An Israeli soldier has been captured by Palestinian fighters and the Gaza Strip is once again burning. Those in Ausralia who don’t rely on the Internet for their news, might turn to their nation’s press to guide them through these painful developments. But just how informative are the Voices of Murdoch (VOM) and Faifax (VOF) when it comes to events in Israel/Palestine? After perusing The Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald of Friday, June 30, the short answer would have to be: Not very.
As far as The Australian’s editorial, “Israel On Target In Gaza Response”, is concerned, the Israel/Palestine conflict is as black and white as a chess board.
“Yet again it is ordinary Palestinians who will be the biggest losers in the latest outrage by terrorists in the Gaza Strip”, intones the VOM. It’s de rigueur, of course, to pay lip service to the welfare of the besieged and malnourished inhabitants of Gaza, but the very next sentence: “Israel’s military strike at the heart of Gaza following the kidnapping of...Corporal Gilad Shalit is exactly right” exposes the hypocrisy of the first. As far as the VOM is concerned, despite the certain knowledge that yet more innocent Palestinian civilians will be killed and maimed by its “military strike”, Israel’s disproportionate response is just what’s needed. The colonel’s “kidnapping” is all that matters.
“Kidnapping”? You don’t kidnap soldiers in war, you capture them. But then, for the VOM, the Palestinians aren’t soldiers, resistance fighters, or even “militants”, only “terrorists”. The capture of Cpl. Shalit is an “outrage”, claims the VOM. Yet, if nabbing an enemy combatant is such a heinous act, why was the VOM silent in the face of an earlier Israeli raid into Rafah and the capture of Palestinian brothers, Mustafa and Osama Muamar? The VOM didn’t bat an eyelid when they were disappeared, like around 10,000 Palestinians before them, into some Israeli prison to be held indefinitely in administrative detention without charge or trial or tried by military courts on secret evidence before being forgotten by all except their own people. But then, they’re Palestinians, aren’t they? For the VOM, only Israelis matter.
“Sunday’s assault on a military post inside Israeli territory...was a bridge too far” lectures the VOM. The fact that the Israelis have been murderously raining thousands of shells on a defenseless Gaza from a safe distance for months is of course overlooked. In the month of June alone 55 Palestinians have been killed and 222 wounded, the bulk of these in the Gaza Strip.
We are told that Israeli Prime Minister Olmert “has shown considerable restraint in recent months in the face of a daily barrage of Palestinian rocket fire into Israel from Hamas’s Qassam rocket sites.” “Restraint”? Israeli scholar, Tanya Reinhart, has pointed out that “in Israeli discourse, Israel is always presented as the side exercising restraint in its conflict with the Palestinians.” Curious that, how Israeli discourse is echoed so faithfully by the VOM.
Reinhart reminds us that up until Israel’s Gaza beach party massacre on June 9, Hamas had maintained a 17-month cease-fire and that “other organizations have generally succeeded in launching only a few isolated Qassams.”
In explaining the recent resurgence of these (70 in 3 days), she discerns a familiar pattern: Israeli leader prepares to go/goes overseas to tell Americans/Europeans that he has no “partner for peace” while army sets scene by killing Palestinian/s to provoke Qassam attacks on the nearby Israeli town of Sderot.
Predictably, just prior to Olmert’s leaving for Europe, the Israelis not only eliminated the head of the Palestinian security forces, but shelled the Gaza coast the day after, wiping out the Ghalya family. And as for the “daily barrage of Palestinian rocket fire into Israel”, UK reporter, Donald Macintyre, writes that “Almost 3 times as many Palestinian civilians have been killed in Gaza in the past 9 days as Israeli civilians in Sderot killed by Qassam rockets in the past 5 years.” (The Independent June 23, 06)
Staying with the theme of supposed Israeli “restraint” in the face of the Palestinian’s “senseless and provocative act”, the VOM paints a portrait of an Israeli PM “tired of fighting” and “wanting a new partnership with its difficult neighbor.” The fact that the Palestinians are in the 38th year of a brutal and illegal Israeli occupation is glossed over by the weasel word “neighbor” — to which has been added the qualifier “difficult”, implying absurdly that the occupied should somehow be in the business of making life more comfortable for the occupying power. That all-important, contextualizing O-word, however, is simply not in the VOM’s vocabulary. The VOM’s war-weary Olmert is, however, a fiction. Even as his army ripped into Gaza, the real Olmert was using his platform at a “peace conference” in Jordan to attack Iran and arrogantly assert Israel’s supposed historical rights to all of Palestine from the Mediterranean to the Jordan.
Exuding Olmertian arrogance the VOM, in reference to Israel’s aerial destruction of Gaza’s electricity supply, cynically opines that as the Gazans “light candles and try to cook without power they will perhaps recall the votes they cast in the January election.” By which we can infer, if the penny still hasn’t dropped, that Cpl. Shalit is really no more than Israel’s excuse to wreak regime change in the occupied Palestinian territories.
If the VOM seemed like an echo from the Israeli Foreign Ministry, the Voice of Fairfax (VOF), as of writing, has been strangely mute — with one fascinating exception. Sydney’s massive anti-IR laws rally in Blacktown may have been consigned to Page 5 of the previous issue, but the capture and execution of settler, Eliyahu Asheri, by Palestinian resistance fighters in the Israeli-occupied West Bank was given front page treatment.
In “A son lost, a faith rocked”, Harriet Alexander painted a glowing portrait of Eliyahu’s father, Yitro, who had moved from Adelaide to the illegal West Bank colony of Itamar 20 years ago.
Although we learned that Yitro was “a person of deep abiding faith”, a “Torah scribe” and an “active member of his community which had suffered several attacks in recent years”, in line with the unwritten law of “Don’t mention the occupation”, we learnt nothing whatever about the significance of his dwelling place, Itamar.
As tragic as the murder of all civilians in this conflict is, would it not have added to our understanding, if the Herald had provided some contextual data? Such as the fact that Itamar, like all Israeli settlements, is illegal under international law; that it is home to members of the extremist Kach movement committed to the outright expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland and the destruction of Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosques; that Kach was banned by the Israeli government following the Hebron massacre in 1994; and that its inhabitants have a long history of engaging in pogroms against the defenseless Palestinian inhabitants of Yanoun and Awata?
It seems that, whether it’s VOM or VOF, when it comes to clarity on the subject of Israel/Palestine, the print media in this country is about as reliable as the old Soviet Pravda.
— Colin Andersen is a retired teacher with a long-term interest in the Middle East. He is the Sydney Director of Deir Yassin Remembered (www.deiryassin.org
