Washington Post Reduces Palestinian Victims to a Word Problem

The Washington Post depicts Palestinian “days of rage.”

“Palestinians Kill 3 Israelis as Violence Mounts in ‘Day of Rage’” was the headline over a Washington Post story (10/13/15) on violence in Israel/Palestine.

The lead paragraphs of the story, written by the Post‘s William Booth and Ruth Eglash, likewise centered on violence by Palestinians against Israelis:

Three Israelis were killed and nearly two dozen injured in a series of Palestinian attacks Tuesday, sparking calls by Israeli officials to cordon off Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem and a decision by the security cabinet to place soldiers in city centers to support the police. The moves came amid rising bloodshed and unrest on a “day of rage” proclaimed by Palestinian groups.

Almost two weeks of daily violence, including a spate of attacks by knife-wielding Palestinian teenagers, has left Israelis deeply shaken and fearful of another sustained Palestinian uprising.

In Tuesday’s attacks, Palestinians used knives, a car, a gun and a meat cleaver to kill and injure Jewish Israelis. As many as 22 Israelis were reported wounded.

This was followed by a quote from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promising vengeance:  “Israel will settle the score with the murderers and those who help them. We will cut the hands of whoever tries to hurt us.”

Up until this point, the story has given no indication that the violence in Israel/Palestine has been anything other than one way—aimed by Palestinians at Israelis. The reality begins to be hinted at in the next paragraph, which reports that Palestinian diplomat Saeb Erekat

blamed the Israelis for the escalation. He asserted that Israel’s 48-year military occupation of the West Bank has spread “a culture of hate and racism that justifies atrocities, including collective punishment and coldblooded executions.”

Only then does the Post acknowledge that violence has not only gone in one direction:

Eight Israelis have been slain and dozens have been wounded in the last couple of weeks, while at least 28 Palestinians have been killed by Israelis. According to Israeli authorities, a dozen of the slain Palestinians were attackers; the rest died in clashes with Israeli forces.

There’s a lot going on in this paragraph. The heretofore unmentioned Palestinian dead come in at the back end of a sentence about Israeli fatalities, to whose numbers are added dozens of wounded so it is not immediately obvious that there are three-and-a-half times as many dead on one side as the other.

Then comes an explanation for why you should not care about the Palestinian dead: A dozen of them, “according to Israeli authorities… were attackers,” while “the rest”—you have to do the math yourself to figure out that these amount to twice as many as the Israeli dead—”died in clashes with the Israeli forces.”

From Electronic Intifada (10/11/15)

One should, of course, keep in mind the phrase “according to Israeli authorities” when thinking of the “attackers.” Electronic Intifada (10/11/15) obtained video of the deaths of one of these ostensible attackers—Fadi Alloun, killed by police in occupied East Jerusalem after being chased by a mob.

The footage, shot from two different cameras, does not show Alloun having a weapon or posing any kind of evident threat, but it does show bystanders egging on the police with cries of “shoot him, bitch!” and chanting “death to Arabs!” after Alloun is killed.

But it is “the rest” who “died in clashes with Israeli forces” that should give readers the most pause. The Israeli military—thanks in large part to US military aid—is one of the best-armed in the world; Palestinians whom they “clash” with are typically unarmed or equipped with homemade weapons. As media critic Adam Johnson observed on Twitter:

It’s not “clashes” when one side has tear gas/shotguns/armored tanks & the other side has whatever they can find around them…. The word “clashes” is a lazy catch-all journalists use in place of taking sides. It necessarily implies power symmetry where none exists.

“At no point did the protestors present any threat to the heavily armed soldiers”:  Mondoweiss (10/10/15)

The website Mondoweiss (10/10/15) described one of these “clashes,” also caught on video, in which seven Palestinians were killed:

Israeli soldiers clad in full combat gear shot protesters and occasionally fired tear gas canisters into the crowd of an estimated 1,000 young men and boys, killing seven and injuring 145 along Gaza’s border area. Layers of barbed wire and open space separated the soldiers from the protesters who threw rocks they found on the ground and molotov cocktails. Additional military installations and dirt mounds protected Israeli snipers as they picked off one protester after the next with Ruger .22 rifles, hitting them in the head, chest, abdomen and limbs…. At no point did the protesters present any threat to the heavily armed soldiers.

Netanyahu’s vow to “settle the score” suggests a view of human life as something that can be tallied up, with deaths on one side balancing deaths on the other. If media outlets are going to present that as a legitimate perspective, they might as well acknowledge what the actual “score” is: Since 2009, according to the Israeli human rights group B’tselem, Israeli security forces have killed 636 Palestinians, with Israeli civilians killing another 14. During this time, Palestinians have killed 43 Israeli civilians, and 12 members of Israeli security forces. This does not include the Israeli military assault on the Gaza Strip in July/August 2014, during which an estimated 1,767 Palestinians died, along with 64 Israeli soldiers and two Israeli civilians.

The violence in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is horrific, and overwhelmingly the victims of it have been Palestinian. To focus on the violence done to Israelis by Palestinians to the near-exclusion of Israeli violence against Palestinians is a grotesque distortion of journalism.

Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org.

Messages can be sent to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com, or via Twitter @washingtonpost. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.

Support FAIR on Patreon!