Reporting on Israel and Palestine.

 

In his second  mock “Annual  Awards” in his “Strike” newsletter commentator Ian Dunt names “Unholy” as Podcast of the year and comments on the . . .”  grotesque trend” in the UK’s reporting of the Israel Palestine conflict in that:

 “… Israeli lives are personalised. They are made real. But Palestinian lives are anonymised, turned into rubble along with their homes.”

Equally of note to me is the disproportionate  quantity of time and space devoted to the suffering of  Israelis compared to that of the Palestinians. Last week, after the shooting on Bondi Beach in Australia, in which 15 people were killed and others injured, including a ten year old girl,  the Guardian devoted five pages , including the front one, to the incident on Monday, seven on Tuesday and still two on the Friday.

On the situation in Gaza, the Google search engine seems to have stopped counting after the end of November, but by then there had been around 300 Palestinian deaths since the October cease fire (repeat, since the cease fire).  Some of them were probably ten year old children, or even younger, but I don’t remember much mention of such details.  One possible explanation  for this, as Dunt points out, is that the Israeli government bars independent journalists from entering and reporting from Gaza.

However, that does not explain the disproportionate amount of coverage.  In  his Christmas Day broadcast there are clips of King Charles visiting Heaton Park Synagogue  in Manchester, where he visited survivors of the October terror attack, and of floral tributes  commemorating the victims of the Bondi Beach attack, but nothing relating to Gaza. 

In her sermon the Bishop of London (++Canterbury designate) offers wise counsel on our national “conversation” in immigration, which divides us when our common humanity should unite us,  but does not stray beyond such domestic  matters.

It is the Archbishop of York, ++ Stephen Cottrell,  who, at least according to the Guardian’s report, highlights the injustices and indignities daily heaped upon the Palestinians in the rest of Palestine, though he does not appear to mention the   death still rained on Gaza.  Cottrell speaks of being subject to intimidation by the Israeli militias, being stopped at check points and being forbidden  to visit Palestinians in the West Bank.

 A letter in yesterday’s Guardian (27^th December) from a Rev’d David Haslam, points  out that the report of the Israeli government ‘s “green light “ given for the establishment of 19 new Jewish settlements in the West Bank, clearly a brazen flouting of international law, was reported simply in an “In Brief” paragraph. (22 December)

King Charles spoke of “peace through forgiveness.”  

 Terrible injustices have been heaped on both the Jewish people and the Palestinians. The persecution of Jews goes back centuries, culminating in the Holocaust in Europe in the twentieth.  Yet the victors of the Second World War have ignored the second part of the Balfour Declaration, that in looking favourably on a  “homeland” for Jews in Palestine “ . . .nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine. ” Thus, in what appears to be a fit of hubris, They gave way what was not theirs to give.

If there is ever to be  “peace through forgiveness” in this benighted area, then one step towards it must surely be that  the wrongs done to  and committed by   both parties should be fairly and equally reported.