Imbalancing Act

 Looking at the current crisis in Gaza, I find that its most striking characteristic is imbalance. First, there is the lack of parity between how most of the mainstream press portrays the Israeli Defense Force’s kidnappings of Palestinian civilians (which reflects the official Israeli line that they are “arresting terrorists’), and how it reports the Palestinian capture of members of the Israeli military, which in contrast is referred to as “illegitimate kidnappings of soldiers.” This disparity is evident in the international media coverage of the June 25 abduction of Corporal Gilad Shalit, a 19-year-old Israeli tank gunner, by three Palestinian militant groups.

The standard media treatment of any aggression against any Israeli target is to extricate it from the context in which it has occurred and ignore circumstances and tensions surrounding it. In this case, the multitude of Palestinian civilian casualties and deaths in the weeks preceding Shalit’s kidnapping is hardly mentioned. In this way, the average reader gets a foreshortened perspective of the story and is likely to view the young corporal as an innocent victim who merely happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In addition, many newspapers have also written several sensitive profiles of Shalit, enabling us to empathize with him and his family’s hope for his safe return. Because Shalit is also a French national; France has tried to intercede on his behalf by putting further pressure on the Palestinians. By comparison, coverage of the IDF’s killings of a Palestinian family of seven who were enjoying a picnic on the Gaza beach on June 9 quickly gave way to the official Israeli response that their deaths resulted from a mine planted by Hamas.

The second kind of imbalance is political. Palestinian groups holding Corporal Shalit are demanding the release of all Palestinian women and children prisoners in exchange for his return, but Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has refused all negotiations, defiantly declaring, “The government of Israel will not yield to the extortion of the Palestinian Authority and the Hamas government, which are led by murderous terrorist organizations…We will not conduct any negotiations on a prisoner release.”

The third kind of imbalance is military. Israel has responded to guerrilla actions with overwhelming force designed to crush the Palestinians’ infrastructure and terrify the population. In the first stage of an operation euphemistically dubbed “Summer Rains,” Israeli aircraft relentlessly pounded Gaza, targeting much of the Palestinian infrastructure and demolishing the main electric plant, leaving the majority Gaza residents without electricity. In its subsequent land invasion, Israeli tanks and armored vehicles invaded Beit Hanoun (in the Gaza Strip) and drove tens of thousands of Palestinians from their homes, further tightening the noose on the 1.3 million inhabitants living in what has become the worlds’ most densely populated area. As of today (July 7), the IDF has killed 27 Palestinians. One Israeli soldier has also died.

Continued on page 2: No balance, no peace... »