The coverage of the Israeli attacks on Gaza is following  some predictable patterns. The New York Times has a headline today (8/26/11), "Israeli Strikes in Retaliation Kill Nine Gazans."  Readers should ask: Retaliation for what?

It's widely understood that this violence stems from the attack last week in the southern Israeli town of Eilat. As the Times puts it:  "The recent round of violence started a week ago, with a terrorist attack on southern Israel in which eight Israelis were killed."

The real question, though, is who committed these acts.  The Times says:

Israeli officials said the perpetrators and planners of the terrorist attack were originally from Gaza, and Israel has retaliated with strikes that have killed at least 23 Palestinians. Gazan officials say they know nothing about the source of the attack.

That's a massive understatement.

To date, no armed Palestinian groups have claimed responsibility for the Eilat attack. Israeli officials claimed the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) were behind it, but have offered no proof to back up these allegations.  And there has been almost no critical coverage of the weakness of the Israeli case.  On NPR (8/18/11), for example, listeners have heard Israeli ambassador Michael Oren claim that Palestinian militants carried out the attack, and five days later London Times reporter James Hider (8/23/11) stated the same thing as if it were a well-established fact.

A handful of journalists have been persistently pointing out that the weakness of this case. One of those writers, Yossi Gurvitz, explains in his latest piece at the Israeli website +972 (8/25/11) that Israeli media are beginning to raise serious questions:

Since Monday, there have been a few more reports in the Israeli media, casting more doubt on the official story. Yediot reported on Tuesday (Hebrew) that nameless people in the security apparatus doubt the PRC were responsible for the attacks, and raise an interesting question: If they were responsible, why was the PRC's entire leadership in the same place?

According to Yediot’s anonymous intelligence sources (bear in mind that such sources should always be viewed with skepticism; by their very nature they cannot be corroborated, and they tend to be unreliable even when speaking openly), the attribution of the attacks to the PRC stems from one somewhat incoherent comment on some Jihadi message board.

Ha'aretz reported on Tuesday (Hebrew) that at least three on the attackers were Egyptian Jihadis. American intelligence sources – the same caveat above applies here--told Globes (Hebrew) that they, too, doubt the PRC are responsible, though they may have had a small role in the attacks.

Two days ago, the IAF attacked the Gaza Strip again--naturally, it does not consider itself bound by the ceasefire; only the Palestinians are, and only them can be blamed for breaking it--and killed some Islamic Jihad apparatchick. Yesterday, the IDF claimed (Hebrew) that he was in charge of funding the Eilat attacks. Hold on a minute, I'm confused: I thought you said the attacks were carried out by the PRC, and now it’s the Islamic Jihad left holding the bag? As of yesterday, reported Amira Hass in Ha'aretz (Hebrew), there are no mourning tents in Gaza. As of today, one week after the attack, the IDF refrains from exposing the identity of the attackers it killed.

This is a remarkable story that deserves serious coverage. Two dozen people in Gaza have been killed in "retaliation" for an attack that very well could have originated somewhere else.

Today's Washington Post (12/21/10) brings a story by Janine Zacharia headlined, "Aid groups decry Israel's Gaza constraints." The lead:

Despite recent moves by Israel to ease construction in the Gaza Strip, restrictions on building materials are hampering international humanitarian efforts while doing little to impede the Hamas-led government they are designed to weaken, aid and nongovernmental groups say.

The groups say that Israel is "snarling the delivery of materials to international relief organizations struggling to build much-needed housing, schools and infrastructure projects."  Zacharia goes on:

But even as Gaza's economy shows signs of improvement, its humanitarian needs remain widespread. Thousands of homes damaged in a punishing three-week war with Israel in 2008-2009 are yet to be rebuilt. Millions of liters of raw sewage are spilling into the Mediterranean Sea because treatment plants remain in disrepair. And experts say Gaza's rapidly growing population of 1.5 million could run out of fresh drinking water by 2015 if the infrastructure is not overhauled.

This account is an interesting contrast to a recent article (12/17/10)  by Ethan Bronner of the New York Times.  The headline alone would give some sign that the Times sees things differently: "Gaza Mends, but Israelis See Signs of Trouble." The primary concern would seem to be that Gaza is showing some signs of rebounding--which is apparently bad news for Israel:

Two years after the Israeli military swooped down here in a three-week war that destroyed thousands of buildings, killed about 1,300 people and largely deterred rocket fire, things are starting to shift again in Gaza. But they seem to be shifting backward, creating a sense of déjà vu. The economic siege is easing, and the border is heating up. Israel hoped that the blockade would break Hamas. Instead, Hamas is fully in charge, Israel is frustrated and another confrontation seems possible.

