The media is twisting the knife into Israel over the 'lone wolf intifada'

How is Israel supposed to trust the international media when it keeps reporting Palestinian terrorists as if they were innocent victims?

Sometimes, the neutralisation of the attackers – presented as civilians – is presented as the story, rather than the attack itself. When Palestinian terrorists stabbed two Israeli women in a mini-market, and were shot before they could stab more, The Guardian ran: “Two Palestinians shot dead after knife attack in West Bank shop”. Aggressor and victim are often inverted: when four Palestinians attempted to stab Israelis in separate incidents, and were stopped with lethal force, USA Today ran “Israelis kill 4 Palestinians as violence surges”. And sometimes, headlines draw false moral equivalence between terrorist and victim: the Irish Times ran the scandalous “3 Palestinians, 1 Israeli Die in West Bank Incidents”, when the “three Palestinians” had stabbed Israelis, and were killed committing terrorist attacks, and the “one Israeli” woman had had been killed in a terrorist attack.

Embarrassingly, on some occasions, even the Arab media produced more accurate headlines than their Western counterparts. Whereas Al Arabiya reported accurately that “Palestinian girl, 13, shot dead after trying to stab Israeli guard”, the New York Times ran the laconically deceitful “Palestinian Girl, 13, Shot Dead by Israeli Guard”. Readers could reasonably assume that the guard had executed an innocent girl in cold blood, instead of defending his own life when an assailant ran at him with a lethal weapon after ignoring calls to stop. Just a week ago, two Palestinians opened fire on Israeli soldiers and were killed in return fire; another lunged at a border police officer with a knife, and was killed trying. The Guardian abased itself with the headline “Three Palestinian Teenagers Shot Dead on West Bank”. Even Al Jazeera had the basic decency to add, perfunctorily, the words “after alleged attacks”.

 

The framing of foiled Palestinian terror attacks as instances of malicious Israeli executions has been so ludicrous as to be practically blood-libellous. The straw that broke the camel’s back, provoking the Knesset to summon the foreign press corps for a discussion, was a CBS headline reading, “3 Palestinians killed as daily violence grinds on”. The three Palestinians in question had just killed a 19-year-old border policewoman and wounded another, and were shot by police before they could perpetrate a bigger attack with the knives, explosives and firearms they carried.

Israelis look at the high terror alert in Europe and the US, and wonder why the world doesn’t “get” it. We wonder whether editors are so craven for click-bait, and know that dead Palestinians sell, that they are willing to sacrifice their integrity. And we also suspect, with good reason, that we are witnessing conscious and subconscious attempts to force the story to fit a preconceived narrative of “bad” Israelis versus “good” Palestinians, even when the facts beg to tell another story entirely.

 

The result is increasing disillusionment in Israel with Western states as reasonable actors, or unbiased mediators, when these are the fallacious and arguably malicious impressions that their publics are fed against Israel. Moreover, as illustrated by the recent antisemitism scandal engulfing Oxford, hatred towards Israel is liable to spill over into unambiguous hostility towards Jews: grossly misleading headlines of this nature, which create an unjustly negative image of Israel, recklessly nourish the campaign to demonise the Jewish state, thereby threatening to perpetuate this dynamic of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish animosity.

It has been difficult enough in Israel to endure this seemingly unending spate of attacks by knife-wielding Palestinian terrorists. We could really do quite well without newspaper editors twisting the knife as well.

Eylon Aslan-Levy is a British-Israeli writer and political commentator. He is a graduate of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.