Melanie Phillips
Melanie Phillips Substack, July 7, 2023
“While any BBC apology is rare, this was wholly inadequate for such a malicious incident. The BBC’s reporting on Israel and the Palestinians is not only consistently distorted but actively promotes hatred of Israel and the Jews who support it.”
Among the media’s customary Israel-bashers, reporting on Israel’s military operation this week against terrorist enclaves in the city of Jenin was predictably atrocious.
Jenin had become a hub of deadly terrorism, responsible for the murder of 31 Israelis in 2022 and 24 so far this year. Almost half the inhabitants of Jenin belong to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). In 2023, more than 50 shooting attacks emanated from Jenin. Recently, two rockets were launched from there towards Israel. During the two-day operation, the IDF uncovered bomb-making laboratories, a homemade rocket launcher, explosives, weapons and military gear. Yet The New York Times saluted Palestinian terrorism as “an ethos of defiance” and described Jenin admiringly as having “a long legacy as a bastion of armed struggle”.
Other media outlets misrepresented Israel’s response to murderous terrorism as wanton aggression. They did so through systematic decontextualisation, having largely ignored the growing toll of Israeli terrorist victims and the attacks that Israeli security forces thwart almost daily. The day after the launch of the IDF operation, a car-ramming and stabbing attack took place in Tel Aviv in which at least nine people were injured and a pregnant woman lost her baby.
The usual suspects in the media instantly misrepresented this as an all-too predictable “revenge” attack in a dismal cycle of violence. But there is no “cycle of violence”. There are unending attempts to murder Israelis and there is the Israeli attempt to deter further attacks. Moreover, there is a fundamental difference between the Palestinians’ deliberate attempts to murder Israeli civilians and the enormous care the IDF takes to avoid civilian deaths. The IDF reported that all 12 of the Palestinians killed in the Jenin operation were combatants. In such a densely populated area, where terrorist caches and operation rooms are deliberately situated next to schools and hospitals, causing no civilian deaths in such an intense raid was an extraordinary achievement.
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