On Tuesday I cited a 26 May-1 June poll conducted by nonpartisan, West Bank-based think tank Policy and Survey Research (PSR). Yesterday I wrote on the results of an April poll conducted by the Israeli Democracy Institute. The gist of yesterday's post was correcting our misimpression of Israeli Jews' unawareness of their leadership's atrocities in Gaza "because they are not exposed to pictures of the destruction and suffering there," as the pollsters wrote.
I withheld one of two key observations made in the institute's poll. The first, unwithheld, summarily destroyed our mythical belief in the aggressor's civilian population's unawareness of the atrocities, which, I noted, had been of some comfort to us. The destruction unfolded in my poll-derived notation, "87% of Jewish Israelis have seen illuminating "pictures or videos of the destruction in Gaza."
In short, Israelis' knowledge of Gaza's apocalypse is nearly universal. The above percentage desolated our cherished myth, regularly reinforced by American reporting such as a Times story published only four days ago that characterized "many Israelis" as still living "in a dark place," a reference to their unrelenting exposure to domestic media's powerful war-coverage emphasis on soldiers' funerals and videos of 7 October.
The quoted darkness I used as a metaphor for another Times passage asserting that the Israeli news media is paying little attention to the horrors of Gaza. The passage is in error, as is the totality of our mainstream journalism's reinforcing the notion of Israelis' broad-based ignorance of the horrors.
For now all of it hobbles strikingly contradicted and severely wounded by The Times' casual, swift 13-word acknowledgement of Israeli Jews — 87% of them — having "seen at least a few pictures or videos of the destruction in Gaza." The paper extracted the percentage, as I did yesterday, from the Israeli Democracy Institute's poll published three-months earlier.
There's more. In yesterday's post I included, as The Times did not in its reporting, that "among informed Jews" — those who've seen Gaza's airstrike-demolition and slaughter in pictures or videos — "almost half 'have seen the destruction in Gaza in the Israeli media.'"
In a snappy turnabout, American reporting on what I metaphorically called Israeli Jews' darkness has vertiginously scurried to almost 90% having seen "illuminating 'pictures or videos,'" with half, as noted, seeing Gaza's leveling and bloodshed in domestic media. The institute's pollsters added that "only a small minority have done so via the foreign media."
Recall from my second paragraph that yesterday I withheld one of the poll's key observations; the first, the 87%, I cited, withheld was the paired "half." I did so not from negligence but a trifle of surreptitiousness, for I wanted both to stand in comparison to the helpful PSR poll of 26 May-1 June. The comparison I found withering of Israelis' pervasively indifferent, unevolving consciousness of their leadership's extraordinary inhumanity and Palestinians' unlike consciousness derived from what I'll further call "The Informed Effect." PSR:
As we found in the previous two polls, three and six months ago, almost all Palestinians [97%] believe that Israel is committing war crimes today while [believing] that Hamas is not committing war crimes.
Only one in ten Palestinians have seen videos showing atrocities committed by Hamas. Those who watched the [7 Oct.] videos are about fifteen times more likely ... to believe that Hamas fighters committed atrocities on October 7. [Emphasis mine.]
The Informed Effect appears to be powerful in Palestinian society — what's left of it as civilization — while but gravely anemic among Israeli Jews.
PSR also makes this observation. "It is useful in this context to mention that Al Jazeera is the most watched [70%] TV news station in Palestine." By that, PSR meant both enclaves. But "due to the current war conditions," virtually all of the 70% are West Bankers, since Gaza's communication centers have been systematically blown up by the Israeli military, leaving only The Strip's inhabitants dwelling in Israelis' darkness.
From that we conclude that whatever the percentage of Israel's war news coverage devoted as well to Gazans' pain, resulting in Israeli indifference, Al Jazeera's percentage devoted to Israelis' pain and Palestinians' enlightenment has been honorably honest.
My commentary's final upshot is that Israelis at large have adopted our Trumpers' keenest ability — an awareness of Trumpism's ghoulish reality in fact does apply to the cult's vast majority, but whenever triggered on their warships' decks it promptly gets thrown overboard in favor of blessed obliviousness.
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