[WCUSP] Down the Memory Hole

Fri Jul 28 12:51:40 CDT 2006

_http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2928_ 
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1060739&url_num=15&url=http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2928)   
Media  Advisory
Down the Memory  Hole
Israeli contribution to conflict is  forgotten by leading papers

7/28/06

In the wake of the most serious outbreak  of Israeli/Arab violence in years, 
three leading U.S. papers—the  Washington Post,  New York Times and  Los 
Angeles  Times—have each strongly editorialized that Hamas in  Gaza and Hezbollah 
in Lebanon were solely responsible for sparking  violence, and that the Israeli 
military response was predictable and  unavoidable. These editorials ignored 
recent events that indicate a  much more complicated situation.

Beginning with the Israeli  attack on Gaza, a New York  Times editorial 
(6/29/06) headlined "Hamas Provokes  a Fight" declared that "the responsibility for 
this latest  escalation rests squarely with Hamas," and that "an Israeli 
military  response was inevitable." The paper (7/15/06) was similarly sure in  its 
assignment of blame after the fighting spread to Lebanon: "It is  important 
to be clear about not only who is responsible for the  latest outbreak, but who 
stands to gain most from its continued  escalation. Both questions have the 
same answer: Hamas and  Hezbollah." 

The Washington  Post (7/14/06) agreed, writing that "Hezbollah and  its 
backers have instigated the current fighting and should be held  responsible for 
the consequences." The L.A. Times (7/14/06)  likewise wrote that "in both cases 
Israel was provoked." Three days  and scores of civilian deaths later, the 
Times (7/17/06) was even  more direct: "Make no mistake about it: Responsibility 
for the  escalating carnage in Lebanon and northern Israel lies with one  
side...and that is Hezbollah."

As FAIR noted in a recent  Action Alert (7/19/06), the portrayal of Israel as 
the innocent  victim in the Gaza conflict is hard to square with the death 
toll in  the months leading up to the current crisis; between September 2005  
and June 2006, 144 Palestinians in Gaza were killed by Israeli  forces, 
according to a list compiled by the Israeli human rights  group B'tselem; 29 of those 
killed were children. During the same  period, no Israelis were killed as a 
result of violence from  Gaza.

In a July 21 CounterPunch column,  Alexander Cockburn highlighted some of the 
violent incidents that  have dropped out of the media’s collective  memory:

Let's go on a brief excursion into pre-history. I’m talking  about June 20, 
2006, when Israeli aircraft fired at least one  missile at a car in an 
attempted extrajudicial assassination  attempt on a road between Jabalya and Gaza 
City. The missile  missed the car. Instead it killed three Palestinian children 
and  wounded 15. 

Back we go again to June 13, 2006. Israeli  aircraft fired missiles at a van 
in another attempted  extrajudicial assassination. The successive barrages 
killed nine  innocent Palestinians. 

Now we're really in the dark ages,  reaching far, far back to June 9, 2006, 
when Israel shelled a  beach in Beit Lahiya killing eight civilians and 
injuring  32.

That's just a brief trip down Memory Lane, and we trip  over the bodies of 
twenty dead and forty-seven wounded, all of  them Palestinians, most of them 
women and  children.

On July 24, the day before Hamas' cross-border  raid, Israel made an 
incursion of its own, capturing two  Palestinians that it said were members of Hamas 
(something Hamas  denied—L.A. Times,  7/25/06). This incident received far less 
coverage in U.S. media  than the subsequent seizure of the Israeli soldier; 
the few papers  that covered it mostly dismissed it in a one-paragraph brief 
(e.g.,  Chicago Tribune,  7/25/06), while the Israeli taken prisoner got 
front-page headlines  all over the world. It's likely that most Gazans don’t share 
U.S.  news outlets' apparent sense that captured Israelis are far more  
interesting or important than captured Palestinians.

The  situation in Lebanon is also more complicated than its portrayal in  
U.S. media, with the roots of the current crisis extending well  before the July 
12 capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah. A  major incident fueling the 
latest cycle of violence was a May 26,  2006 car bombing in Sidon, Lebanon, 
that killed a senior official of  Islamic Jihad, a Palestinian group allied 
with Hezbollah. Lebanon  later arrested a suspect, Mahmoud Rafeh, whom Lebanese 
authorities  claimed had confessed to carrying out the assassination on behalf 
of  Mossad (London Times, 6/17/06).

Israel denied  involvement with the bombing, but even some Israelis are 
skeptical.  "If it turns out this operation was effectively carried out by  Mossad 
or another Israeli secret service," wrote Yediot Aharonot,  Israel’s 
top-selling daily (6/16/06; cited in AFP, 6/16/06), "an  outsider from the intelligence 
world should be appointed to know  whether it was worth it and whether it 
lays groups open to  risk."

In Lebanon, Israel's culpability was taken as a given.  "The Israelis, in 
hitting Islamic Jihad, knew they would get  Hezbollah involved too," Amal 
Saad-Ghorayeb, a professor at Beirut’s  Lebanese American University, told the New 
York Times (5/29/06).  "The Israelis had to be aware that if they assassinated 
this guy  they would get a response." 

And, indeed, on May 28, Lebanese  militants in Hezbollah-controlled territory 
fired Katyusha rockets  at a military vehicle and a military base inside 
Israel. Israel  responded with airstrikes against Palestinian camps deep inside  
Lebanon, which in turn were met by Hezbollah rocket and mortar  attacks on more 
Israeli military bases, which prompted further  Israeli airstrikes and "a 
steady artillery barrage at suspected  Hezbollah positions" (New York  Times, 
5/29/06). Gen. Udi Adam, the commander of  Israel’s northern forces, boasted that 
"our response was the  harshest and most severe since the withdrawal" of 
Israeli troops  from Lebanon in 2000 (Chicago  Tribune, 5/29/06).

This intense fighting was  the prelude to the all-out warfare that began on 
July 12, portrayed  in U.S. media as beginning with an attack out of the blue 
by  Hezbollah. While Hezbollah's capture of two Israeli soldiers may  have 
reignited the smoldering conflict, the Israeli air campaign  that followed was not 
a spontaneous reaction to aggression but a  well-planned operation that was 
years in the making. 

"Of all  of Israel’s wars since 1948, this was the one for which Israel was  
most prepared," Gerald Steinberg, a political science professor at  Israel's 
Bar-Ilan University, told the San Francisco Chronicle  (7/21/05). "By 2004, the 
military campaign scheduled to last about  three weeks that we’re seeing now 
had already been blocked out and,  in the last year or two, it’s been 
simulated and rehearsed across  the board." The Chronicle reported that a  "senior 
Israeli army officer" has been giving PowerPoint  presentations for more than a 
year to "U.S. and other diplomats,  journalists and think tanks" outlining the 
coming war with Lebanon,  explaining that a combination of air and ground 
forces would target  Hezbollah and "transportation and communication  arteries."

Which raises a question: If journalists have been  told by Israel for more 
than a year that a war was coming, why are  they pretending that it all started 
on July 12? By truncating the  cause-and-effect timelines of both the Gaza and 
Lebanon conflicts,  editorial boards at major U.S. dailies gravely 
oversimplify the  decidedly more complex nature of the facts on the  ground.      
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