Thursday, March 15, 2012

Fire and the media


Fire and the media


Dror Eydar


For many, not just for me, the photo that graced the front page of the daily Yedioth Aharonoth on Monday represented one of the two political (and cultural and spiritual, in my opinion) viewpoints within Israeli society today.

Three days after tensions flared in southern Israel, the paper that once ruled supreme in Israel ran its version of the fabricated Muhammad al-Dura photo: a young Beersheba girl cowering on her knees and elbows, her hands covering her head. Perhaps an expression of terror is also perceptible on her face. Opposite the girl, a police officer kneels down and looks at her with sympathy. They are both shielded by a low wall.

The headline reads: “Children under fire.” A teaser headline above the photo prompts readers: “Children write from the bomb shelters: The sprint to the bomb shelter is very scary, the siren is even scarier.” Unbelievable – this is the image that Yedioth chose to imprint in its readers’ memories of the war in the south.

Haaretz, the political mirror image of Yedioth Aharonot, chose, as usual, to cast doubt on the necessity of assassinating the latest ticking time bomb in Gaza, because the “price” of paralyzing the entire southern part of Israel may not be “worth it.”

Last Friday, Haaretz was kind enough to offer us another helping of the defeatist musings penned by author David Grossman. According to Grossman, Israel must not attack Iran because it is not clear whether Iran’s leaders will follow through on their threats. (When will it become clear? When they drop the bomb?)

As a rule, the Israeli media likes to complain about the pornography of the different reality television shows but offers mainly tearjerkers about suffering children – this time in the south. How lucky that we invented Iron Dome – now we can minimize the offensives and show more restraint – as the various Grossmans would have it.

This is the legacy of a post-colonialist West, which abandoned the quest for truth and the facts long ago. The news desks are commanded to bring stories about victims. The main thing is to talk about the suffering, no matter who the sufferer is or what the reason for the suffering is. As far as the radical Left is concerned, both in Israel and around the world, the state of Israel has no right to fight or go on the offensive – we are fated to be crucified forever and it is wrong for us to want to get down from the cross and fight back.

The other political viewpoint is this: We are situated in a region that will never accept us. Therefore, while reaching out for real peace and truth (and not the pale musings of the Grossmans), we should hit back sevenfold for every attack on our citizens. The recurring reality teaches us that this is the only effective course of action around here. Iron Dome is not the end of the story, but only a means of relocating the fighting to the enemy’s court.

Meanwhile, we will continue doing what we have become experts at since returning to Zion: building, planting, developing and blossoming. History demonstrates that, thank God, we’ve succeeded pretty well with this double task.


http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1553

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