Israel as a half-full glass – in the Washington Post
Category: J.W.N. Exclusives
By MICHAEL D. EVANS
The Washington Post does its readers a disservice by publishing reports about Israel that lack balance and context. Israel’s behavior is constantly presented without relation to Palestinian behavior; its reaction to Palestinian actions is given without reference to the Palestinian actions that precipitated it.
 
In a recent article, for example, reporter Scott Wilson accused Israel of degrading the residents of the Gaza Strip to “beggar status.”  He neglected to inform Post readers that Gazans are going begging for a properly functioning government because they elected Hamas, which is committed to the destruction of Israel, as their leadership. Had Wilson chosen to write about the Israeli civilians of the northern Negev who are daily bombarded with Hamas rockets, he might have described them as being reduced to “beggar status” with regard to security from Palestinian terrorism.
 
At the beginning of December, the number of Kassam rockets and mortars fired at Israel by Palestinian terrorists in Gaza during 2007 hit the 2,000 mark – nearly double the number in 2006. Attacks and casualties increased steadily despite efforts to renew Israel-Palestinian peace talks, whose primary goal is solving the conflict by creating a sovereign Palestinian state. The escalation, it should be pointed out but seldom is in the Post, followed Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from all of Gaza and parts of the West Bank. Palestinian autonomy in Gaza has meant intensification in arms smuggling and the attacks this enables, a context that is not to be found in the Post.
 
The paper recently published another front page article supposedly describing the “isolation and exclusion” of Israel’s Arab citizens.  It depicts a young and successful Arab-Israeli couple, both professionals, whose application to join a new Jewish community in the Galilee was rejected. In response, they have filed suit against discrimination. Not coincidentally, Arab members of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, voting with the Jewish majority, have approved the construction of a new city in the Galilee for Arabs.

Leaving aside the curious fact that the Post chooses to single out and analyze ethnic inequalities within only one country in the world, Israel, it doesn’t do a very good job of it. The Post fails to note, for example, that following independence the Arab countries expelled all their Jews. This fact could reasonably be expected to lead the Post to observe that finding Arab and Jewish citizens living together in peace inside Israel is quite remarkable. And if an exclusive Jewish community votes not to admit an Arab couple, such discrimination is challenged in the High Court of Justice. The Post does not mention this, nor the fact that Jewish couples would also not be welcome in close-knit Arab communities.

The world tolerates discrimination against racial and religious minorities in countless countries without this being singled out on the front page of the Washington Post. The fact that Israeli Arab victims of discrimination have recourse through the courts and their democratically elected parliament means that they have it a lot better than in some European Community countries, not to mention the members of the Arab League.

Israeli Arabs have equal rights, serve in parliament and on the Supreme Court, have the highest per capita income and standard of living, and the lowest infant mortality rate of any Arab country. Do the few inequalities they may suffer rate the front page treatment that is not accorded worse discrimination in other countries? Not if balanced reporting is the issue, rather than badmouthing Israel.

The Post’s apparent bias also leads to a rather silly tendency to misinterpret facts. For example, Wilson bemoans the fact that “Arabs are excluded from military service” as if this is yet another example of discrimination. Arab citizens are excused from military service by their own request, so they would not be in the position of having to fight their own relatives. Arabs may perform non-military national service instead, and many do. Druze and Bedouin citizens do proudly serve in the Israel Defense Forces.

The Middle East is a tough neighborhood, and Israel has been defending its place in it not just for the past 60 years since independence, but for more than a century. Israelis deserve better consideration on its pages than to be cast as the default villain. One can only wonder how the Washington Post would have covered the story if French Canadian separatists had fired 2,000 rockets into New England during the past year.