••
A SENIOR Hamas leader has admitted the terror group carried out the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teens in the West Bank in June — the first time anyone from the ­Islamic militant group has said it was behind an attack that helped spark the current war in the Gaza Strip.

Saleh Arouri told a conference in Turkey that Hamas’s military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, carried out what he described as a “heroic operation’’ with the broader goal of sparking a new Palestinian up­rising.

“It was an operation by your brothers from the al-Qassam Brigades,’’ he said, saying Hamas hoped to exchange the youths for Palestinian prisoners held by ­Israel.

Hamas has repeatedly praised the kidnappings, but Mr Arouri, the group’s exiled West Bank leader, is the first member to claim ­responsibility.

Israel had accused Hamas of orchestrating the June kidnap­pings and identified two operatives as the chief suspects. The two men remain on the loose.

The kidnappings on June 12, along with the discovery of the youths’ bodies two weeks later, sparked a broad Israeli crackdown on Hamas members throughout the West Bank.

An Egyptian effort to mediate a ceasefire collapsed this week, leading to a resumption of heavy ­fighting.

Mr Arouri told the conference that Hamas “did not have the ­intention at this time to ignite a large battle’’.

He said Hamas did not believe Israel wanted a war either.

“But Allah has chosen and willed that a large battle would be ignited,’’ he said.

Mr Arouri, one of Hamas’s most senior figures, founded Hamas’ military wing in the West Bank two decades ago and now commands the group’s operations in the area from exile in Turkey.

He was deported several years ago in a deal that freed him from an Israeli prison.

Also, the armed wing of Hamas has executed three Palestinians and arrested seven others for ­allegedly collaborating with Israel during the Gaza war, a website close to the movement reported yesterday.

No date was given for the executions or the arrests.

Under Palestinian law, collaborating with Israel, murder and drug trafficking are punishable by death.

 

 

Hamas executes 18 suspected informants

 http://edition.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/international/2014/08/22/penhaul-hamas-executes-18.cnn.html?c=weekend-intl-homepage-t

Latest developments:

22:35 GMT: A salvo of at least five rockets was fired from Syria into northern Israel. Three rockets struck just outside a community while two more hit an open area.

Syrian rebel sources claim that Syrian Army forces launched a large attack on opposition forces near the Israeli border, and some of those projectiles may have accidentally crossed into Israeli territory.

22:24 GMT: Sirens warning of incoming rockets sound in communities in the Golan Heights, Israel's northernmost point.

19:35 GMT: Israeli media report two rockets were fired at northern Israel from Lebanon. One landed in open terrain, another hit a structure empty of residents.

19:27 GMT: Sirens warning of incoming rockets sound in Upper Galilee region in northern Israel. Rocket fired at northern Israel was launched from Lebanon and landed in open terrain: reports

19:04 GMT: More than 100 rockets were fired at Israel since midnight, counting a total of 590 rockets that were fired at Israel since Hamas breached the ceasefire: IDF.

17:23 GMT: Iron Dome intercepts a number of Gaza rockets over central Israel.

16: 58 GMT: IDF spokesperson says 440 of the 570 missiles fired by Hamas since end of truce were launched from schools, cemeteries and hospitals.

News since

Seventeen years ago, the Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal lay dying, as poison in his veins began to shut down his vital organs one by one.

At the last moment, a shadowy figure emerged, handing over a secret antidote that brought him back from near death. Now, as the war between Israel and Gaza continues to rage, that same figure – the former Mossad agent, Mishka Ben David – has appealed to Meshaal to return the favour: stop taking “the most extreme side” in Hamas and accept a compromise to end the war with Israel.

“You can see Gaza from here,” says the former spy, pointing to a tiny blur in the distance beyond the city of Ashkelon. “I can hear the bombardments at night.”Several weeks ago, a more immediate message from Gaza arrived, in the form of a rocket that exploded just 50 yards from Mr. Ben David’s dining room table.

“It was a huge blast,” he said. “All the houses around here shook, all the glass in the windows broke, there was shrapnel everywhere.”

Although Mr. Ben David was with his daughter and his three grandchildren at the time, no one was hurt. But their close shave with death or injury prompted him to appeal to Meshaal, via a letter published in a newspaper, reminding him of the failed Mossad operation in the aftermath of which he had been involved.

“I though that it is time to address the rational side of Khaled Meshaal,” he said. “And I thought that I am the person to do so, because I’m the person who had a hand in reviving him.”
Meshaal has long been Hamas’s most powerful leader abroad, the figurehead whose stance has discouraged the group’s leadership in Gaza from considering any compromise.

In September 1997, a Mossad squad stood in position ready to ambush Meshaal at his office in Amman, the Jordanian capital.

In Israel, the war forced up to two thirds of the country’s population to seek refuge in bomb shelters, while those in communities close to the Gaza border fled in fear of the tunnels dug by Hamas. Unsuccessful in kidnapping live soldiers, Hamas has resorted to snatching the bodies of Israeli troops, to be used as bargaining chips in negotiations that have failed so far.

Yet Meshaal, who has visited Gaza only once, conducts the war from luxurious hotel rooms in exile in Doha, Qatar.

