23 February 2018
Israelis, according to The
New York Times, carry out “nationalist” attacks against Palestinian civilians;
Palestinians commit “terrorism” against Israeli civilians.
So indicates correspondent
Isabel Kershner this week in the “newspaper of record.”
In a “Fact Check” piece,
Kershner references Baruch Goldstein’s attack
on Palestinian civilians in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron. She writes,
“There have also been occasional nationalist attacks against Palestinians by
armed Israelis, such as the massacre perpetrated by Baruch Goldstein in Hebron
in 1994 with an army-issued automatic rifle.”
The words “nationalist” and
“massacre” are appropriate, but can Israeli settlers not commit “terrorism”?
The absence of the word speaks to the fact that The New York Times regards
some forms of violence as more acceptable than others, particularly the
violence of a colonizing occupying force and its accompanying settlers against
an occupied population.
The violence and intimidation
brought to bear by that settler-colonial force is consistently described in
less menacing terms than the response from those subjugated. This article is a
clear example of such thinking.
Kershner reinforces this
message throughout. “Palestinian gunmen carried out deadly terrorist attacks on
a school in Maalot, near the border with Lebanon, in 1974 and at a rabbinical
seminary in 2008,” she writes.
Kershner does not explain why
this Palestinian violence is terrorism, but the Israeli violence is not.
Readers are forced to conclude that terrorism is something Palestinians do, but
Israelis simply act out of “nationalist” belief. These beliefs, evidently,
shelter Israel from charges of terrorism.
Routine Israeli military gun violence
against Palestinian civilians is not mentioned. Nor is there a mention of the
impunity for Israeli soldiers responsible for the deaths of Palestinian school
children in even the most egregious cases such as that of Iman al-Hams, which
was reported by The
New York Times at the time. She posed no threat, was repeatedly shot at
close range and yet the Israeli officer who killed her was cleared.
Similar impunity for police
officers and “stand your ground” vigilantes in the US is not cited, though
racial bias pervades the legal systems of both countries.
Misleading
Elsewhere in the article,
Kershner writes: “Guns are not seen as a hobby, but as a tool for self-defense,
and if necessary, to help protect others from terrorism. And while Israel has
sophisticated policing and intelligence aimed at stopping terrorism, it has
little experience with the kinds of civilian mass shootings that have become the
source of anguished debate in the United States.”
But this is grossly
misleading. Israel does have abundant experience with “civilian mass
shootings.” It is just that it is Palestinian civilians doing the dying –
whether meted out by Israeli
settlers as in the case of Goldstein or by Israeli
soldiers.
Strikingly, Kershner
reinforces the double standard when she recalls a Palestinian truck
attack against Israeli soldiers. She notes, “Last year, a tour guide
was among those who opened fire at a Palestinian driver who plowed his truck
into a group of soldiers in Jerusalem.”
Kershner referred in that
story to the incident constituting “terrorism.” She wrote of the January 2017
attack: “Israel buried its latest terrorism victims on Monday, the day after
they were run down by a Palestinian man in a truck, enveloping them in the
country’s familiar outpouring of love for its service members.”
The Electronic Intifada
highlighted the flawed reporting guidelines at the newspaper at the time and
quoted Jodi Rudoren, a former Jerusalem bureau chief and at the time deputy
international editor, as commenting,
“A truck ramming into a crowd felt like terrorism.”
An Israeli plane dropping
bombs on Palestinian civilians, however, is not described as terrorism.
Perspective
Where one sits makes an
enormous difference in what one regards as terrorism. The newspaper has yet to
figure this out – or has ceded the language to right-wing organizations that
insist one form of violence is terrorism and the other self-defense.
Anybody who has been in the
occupied West Bank and confronted by an Israeli settler with a drawn weapon is
apt to have a very different perspective on what constitutes legitimate resort
to “self-defense.” From that perspective it looks less like self-defense than
intimidation and the sensation felt is apt to be one of terror.
The Electronic Intifada’s Ali
Abunimah last month pointed out how the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has
similarly resorted to the “nationalistic” motives euphemism.
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