U.S. news on Israelis' awareness of their government's cataclysmic war on Gaza now ranges from mainstream Israeli media "rarely focus[ing]" on soaring civilian Palestinian deaths and the Strip's widespread destruction — suggesting media imposition of widespread public ignorance — to "most Israelis seem to be aware" of soaring civilian Palestinian deaths and the Strip's widespread destruction.
On occasion this sort of distinctly hither-and-yon reporting is coupled in one report, as in The Times story on all but a news blackout and countervailing Israeli awareness. After reading for months the virtually homogenous versions of Israeli ignorance, particularly those of The Times', 10 days ago my responsibly informed self wrote with an ignorance that "most Israelis seem to" lack.
To wit, "I'm rather certain that a majority of the more than nine million Israelis would take strong exception to their government's bloodiest of genocidal campaigns in Gaza, if only their news media would report it."
I also responsibly corroborated if only with this Times passage: "The Israeli news media has paid scant attention to" the 274 dead Palestinians — children, in the dozens — resulting from the Israel Defense Forces' 8 June hostage-rescue operation, that being but one massacre paid scant attention by Israeli news media.
Two weeks later the paper reiterated its assessment. "Many Israelis have remained in a dark place." I trust your bewilderment at what followed is much as mine was, and that my usage of followed is nearly as bewildering as, in fact, what followed — for its mere two paragraphs' proximity to "remain[ing] in a dark place" essentially rendered it superimposed on the darkness: 87% of Jewish Israelis have seen illuminating "pictures or videos of the destruction in Gaza."
I would have been embarrassed to do so, but not The Times when writing its in-tandem reports on Israeli darkness and Israeli enlightenment. The Big Apple's Grey Lady even linked to its speculator back-flipping inconsistency. The 87% stat came from a nonpartisan mid-April Israeli Democracy Institute's poll.
I disclose here with no little mortification that my research staff isn't quite as populated as The Times'. I'm clueless as to the paper's researcher number dedicated to Palestine-Israel's daily top-headlining "events." It does however strike me that perhaps one of the number should have landed on the then-two-month-aged poll sometime pert-near its birth.
The fact digger's discovery might well have relieved the paper's myriad reporters from writing day upon day about Israelis' general obliviousness to their government's leveling of Gaza and mass slaughter of Gazans.
Observed the pollsters: "It is commonly claimed that Israelis support the continuation of the fighting in Gaza because they are not exposed to pictures of the destruction and suffering there." They then hastened to note Jewish respondents' 87% awareness of destruction and suffering.
American journalists might defensively rebut the profession's monthslong negligence with: Well yeah, sure, informed Israelis have seen extraneous, gory "pictures and videos" — but we've reported only on mainstream Israeli media's paltry coverage of the gore.
And that would be the wrong play. Its rationale overlooks the much earlier finding that among informed Jews, almost half "have seen the destruction in Gaza in the Israeli media, while only a small minority have done so via the foreign media."
If you regret my belaboring this subject, your sentiment is perhaps justifiable. On the other hand, I repeat that responsible commentary often calls for respectable support of its contentions, which leads to this additional note: Had such support been a bit more respectable, I wouldn't have squandered your time with my belief in majority Israelis strongly objecting to their leaders' Gaza policies — if their media had only reported the ghastly outcomes.
With all that said, the revelation of Israelis' near-universal knowledge of Palestinians' steady annihilation — the majority, women, children, the infirm and elderly — shatters our heretofore rather comforting myth of fundamental Israeli humanity. Instead we're now informed on their inhumane indifference to, or misanthropy toward, Palestinian suffering and death.
And that's the most distressing and critical aftershock within these 658 words.
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