We need to acknowledge what an extraordinary moment this is. Mainstream media are finally focused on Israeli attacks on Palestinian children.
The New York Times did the unprecedented, and devoted a huge portion of its front page to the images of 65 children, almost all of them Palestinian, killed during the recent onslaught. The accompanying report is almost impossible to look at, it is the face of innocence, beauty, hope, all defiled. Notes the Times:
Nearly all of the children killed were Palestinian.
In all 69 children were killed, two of them Israelis. Nothing like this took place in 2014 when Israel killed 526 children. While in 2018, the New York Times ran four columnists’ justifications of Israel’s slaughter of over 200 unarmed protesters on the Gaza border, as well as the maiming of thousands more.
From Jim Zogby:
Never thought I’d see the day when Palestinian victims were pictured, named, & their stories told. These children deserve to be known. Showing us the humanity of Palestinians is an important 1st step in forcing a recognition that #PalestiniansLivesMatter & insuring their rights
Ali Abunimah:
This makes me feel bitter. For decades @nytimes has been and remains one of the leading outlets for racist Zionist propaganda dehumanizing Palestinians and justifying their murder. This does not wash their crimes away.
And notice the angry/unhinged response from Abe Foxman. The news is antisemitic; publishing such pictures is a “blood libel.”
I am cancelling my subscription to NYTimes. I grew up in America on the NYT… but no more. Today’s blood libel of Israel and the Jewish people on the front page is enough..
Also significant in the changing optics of the conflict in the United States was this stirring NBC Nightly News report by Andrea Mitchell from Sheikh Jarrah in occupied East Jerusalem two nights ago. The veteran international correspondent’s report was an insistent call on Secretary of State Antony Blinken to stop the evictions of Palestinians. It featured Dr. Ahmad Tibi, the Palestinian member of Knesset, telling Blinken to “intervene”– yes, Ahmad Tibi on NBC Nightly News. Mitchell:
Protests today in East Jerusalem where 700 more Palestinians are fighting evictions to make room for Jewish settlers. The first question I got when I got here is, What did Blinken say? What did Blinken say? They wanted to know, what did the U.S. Secretary of State say about the threat that they are going to be evicted from their homes?
Today they have new hope after Blinken said Israel should stop demolishing their homes.
The best part of the report was when Mitchell observed the brutal arrest of a child, and said so:
We don’t know how this started, but we saw a 15 year old boy getting beaten and carried off by police. People say, ‘Leave him, he is a child, he is a child!'”
We can only hope that this emphasis will continue in the U.S. press, including a look at some of the 100s of thousands of young people in Gaza denied any hope of fulfilling their dreams.
Israel lobbyists are seeing what we are seeing and they’re panicked. CAMERA points to a string of pro-Palestinian op-eds in the New York Times op-ed page– “balanced” today by a religious Zionist offering from Rabbi David Wolpe about how Jews have been in that land since biblical days.
That string includes Diana Buttu’s fine piece on the “nakba, the ethnic cleaning of Palestine,” that details the destruction of her father’s village of Mujaydil and the creation on its lands of a Jewish-only town called Migdal Haemek.
That piece was accompanied by this excellent graphic on the loss of land under assigned Palestinian control since 1948. The graphic is similar to one featured in Palestinian solidarity postcards and posters.
The Times response to the criticism is laughable, saying that the image is an “artwork’ that is not meant to convey historical information!
P.S. Weiss notes: In 2014, Brooke Gladstone hosted me on the NPR show “On the Media” to talk about the 526 Palestinian children then being killed in Gaza. Gladstone got a lot of pushback from pro-Israel folks at the time; which may explain why “On the Media” hasn’t touched the issue since, that I’m aware of. (Please tell me I’m wrong Brooke).
“And notice the angry/unhinged response from Abe Foxman. The news is antisemitic; publishing such pictures is a “blood libel.”
Poor ole abe.Knows a defamation (of Jews) when he sees one.what,s up ABE.Lost your clout.Can,t pick up The phone anymore and brow beat anyone who tells the truth about the so called only democracy in the ME.
My heart bleeds for this poor old lying fraud.
“More than 140 Rutgers Faculty Sign Statement of Solidarity with Palestinians”
https://csrr.rutgers.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/ru-faculty-solidarity-with-palestinians.pdf
This is welcome, but I’ve become more cynical: I used to think that U.S. pressure could bring Israel to heel, but I think at some point Israel will just tell the U.S. to shove it, they can buy and sell weapons with Bolsonaro or Putin. Reading Haim Bresheeth-Zabner’s “An Army Lie No Other – How The Israel Defense Forces Made A Nation” has made me realize the extent to which the army permeates life in Israel and how much it prefers to use force to solve every problem. From the inside flap:
David Ben-Gurion, founder and first prime minister of the State of Israel, established that force in 1948 convinced that the ‘whole nation is an army’….the IDF has been the largest, richest and most influential institution in Israel’s Jewish society and the Alma Mater of its social, economic and political ruling class..it is embedded in all aspects of daily life and identity, including the vast military industrial complex that drives the national economy.
Well it seem they took their cue from Haaretz. That is one powerful front page.
Gazan Artist Speaks About a Lifetime of Trauma and War“We live in constant fear of censorship. No artist should have that fear,” says 21-year-old artist Malak Matar.
“In several previous interviews with the international press, Matar has been routinely asked: “What message do you have to the world?” Admittedly, that’s a question we intended to ask her as well, as voices of artists from Gaza are rarely amplified. But before we did, Matar stated that she finds this question “offensive.”
“I get asked these questions a lot, but I lost faith in the ‘international community’ when I was eight years old and witnessed things that I didn’t even have words to describe,” the artist said. “I’m not yet healed from the trauma of 2014. I’ve seen neighbors being carried to ambulances in pieces.”
“I’ve always tried to be a citizen of the world, but then I’m always reminded that I’m stateless,” Matar continued. “All I hear from leaders of other countries is that they are ‘concerned about the situation in Gaza.’ Don’t just be concerned. Take action.”
https://hyperallergic.com/647339/gazan-artist-speaks-about-a-lifetime-of-trauma-and-war/