Media Analysis

‘NYT’ report on killing of Gaza paramedic Rouzan al-Najjar is a big step forward, though flawed

The New York Times surprised us yesterday by running a long, front-page investigation into the Israeli army’s killing last June 1 of a 20-year-old Gazan health worker, Rouzan al-Najjar. Before we criticize, let’s state clearly that this article was inconceivable in the Times up until a year, or even 6 months ago. By contrast, when Israel killed four small boys who were playing soccer on the beach during its 2014 assault on Gaza, the paper swallowed the army’s dishonest explanation, without challenge, even though one of its own photographers had been an eyewitness to the killings.

This time, the Times came right out and said its inquiry showed that “. . . the shooting [of Rouzan al-Najjar] appears to have been reckless at best, and possibly a war crime, for which no one has yet been punished.” The paper waited until the 9th paragraph to say this, but better late than never.

This improved Times coverage is no accident. The paper understands that its reading public is growing steadily more informed about Israel/Palestine, partly due to alternative news sources like this site. Public comments sections that follow some Times reports show that readers will no longer accept one-sided pro-Israel coverage.

Back to Rouzan al-Najjar, the murdered young Gazan health worker. Despite the considerable improvement, the Times investigation had major flaws. First, why didn’t the paper consult long-established Israeli human rights groups, like B’Tselem and Breaking the Silence? Way back on July 17, B’Tselem released a report with the headline: “Israeli Soldiers Deliberately and Fatally Shot Palestinian Paramedic Rozan a-Najar in the Gaza Strip.” [Her name has been spelled several different ways.] And surely some digging around the courageous, outspoken Israeli soldiers who participate in Breaking the Silence might have found actual witnesses, whom the paper could have protected by allowing them to stay anonymous?

Next, concentrating on a single victim of Israel’s army does make sense. But the result, probably unintended, is to imply that Rouzan al-Najjar’s death was an isolated or rare occurrence. The Times did point out that the Palestinian death toll during the Great March of Return was 185, but it could have emphasized this truth more. And only one sentence notes that the Israel military lost only one single soldier.

Critics, such as Adalah-NY, noted that the Times report was “marred by framing aiming to discredit Palestinian protesters, saying ‘the protests amount to little more than a PR stunt for Hamas.’” Truly, the Times’s assessment is obnoxious, and beneath its dignity. Would it ever have published something like: “When the young John Lewis, who would later become a distinguished member of Congress, was attacked by white police in Selma, Alabama in March 1965 and suffered a broken skull, he was part of a protest that amounted to little more than a PR stunt for the voting rights movement?” Never.

There was more. The Times said that al-Najjar “lied about her lack of education,” and “pretended to be a college student.” It turned out that she “couldn’t afford college,” but was determined to go eventually. The paper also noted that “her Facebook posts could be florid.” Helping to care for hundreds of unarmed people who are regularly shot around you might excite even the most phlegmatic mainstream American reporter.

Still, on balance the Times report was a big step forward. Let us end by simply repeating the paper’s conclusion: “. . . the shooting appears to have been reckless at best, and possibly a war crime, for which no one has yet been punished.”

H/T Norman Finkelstein

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If anyone hasn’t seen this yet, you must read this article on Palestinian superbug problems in Gaza:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/31/palestinian-superbug-epidemic-could-spread-say-doctors-drug-resistant-antibiotics

A doctor researching “conflict medicine” in Beirut says “The untreated sewage from Gaza containing multi-drug-resistant bacteria goes into the aquifer and that is a shared aquifer [with Egypt and Israel].”

Great way for Israel to bite itself in the ass. Even with fancy medicine, medical care, and hospitals, people in Israel, Zionist members of the “master race” will die or become maimed because of the superbugs they helped to incubate by their vicious mistreatment of Palestinians, but, hey, they got to feel racially superior to another people, so it must be worth it….

Thanks for a good assessment of a modest step forward for an immoral Zionist apologist that pretends to be unbiased journalism.

By the way, alluding to a “possible war crime” may be a step forward, but I have to wonder, “what war?” There’s no clash of armies, just highly armed soldiers safely taking potshots at unarmed refugees imprisoned in a giant camp.

I am glad to have read Mr. North’s nuanced and intelligent reaction to the 31st Dec NYC piece, which was not only the NYT’s headline, but it was THE nyt headline as it formatted on my phone.
But when I read the NYT piece, far from thinking it was an improvement over their previous piece on the murder, I was ready to crazy-glue myself to the NYT building and threaten to hold a seance to contact Arthur Sulzberger, NYT publisher in the 1940s, who would I am sure give his successors a lecture on integrity and racism.
The core NYT problem remains: Israel has us dancing around parsing the causes and effects within the catastrophe they have created. But it doesn’t make any difference whether Rouzan al-Najjar, or any other inmate in the Gaza Ghetto, or any individual IDF soldier, did this-or-that. The quagmire itself is the doing of Zionism. As regards all the endless “complications” and nuances, see the previous sentence.

@Jon66: “If we assume that the 1% figure is accurate then there is plenty of money to both pay for waste management and still have some left over.”

Yes, but they don’t control their borders, they can’t import machinery, they can’t freely travel, no one can enter without Israel’s approval, everything is controlled by Israel. What part of ‘prison’ don’t you understand?

A “big step”. Right. If onereads the paragraph deeply buried in the article one will read that the shot that was not only unintentional , it was fired at our hit the ground splintering, hitting first one then another person before a fragment hit the Hamas nurse in the chest. That’s a far cry from intentionally aiming at a medic which the Hamas, anti-zionist press including MW and other Israel haters either reported as ‘fact’ or strongly implied. I have read the NYT has spent an enormous amount on this investigation and while it struggled mighty hard to pin blame on Israel and the IDF it simply could not conclude the shot was anything but “reckless” . A term that could apply to any number of actions committed by both palestinians and Israeli soldiers in the midst of a chaotic and violent protest. But, of course, the MW adherents will interpret this nyt article, tinged with biased opinion but curiosly backed up by genuine journalistic standards proving the shot was not aimed, as far as can be discerned, at anybody. Of course, since zionists control the world’s media it’s hard to understand how this could happen