Media underreporting Palestinian deaths from Israeli

Thursday, Jan. 29, a Palestinian detonates a shrapnel-packed explosive on a crowded… Thursday, Jan. 29, a Palestinian detonates a shrapnel-packed explosive on a crowded Jerusalem bus. He kills 10, plus himself. He wounds 50 more.

Even more tragic than this reprehensible act is the fact that, as wrong as it is, it is dwarfed by Israeli crimes.

As the BBC reported — apparently, foreign media outlets try to give context — at least 2,600 Palestinians and 875 Israelis have been killed since the beginning of the second Palestinian Intifada — Arabic for “uprising” — in September 2000. For the math-impaired, this means that Palestinian deaths — at least 439 of which were victims younger than 18, according to Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem — outnumber Israeli deaths three to one.

If this sounds new, thank the press.

According to a recent study of Middle East coverage in the San Jose Mercury News — a representative part of that intractable U.S. liberal media — “the killing of an Israeli was over 19 times more likely to show up in a front-page headline than the killing of a Palestinian.” Nor was the paper likely to mention who’s footing the bill — only 1.1 percent of articles mentioned U.S. aid to Israel. Similar figures exist for the San Francisco Chronicle.

This may explain why only 12 percent of respondents in an August 2002 poll correctly identified Israel as “mainly to blame for the violence.”

Those of us concerned with reality may also be interested in a larger view of human rights in the Occupied Territories.

With all the subtlety of a G Unit album, Israel is building a “security fence,” which, as even the hawkish New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman says, “is apparently part of a broader [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon plan to unilaterally create an interim Palestinian state in about 50 percent of the West Bank and all of Gaza, and leave Israel with the rest.”

This apartheid wall’s role as a blatant land grab notwithstanding, Amnesty International notes that it is “having devastating economic and social consequences on the daily lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, separating families and communities from each other and from their land and water — their most crucial assets,” and leaving Palestinians “trapped into enclaves and cantons, unable to have any semblance of a normal life.”

The list of abuses goes on, from Israeli restrictions on Palestinian movement that have “crippled the Palestinian economy” (over two-thirds of Gaza Strip residents now live in poverty), to the “war crime” of the destruction of more than 4,000 Palestinian homes in the last three years.

Lest we operate under the delusion that this constitutes yet another instance of a faraway people who suffer through no fault of our own, a glance at the downright insulting U.S.-brokered “peace process” is in order.

The United States, furnishing Israel with around $3 billion each year in military aid, has single-handedly rejected dozens of U.N. Security Council resolutions on the conflict that are accepted virtually unanimously throughout the world.

Instead, the United States has supported plans that, as Amnesty notes, have failed to “address the key human rights issues.” Such plans, adds Jeff Halper — who is, as the Guardian notes, “regularly called in by the U.S. Embassy to brief visiting American officials” — are part of a greater strategy for “a two-state solution based on a bantustan, along the lines of those South Africa tried to create during the apartheid era. They will call it a country, but it won’t be a country. It will be a ghetto.” — a ghetto made possible by our tax money, voting habits and silence.

The fate — and the blood — of the Palestinian people lies in our hands.

To preempt accusations of anti-Semitism, Kevin would like to say that only people with strong fascist tendencies equate the criticism of a government with the criticism of a religion. E-mail him at kbf1@pitt.edu.