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May 10th, 2021 
Awake Goy It comes as no surprise that the U.S. (and British) mainstream media are ignoring or distorting the big and growing Palestinian resistance to evictions in the occupied Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. But there is a sign of hope, as the New York Times correspondent did sneak some fairness into his report.
The mainstream media’s favorite word to describe the Palestinian uprising is “clashes.” Whether you consulted the Washington Post, the Guardian or NBC News, “both-sides-ism” was the dominant theme. Even the BBC fell into the misleading “clashes” narrative. The National Public Radio website was even more dishonest: “[Palestinian] worshippers threw rocks and chairs at police, who fired rubber-coated bullets and stun grenades.” The implication, although unstated, is cause and effect; Palestinians actually started it by provoking those Israeli police.
Contrast NPR’s slipperiness with this site’s report by Yumna Patel, which accurately headlined the exact same event: “Hundreds injured as Israeli forces attack Palestinian worshippers.” Her view was corroborated in the Israeli paper Haaretz, in a detailed article that explained how “Israeli police fan the flames at Temple Mount instead of putting them out.”
That Haaretz report also included the kind of graphic details the mainstream mostly ignored. Reporter Nir Hasson described a video circulating on social media:
. . . a young [Israeli] Border Police officer approaches a group of Palestinians; he threatens them with a stun grenade and then casually rolls it, like a bowling ball, between their legs. The grenade explodes between a wheelchair and a young girl, who runs away, panicked.
The mainstream media has also failed to adequately report on the Israeli extreme right and its provocations. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post said that the Jewish supremacist (and new member of Israel’s parliament) Itamar Ben-Gvir was at the demonstrations, but then inexplicably did not quote him. A widely circulated video on Twitter shows Ben-Gvir taunting a Palestinian who had been wounded by a bullet at a previous protest: “I’m only sorry the bullet didn’t go into your head.”
But the mainstream’s media biggest failure is that it mostly stuck to its (distorted) reporting on the rising violence without sufficiently explaining that expanding Israeli apartheid is the prime cause of the crisis. Israeli “settlers” claim they have legal title to the disputed homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood because Jews owned them before the 1948 war for Israeli independence/Nakba. But under Israel’s apartheid system Palestinians are not allowed to appeal in Israeli courts for the homes they or their ancestors owned before they were expelled from pre-1967 Israel, residences to which in many cases Palestinian families still have keys. (One such home, in West Jerusalem, actually houses the New York Times’s bureau chief.) What’s more, seizing the Palestinian homes in Sheikh Jarrah is just the latest step in Israel’s effort to expel Palestinians from the occupied territories, a concerted and planned ethnic cleansing campaign that has marched on for decades.
The New York Times’s Patrick Kingsley’s report was a partial exception to the mainstream’s dismal record on Sheikh Jarrah. He used a couple of tactics to smuggle some truths into his article. Back in the 1970s, journalists at Mexico’s leading paper, Excelsior, knew they couldn’t put anything that would disturb the government high up in their articles. So they placed their important truths lower down, after the obligatory pro-government opening paragraphs. Discerning Mexicans learned to skip straight to the inside pages to find the real news.
Kingsley used the same tactic. If you read his report all the way down to paragraph 39, you will learn that
Israeli law allows Jews to reclaim ownership of land they vacated in 1948, but denies Palestinians the right to reclaim the same properties they fled from in the same war.
Better late than never. Kingsley then used another method that this site has been recommending for years; instead of covering up Israel’s far rightists, interview them to give readers a true picture of what the country is like today. Kingsley uses Aryeh King, a “settler” leader who is the deputy mayor of Jerusalem. The Israeli government has dismissed the Sheikh Jarrah uprising as a mere dispute over real estate. But Kingsley lets King tell the truth:
“Of course,” King says, seizing the Sheikh Jarrah homes is part of the wider colonization strategy, “the way to secure the future of Jerusalem as a Jewish capital for the Jewish people.”
People like Aryeh King are not shy about telling you their real views, as this site has discovered. If Kingsley keeps putting them in his reports, his readers will have a far better idea about where Israel/Palestine are going.
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