In today's New York Times, Jennifer Steinhauer  notes the remarkable number of Congressmembers-- more than 80--who are heading to Israel thanks to a program affiliated with AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobbying force.

Steinhauer sizes up the political backdrop-- the White House has strained relations with the current Israeli government, and there's more:

the Palestinians are weighing a request to the United Nations Security Council to support a bid for statehood, leaving Washington in the uncomfortable position of blocking such a unilateral move while supporting democracy movements in other Arab nations.

U.S. policy at the United Nations has historically been pro-Israel. There's no debate about that. So it's hard to see how this particular case would be "uncomfortable," since it's in keeping with a well-established pattern.

As for the supporting Arab democracy movements: Which one did the U.S. "support" when it really mattered? Not Tunisia, Bahrain or Egypt. Not Yemen. Not Saudi Arabia or Jordan. Certainly not Palestine. Syria? Not really.  I guess you could argue that the Libya War is "supporting" something.  But Steinhauer's vision of the U.S. as 'uncomfortably' fitting its rejection of Palestinian autonomy within a prevailing policy of encouragement  for Arab democracies is more media creation than diplomatic reality.

The Israeli government's near-total blockade of the Gaza Strip has been roundly criticized by international human rights groups as a harsh form of collective punishment. Some U.N. investigations have labeled it much worse--that Israel's actions amount to crimes against humanity.

Back in medialand, the Washington Post's Howard Schneider has a story today (12/15/09) comparing life in Gaza with the West Bank. While the latter is still under Israeli occupation, its economy is (predictably enough) much stronger, and its standard of living relatively higher. This is a somewhat familiar theme in the press--noting that while Hamas' rule in Gaza is a disaster, the West Bank's more moderate political leadership is getting results. (Tom Friedman wrote two columns about this in August.)

The Post 's examination offers only glancing mentions of the Israeli blockade. The piece employs unusually soft language in the fifth paragraph in describing "Israeli policies that restrict travel into and out of the Gaza Strip and limit its economic growth in a bid to undercut support for the area's ruling Islamist Hamas movement." Near the end of the article, we read that "Israel's rules have choked off the economy in Gaza, increasing poverty and despair among its 1.5 million people." Somewhat better, but buried.

If one is going to compare Gaza to the West Bank- or to anywhere else, for that matter--one would have to point out the punishing effects of this blockade. And if one were to do that, you might want to come up with a word other than "rules" to describe what some see as potential crimes.

National Public Radio watchdog Mytwords (NPR Check, 3/3/09) is moved to declare the network's Palestine/Israel coverage "worse than worthless" after "yesterday morning first featured Michele Kelemen redelivering Secretary of State Clinton's talking points (Hamas is a terrorist organization, blah, blah, blah, Hamas has to renounce violence, blah, blah, blah, U.S. is giving tons of money to Gaza, blah, blah, etc.)":

After that four-minute-plus State Department summary, what does NPR offer? Who would you go to for expert analysis? How about someone who has "has advised six American secretaries of state." Yep, NPR serves up the stale ideas of Aaron David Miller--again....

Miller mentions Netanyahu's negotiations with Arafat at the Wye River and the Hebron withdrawal. Throughout the interview, Linda Wertheimer just nods along like a bobblehead. I think she forgot to see how the actual settlement policies went under Netanyahu back when he was Prime Minister. Nothing about what that great Hebron concession really meant for Palestinians. Nothing about Netanyahu's provocations that even an editor from the rightist WINEP takes note of. Nothing about Netanyahu's Jerusalem expansionist efforts.

Mytwords imagines "it would be hard to do more pro-Likud, pro-Zionist coverage of the Palestine conflict." Indeed, you can read about NPR's long history of biased reportage on the region in the FAIR magazine Extra!: "The Illusion of Balance: NPR's Coverage of Mideast Deaths Doesn't Match Reality" (11-12/01) by Seth Ackerman.

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."