From there, he insists that Hamas must not relent in its campaign against Israel, ordering rockets to be fired from Gaza even as the two sides commenced negotiations in Cairo.

http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/08/24/mossad-spy-who-saved-khaled-meshaals-life-urges-hamas-leader-to-end-gaza-war/

It seems that a long term ceasefire has been negotiated with the blockade on Gaza being eased  (but not removed). Crossings will be opened and will NOT be manned by Hamas operatives. The Palestinians also want an airport and shipping port for Gaza which seems only reasonable in this day and age. It will be interesting to see how much Israel bows to international pressure on their treatment of the Palestinians. If long term peace is to be maintained, Israel must step back and give the Palestinians the same level of freedom and prosperity that Israel enjoys.

The final word can be left to 327 Jewish survivors and descendants of victims of the Nazi genocide who signed an open letter to The New York Times this week:

"We unequivocally condemn the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza and the ongoing occupation and colonization of historic Palestine.

"We further condemn the United States for providing Israel with the funding to carry out the attack, and Western states more generally for using their diplomatic muscle to protect Israel from condemnation. Genocide begins with the silence of the world.

"We are alarmed by the extreme, racist dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli society, which has reached a fever-pitch. In Israel, politicians and pundits in The Times of Israel and The Jerusalem Post have called openly for genocide of Palestinians and right-wing Israelis are adopting Neo-Nazi insignia ...

"Furthermore, we are disgusted and outraged by... Israel’s wholesale effort to destroy Gaza and the murder of more than 2,000 Palestinians, including many hundreds of children. Nothing can justify bombing UN shelters, homes, hospitals and universities. Nothing can justify depriving people of electricity and water.

"We must raise our collective voices and use our collective power to bring about an end to all forms of racism, including the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people. We call for an immediate end to the siege against and blockade of Gaza. We call for the full economic, cultural and academic boycott of Israel. 'Never again' must mean NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE!"

But then, they're probably anti-Semitic.

 

http://smpalestine.com/2014/08/02/list-of-op-eds-calling-for-the-elimination-of-gaza/

source

I did not participate on the 19th that I can recall . There were so many posts and pics that seemed more about posts and pics than saying anything its hard to tell what happened on the 19th .

I came across this today . Seeing you post stuff from years ago as if its relevant to a current topic , up yours .

The more important or relevant info was the link to various op eds .

http://smpalestine.com/2014/08/02/list-of-op-eds-calling-for-the-elimination-of-gaza/

source

1. “My Outline for a Solution in Gaza”
Author: Moshe Feiglin, Member of Knesset
Publisher: Arutz Sheva
Summary: “Quiet” Gaza permanently by attacking whoever and wherever without any consideration.
Link to article

2. “When Genocide is Permissible”
Author: Yochanan Gordon
Publisher: The Times of Israel, The Five Towns Jewish Times
Summary: If genocide is the only action that will quiet Gaza once and for all, so be it.
Link to The Times of Israel article (taken down)
Link to The Five Towns Jewish Times article (taken down)
Link to reprint

3. “Into the fray: Why Gaza must go”
Author: Martin Sherman
Publisher: The Jerusalem Post
Summary: Depopulate the Gaza Strip, relocate only the ‘good Arabs’, and annex the territory.
Link to article

4. “1 Samuel 15:18″
Author: Irwin E. Blank
Publisher: The Times of Israel
Summary: There is a religious obligation to make “the war more horrific for the people of Gaza”, to destroy Gaza once and for all, so that Israel will never feel threatened ever again. After receiving criticism, the author published a clarification for giving the impression that he advocates genocide.
Link to article

5. “Hamas’s Civilian Death Strategy”
Author: Thane Rosenbaum
Publisher: The Wall Street Journal
Summary: The rules of war do not apply to Israel’s invasion because there are no civilians in Gaza, and all of them are legitimate if not necessary targets.
Link to article

6. “In Gaza, there is no such thing as ‘innocent civilians'”
Author: Giora Eiland
Publisher: Ynet News
Summary: Israel’s generosity in supplying food, fuel, and electricty to the enemy is absurd: Gaza must be dealt with swiftly and totally.
Link to article

7. Untitled
Author: Ayelet Shaked, Member of Knesset
Publisher: (Self-published on Facebook)
Summary: The Palestinian people as a whole are the enemy; they are snakes who deserve to die, every single one of them.
Link to reprint

Geo we are lucky in Aust. we can say and believe what we wish, even any propaganda  or lies that fall in with our beliefs, It ponders believing that amongst the ruins, in Gaza, people were cheering as if they had won a war, when they were the victims of Hamass,cheering among the ruins of their own misfortune. I am sure their are some Gazans, who do realise that a lasting peace and acceptance of Israel, would be beneficial to both sides, the alternative? continuing killing until maybe another world war? Where everyone will lose. IMO no one wins a war, one only lasts longer.

According to reports, in the Jordanian daily Al'ad, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and PA chief Mahmoud Abbas met last week in Amman. Diplomatic sources stated that the meeting occurred several days before the latest cease-fire between Israel and Hamas came into effect Tuesday.

Whilst the report did not specify what was discussed, it  did say that Abbas was expected to be an important factor in the upcoming indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas. The PA is expected to be given control of passages into and out of Gaza, either with Israeli or other third-party assistance, the PA will be in charge of ensuring that only approved items are allowed to enter Gaza.

The PA will be leading an international fund-raising campaign aimed at raising funds for reconstruction in Gaza. A deal between Israel and Hamas, if it comes to fruition, will require that international supervision be implemented to ensure that Hamas does not use the cash for terror purposes.

