Sunday, March 2, 2008
A step up in violence in the South: Qassams slamming Sderot, Katushas slamming Ashkelon, the IDF retaliating with strikes against Hamas rocket launch sites.
All this means for me, at the moment, as a resident of the bucolic suburb of Raanana, on a sunny Sunday morning, is that my once favorite TV news station, SKY, has moved from obsessive coverage of Prince Harry's forced return to the UK and football to an obsessive body count. Yes, the war in the Gaza Strip is competing with yesterday's Premiere League scores as a lead story -- all presented with TV news' usual mindless focus on The Numbers. "34 Palestinians [no distinction between types of Palestinians, fighter or school girl, is made] killed by Israeli strikes", they grimly intone, then it's 42, and so on -- as if everything one needs to know about the moral dimension of a situation can be understood by who lives and who dies.
How they came to be killed -- because Hamas fires from within deeply populated areas -- is mentioned, if it is mentioned at all, in the 55th graf and of course TV never gets to a 55th graf. Is it possible that the how and whys of how people die simply do not matter anymore? No wonder one PLO leader predicted in 2000 at the start of the second intifada that "we will win because you want to live but we die better." Israel is good at surviving and in a victim-glorifying culture this means they will always be a villain.
People in the U.S. of the Solomonia reading-ilk must be tearing their hair out if the coverage over there is anything like SKY News' (I haven't had the guts to face BBC) and some will be cursing the Israeli government for not getting its story out, for losing the PR battle etc. I am far less mad at the Israeli government about this than I used to be. There was some reason for hair-tearing in the summer of '06 during the 2nd Lebanon War when the talking points for spokespeople seemed to be 1. "We're sorry" 2. "We're really sorry this happened" and then, if they were given time to get to point 3. "Hezbollah is firing rockets from heavily populated areas thus making its citizens into human shields."
But it seems a new boss is in town: According to the Jerusalem Post an emergency meeting was called on Saturday night and diplomats were instructed to stress that "150 rockets and mortars have been fired at Israel since Wednesday", that the rockets were fired "from residential areas thus putting Palestinian residents living in the area at risk", and that "Israel is acting carefully to avoid harming innocent people but at times this is impossible to prevent."
Nothing so far about "We're sorry." I hope.
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You wouldn't think at this point that I'd be surprised at the behavior of the press, but they seem to plumb new depths every time you look. There's little to blame official Israel with this time, unless they leave the job half done and wind up going back to the status quo. They're taking their PR lumps, may as well change the conditions on the ground while they're at it.
The world has proven, time and time again, that, in the short term, it backs evil over good.
Israel needs to focus on its responsibilities to G-d and its own citizens first, the the delicate international community last.