NEIGHBORHOOD BULLY'S CHECKPOINT ATTACKS DRIVER

                              A screenshot from a cartoon published on the Facebook page of the Fatah movement

Why is so much left out of reporting about Israel at the same time that these stories spread around the world as big news?

It looks like it just happened again: a car-ramming attack. There have been over 80 such attacks in Israel in the past five years. It’s a terror method that has been copied by ISIS.

 

Associated Press wire service doesn’t discuss the frequency of these attacks on Israelis or the praise and rewards Palestinian leadership gives to attackers. Instead, reports describe Israeli border guards shooting a young man, who his relatives say, was just driving to a wedding.

 

For some reason, the stories also include mention of ongoing discussion about “annexing” Israeli towns in the West Bank.

 

So far, only the Israeli and Jewish press has reported that there is a relevant video made prior to the incident by Ahmed Erekat in which he describes “shame” at being accused of collaborating with Israel and bringing “dishonor” to his family.

 

News stories don’t mention that about a month ago there was a car ramming at this same spot. After the crash the perpetrator jumped out of his car and stabbed a soldier.  

 

CNN headlines their story: “Video Shows Palestinian Man Shot at Israeli Checkpoint.” Yet you can see in the video that there is a line of cars at a standstill when Erekat carefully pulls out far to the left side of the road and then turns the car sharply to the right speeding directly into a guard, sending her flying through the air. It sure looks like a deliberate car ramming.

 

Erekat was running toward the guards when he was shot. Though medical help arrived within minutes, he didn’t survive. The border guard, Shani Or Hama Kodesh was injured and taken to the hospital and is recovering. She said Erekat looked her in the eye and aimed for her, a detail that can be found in the Times of Israel and other Israeli news sites. But not, for instance, at Sky News that labels the event “Israeli Guard Kills Relative of Top PLO Negotiator Saeb Erakat.”    

 

Rutgers University professor Noura Erakat has been posting on Twitter that her “young cousin” is a victim of “dehumanization.” She is a well-known anti-Israel speaker who advocates for the end of the Jewish state.    Her posts are praised and supported by Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib.

 

I call it the Frame of the Neighborhood Bully.  Regardless of current actions or recorded history, the bully is always in the wrong, as Bob Dylan described in his song about Israel in 1983. If there is any conflict, the stronger party, even though vastly outnumbered is always at fault no matter the circumstances.

 

In more academic terminology, Israel is considered the oppressor in every situation. The rhetoric of victim and oppressor gets in the way of even attempting to see events here clearly.

 

Of course this does not mean that Israel is always right, either. Rather, it means there is little room for reasoned discussion of what happens in Israel.

 

The journalists I’ve quoted may or may not be promoting their own views of Israel. But they are presenting the news in a predictable format, one in which getting at all the facts is subordinate to following an expected storyline.

 

                                          published atTimes of Israel

When The Neighborhood Bully Fires Back

                                                                                                              photo: Hirek Israelbol                                                                                     

The neighborhood bully just lives to survive

He’s criticized and condemned for being alive

He’s not supposed to fight back, he’s supposed to have thick skin

He’s supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in

He’s the neighborhood bully

                                               -- Bob Dylan, “The Neighborhood Bully”                 

Much of English language media is returning to an old standby: Israel as the neighborhood bully. Sometimes this perspective is stated outright; more often it simply underlies the way stories are presented.

Hamas is usually referred to as a “militant group,” without indicating that it is also the elected government of Gaza. We get the impression of a renegade gang acting outside any official capacity. Working with Hamas is Islamic Jihad; though the two are aligned against Israel they are also in conflict with each other within the larger context of their shared Islamic extremism.

Yet, rarely is “Islamic extremism” mentioned, the widespread phenomenon that greatly overshadows the size of tiny Israel and negates its image as neighborhood bully.

Sometimes Hamas is referred to as a terrorist organization, often by saying Israel “considers” them so, suggesting this is Israeli propaganda.  But Hamas is designated a terrorist organization by many other countries, by the EU, US, Japan, Canada, Egypt and Jordan. And all of the rockets being fired from Gaza into Israel are aimed at civilians, pretty much the definition of terrorism. 

Even the Palestinian ambassador to the UN freely acknowledges that “every missile” from Gaza coming into Israel is “a crime against humanity.”  There have not been a lot of headlines conveying this message. Also a war crime is the launching of rockets from residential areas and endangering one’s own people.

When targeting Hamas fighters and their weapons, the IDF has many methods of warning civilians to leave. They call cellphones, send texts, and distribute leaflets so that people will get out of the way. They have a system of “knock on the roof” as warning and if they see people still in an area they will abort their mission.  During this week the Israeli government helped over 800 foreign nationals who wanted to leave Gaza to do so. 

But there are casualties. It is impossible to call people casualties without stopping right there to say: we should have no wars, ever. Yet, in the world as it is at the moment, in which Israel’s cities are under rocket fire, its government has the responsibility to protect its citizens.

Mention of that responsibility deflates the bully image, as does attributing Israel’s far fewer casualties to its building of bomb shelters, its requirement since the 1980’s that apartments have safe rooms, and its investment in a technology that dissolves incoming rockets in the air before they can do the damage they are intended to do.

Hamas has been firing rockets into Israeli towns for years. In 2008 and 2012 when the rocket firing escalated, and again now, the IDF fired back.  A lot of news coverage begins with Israeli strikes on Gaza as if the neighborhood bully just decided to flex his muscles for no reason.

Reporting that sirens sounded in particular cities or that the Iron Dome stopped rockets over Tel Aviv without ever suggesting that what is transpiring is the attempted murder of families in their homes helps create a familiar storyline in which Israel, because it is the stronger country, is to blame for there being a war at all. 

Bob Dylan wrote “The Neighborhood Bully” about Israel in 1983.

published at Honest Reporting