The Times of Israel on Friday removed an unacceptable blog post, entitled “When genocide is permissible.”

This blog post, which was described by our Ops & Blogs editor as both damnable and ignorant, blatantly breached The Times of Israel’s editorial guidelines.

We have discontinued the writer’s blog.

The Times of Israel maintains an open blog platform: Once we have accepted bloggers, we allow them to post their own items. This trust has rarely been abused. We are angry and appalled that it was in this case, and will take steps to prevent a recurrence.

We will not countenance blog posts that incite to violence or criminal acts.

(The blogger concerned has issued a public apology for his post.)

Read more: Times of Israel removes an unacceptable blog post | The Times of Israel http://www.timesofisrael.com/times-of-israel-removes-an-unacceptable-blog-post/#ixzz3BglnPzHT 

I think this article is extremely important in understanding how the media works.  It is written by a former AP journalist.  I realise many don't like cut and paste, to those just scroll past.

*HOW IMPORTANT IS THE ISRAEL STORY?*


Staffing is the best measure of the importance of a story to a particular news organization. When I was a correspondent at the AP, the agency had more than 40 staffers covering Israel and the Palestinian territories. That was significantly more news staff than the AP had in China, Russia, or India, or in all of the 50 countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined. It was higher than the total number of news-gathering employees in all the countries where the uprisings of the “ Arab Spring” eventually erupted.


To offer a sense of scale: Before the outbreak of the civil war in Syria, the permanent AP presence in that country consisted of a single regime-approved stringer. The AP’s editors believed, that is, that Syria’s importance was less than one-40th that of Israel. I don’t mean to pick on the AP—the agency is wholly average, which makes it useful as an example. The big players in the news business practice groupthink, and these staffing arrangements were reflected across the herd. Staffing levels in Israel have decreased somewhat since the Arab uprisings began, but remain high. And when Israel flares up, as it did this summer, reporters are often moved from deadlier conflicts. Israel still trumps nearly everything else.


The volume of press coverage that results, even when little is going on, gives this conflict a prominence compared to which its actual human toll is absurdly small. In all of 2013, for example, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict claimed 42 lives—that is, roughly the monthly homicide rate in the city of Chicago.
Jerusalem, internationally renowned as a city of conflict, had slightly fewer violent deaths per capita last year than Portland, Ore., one of America’s safer cities. In contrast, in three years the Syrian conflict has claimed an estimated
190,000 lives, or about 70,000 more than the number of people who have ever died in the Arab-Israeli conflict since it began a century ago.


News organizations have nonetheless decided that this conflict is more important than, for example, the more than 1,600 women murdered in Pakistan last year (271 after being raped and 193 of them burned alive), the ongoing erasure of Tibet by the Chinese Communist Party, the carnage in Congo (more than 5 million dead as of 2012) or the Central African Republic, and the drug wars in Mexico (death toll between 2006 and 2012: 60,000), let alone conflicts no one has ever heard of in obscure corners of India or Thailand. They believe Israel to be the most important story on earth, or very close.


*WHAT IS IMPORTANT ABOUT THE ISRAEL STORY, AND WHAT IS NOT*


A reporter working in the international press corps here understands quickly that what is important in the Israel-Palestinian story is Israel. If you follow mainstream coverage, you will find nearly no real analysis of Palestinian society or ideologies, profiles of armed Palestinian groups, or investigation of Palestinian government. Palestinians are not taken seriously as agents of their own fate. The West has decided that Palestinians should want a state alongside Israel, so that opinion is attributed to them as fact, though anyone who has spent time with actual Palestinians understands that things are (understandably, in my opinion) more complicated. Who they are and what they want is not
important: The story mandates that they exist as passive victims of the party that matters.


Corruption, for example, is a pressing concern for many Palestinians under the rule of the Palestinian Authority, but when I and another reporter once suggested an article on the subject, we were informed by the bureau chief that Palestinian corruption was “ not the story.” (Israeli corruption was, and we covered it at length.)


Israeli actions are analyzed and criticized, and every flaw in Israeli society is aggressively reported. In one seven-week period, from Nov. 8 to Dec. 16, 2011, I decided to count the stories coming out of our bureau on the various moral failings of Israeli society—proposed legislation meant to suppress the media, the rising influence of Orthodox Jews, unauthorized settlement outposts, gender segregation, and so forth. I counted 27 separate articles, an average of a story every two days. In a very conservative estimate, this seven-week tally was higher than the total number of significantly critical stories about Palestinian government and society, including the totalitarian Islamists of Hamas, that our bureau had published in the preceding three years.


The Hamas charter, for example, calls not just for Israel’s destruction but for the murder of Jews and blames Jews for engineering the French and Russian revolutions and both world wars; the charter was never mentioned in print when I was at the AP, though Hamas won a Palestinian national election and had become one of the region’s most important players. To draw the link with this summer’s
events: An observer might think Hamas’ decision in recent years to construct a military infrastructure beneath Gaza’s civilian infrastructure would be deemed newsworthy, if only because of what it meant about the way the next conflict would be fought and the cost to innocent people. But that is not the case. The Hamas emplacements were not important in themselves, and were therefore ignored.
What was important was the Israeli decision to attack them.


