of news reports, than were casualties sustained by Palestinians. Palestinian deaths, even when far more numerous, were likely to be rendered in news accounts as numbers, merely...and towards the end of the article. (For validation of these remarks about the media's unbalanced handling of Mideast news, see the abundant investigations of media analyst Ali Abunimah in the archives of The Electronic Intifada.) In light of all this, I would like to thank The Times Argus for printing the editorial that Mr. Carpenter objected to. The editorial in fact expressed what the rest of the shocked world had perceived and condemned: that dropping a one-ton bomb as Israel did recently in Gaza, the most densely populated region in the world, in order to kill a single individual, could not fail to kill and maim a great many other people as well. Now, as the title of the editorial stated, ruefully and accurately, "The circle of terror remains intact." The editorial writer of The Times Argus was right to call our attention to the bloody event in Gaza. I wish he had gone a step further, and noted that the Fourth Geneva Convention, the ruling code of civilized warfare, expressly forbids the kind of "preventive assassination" which the Gaza City bomb was intended to carry out in the first place. Jules Rabin |
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