Israel has waged war on Palestinians for decades.
That fact may come, I suspect, as a surprise to many people whose grasp of the world is shaped by their exclusive consumption of Western media.
The deep and lasting human consequences of Israel’s terrifying, perpetual war on Palestinians – prosecuted with indiscriminate cruelty by an occupying army and its de facto proxies, fanatical settler militias – have been plain for anyone willing or inclined to see, for generations.
Countless lives lost and maimed in body and spirit. Land and homes stolen. Livelihoods and ancient traditions destroyed. The exhausting cycle of having to rebuild, then watching all the promise and possibility turn, in an instant, to dust. The wholesale imprisonment of a people penned like cattle behind walls and barbed wire fences, where water and electricity, food and fuel, are switched on and off on a colonial power’s whim.
But, of course, much of the Western media won’t acknowledge these facts and outrages. That’s because many of the reporters and columnists now gripped by the latest eruption of murderous madness in Palestine and Israel have always interpreted events through a prism largely dictated by Israel – whether they are prepared to admit it or not.
In this myopic calculus, Israel is always the victim, never the perpetrator. Israel’s understanding of history matters; Palestinians’ reading not only of the past but of the present and the future too, does not count. And, perhaps most indecent of all, Israeli lives and deaths matter; Palestinian lives and deaths don’t.
Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations, made this point in a quiet, but persuasive address he delivered on Sunday to that apparently powerless body.
“History,” he said, “begins for some media and politicians when Israelis are killed. Our people have endured one deadly year after another”.
Further reading, click ;
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/10/10/get-this-straight-western-media-palestinians-arent-sub-human
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