There has been much discussion recently of Hamas attempts to intimidate reporters. Any veteran of the press corps here knows the intimidation is real, and I saw it in action myself as an editor on the AP news desk. During the
2008-2009 Gaza fighting I personally erased a key detail—that Hamas fighters were dressed as civilians and being counted as civilians in the death toll—because of a threat to our reporter in Gaza. (The policy was then, and remains, not to inform readers that the story is censored unless the censorship is Israeli. Earlier this month, the AP’s Jerusalem news editor reported and submitted a story on Hamas intimidation; the story was shunted into deep freeze by his superiors and has not been published.)


But if critics imagine that journalists are clamoring to cover Hamas and are stymied by thugs and threats, it is generally not so. There are many low-risk ways to report Hamas actions, if the will is there: under bylines from Israel, under no byline, by citing Israeli sources. Reporters are resourceful when they want to be.


The fact is that Hamas intimidation is largely beside the point because the actions of Palestinians are beside the point: Most reporters in Gaza believe their job is to document violence directed by Israel at Palestinian civilians.
That is the essence of the Israel story. In addition, reporters are under deadline and often at risk, and many don’t speak the language and have only the most tenuous grip on what is going on. They are dependent on Palestinian colleagues and fixers who either fear Hamas, support Hamas, or both. Reporters don’t need Hamas enforcers to shoo them away from facts that muddy the simple story they have been sent to tell.


It is not coincidence that the few journalists who have documented Hamas fighters and rocket launches in civilian areas this summer were generally not, as you might expect, from the large news organizations with big and permanent Gaza operations. They were mostly scrappy, peripheral, and newly arrived players—a Finn, an Indian crew, a few others. These poor souls didn’t get the memo.


*WHAT ELSE ISN’T IMPORTANT?*


The fact that Israelis quite recently elected moderate governments that sought reconciliation with the Palestinians, and which were undermined by the Palestinians, is considered unimportant and rarely mentioned. These lacunae are often not oversights but a matter of policy. In early 2009, for example, two colleagues of mine obtained information that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had made a significant peace offer to the Palestinian Authority several months earlier, and that the Palestinians had deemed it insufficient. This had not been reported yet and it was—or should have been—one of the biggest stories of the year. The reporters obtained confirmation from both sides and one even saw a map, but the top editors at the bureau decided that they would not publish the story.


Some staffers were furious, but it didn’t help. Our narrative was that the Palestinians were moderate and the Israelis recalcitrant and increasingly extreme. Reporting the Olmert offer—like delving too deeply into the subject of Hamas—would make that narrative look like nonsense. And so we were instructed to ignore it, and did, for more than a year and a half.


This decision taught me a lesson that should be clear to consumers of the Israel
story: Many of the people deciding what you will read and see from here view their role not as explanatory but as political. Coverage is a weapon to be placed at the disposal of the side they like.


*HOW IS THE ISRAEL STORY FRAMED?*


The Israel story is framed in the same terms that have been in use since the early 1990s—the quest for a “ two-state solution.” It is accepted that the conflict is “ Israeli-Palestinian,” meaning that it is a conflict taking place on land that Israel controls—0.2 percent of the Arab world—in which Jews are a majority and Arabs a minority. The conflict is more accurately described as “ Israel-Arab,” or “ Jewish-Arab” —that is, a conflict between the 6 million Jews of Israel and 300 million Arabs in surrounding countries. (Perhaps “ Israel-Muslim” would be more accurate, to take into account the enmity of non-Arab states like Iran and Turkey, and, more broadly, 1 billion Muslims
worldwide.) This is the conflict that has been playing out in different forms for a century, before Israel existed, before Israel captured the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank, and before the term “ Palestinian” was in use.


The “ Israeli-Palestinian” framing allows the Jews, a tiny minority in the Middle East, to be depicted as the stronger party. It also includes the implicit assumption that if the Palestinian problem is somehow solved the conflict will be over, though no informed person today believes this to be true. This definition also allows the Israeli settlement project, which I believe is a serious moral and strategic error on Israel’s part, to be described not as what it is—one more destructive symptom of the conflict—but rather as its cause.


A knowledgeable observer of the Middle East cannot avoid the impression that the region is a volcano and that the lava is radical Islam, an ideology whose various incarnations are now shaping this part of the world. Israel is a tiny village on the slopes of the volcano. Hamas is the local representative of radical Islam and is openly dedicated to the eradication of the Jewish minority enclave in Israel, just as Hezbollah is the dominant representative of radical Islam in Lebanon, the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and so forth.


Hamas is not, as it freely admits, party to the effort to create a Palestinian state alongside Israel. It has different goals about which it is quite open and that are similar to those of the groups listed above. Since the mid 1990s, more than any other player, Hamas has destroyed the Israeli left, swayed moderate Israelis against territorial withdrawals, and buried the chances of a two-state compromise. That’s one accurate way to frame the story.


An observer might also legitimately frame the story through the lens of minorities in the Middle East, all of which are under intense pressure from
Islam: When minorities are helpless, their fate is that of the Yazidis or Christians of northern Iraq, as we have just seen, and when they are armed and organized they can fight back and survive, as in the case of the Jews and (we must hope) the Kurds.


