Opening at the International Center of Photography in New York on Jan. 10, the exhibition was called "Hidden Truths: Bloody Sunday 1972." That I went to see it that day, taking a six-hour, round-trip journey on the Metroliner from Washington, attests to the weakness I have for photojournalism.

But more than that, I also have an abiding weakness for an exhibition of photographs about a people engaged in national struggle.

Holland Cotter, the New York Times reviewer of the show, put it in a nutshell: "The pictures all have one subject: they are documents of a specific event at a certain place on a certain day. But in the context of the show, they are also something less passive and more passionate than that. They are prosecution witnesses called to testify exactly how that happened and who was responsible. They are pieces of legal, moral and emotional evidence on which ultimate verdicts of innocence and guilt rest."

The day in question is Jan. 30, 1972, when political violence erupted in the Catholic city of Londonderry in British-ruled Northern Ireland, after local groups organized a mass demonstration, that included women and children, to protest government (that is, British) internment camps where militants were being held without trial.

The march was disrupted by British paratroopers who fired at the seemingly festive and peaceful crowd and, within minutes, killed 14 men and boys. (No soldiers were killed or injured.)

The exhibition is a poignant collection of pictures of the demonstration, of writhing wounded, and of bodies sprawled on the pavements, of grieving families and friends marching in funerals afterward, as well as of objects from that day, on display — a bloody necktie, a watch, a notebook, a fountain pain, all found on the dead.

The power of a picture to persuade, to accuse or to editorialize emotionally is a prerogative that a photojournalist enjoys, but a reporter is forever denied it in his own work. Photojournalism, by its skillful measurement of light and choice of angle — sometimes simply because of a serendipitous moment in a photographer’s shoot — has become a mainstream force in, and a reliable witness of, our political lives, much in the manner that the work of social critics, commentators and writers has become a narrative of it.

A confession here, proffered somewhat sheepishly: At the same time I was being emotionally moved by the exhibition, I was also struck by the asymmetrical manner in which the costs paid by a people struggling for independence in Europe are measured against those paid by a people in a Third World country. Consider how Cotter referred to the dreadful events on that Bloody Sunday in his review: "The shots were heard around the world. The killings were front-page news in Europe and the United States."

Fourteen men and boys were killed that day.

Far from wanting to minimize the significance of those deaths, or to disregard the iconic place Bloody Sunday has in modern Irish history, I left the exhibition thinking this: But, Gosh, that’s how many Palestinian men and boys are killed by Israelis on a slow week-end — not to include how many houses they blow up, how many olive trees (many of which had been there since Roman times) they uproot, and how many roadblocks they put up, while they’re at it. (Since the intifada began 16 months ago, more than 800 Palestinians have been killed in a population of 3 million, the equivalent of 70,000 in the US.)

The fact of the matter is that when Israeli soldiers shoot to kill, the shots are not "heard around the world" and they do not become "front-page news in Europe and the United States the next day." That could be because Palestinians are not European. They are not "like us." They are "the other" and the other is, well, a lesser species of man. His death, along with the cause he died for, cannot resonate as much in our psyche.

Perception rests much more on culture — on notions in that culture of "us" and "them" — and less on morally objective criteria of judgment.

Had Theodore Herzl, for example, who suggested in his book "A Jewish State" (1896), that Argentina could be a fine place to establish a Jewish state, had his way, it is doubtful that the world would have turned a blind eye in that country to the kind of barbarities that Zionism has been practicing in Palestine all these years.

What is involved here is what the French scholar Jacques Revel called "the play of scales," and how in the global dialogue of cultures some societies see themselves as, well, superior.

This is not a tenable notion these days for it runs counter to the kind of fundamental change that is taking place in the globalized, borderless world of electronic information and international commerce that we inhabit in this new century.

There may continue to be what we have come to call haves and have-nots, rich and poor, developed and developing countries around us, but who wants his children to grow up in a world where Jack is not as good as his master, and where international laws that govern, as it were, the behavior of a goose do no also apply to a gander.

But watch the US at the Security Council soon vetoing a resolution next time the members call on Israel to cease and desist from any action that contravenes the UN Charter and several clauses in the Geneva Convention!

Oh, yes, visiting the exhibition of photographs on Bloody Sunday was a liberating experience. Beyond the weakness I have for photography as an art medium, I happen to have a special fondness for the Irish, and not only because they are adept at stringing words together and make them sing (they are, after all, behind many of the literary masterpieces of the 20th century), but because they are a tenacious people who, for 500 years, had sworn to fight against oppression.

Like their Palestinian counterparts, it would never have occurred to the good, old Fighting Irish to give up. And "Hidden Truths: Bloody Sunday 1972" attests to that.