In a bomb shelter, a young boy gazes at a bird perched on his wrist, while another boy chuckles contently from his green plastic chair in the corner of the room.
Beneath that is a shocking close-up of a ten-year-old Gazan murdered in a drone attack. Her eyes are shut, her mouth is slightly ajar with the tips of her crooked newly grown adult teeth visible, and her small head is wrapped in a graying bandage. A woman’s delicate hand strokes her chin and two palms clutch her cheeks.
Photo series like this from the New York Times Magazine convey the destruction of the normalcy of Gazan life in a tragic and pity-invoking manner. The contrast of Palestinian funerals to the colorful and seemingly bearable Israeli realities elicits further horror from viewers, and presents the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an attack on the innocent Gazans.
In many other areas of media, the news is reported in ways that elicit recurring sympathy toward the Gazans, especially during the war this summer.
On the radio: Radio stations periodically reported the casualties suffered by both Israel and Gaza. They mentioned that the number of Israelis killed was under one hundred, with a small number of them civilians, and they subsequently emphasized that the death toll of the Palestinians was over one thousand, stressing that a high percentage of them are civilians. However, they failed to report that Hamas hides in highly populated civilian areas, and that Israel is protected by the Iron Dome, which prevents civilian casualties despite the constant firing of rockets at civilian areas.
Additionally, even though far less Israelis were killed, the attempts to kill Israelis were constant. Sirens sounded every few minutes in the south, day and night. A Stern student who was in Israel during the beginning of the war this summer recalled that she was on a train passing through Tel Aviv, when a siren began to blast. Everyone in the area was forced to race for shelter. “That was a real shock,” she said, “and also strange to see an entire city completely disrupted for half an hour because of a rocket attack.”
Another time, a siren awoke her and her family at two in the morning. “We had to wake up all my younger siblings and run to the ma’amad, and then count and make sure that we didn’t leave anyone upstairs. That gave us a real taste of what the south went through every night.” Overall, she pointed out, “even though there weren’t many casualties from the rockets, the sirens themselves caused real disruption and anxiety.”
On television: On August 26, CNN showed footage of fiery explosions amidst homes in Gaza. On the Israeli side, they showed children and parents who were forced to evacuate their homes due to rocket fire, smiling as they jubilantly boarded a bus to Jerusalem. Though the facts were accurate, the video portrayed the Israeli situation, specifically citizens being uprooted from their unsafe communities, as miniscule and tolerable, whereas the images of bombs erupting in Gaza seemed far more severe.
Generally, media reports relay information about both Israel and Gaza, but they tend to be geared toward arousing sympathy for the Palestinians, rather than revealing the truth of their terrorizing goals. And when they air reports about Israel, it is typically accompanied by footage of Gaza or by mention of other reasons to believe that Israel is the avenger.
Tova Kwiat, a Stern sophomore who interned for an organization called Endowment for Middle East Truth, the Capitol Hill think tank, worked this summer to reverse those effects.
“The whole point of my internship was to inform congressmen and their staffers the truth about the Middle East. So often the media talks about Israel and half of what it is saying is wrong,” she notes. “Some people have no clue. They follow the media and therefore think poorly of Israel.”
In addition to working on Capitol Hill, Tova also attended an Israel rally as well as a pro-Israel conference, among other events. At both events, protestors who have a skewed view of Israel because of the biased media came to shout that Israel is the murderer.
“They are saying it as if the Gazans are just sitting there, minding their own business and suddenly being killed,” Tova observed. But the truth is, Tova remarked, that Israel does “all it can to avoid injuries and death.”
In contrast to the protestors, those that are not yet completely swayed by the media are willing to listen to what Israel has to say.
“During the war we had the ambassador to Israel come give an information session about what was really going in Israel. It was well attended,” Tova recalled. “People are interested in hearing the truth.”
The bias of the media also makes it difficult to ascertain which information is accurate and which is not.
Rabbi Hidary, professor of Jewish History as well as other Judaic studies at Stern College, advises students “to approach current events the same way we approach ancient history. Read multiple sources from various points of view, try to distinguish fact from opinion, and use your best judgment.”