Yitzhak Laor wrote this article during the recent re-destruction of Rafah for the London Review of Books (published May 20). Laor is a novelist and poet who lives in Tel Aviv. I really like the last paragraph:
Hebron is hidden. Rafah is entirely cut off. The Israeli army didn’t kill the children in Rafah intentionally, it will be said. Who will remind us that for three months now, the army has been killing unarmed Palestinians demonstrating peacefully along the Wall that’s going up in the West Bank?
Israeli families of dead soldiers or dead civilians get a follow-up, even on foreign TV, for they had a future ahead of them before they died. Did the Palestinian children who died in Rafah have any future? No. So they are dead, and it will be over in a few days. Palestinians don’t get a follow-up, not even on foreign TV. Maybe there’ll be a documentary movie, followed by some public discussion about whether to allow the movie to be publicly screened, or whether it’s another sign of ‘the new anti-semitism’. Nothing will be followed up. The Israeli army is secure. It calls itself the Israel Defence Force.
The LRB seems to have published some good stuff lately (It published Paul Farmer’s important article, “Who Removed Aristide“). Laor’s article touches on a very important point about media, I think.
If you look at a site like ‘News Insider’, you realize that a dedicated person (in this case group of people) can learn a tremendous amount from reading the mainstream media. You have to read carefully and critically, you have to have a good memory, be able to compare one set of lies to another, and above all I think you have to know what you’re looking for. That is, you have to understand how the media works, what they are trying to present and what they are trying to obscure. In a way, you already have to know the story before you can interpret what the media provides.
The question is then, if the media provides so much of this information, why are we so misinformed? I spoke at a media conference once, presenting figures and analyses from groups like FAIR on media bias. Someone got up at the end and said: “I read the papers and know everything you said. So maybe the papers aren’t so bad, and you’re trying to make them sound bad because you have an agenda.”
I do have an agenda, it’s true. I have no desire to hide it. But my agenda doesn’t include distorting the facts. In a sense, the gentleman was right: the papers aren’t that bad. One reporter at the conference, from USA Today, said the problem was simply that no one reads. Her paper, the biggest in the country, has a circulation of a few million (in a country of a few hundred milion). The NYT has a circulation of about a million. Those of us who spew out thousands of words on the internet are in some cases trying to reach a subset of those who read.
But whether you read or watch TV or listen to the radio for information, the problem is not usually that things never come up. It is, as Laor identifies in his article, a question of ‘follow-up’. And for follow-up, it has to be the alternative media…
(links should be opening in a new window, thanks to the suggestion of a certain person who maintains fromoccupiedpalestine.org, a very important site in case you haven’t seen it)