Israeli officials, readers are told, saw the humanitarian needs in Gaza, and responded accordingly:

Maj. Gen. Eitan Dangot, who runs civilian affairs in Gaza for the Israeli Defense Ministry, said that 78 civilian projects had been approved and that they included hospitals, schools and housing, although only half had been started. All those projects involve international groups that decline to work with Hamas.

And what of the humanitarian groups working in Gaza,  who see things very differently? They receive a passing mention:

Twenty-two human rights and aid organizations recently published a report saying that Israel had not yet carried out its obligations to change its policy and that life here remained unchanged.

The Post sees this as the news; the Times sees it more like a footnote to a story about how Israelis view the threat from the Gaza Strip.

Isabel Kershner writes a piece in the New York Times (10/9/09) that starts out as a profile of an Israeli artist who makes flowers out of Qassam rocket pieces. The main point, though, is to discuss the changed reality in southern Israel, thanks to the invasion of the Gaza Strip late last year that killed over 1,000 Palestinians:

Israel said its three-week offensive was intended to change the reality in the south. Since January, when the military campaign ended, the rocket fire has significantly fallen off and residents here are trying to accustom themselves to a kind of normalcy amid the lingering uncertainty and fear.

This recycles the myth that rocket fire was a constant barrage until the war changed all that-- a point Kershner makes more explicitly later:

According to the Israeli military, some 3,300 rockets and mortar shells were launched from Gaza at southern Israel in 2008, compared with fewer than 300 since the end of the war.

This is highly misleading; much of that rocket fire came at the end of the year-- after the invasion and bombing of Gaza was underway. In fact, a  negotiated peace prevailed for much of the middle of 2008--which is something that you would have learned if you were a careful reader of the New York Times. Right before the invasion, the paper (12/19/08) reported that much of 2008 was quiet:

Israeli and United Nations figures show that while more than 300 rockets were fired into Israel in May, 10 to 20 were fired in July, depending on who was counting and whether mortar rounds were included. In August, 10 to 30 were fired, and in September, 5 to 10.

Rocket fire increased significantly in November after Israel attacked a Hamas tunnel and killed six militants. For a graphic understanding of the rate of rocket/mortar fire, see this (which is based on Israeli figures).

The more natural lesson to draw is that negotiations work better than violence. This is apparently not what the New York Times wants you to believe,  though they did once report that reality. Perhaps it was an accident.

PBS's NewsHour's  Gwen Ifill (9/15/09), quizzing Richard Goldstone on his U.N. fact-finding mission that found that both Israel and Palestinian fighters had committed war crimes in the Gaza conflict:

The term "even-handed" is the problem that Israel has with the conclusions in the report. Your criticism of Israel seems so much harsher than that of the Palestinians. Why is that?

CBS News (9/9/09), summarizing a report by Israel's leading human rights group:

Well over half of nearly 1,400 Palestinians killed in Israel's Gaza war were civilians, including 252 children younger than 16, a leading Israeli human rights groups said Wednesday, challenging Israel's claim that most of the dead were militants.... The Israeli rights group B'Tselem on Wednesday published figures it said were compiled in months of research, including visits to families of victims. It said 1,387 Gazans were killed, including 773 civilians and 330 combatants. Thirteen Israelis also died, including four civilians.

So why would the U.N. be more interested in the war crimes that killed nearly 200 times as many people? Thanks to Ifill and the NewsHour for challenging this strange moral reasoning.

Sometimes when you read reports about the Middle East, you get the impression that corporate journalists think Palestinians are another species entirely. Here's the New York Times' Mark Landler (3/4/09) explaining the theory of how better relations with Syria could help create a peace deal between Israel and Palestine:

By seeking an understanding with Syria, which has cultivated close ties to Iran, the United States could increase the pressure on Iran to respond to its offer of direct talks. Such an understanding would also give Arab states and moderate Palestinians the political cover to negotiate with Israel. That, in turn, could increase the burden on Hamas, the Islamic militant group that controls Gaza, to relax its hostile stance toward Israel.

Israel just recently launched an assault on the Gaza Strip that killed nearly 1,300 Palestinians, including 280 children under the age of 18 and 111 adult women. The Israelis killed roughly 1 out of every thousand residents of Gaza; the equivalent death toll in the U.S. would be almost 300,000.

