The War Israel Cannot Win The New York Times devoted a good part of its front page Friday to photographs of children, mostly Palestinian, killed in the latest Israel-Hamas war. “They Were Only Children,” reads the headline, over an article (and, online, a multimedia presentation) providing capsule biographies of 67 children under the age 18 who were killed in Gaza and two children killed in Israel. (“Suheib loved birds. Yahya liked riding his bike. Osama was known for his style. And Abdurrahman dreamed of going to Turkey.”)
It’s a powerful, heartbreaking feature, a callback to The Times’ groundbreaking series of profiles of Sept. 11 victims, “Portraits of Grief.” That series earned the newspaper a Pulitzer and created a new journalistic ritual for memorializing the victims of conflict, shootings and natural disasters.
It is a human tendency to forget the lives lived, ended and upended behind the cold statistics. It’s a Jewish imperative, too, to insist that every human being is created in the image of God, and each individual has infinite value.
And it’s the work of journalists to break through the numbness that sets in in the face of suffering. Sometimes it is a single image or story that shatters this indifference. Photos of the lifeless body of a young Syrian boy drowned while attempting to reach the Greek island of Kos briefly changed the conversation around Europe’s refugee crisis in 2015. “Portraits of Grief” features are statements that, yes, all lives matter, and it is one of journalism’s jobs to remind you of that.
And yet The Times’ feature on the children killed in the latest conflict didn’t feel like journalism. It felt like “op-art” or agitprop. It seems intended to bypass the arguments of who is right and wrong and go straight for the kishkes.
And let’s face it: The optics are terrible for Israel. The feature is a sort of front page “Guernica” that suggests there is only one way to think about this latest war. “Disproportionality” is an argument that Israel cannot win. Supporters of the Palestinian cause certainly took it that way: Tweet after tweet in response has praised The Times with some version of “This is not a number.”
A lot of Jewish readers will assume this is another example of The Times’ bias against Israel. (Remember, many pro-Palestinian activists think exactly the opposite: that The Times’ reports on the Mideast from Israel’s perspective and treats Palestinians as objects, not subjects.)
Put that aside for a moment. This week, I should note, The Times’ popular “The Daily” podcast had an important segment on Hamas. The podcast reported how Hamas provokes Israel into “battles it knows it can’t win” in part because they know that their citizens – their children -- will suffer the brunt of the fighting and media coverage will be devastating for Israel.
The article about the child victims also notes that “Israel blames Hamas for the high civilian death toll in Gaza because the group fires rockets and conducts military operations from civilian areas.” There is also a mention that two children in Gaza were killed when a rocket fired by “militants in Gaza slammed into the ground next to their home.”
But I wonder how many readers will register these facts while scanning the children’s faces.
My discomfort with the feature is that it is simultaneously powerful and, forgive me, banal, like the old Vietnam-era poster, “War is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things." It takes sides, even if the paper's editors deny it. And I’ll even say this: There are times when journalists should take sides. From Bosnia to Myanmar to Tulsa, the evidence of guilt is sometimes so overwhelming that the perpetrators must be shown for what they are. I just think it is a travesty to slot the Israel-Hamas conflict into that same black-and-white category. If Hamas is killing far fewer children than Israel, it is not for want of trying. If Gaza’s children “are the most vulnerable,” it is because their own leaders are not doing anything to make them any safer. If Israel’s blockade is causing suffering, Hamas’ behavior demonstrates why Israel would be crazy to lift it.
And yet the feature is a good reflection of public opinion during and after the latest round of fighting. Israel lost the social media battle in part because of heart-tugging images of Palestinian suffering – shared not by The New York Times, but by individual Instagrammers, influencers and no doubt the occasional bot. Israel’s ritualistic condemnations of Hamas and assertions that it goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid civilian casualties were no match for a single video of a crying Palestinian child.
So instead of condemning The Times for bias, supporters of Israel might want to consider what its coverage of the latest fighting means: We are living in a new media moment. Israel is engaged in war of emotions that it might not be able to win. It is possible to be right and still lose. American Jews will write their angry letters to The New York Times. But it is up to Israel – a proud, innovative, resilient and powerful country -- to change the story.
Appearances
Join me and author Sam Apple to learn about his new book, “Ravenous: Otto Warburg, the Nazis, and the Search for the Cancer-Diet Connection,” in a live streaming event from My Jewish Learning, Thursday, June 3 at 1:00 pm. I wrote about Sam’s fascinating book, about a gay scientist from a Jewish family who studied cancer under the indulgent watch of the Nazis, here.
Photo, top: The front page of the May 28, 2021 issue of The New York Times featured images of children killed in the recent Israel-Hamas conflict. (nyt.com) Thanks for reading. Reach me at editor@jewishweek.org. Follow me on Twitter, and don’t forget to forward this newsletter to your friends.
|