There are, in other words, many different ways to see what is happening here.
Jerusalem is less than a day’s drive from Aleppo or Baghdad, and it should be clear to everyone that peace is pretty elusive in the Middle East even in places where Jews are absent. But reporters generally cannot see the Israel story in relation to anything else. Instead of describing Israel as one of the villages abutting the volcano, they describe Israel as the volcano.


The Israel story is framed to seem as if it has nothing to do with events nearby because the “ Israel” of international journalism does not exist in the same geo-political universe as Iraq, Syria, or Egypt. The Israel story is not a story about current events. It is about something else.


*THE OLD BLANK SCREEN*


For centuries, stateless Jews played the role of a lightning rod for ill will among the majority population. They were a symbol of things that were wrong. Did you want to make the point that greed was bad? Jews were greedy. Cowardice? Jews were cowardly. Were you a Communist? Jews were capitalists. Were you a capitalist? In that case, Jews were Communists. Moral failure was the essential trait of the Jew. It was their role in Christian tradition—the only reason European society knew or cared about them in the first place.


Like many Jews who grew up late in the 20th century in friendly Western cities, I dismissed such ideas as the feverish memories of my grandparents. One thing I have learned—and I’m not alone this summer—is that I was foolish to have done so. Today, people in the West tend to believe the ills of the age are racism, colonialism, and militarism. The world’s only Jewish country has done less harm than most countries on earth, and more good—and yet when people went looking for a country that would symbolize the sins of our new post-colonial, post-militaristic, post-ethnic dream-world, the country they chose was this one.


When the people responsible for explaining the world to the world, journalists, cover the Jews’ war as more worthy of attention than any other, when they portray the Jews of Israel as the party obviously in the wrong, when they omit all possible justifications for the Jews’ actions and obscure the true face of their enemies, what they are saying to their readers—whether they intend to or not—is that Jews are the worst people on earth. The Jews are a symbol of the evils that civilized people are taught from an early age to abhor. International press coverage has become a morality play starring a familiar villain.


Some readers might remember that Britain participated in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the fallout from which has now killed more than three times the number of people ever killed in the Israel-Arab conflict; yet in Britain, protesters furiously condemn Jewish militarism. White people in London and Paris whose parents not long ago had themselves fanned by dark people in the sitting rooms of Rangoon or Algiers condemn Jewish “ colonialism.” Americans who live in places called “ Manhattan” or “ Seattle” condemn Jews for displacing the native people of Palestine. Russian reporters condemn Israel’s brutal military tactics.
Belgian reporters condemn Israel’s treatment of Africans. When Israel opened a transportation service for Palestinian workers in the occupied West Bank a few years ago, American news consumers could read about Israel “ segregating buses.” And there are a lot of people in Europe, and not just in Germany, who enjoy hearing the Jews accused of genocide.


You don’t need to be a history professor, or a psychiatrist, to understand what’s going on. Having rehabilitated themselves against considerable odds in a minute corner of the earth, the descendants of powerless people who were pushed out of Europe and the Islamic Middle East have become what their grandparents were—the pool into which the world spits. The Jews of Israel are the screen onto which it has become socially acceptable to project the things you hate about yourself and your own country. The tool through which this psychological projection is executed is the international press.


*WHO CARES IF THE WORLD GETS THE ISRAEL STORY WRONG?*


Because a gap has opened here between the way things are and the way they are described, opinions are wrong and policies are wrong, and observers are regularly blindsided by events. Such things have happened before. In the years leading to the breakdown of Soviet Communism in 1991, as the Russia expert Leon Aron wrote in a 2011 essay for Foreign Policy, “ virtually no Western expert, scholar, official, or politician foresaw the impending collapse of the Soviet Union.” The empire had been rotting for years and the signs were there, but the people who were supposed to be seeing and reporting them failed and when the superpower imploded everyone was surprised.


And there was the Spanish civil war: “ Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which do not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. … I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what had happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines.’ “ That was George Orwell, writing in 1942.


Orwell did not step off an airplane in Catalonia, stand next to a Republican cannon, and have himself filmed while confidently repeating what everyone else was saying or describing what any fool could see: weaponry, rubble, bodies. He looked beyond the ideological fantasies of his peers and knew that what was important was not necessarily visible. Spain, he understood, was not really about Spain at all—it was about a clash of totalitarian systems, German and Russian. He knew he was witnessing a threat to European civilization, and he wrote that, and he was right.


Understanding what happened in Gaza this summer means understanding Hezbollah in Lebanon, the rise of the Sunni jihadis in Syria and Iraq, and the long tentacles of Iran. It requires figuring out why countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia now see themselves as closer to Israel than to Hamas. Above all, it requires us to understand what is clear to nearly everyone in the Middle East: The ascendant force in our part of the world is not democracy or modernity. It is rather an empowered strain of Islam that assumes different and sometimes conflicting forms, and that is willing to employ extreme violence in a quest to unite the region under its control and confront the West. Those who grasp this fact will be able to look around and connect the dots.


Israel is not an idea, a symbol of good or evil, or a litmus test for liberal opinion at dinner parties. It is a small country in a scary part of the world that is getting scarier. It should be reported as critically as any other place, and understood in context and in proportion. Israel is not one of the most important stories in the world, or even in the Middle East; whatever the outcome in this region in the next decade, it will have as much to do with Israel as World War II had to do with Spain. Israel is a speck on the map—a sideshow that happens to carry an unusual emotional charge.