If you were writing about human beings, you would assume that those massive losses, rather than a lack of "political cover," would probably result in a  "hostile stance" toward the country that inflicted them. Since Landler doesn't seem to think that those deaths are a significant factor in the political situation, he must think he's writing about a very different sort of creature.

Even though "Al Jazeera English is also on the cusp of a carriage deal in Canada," Broadcasting & Cable's Marisa Guthrie reports (2/18/09) that the channel has "had little luck getting picked up by U.S. cable and satellite providers." As part of an effort to "appeal to consumers via a grassroots marketing campaign that attempts to dispel long-held attitudes about the network," AJE has "launched a website that bluntly addresses popular perceptions about the English language offshoot of Al Jazeera, the most-watched news network in the Middle East":

The site, IWantAJE.net, lets consumers send electronic letters directly to their cable or satellite provider demanding the channel. It also includes a "Speak Out" forum and a "Hits & Myths" page debunking popular assertions, such as: "Al Jazeera Supports Terrorism," "Al Jazeera Is Anti-Semitic," "Al Jazeera Is Anti-American" and "Al Jazeera Shows Beheadings."...

AJE filled a news vacuum during the recent war in Gaza, when Israel’s decision to ban foreign journalists from the region arguably gave Al Jazeera English a priceless amount of exposure. As the only English-language news organization with a presence in Gaza, its reports and video were widely seen on television sets in the U.S. and Canada. PBS's World Focus aired full segments. And other networks, including NBC News and the CBC, aired video from Al Jazeera English.

Indeed, "traffic on the network’s website... spiked by 600 percent during the war in Gaza." Contrast the fact that "more than half of that traffic came from North America" with current accessibility: "AJE is available in 130 million households internationally but is only carried in the U.S. in Burlington, Vt.; Toledo, Ohio; and Washington, D.C."

Listen to the FAIR radio program CounterSpin: "Ken Picard on Al-Jazeera in Burlington" (6/6/08)

New York Times reporters Ethan Bronner and Sabrina Tavernise went to Gaza (2/4/09) to look into stories of civilian atrocities, and turned up some very powerful examples. Unfortunately, the impact of that reporting was undermined by the all-too-familiar tendency to "balance" these facts with criticisms of Palestinians.

For a piece that is attempting to get a better sense of who's "version" of events is more accurate, the Times reveals its bias from the start, rendering a white phosphorous attack on a house as a "phosphorus smoke bomb," the qualifier "smoke" helpfully suggesting that the bomb, which accidentally incinerated most of a family in their home, was being used legally as a smoke screen.

The Times underlines this point in the second graph by noting that the bomb was "intended to mask troop movements outside." According to whom? That claim is stated is as a fact, with no attribution.

The Times' reporters continue by writing:

The war in El Atatra tells the story of Israel’s three-week offensive in Gaza, with each side giving a very different version. Palestinians here describe Israeli military actions as a massacre, and Israelis attribute civilian casualties to a Hamas policy of hiding behind its people.

In El Atatra, neither version appears entirely true, based on 50 interviews with villagers and four Israeli commanders. The dozen or so civilian deaths seem like the painful but inevitable outcome of a modern army bringing war to an urban space. And while Hamas fighters had placed explosives in a kitchen, on doorways and in a mosque, they did not seem to be forcing civilians to act as shields.

OK--neither side's tale is completely accurate.  But after reading the Times' own account, it certainly seems that the Palestinian "version" is much closer to reality. Nonetheless, the reporters chalk up the differences as part of  "a desire to shape public opinion."

The Times goes on to review--and in some cases debunk--some of the Israeli justifications, including an attack on a school and the destruction of homes. The impact of that investigative work is, yet again, diluted by the framing of the big picture:

Both sides engage in their own denials.

Israelis argue that this war was especially tough because they had waited so long before taking action in response to the thousands of rockets fired from Gaza over eight years.

Yet after Israelis withdrew their settlers and soldiers from Gaza in late 2005, they killed, over the next three years in numerous military actions here, the same number of Gazans as those killed in this war--about 1,275.

For their part, few Palestinian villagers even acknowledged the existence of fighters here. Hamas is now asserting that it achieved a victory.

Let's compare those two forms of "denial." Israelis somehow have convinced themselves that their military has been exercising unusual restraint--while killing over 1,000 people before this latest round of attacks. Palestinians, meanwhile, deny the existence of Hamas fighters in their area-- though, by the Times' own reporting, in the very same article, Israeli claims about the numbers of Hamas fighters in this given area appear to be (in some cases) unfounded.

