Periods of Calm vs. Periods of Violence in Israel/Palestine

Michael Brown and Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada hightlight an all too common trend in the reporting of the Israel-Palestine conflict: Palestinians are killed, and nobody blinks an eye; Israelis are killed, and the media hops on the "renewed bloodshed" bandwagon. They write,

Many US media reports were quick to declare that two suicide bombings in Israel on September 18 and 19, in which eight Israelis were killed, had brought an end to a period of "calm" simply because there had been no similar attacks for six weeks and few Israelis had been victims of Palestinian violence.

In fact, the bombings came at the end of a particularly bloody period in which dozens of Palestinians, most of them unarmed civilians, and a large number of them children, had been killed and injured by Israeli occupation forces. In effect, the definition of "calm" or a "lull in violence" inherent in these reports is 'only Palestinians are being killed.'

...there is a widespread tendency in the US media to simply ignore or severely underplay violence when its victims are Palestinians, while focusing intensely on incidents when the victims are Israeli. One of the reasons for the disturbing and persistent phenomenon of devaluing Palestinian life and death, is a structural geographic bias - most US news organizations who have reporters on the ground base them in Tel Aviv or west Jerusalem, very far from the places where Palestinians are being killed and bombarded on a daily basis.

But these geographical basing decisions in themselves may reflect an underlying calculation that what happens to Israelis is inherently more important and newsworthy than anything else in the conflict. What it boils down to is that from the perspective of many in the US media, Israeli lives are just worth more than those of Palestinians.

Similar comments from me are here.