Many in the West clearly prefer the old comfort of parsing the moral failings of Jews, and the familiar feeling of superiority this brings them, to confronting an unhappy and confusing reality. They may convince themselves that all of this is the Jews’ problem, and indeed the Jews’ fault. But journalists engage in these fantasies at the cost of their credibility and that of their profession.
And, as Orwell would tell us, the world entertains fantasies at its peril.


<http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/183033/israel-insider-guide>

I think this article is extremely important in understanding how the media works.  It is written by a former AP journalist.  I realise many don't like cut and paste, to those just scroll past.

*HOW IMPORTANT IS THE ISRAEL STORY?*


Staffing is the best measure of the importance of a story to a particular news organization. When I was a correspondent at the AP, the agency had more than 40 staffers covering Israel and the Palestinian territories. That was significantly more news staff than the AP had in China, Russia, or India, or in all of the 50 countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined. It was higher than the total number of news-gathering employees in all the countries where the uprisings of the “ Arab Spring” eventually erupted.


To offer a sense of scale: Before the outbreak of the civil war in Syria, the permanent AP presence in that country consisted of a single regime-approved stringer. The AP’s editors believed, that is, that Syria’s importance was less than one-40th that of Israel. I don’t mean to pick on the AP—the agency is wholly average, which makes it useful as an example. The big players in the news business practice groupthink, and these staffing arrangements were reflected across the herd. Staffing levels in Israel have decreased somewhat since the Arab uprisings began, but remain high. And when Israel flares up, as it did this summer, reporters are often moved from deadlier conflicts. Israel still trumps nearly everything else.


The volume of press coverage that results, even when little is going on, gives this conflict a prominence compared to which its actual human toll is absurdly small. In all of 2013, for example, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict claimed 42 lives—that is, roughly the monthly homicide rate in the city of Chicago.
Jerusalem, internationally renowned as a city of conflict, had slightly fewer violent deaths per capita last year than Portland, Ore., one of America’s safer cities. In contrast, in three years the Syrian conflict has claimed an estimated
190,000 lives, or about 70,000 more than the number of people who have ever died in the Arab-Israeli conflict since it began a century ago.


News organizations have nonetheless decided that this conflict is more important than, for example, the more than 1,600 women murdered in Pakistan last year (271 after being raped and 193 of them burned alive), the ongoing erasure of Tibet by the Chinese Communist Party, the carnage in Congo (more than 5 million dead as of 2012) or the Central African Republic, and the drug wars in Mexico (death toll between 2006 and 2012: 60,000), let alone conflicts no one has ever heard of in obscure corners of India or Thailand. They believe Israel to be the most important story on earth, or very close.


*WHAT IS IMPORTANT ABOUT THE ISRAEL STORY, AND WHAT IS NOT*


A reporter working in the international press corps here understands quickly that what is important in the Israel-Palestinian story is Israel. If you follow mainstream coverage, you will find nearly no real analysis of Palestinian society or ideologies, profiles of armed Palestinian groups, or investigation of Palestinian government. Palestinians are not taken seriously as agents of their own fate. The West has decided that Palestinians should want a state alongside Israel, so that opinion is attributed to them as fact, though anyone who has spent time with actual Palestinians understands that things are (understandably, in my opinion) more complicated. Who they are and what they want is not
important: The story mandates that they exist as passive victims of the party that matters.


Corruption, for example, is a pressing concern for many Palestinians under the rule of the Palestinian Authority, but when I and another reporter once suggested an article on the subject, we were informed by the bureau chief that Palestinian corruption was “ not the story.” (Israeli corruption was, and we covered it at length.)


Israeli actions are analyzed and criticized, and every flaw in Israeli society is aggressively reported. In one seven-week period, from Nov. 8 to Dec. 16, 2011, I decided to count the stories coming out of our bureau on the various moral failings of Israeli society—proposed legislation meant to suppress the media, the rising influence of Orthodox Jews, unauthorized settlement outposts, gender segregation, and so forth. I counted 27 separate articles, an average of a story every two days. In a very conservative estimate, this seven-week tally was higher than the total number of significantly critical stories about Palestinian government and society, including the totalitarian Islamists of Hamas, that our bureau had published in the preceding three years.


The Hamas charter, for example, calls not just for Israel’s destruction but for the murder of Jews and blames Jews for engineering the French and Russian revolutions and both world wars; the charter was never mentioned in print when I was at the AP, though Hamas won a Palestinian national election and had become one of the region’s most important players. To draw the link with this summer’s
events: An observer might think Hamas’ decision in recent years to construct a military infrastructure beneath Gaza’s civilian infrastructure would be deemed newsworthy, if only because of what it meant about the way the next conflict would be fought and the cost to innocent people. But that is not the case. The Hamas emplacements were not important in themselves, and were therefore ignored.
What was important was the Israeli decision to attack them.


There has been much discussion recently of Hamas attempts to intimidate reporters. Any veteran of the press corps here knows the intimidation is real, and I saw it in action myself as an editor on the AP news desk. During the
2008-2009 Gaza fighting I personally erased a key detail—that Hamas fighters were dressed as civilians and being counted as civilians in the death toll—because of a threat to our reporter in Gaza. (The policy was then, and remains, not to inform readers that the story is censored unless the censorship is Israeli. Earlier this month, the AP’s Jerusalem news editor reported and submitted a story on Hamas intimidation; the story was shunted into deep freeze by his superiors and has not been published.)


