I am aware that many readers disagree with the very premise of this article, and I shall answer them in two very brief points before I move to the article:
a. I am talking about the average world citizen. The few yet vocal 'Palestine supporters' are not average - first, they can generally place the West Bank on a map. And they're younger and generally more activist overall. And, most importantly, they're a minority.
and
b. If the world was more sympathetic to the Palestinians, the conflict would be long over.
Now I'll return to my main argument, if you please. And relax, it's a non-accusative explanation, I said..
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Yes, there are biased news sources, pressure and advocacy organisations, and tons of prejudices and beliefs people have. That we all have.
I’m not discarding them. But there’s a simpler and deeper explanation:
The world can relate to the Israeli plight. It just makes more sense. It’s simpler.
Let me explain.
Imagine citizen Lambda in a random developed country. The Netherlands, or Australia, or something.
On the evening news is the story of a woman who has lost a child, Alpha, in a suicide bombing in the market in Jerusalem. He was 17 and had a cute girlfriend and was happy, etc etc. Woman is crying. Interviews with the family. Childhood photos. Scenes from the hospital. The bombing location shown repeatedly, ambulances, testimonies from bystanders, images of bits of broken cars.
It’s a simple, unidimensional, unequivocal tragedy. Mrs. Lambda, eating her dinner, will go ‘owww, poor baby, and his poor mother’. She’ll also remember that her next door neighbour went to Israel last summer and showed her those photos of Jerusalem. “I’d better tell her about this”, she thinks.
Now also on the news is the story of 17-year old boy Beta killed during a demonstration against a wall in some godforsaken village somewhere. He was shot in the head by a rubber bullet. There are images of people walking on a hill, of kids with flags, of boys with their faces covered with keffiyehs throwing a stone or two. Then plenty of smoke, some people running, soldiers filmed from afar with their big transparent anti-riot shields, and the voice-over talking about a wall, and land annexation, and that the boy’s family’s lands have been confiscated, and that his older sister was killed by an Israeli army incursion in 2003.
A big mess.
Mrs. Lambda, now at her dessert, will go ‘what the heck are those crazy people doing to each other’ and then ‘kids, don’t watch that, it’s too violent, damn news broadcast!’ and proceed to switch the television off.
Add to this the fact that the first story will be on the news for the following 6 days, with more and more details, Alpha’s teacher saying how great a student he was, his heartbroken grandma sick of sadness, details of his funeral, his mother crying at the cemetery, the occasional photo of the perpetrator of the attack.
During that time the story from the West Bank will be long forgotten because probably nine others would’ve been killed since. Beta’s name was rapidly forgotten - those Arabs with their complicated names that foreign newscasters never get right anyway - was rapidly followed by a series of other nameless people, with more or less messy stories, of checkpoints and confiscations and house demolitions.
We'll never know who killed him, of course. His name was briefly back two days later when the news showed a demonstration of scary-looking people carrying Beta’s dead body and waving flags, people shouting things, with the voice-over ‘Hamas vowed revenge for the death of Beta, who was killed two days earlier in a demonstration in Nil’in’.
And on its Sunday edition, a newspaper will devote a full page to the Middle East conflict; they'll split it in two, in an effort for 'fairness'.
On the top half will be a beautiful photo of a smiling Alpha with very detailed coverage of the events.
On the bottom half, they couldn’t go with a photo of Beta because the resolution of the photo his mother had wasn’t good enough, so they’ll go with a photo of people queuing up at a checkpoint or of the demo where Beta was killed, with some coverage of the events of the death of the other nine but it’s too much info so they’ll just talk about ‘series of events’ and ‘clashes with the Israeli Defense Forces’ leaving ‘several dead’.
We cannot blame the media for not devoting the same particular attention to individual Palestinian stories: their job is to put the new stuff on the 8 pm news broadcast. Unfortunately, there are news in Palestine every 6 hours.
That's why the average person abroad knows the name of Gilad Shalit, but will fail to name a single one of the 10,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.
And which is also why things like occupation, land confiscations, blockades, settlements, daily humiliations and discrimination aren’t news: there’s nothing new about them, going on for decades upon decades.
It really isn’t anyone’s fault - except, you know, the Palestinians because too many of them die and we can’t keep track, and being subject to multi-faceted violence and coercion, rendering them a troublesome nameless mass that we, as outside observers, simply cannot relate to.
