Today Ethan Bronner of the New York Times reports on his trip into Gaza. You see in recent months embarrassing reports have come out that have suggested that perhaps poverty in Gaza was not nearly as bad as advertised by the likes of Lauren Booth.
But the broader point many of these advocates are making — that the poverty of Gaza is often misconstrued, willfully or inadvertently — is correct. The despair here is not that of Haiti or Somalia. It is a misery of dependence, immobility and hopelessness, not of grinding want. The flotilla movement is not about material aid; it is about Palestinian freedom and defiance of Israeli power.
Actually, that’s not reporting that’s advocating.
If the reports of poverty in Gaza were refuted by only the instance of this mall, maybe the Times and Bronner would have a point. But numerous pictures from Gaza have shown markets full of products for sale.
My Right Word observes the degree to which blogging forced this article.
But Israel Matzav notes that there’s a false narrative that Bronner doesn’t address.
If you go to Turkey or most of the Arab countries you will be told that Gazans are starving to death, an image that the Hamas leadership has promoted. Maybe if they told the truth – that no one is starving and that the Israeli blockade is aimed at stopping weapons and not food and at obtaining the release of kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit – it might be possible to talk about ways to ease the blockade.
Daled Amos points out the missing element to the story:
Why does Bronner, who bewails the modesty of the Gaza Mall, make no mention of the malls in the West Bank? The answer is: the same reason that he makes no mention of the Kassam rockets still being fired at Israel from Gaza. The West Bank is not firing rockets at Israel, but Gaza is. The situation in Gaza is the result of the terrorist government of Hamas, not the defensive measures of Israel.
Brian of London (at Israelly Cool!) mocks the Times’s newfound focus:
The New York Times has, finally, figured out how to respond to the scenes of abject and desperate non-poverty in Gaza as Dave has ably documented and discussed (a Taste of “Concentration Camp†Gaza series and Gaza mall posts, for example).
So they’ve switched tack… it’s all about humiliation. It reads like a PR piece written by a foreign lobbyist firm. I thought you needed a license in the US to be a foreign lobbyist?
Elder of Ziyon is outlines the hypocrisy involved:
However, the fact is that both the media and the anti-Israel activists have used the “starvation” meme as a convenient fiction to focus the world on demonizing Israel. Their current re-framing to change it instead to “dependence, immobility and hopelessness” is nothing more than an attempt to not look like fools and not admit that they have been lying to the world for years.
If they cared about Palestinian Arab “hopelessness” they would be spending much more time in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. They would be interviewing Mahmoud Abbas about why he has yet to dismantle a single “refugee” camp in the West Bank – all of which are under Palestinian Arab control.
No, these hypocritical reporters are not interested in revealing truths about how Gazans live. They have been dining in fine restaurants in Gaza and staying in fancy hotels – they knew the truth for years. They are equally not interested in Palestinian Arab suffering and deprivation – because by any measure, the Arabs in camps in Lebanon envy the Gazans. These hypocrites hammer away at Gaza for years because they want to blame Israel for Gaza’s problems, nothing more. They’ll occasionally leaven their prodigious Gaza output with an article about Hamas abuses of Gazans, but their focus has been unrelentingly on Israel.
The unraveling of the “humanitarian crisis” meme just shows how deeply the mainstream media has been in bed with NGOs and anti-Israel activists and how easily they parrot false statistics and claims.
Any way you look at it, the media has been lying to you about Gaza for years. Why should you believe them now?
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