But if critics imagine that journalists are clamoring to cover Hamas and are stymied by thugs and threats, it is generally not so. There are many low-risk ways to report Hamas actions, if the will is there: under bylines from Israel, under no byline, by citing Israeli sources. Reporters are resourceful when they want to be.


The fact is that Hamas intimidation is largely beside the point because the actions of Palestinians are beside the point: Most reporters in Gaza believe their job is to document violence directed by Israel at Palestinian civilians.
That is the essence of the Israel story. In addition, reporters are under deadline and often at risk, and many don’t speak the language and have only the most tenuous grip on what is going on. They are dependent on Palestinian colleagues and fixers who either fear Hamas, support Hamas, or both. Reporters don’t need Hamas enforcers to shoo them away from facts that muddy the simple story they have been sent to tell.


It is not coincidence that the few journalists who have documented Hamas fighters and rocket launches in civilian areas this summer were generally not, as you might expect, from the large news organizations with big and permanent Gaza operations. They were mostly scrappy, peripheral, and newly arrived players—a Finn, an Indian crew, a few others. These poor souls didn’t get the memo.


*WHAT ELSE ISN’T IMPORTANT?*


The fact that Israelis quite recently elected moderate governments that sought reconciliation with the Palestinians, and which were undermined by the Palestinians, is considered unimportant and rarely mentioned. These lacunae are often not oversights but a matter of policy. In early 2009, for example, two colleagues of mine obtained information that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had made a significant peace offer to the Palestinian Authority several months earlier, and that the Palestinians had deemed it insufficient. This had not been reported yet and it was—or should have been—one of the biggest stories of the year. The reporters obtained confirmation from both sides and one even saw a map, but the top editors at the bureau decided that they would not publish the story.


Some staffers were furious, but it didn’t help. Our narrative was that the Palestinians were moderate and the Israelis recalcitrant and increasingly extreme. Reporting the Olmert offer—like delving too deeply into the subject of Hamas—would make that narrative look like nonsense. And so we were instructed to ignore it, and did, for more than a year and a half.


This decision taught me a lesson that should be clear to consumers of the Israel
story: Many of the people deciding what you will read and see from here view their role not as explanatory but as political. Coverage is a weapon to be placed at the disposal of the side they like.


*HOW IS THE ISRAEL STORY FRAMED?*


The Israel story is framed in the same terms that have been in use since the early 1990s—the quest for a “ two-state solution.” It is accepted that the conflict is “ Israeli-Palestinian,” meaning that it is a conflict taking place on land that Israel controls—0.2 percent of the Arab world—in which Jews are a majority and Arabs a minority. The conflict is more accurately described as “ Israel-Arab,” or “ Jewish-Arab” —that is, a conflict between the 6 million Jews of Israel and 300 million Arabs in surrounding countries. (Perhaps “ Israel-Muslim” would be more accurate, to take into account the enmity of non-Arab states like Iran and Turkey, and, more broadly, 1 billion Muslims
worldwide.) This is the conflict that has been playing out in different forms for a century, before Israel existed, before Israel captured the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank, and before the term “ Palestinian” was in use.


The “ Israeli-Palestinian” framing allows the Jews, a tiny minority in the Middle East, to be depicted as the stronger party. It also includes the implicit assumption that if the Palestinian problem is somehow solved the conflict will be over, though no informed person today believes this to be true. This definition also allows the Israeli settlement project, which I believe is a serious moral and strategic error on Israel’s part, to be described not as what it is—one more destructive symptom of the conflict—but rather as its cause.


A knowledgeable observer of the Middle East cannot avoid the impression that the region is a volcano and that the lava is radical Islam, an ideology whose various incarnations are now shaping this part of the world. Israel is a tiny village on the slopes of the volcano. Hamas is the local representative of radical Islam and is openly dedicated to the eradication of the Jewish minority enclave in Israel, just as Hezbollah is the dominant representative of radical Islam in Lebanon, the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and so forth.


Hamas is not, as it freely admits, party to the effort to create a Palestinian state alongside Israel. It has different goals about which it is quite open and that are similar to those of the groups listed above. Since the mid 1990s, more than any other player, Hamas has destroyed the Israeli left, swayed moderate Israelis against territorial withdrawals, and buried the chances of a two-state compromise. That’s one accurate way to frame the story.


An observer might also legitimately frame the story through the lens of minorities in the Middle East, all of which are under intense pressure from
Islam: When minorities are helpless, their fate is that of the Yazidis or Christians of northern Iraq, as we have just seen, and when they are armed and organized they can fight back and survive, as in the case of the Jews and (we must hope) the Kurds.


There are, in other words, many different ways to see what is happening here.
Jerusalem is less than a day’s drive from Aleppo or Baghdad, and it should be clear to everyone that peace is pretty elusive in the Middle East even in places where Jews are absent. But reporters generally cannot see the Israel story in relation to anything else. Instead of describing Israel as one of the villages abutting the volcano, they describe Israel as the volcano.


The Israel story is framed to seem as if it has nothing to do with events nearby because the “ Israel” of international journalism does not exist in the same geo-political universe as Iraq, Syria, or Egypt. The Israel story is not a story about current events. It is about something else.


