Today Democracy Now has an interview with the artist Emily Henochowicz, whom the Israelis partially blinded on May 31 by firing a tear gas canister at her head during a protest of the flotilla raid:
"I’m not ashamed of the fact that I lost my eye. I’m proud of who I am. I believed in the cause, and that’s why I came to that demonstration on that day," Henochowicz says. "I’m not going to be the same person that I was before this happened."
A week or so back the Village Voice also did a big glorious story on Henochowicz. Contrast these two pieces, and the beautiful photograph of Henochowicz at the DN site, with Isabel Kershner’s detached story in the NY Times last week about Israel demanding payment from the Henochowicz family for the medical treatment Emily Henochowicz received in Israel.
I know that many friends of mine were excited by the Times story, that it appeared. I found the story detached because Kershner took a subsidiary issue and made it the number one issue: the issue of Henochowicz’s bills, as opposed to what the heck this young American was doing in the Occupied Territories.
And the story was so straight-down-the-middle, quoting Israelis saying that the demonstration in which Henochowicz took part was violent, while quoting Henochowicz on what she was doing in Palestine, at the Qalandiya checkpoint, the grand-daughter of ardent Zionists.
Because this story isn’t a down-the-middle story. It’s a story of a young idealistic American in a foreign country who is fired by sympathy for Palestinians and takes huge risks for them, summoning her own Jewish tradition to do so. Shouldn’t American publications (like DN and the Voice) show natural sympathy for an American in this situation? Just as Roger Cohen has asked, where is the journalistic sympathy for Furkan Dogan, another American struck down by the Israelis?
I know, Kershner was being objective and professional. She’s an Israeli who is under tremendous pressure from both sides, including her own Israeli husband, who has said that it is a matter of the greatest urgency that Israel get a better story out to counter the international campaign to "besmirch" the state.
But imagine being so chill about John Lewis’s fractured skull in Selma in 1965.
Seham adds: "If she were doing her job she would say, here is a list of all the foreigners injured or killed at protests. This is what they or eyewitnesses said and this is what the Israelis said. Instead she just mentions Tristan Anderson and kinda makes it seem like these are somehow ALL isolated incidents where all the stars were aligned in such a way that poor Israel didn’t have a choice."
