The second event was the death of an Israeli Druze soldier near Joseph’s Tomb in Shechem. This soldier, stationed to defend the Jewish enclave there, was attacked by a huge Arab mob intent on overrunning the yeshiva in the compound. He was shot in the neck and wounded. For four hours, he lay bleeding to death while the Palestinians refused to allow Israeli rescue teams to extricate him and possibly save his life. And the media outside Israel did not say a word or take a picture. No one cared.
What got even less mention in the media was the injury suffered by the son of Shechem’s Arab governor, and the fact that the Israelis themselves removed this boy for treatment at an Israeli hospital.
So there are two equations to be made here. First, if the world media truly valued the life of every child, or even of every Arab child – if the media really cared about more than the cynical exploitation of a child’s admittedly horrific death, then they would have also played up the heroism inherent in the rescue of the Arab child from Shechem. They would have lauded Israeli efforts to save him. They would have effected at least some balance in their coverage of the stories.
The second equation is that if the media were truly concerned about the value of human life – if they were truly intent on presenting a balanced picture of the conflict and fulfilling their mandate to their audience, the condemnation would have been leveled at the Arabs for allowing a soldier to die hopelessly while his rescuers were blocked from assisting him. And that condemnation would have been at least equal to the withering condemnation Israel suffered when the Arab boy was killed in Gaza.
But the reality is that morals play no part in media coverage of the Arab war against Israel. They never have. What rules the media’s coverage is a vast hatred of Israel for daring to survive when the world should have destroyed the Jews many times over.
A number of truths were laid bare this week. Yasser Arafat is not at all interested in peace. He is interested only in destroying the Jewish presence in the Jewish homeland. Ehud Barak doesn’t understand the meaning of the word “peace”, and neither do most in Israel. They continue to believe that peace is at hand simply because a certain process is labeled with that gloried word. The other truth of this week is that the media is more interested in vilifying Israel than it is in representing the truth to its audience.
Just in case the moral equations listed above are too difficult for some at the Associate Press or New York Times to comprehend, there was the picture of Tuvia Grossman. Grossman is an American Jewish yeshiva student who was riding in a taxi toward the Old City of Jerusalem last Friday. The car was stopped in front of a gas station by an Arab mob and Grossman was pulled out, beaten and stabbed, and seriously injured. An Israeli soldier nearby drove off the crowd. The picture shows the soldier with his baton raised in a threatening gesture, standing over Grossman and shouting, the gas station in the background.
The AP captioned the photo describing a Palestinian youth being beaten by the soldier on the Temple Mount. But anyone who has ever visited Jerusalem knows that there is no gas station at all in the Old City, much less atop the Temple Mount itself.
What emerges from the caption is that the AP, and every media outlet that ran the picture and caption, is prepared to falsify a story or a picture in order to convey the message that Israel is the villain.
The reality, however, is quite different. And only when the media acquires some morals will the rest of the world realize the real truth of the Arab war against Israel.
Copyright 2000. Yehuda Poch is a writer living in Israel. Reproduction in electronic or print format by permission only.