*THE OLD BLANK SCREEN*


For centuries, stateless Jews played the role of a lightning rod for ill will among the majority population. They were a symbol of things that were wrong. Did you want to make the point that greed was bad? Jews were greedy. Cowardice? Jews were cowardly. Were you a Communist? Jews were capitalists. Were you a capitalist? In that case, Jews were Communists. Moral failure was the essential trait of the Jew. It was their role in Christian tradition—the only reason European society knew or cared about them in the first place.


Like many Jews who grew up late in the 20th century in friendly Western cities, I dismissed such ideas as the feverish memories of my grandparents. One thing I have learned—and I’m not alone this summer—is that I was foolish to have done so. Today, people in the West tend to believe the ills of the age are racism, colonialism, and militarism. The world’s only Jewish country has done less harm than most countries on earth, and more good—and yet when people went looking for a country that would symbolize the sins of our new post-colonial, post-militaristic, post-ethnic dream-world, the country they chose was this one.


When the people responsible for explaining the world to the world, journalists, cover the Jews’ war as more worthy of attention than any other, when they portray the Jews of Israel as the party obviously in the wrong, when they omit all possible justifications for the Jews’ actions and obscure the true face of their enemies, what they are saying to their readers—whether they intend to or not—is that Jews are the worst people on earth. The Jews are a symbol of the evils that civilized people are taught from an early age to abhor. International press coverage has become a morality play starring a familiar villain.


Some readers might remember that Britain participated in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the fallout from which has now killed more than three times the number of people ever killed in the Israel-Arab conflict; yet in Britain, protesters furiously condemn Jewish militarism. White people in London and Paris whose parents not long ago had themselves fanned by dark people in the sitting rooms of Rangoon or Algiers condemn Jewish “ colonialism.” Americans who live in places called “ Manhattan” or “ Seattle” condemn Jews for displacing the native people of Palestine. Russian reporters condemn Israel’s brutal military tactics.
Belgian reporters condemn Israel’s treatment of Africans. When Israel opened a transportation service for Palestinian workers in the occupied West Bank a few years ago, American news consumers could read about Israel “ segregating buses.” And there are a lot of people in Europe, and not just in Germany, who enjoy hearing the Jews accused of genocide.


You don’t need to be a history professor, or a psychiatrist, to understand what’s going on. Having rehabilitated themselves against considerable odds in a minute corner of the earth, the descendants of powerless people who were pushed out of Europe and the Islamic Middle East have become what their grandparents were—the pool into which the world spits. The Jews of Israel are the screen onto which it has become socially acceptable to project the things you hate about yourself and your own country. The tool through which this psychological projection is executed is the international press.


*WHO CARES IF THE WORLD GETS THE ISRAEL STORY WRONG?*


Because a gap has opened here between the way things are and the way they are described, opinions are wrong and policies are wrong, and observers are regularly blindsided by events. Such things have happened before. In the years leading to the breakdown of Soviet Communism in 1991, as the Russia expert Leon Aron wrote in a 2011 essay for Foreign Policy, “ virtually no Western expert, scholar, official, or politician foresaw the impending collapse of the Soviet Union.” The empire had been rotting for years and the signs were there, but the people who were supposed to be seeing and reporting them failed and when the superpower imploded everyone was surprised.


And there was the Spanish civil war: “ Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which do not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. … I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what had happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines.’ “ That was George Orwell, writing in 1942.


Orwell did not step off an airplane in Catalonia, stand next to a Republican cannon, and have himself filmed while confidently repeating what everyone else was saying or describing what any fool could see: weaponry, rubble, bodies. He looked beyond the ideological fantasies of his peers and knew that what was important was not necessarily visible. Spain, he understood, was not really about Spain at all—it was about a clash of totalitarian systems, German and Russian. He knew he was witnessing a threat to European civilization, and he wrote that, and he was right.


Understanding what happened in Gaza this summer means understanding Hezbollah in Lebanon, the rise of the Sunni jihadis in Syria and Iraq, and the long tentacles of Iran. It requires figuring out why countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia now see themselves as closer to Israel than to Hamas. Above all, it requires us to understand what is clear to nearly everyone in the Middle East: The ascendant force in our part of the world is not democracy or modernity. It is rather an empowered strain of Islam that assumes different and sometimes conflicting forms, and that is willing to employ extreme violence in a quest to unite the region under its control and confront the West. Those who grasp this fact will be able to look around and connect the dots.


Israel is not an idea, a symbol of good or evil, or a litmus test for liberal opinion at dinner parties. It is a small country in a scary part of the world that is getting scarier. It should be reported as critically as any other place, and understood in context and in proportion. Israel is not one of the most important stories in the world, or even in the Middle East; whatever the outcome in this region in the next decade, it will have as much to do with Israel as World War II had to do with Spain. Israel is a speck on the map—a sideshow that happens to carry an unusual emotional charge.


Many in the West clearly prefer the old comfort of parsing the moral failings of Jews, and the familiar feeling of superiority this brings them, to confronting an unhappy and confusing reality. They may convince themselves that all of this is the Jews’ problem, and indeed the Jews’ fault. But journalists engage in these fantasies at the cost of their credibility and that of their profession.
And, as Orwell would tell us, the world entertains fantasies at its peril.


<http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/183033/israel-insider-guide>

I apologise for duplicating the above article.