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Eyeless in Gaza

By Colin Andersen - posted Wednesday, 5 July 2006


Predictably, just prior to Olmert's departure to Europe, the Israelis not only eliminated the head of the Palestinian security forces, but shelled the Gaza coast the day after, wiping out the Ghalya family.

And as for the "daily barrage of Palestinian rocket fire into Israel", UK reporter Donald Macintyre writes in The Independent (June 23, 2006), "Almost three times as many Palestinian civilians have been killed in Gaza in the past nine days as Israeli civilians in Sderot killed by Qassam rockets in the past five years".

Staying with the theme of supposed Israeli "restraint" in the face of the Palestinians' "senseless and provocative act", the VOM paints a portrait of an Israeli PM "tired of fighting" and "wanting a new partnership with its difficult neighbour". The fact the Palestinians are in the 38th year of a brutal and illegal Israeli occupation is glossed over by the weasel word "neighbour", to which has been added the qualifier "difficult", implying, absurdly, that an occupied people should somehow be in the business of making life more comfortable for the occupying power.

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That all-important, contextualising O-word, however, is simply not in the VOM's vocabulary. The VOM's war-weary Olmert is, however, a fiction. Even as his army ripped into Gaza, the real Olmert was using his platform at a “peace conference” in Jordan to attack Iran and arrogantly assert Israel's supposed historical rights to all of Palestine from the Mediterranean to the Jordan.

Exuding Olmertian arrogance the VOM, in reference to Israel's aerial destruction of Gaza's electricity supply, cynically opines that as the Gazans "light candles and try to cook without power they will perhaps recall the votes they cast in the January election". By which we can infer, if the penny still hasn't dropped, that Corporal Shalit is really no more than Israel's excuse to wreak regime change in the occupied Palestinian territories.

If the VOM seemed like an echo from the Israeli Foreign Ministry, the Voice of Fairfax (VOF), as of writing, has been strangely mute - with one fascinating exception. Sydney's massive anti-IR laws rally in Blacktown may have been consigned to page five of the previous issue, but the capture and execution (following Israel's re-invasion of Gaza) of settler Eliyahu Asheri by Palestinian resistance fighters in the Israeli-occupied West Bank was given front page treatment.

In “A son lost, a faith rocked”, Harriet Alexander painted a glowing portrait of Eliyahu's father, Yitro, who had moved from Adelaide to the illegal West Bank colony of Itamar 20 years ago. Although we learned that Yitro was "a person of deep abiding faith", a "Torah scribe" and an "active member of his community which had suffered several attacks in recent years", in line with the unwritten law of “Don't mention the occupation”, we learnt nothing whatever about the significance of his dwelling place, Itamar.

As tragic as the murder of all civilians in this conflict is, would it not have added to our understanding, if the Herald had provided some contextual data? Such as the fact Itamar, like all Israeli settlements, is illegal under international law; that it is home to members of the extremist Kach movement committed to the outright expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland and the destruction of Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosques; that Kach was banned by the Israeli Government following the Hebron massacre in 1994; and that its inhabitants have a long history of engaging in pogroms against the defenceless Palestinian inhabitants of Yanoun and Awata?

It seems that, whether it's VOM or VOF, when it comes to clarity on the subject of Israel and Palestine, the print media in this country is about as reliable as the old Soviet PRAVDA.

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About the Author

Colin Andersen is a retired teacher with a long-term interest in the Middle East. He is the Sydney Director of Deir Yassin Remembered, an international non-sectarian network dedicated to keeping alive the memory of the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948-49, and in particular its most infamous component, the wholesale massacre of the inhabitants of the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin by Zionist forces in April 1948.

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