This equivalence comes amid stories of heart-wrenching suffering--an injured baby left to die on a tractor because Israeli soldiers were firing on family members trying to get to a hospital. Why dress up that kind of reporting with this sort of "he said, she said" balance? Perhaps the sense that the truth is too one-sided.

Two newspaper stories today provide a false account of the context of the Israeli attacks on Gaza.

The Washington Post:

Hamas and its allies have fired thousands of rockets into Israel in the past eight years. The pace accelerated after the Islamist movement, which won Palestinian elections in 2006, routed forces loyal to the rival Fatah party in June 2007 and seized control of the narrow coastal strip. Since then, Israel has implemented a crushing economic blockade and carried out regular military raids that it has said were a response to rocket fire.

This is an extremely selective history. The Post's claim that Hamas "accelerated" its rocket attacks after 2007 ignores the fact that a cease-fire agreement for much of the second half of 2008 drastically curtailed rocket fire into Israel (an agreement that largely fell apart after an Israeli attack in November).

Meanwhile, in USA Today:

Israel wants to ensure that Hamas cannot rearm itself. Before the offensive, Hamas militants fired up to 80 mortar shells and rockets a day at Israel. The number of attacks has declined to less than 20 a day, the Israeli army says.

Well, that depends on what you mean by "before the offensive." During the cease-fire period last year, rocket fire into Israel was well below the 80 a day figure the paper cites. In fact, it was much lower than the 20 a day figure too; it was around a dozen a month. USA Today wants to advance the argument that Israel's violence has 'worked'-- but to do so you must erase certain inconvenient facts.

When white phosphorus was used by Saddam Hussein, the weapon was identified by U.S. intelligence as a "chemical weapon."

The New York Times (3/22/95) seemed to concur; In an article noting that white phosphorus was technically classified as an "incendiary weapon," the paper nonetheless described it as one of "the worst chemical weapons" in existence: a "waxy substance [that] adheres to flesh, and when it is exposed to air, it bursts into flame."

As Seth Ackerman observed in an article for FAIR's magazine Extra! (3/4/06), in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, "U.S. media vividly evoked the cruel effects" of such unconventional weapons used by Hussein's regime.

The Times' reporting on Israel's recent use of white phosphorus in Gaza has taken quite a different tone. Yesterday, for instance, the New York Times described white phosphorus as "an obscurant used in military conflicts that can be dangerous for civilians under certain circumstances."

As Ackerman's article documented, newspapers like the Times have long exhibited a very different standards when it comes to U.S. and Israeli use of the substance that was considered one of "the worst chemical weapons" in the days when it was known as part of Saddam Hussein's arsenal.

However, today, the Times' double standards on white phosphorus faced a curious challenge. As the fallout over Israel's documented use of white phosphorus in the shelling of the U.N. compound yesterday continued to make world headlines, the Israeli police's alleged that Hamas had fired a white phosphorus shell at Israel.

The New York Times responded with an unusually long explanation of both the incendiary substance's acceptable and unacceptable applications:

White phosphorus is a standard, legal weapon in armies, long used as a way to light up an area or to create a thick white smoke screen to obscure troop movements. While using it against civilians, or in an area where many civilians are likely to be affected, can be a violation of international law, Israel has denied using the substance improperly. On Wednesday, Hamas fired a phosphorus mortar shell into Israel, but no one was hurt.

Writing for the Nation (1/7/09), Alexander Cockburn finds that in "the major media, aside from some passable stuff on the cable news shows, the flow of ignorant drivel seems as toxic as ever,"

maybe worse, since Israel has tried to empty Gaza of all reporters. The Israelis wipe out whole families, phone apartment blocks to terrify the occupants with boasts that their homes will shortly be blown up, and the Israel claque here stresses the consummate humanity of the attackers. Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post celebrates the birth of the new year by extolling Israel for being "so scrupulous about civilian life." Professor Alan Dershowitz dishes out congratulation for Israel's "perfectly proportionate" onslaught.

Cockburn's memory even "goes back to Martin Peretz in 1982 inscribing in the New Republic glowing sermons on the doctrines of humanity instilled in the Israeli Defense Force." Cockburn notes that these were "words written not long before Israeli generals gave the green light for the killers of the Phalange to go to work, disemboweling women in the camps under the indifferent or admiring gaze of IDF personnel" in Beirut's Palestinian refugee camps Sabra and Shatila.

Listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Ali Abunimah on Gaza" (1/9/09)

Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer continues to support Israel's assault on Gaza in today's paper (1/9/09). He displays a remarkably odd notion of what a cease fire is for, citing the lessons of Lebanon as a cautionary tale:

The U.N.-mandated disarmament of Hezbollah in Lebanon is a well-known farce. Not only have foreign forces not stopped Hezbollah's massive rearmament, their very presence makes it impossible for Israel to take any preventive military action, lest it accidentally hit a blue-helmeted Belgian crossing guard.

In other words, the Lebanese cease-fire is problematic because it is currently preventing an outbreak of violence.

When you routinely report about Israel and Gaza through the eyes of Israelis, the results can be awkward, like today's New York Times front-pager that frames what was a human catastrophe for many Palestinians--the killing by Israel of some 40 Gazans at a U.N. school--into a mere military and PR "pitfall" for Israelis. As the headline read, "For Israel, Lessons from 2006, but Old Pitfalls."

In the third paragraph of the story, reporter Steven Erlanger mentions the killings along with other earlier "pitfalls":

And then there are the sudden events that can throw off so many careful calculations and come to symbolize the horrors of war--like the deaths of civilians from Israeli munitions in Qana, Lebanon, both in 1996 and 2006, and the reports on Tuesday evening of as many as 40 people, including children, killed as they sought shelter in a United Nations school in northern Gaza.

In fact, neither of Israel's Qana attacks--the attack on a building near Qana in 2006 that killed 28 civilians, nor the 1996 attacks on the Qana U.N. refugee camp that took 106 lives--resulted from from "careful calculations" being "thrown off." As the Israeli daily Ha'aretz reported (8/1/06), the 2006 attack purposely targeted a three-story building near Qana because it was near the site of a previous Hezbollah rocket launch, even though the IDF, in Ha'aretz's words, "had no information on rockets launched from the site of the building, or the presence of Hezbollah men at the time."

In the case of the 1996 massacre, a U.N. investigation found that Israel Defense Forces had misrepresented key facts of the assault and had likely intentionally targeted the Qana refugee camp: "While the possibility cannot be ruled out completely, it is unlikely that the shelling of the United Nations compound was the result of gross technical and/or procedural errors."

The Associated Press reported on December 27 that "thousands of Gazans received Arabic-language cell-phone messages from the Israeli military, urging them to leave homes where militants might have stashed weapons."

In his latest column (1/2/09), Charles Krauthammer pointed to that report to prove just how obvious it is that Israel is the moral actor in this battle of good and evil:

Some geopolitical conflicts are morally complicated. The Israel/Gaza war is not. It possesses a moral clarity not only rare but excruciating. Israel is so scrupulous about civilian life that, risking the element of surprise, it contacts enemy noncombatants in advance to warn them of approaching danger.

Here's what Amnesty International (12/29/08) has to say about it:

Compounding the atmosphere of fear resulting from the Israeli bombardments, Israeli forces have been sending seemingly random telephone messages to many inhabitants of Gaza telling them to leave their homes because of imminent air strikes against their houses. Such messages have been received by residents of multi-storey apartment building, causing panic not only for those who received the calls but for all their neighbours. Such practice was widely used by Israeli forces both in Gaza and in Lebanon in 2006, but has not been reported since. The threatening calls seem to aim to spread fear among the civilian population, as in most cases no air strikes were carried out against the buildings. If this is the purpose, rather than to give effective warning, this practice violates international law and must end immediately.

One of the facets of the Gaza crisis not getting enough media attention is the fact that Israel has barred reporters from entering the Gaza Strip to report on the war--despite an Israeli Supreme Court ruling that stated that foreign journalists should be allowed into the territory.

It was good, then, to see the issue raised on CNN's media program Reliable Sources on January 5. Not so good, though, were host Howard Kurtz's comments:

And when we do see video of the attacks in Gaza or the aftereffects, much of that video, as my understanding, is supplied by Arab media outlets, so it may be very selective.

Yes, the Arab channels tend to not show the buildings that haven't been destroyed in airstrikes--a clever propaganda trick indeed. Kurtz followed up on that by saying to his guest:

Your point about civilian casualties, Paula Hancocks--I heard interviews yesterday with Palestinian officials on CNN, MSNBC and elsewhere; they were using words like "massacre" and "bloodbath." Obviously, it's in their interest to portray the Israeli incursion in the harshest light. And as you just noted, you have no independent way to check that, or do you have at least limited ways to try to check that?

It's hard to miss the point that Kurtz is trying to make about how media should cover the Gaza conflict: Journalists should be allowed into Gaza to show that Palestinians (and Arab TV stations) are exaggerating the level of suffering.