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4 September 2014

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Israeli Ambassador plays the victim in media battle over Gaza

ISRAEL’S Ambassador to Ireland has argued in the Sunday Business Post ‘Comment & Analysis’ (Sunday 3 August) that the European media treats Israel differently from “other nations at war”.

Attacking the “bias”, Ambassador Boaz Modai argues that the European media says: “Israel is always guilty.”

Really?

The Israeli Ambassador also plays the anti-Semitism card when he goes on to say this is “the latest echo of the old cry that ‘the Jews’ are guilty”.

Concluding, he appeals to ‘First World’ racism and Islamophobia when he says:

“One could understand such perverse instincts from the media in the Arab world, perhaps, but one expected better from the European media towards a fellow democracy which is fighting jihadi madness on its own doorstep.”

On its editorial page the Post’s cartoon depicts an Israeli soldier and a Hamas fighter linked by a speech bubble saying “It’s a fight to the death.” Between them, three young boys retort: “Ours.”

The cartoon presents what is happening in Gaza as a battle between two opposing and equal forces with the innocent being caught in the crossfire. The Sunday Business Post takes the easy way out of ‘a curse on both your houses’ and ignores the facts that the three young boys and countless others die as a result of an Israeli blitz on their communities.

That framework is the pattern for the majority of reporting on the genocide that is being inflicted on the Palestinian people.

It has been portrayed that this ‘cycle of violence’ began with the kidnap on 12 June and the killing of three young Israelis in the West Bank, reinforcing the narrative that Israel only retaliates to Palestinian ‘violence’ or ‘terrorism’.

Therefore the killing by Israeli Army snipers of two unarmed Palestinian teenagers at a Nakba Day protest on the West Bank in May, prior to the kidnappings, were not linked by the mainstream media to the ‘cycle of violence’.

Nakba (“Catastrophe”) Day marks the day in May 1948 when more than 700,000 Palestinians were forced to flee their homes and lands but is celebrated as Israeli Independence Day.

On 8 July, the Israeli military launched ‘Operation Protective Edge’.

In its editorial of 14 July, the Irish News clearly buys the ‘cycle of violence’ narrative. And, at a point where 160 Palestinians had been killed in the Israeli bombardment, the paper called for “common sense to achieve a resolution”.

A number of aspects to the Irish News reportage stand out. The vast majority of the reports they published began with references to the Israeli military launching attacks on Hamas or striking at Hamas infrastructure.

Not only did this give legitimacy to the actions of the Israeli military, in effect it pushed the slaughter of largely defenceless Palestinians into the halfpenny place.

In recent years, the Irish News has used a strip headline across as many as three to five pages to highlight important issues.

Since the bombardment of Gaza began, the paper used this format for the Malaysian jet downed over Ukraine, which clearly is a major international story. However, it was 7 August before this format was used for Gaza.

In between times the paper featured stories highlighting benefit fraud, and the hype around the 100th anniversary of the First World War.

Clearly, the blitz on Gaza wasn’t a crisis until a ceasefire and tentative talks got under way.

Gaza Irish Times

It wasn’t until 500 Palestinians had been killed that the Irish Times described what was happening in Gaza as slaughter.

In that same editorial, the paper was exercised over Hamas’s refusal to sign up to an Egyptian-backed ceasefire proposal endorsed by Israel that Hamas wasn’t even consulted about.

As Israel said it was willing to accept the deal, this allowed Tel Aviv to present itself as flexible and willing to compromise.

This reinforced the idea prevalent and fostered in the media that Hamas was ultimately to blame.

In a letter to The Irish Times, criticising its editorial of 29 July, E. F. Fanning asks: “Why do The Irish Times and other newspapers, as well as television networks, tread an imaginary line of equality through this massacre?”

In much of the mainstream media, Palestinians use ‘violence’ and ‘terrorism’; the Israeli war machine uses ‘force’ – and never mind that the 18,000 to 20,000 tons of explosives Israel unleashed on Gaza was roughly equivalent to one of the atomic bombs the United States dropped on Japan in August 1945.

The matter-of-fact way in which the media reported the killing of almost 2,000 Palestinian people by the Israelis, using words like war and conflict – thus underpinning the notion that this was a battle between equal powers – belied the fact that here was a cynical attack on the largely defenceless residents of Gaza by a military superpower.

So rather than blithely churn out reporting using clichéd ‘cycle of violence’ descriptions, the mainstream media might do better to highlight the continuing Israeli imprisonment of 1.8million Palestinians and the siege of Gaza.

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Contributions from key figures in the churches, academia and wider civic society as well as senior republican figures

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