OxBlog

Tuesday, February 11, 2003

# Posted 8:38 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

OXBLOG VS. ISRAEL? Yesterday, OxBlog praised the WaPo's in-depth account of a brutal firefight in the Gaza Strip.

Yet, as both reader IW and fellow blogger Judith Weiss pointed out, the same story that I praised has become the subject of a five-fingered fisking by Meryl Yourish.

What gives? After all, OxBlog is usually the first to denounce anti-Israel media bias. In this instance, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that while Meryl makes some good points, she is grasping at straws.

Here's why:

The article begins with the classic image of a Palestinian boy, 13-year old Mohammed Jibril, terrified by Israeli tanks and helicopters. That's cliche, but not exactly unfair. Moreover, Mohammed isn't all that innocent. For some reason, he is running around at night with his father, brother, and a number of other men, most of whom
"were shooting at [Israeli Lt. Col. Tal] Hermoni's tanks with AK-47 assault rifles...[Jibril] also saw some Palestinian fighters throwing hand grenades and others in black ski masks planting mines in the paths of the tanks."
Talk about lax parenting. Anyway, the Post's correspondent, Molly Moore, then interrupts her narrative to tell us the point of her article:
"That [this] has been the consistent pattern of the grueling standoff between Palestinians and Israelis: urban guerrillas armed with assault rifles and homemade explosives battling a military partially financed with U.S. money and equipped with some of the most lethal fighting machines in the world. The result is a startling imbalance in casualties."
Meryl thinks that this reference to US financing is bascially an implicit statement that US support for the Israeli government is responsible for Palestinian deaths. While references to US financing tend to have critical connotations, Moore's description of the Israelis' opponents as "Palestinian gunmen" and "urban guerrillas" suggest that the Israelis are hitting the right targets. If this were a story about innocent civilans lost in the crossfire, Meryl might be right. But it isn't.

Surprisingly, Meryl doesn't comment on the following paragraph, which seems to be lifted directly from the New York Times'anti-Israel repertoire:
"Approximately one of every four Palestinians killed in the Gaza Strip has been a child or youth under the age of 18 who, in many instances, was playing, sleeping or standing in the wrong place at the wrong time, according to an analysis of tallies from three Palestinian human rights organizations that monitor deaths in Gaza.
While the Post doesn't question the validity of such reports, it is worth remembering that the focus of the Post's article is little Mohammed Jibril, who finds himself in danger not because he was "in the wrong place at the wrong time", but because he ran into battle along with his father and brother.

Another passage Meryl passes over is this one, which makes the Israelis look rather good:
"This [mission] would be different, Hermoni recalled telling his men -- the first time in the current uprising that an Israeli commander took his tanks into the heart of Gaza City. The mission, he warned them, would be difficult, dangerous and particularly sensitive because of the potential for civilian casualties in such a populous setting."
All in all, Moore does a good job of detailing Israeli views of what happened. This is a pleasant change from the Reuters and AP dispatches where the headlines reflect Palestinian accounts while the Israelis' views are buried in the next to last paragraph.

Meryl also focuses on the Post's apparent effort to downplay the significance of the Palestinian threat, via passages such as this one:
"You are wounded, you see your cousin die in front of you. All your friends are there, most from the resistance," Hussan said. "They are fighting with Kalashnikovs and hand grenades. It was like toys against a tank."
While the Post does not explicitly comment on Hussan's lack of credibility, it does provide its readers with this credible Israeli account of the dangers of Palestinian weapons:
"Ingrained in [Levinson's] psyche and training were the images of three Merkava tanks that were disabled when they rolled over Palestinian explosives during the past year. Seven soldiers died in the three incidents. They were a reminder that he was not invulnerable, no matter how crude the Palestinian weapons."
Next, Meryl takes issue with the Post's acceptance at face value of Palestinian claims that three of the Gaza fatalities -- aged 16, 17 and 20 -- had arrived at the scene for the sole purpose of caring for the wounded. Now, Meryl is right to point out that Palestinian eyewitnesses have a very poor record of reporting the truth and that the Post should be more critical of claims that dead Palestinians were non-combatants.

Still, the fact that these three victims chose of their own free will to enter a battlezone implicitly rebuts Palestinian human rights organizations' claims that young victims of the war are innocent bystanders.

Meryl ends her commentary by asking the Post to
"Spare us any more articles on the poor, downtrodden Palestinian 'resistance' fighters, who are forced to use inferior weaponry. Even when there is parity and beyond, the Arab armies have been defeated time and again by the Israelis."
Admittedly, the Israelis have a good record even when they are outmanned and outgunned. But when it comes to this specific article, it is hard to detect any real sympathy for the Palestinian tactics that produce such one-sided casualty figures.

If anything, the article seems to imply that the Palestinian leadership is callously sacrificing its children despite the relative hopelessness of such amateurs taking on professional and well-armed Israeli forces. There is an implicit agenda of sympathy in the Post's report, but it is for the Palestinian youths who have been tricked by their elders, not the Israelis who have no choice but to defend themselves.

As Golda Meir said, "We can forgive you for killing our sons, but we can never forgive you for making us kill yours."
(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

Comments: Post a Comment


Home