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Fun with chronology: misreporting the Israeli assault on Gaza - Opinion - Al Jazeera English
The New York Times' rendering of recent violence on the border between Gaza and Israel is a shining example of the chronological sleights of hand that have come to characterise mainstream reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Isabel Kershner's December 24 dispatch, "Killing and Retaliation at Gaza-Israel Border Continue Violent Cycle", sets up the timeline as follows:
The seeming cause-and-effect relationship is emphasised by two photographs appearing side by side at the top of the article. On the left: the body of the sniper victim. On the right: the body of the three-year-old Palestinian girl cast as unintended collateral damage in the photograph's caption: "A shell killed her as Israel, responding to the sniper attack, struck targets it associated with militant groups."
Buried in a paragraph in the second half of the article, however, is the following detail: "On Friday, Israeli forces fatally shot a Palestinian man who approached the border fence separating Gaza from Israel."
As it turns out, the Friday in question occurred four days prior to the Tuesday sniper fire and military assault.
The Israeli daily Haaretz adds further specifics to the manipulated chronology:
Tampering with timelines
This is not the first instance in which the Times has deployed a truncated timeline in order to excuse Israeli attacks on Gaza.
When over 100 civilians were slaughtered in November 2012, the paper supplied the following explanation for the start of the conflict:
This particular Saturday was November 10. The disingenuousness of the "retaliation" alibi was exposed by Max Ajl in an essay for Jacobin magazine:
As for previous bloody interruptions of the holiday season, these include Operation Cast Lead - the 2008-09 Israeli initiative that exterminated approximately 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them civilians.
Advertised in the media as retaliation for Hamas' alleged breaking of the ceasefire then in effect, Cast Lead was in fact a retaliation against Hamas' retaliation against Israel's breaking of the ceasefire. A relatively unadulterated cause-and-effect timeline appears in a Guardian article dated November 5, 2008:
Back to the beginning
Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz - proponent of extrajudicial killings, torture, and variousstrategies for increasing the suffering of Palestinians - has taken issue with an alleged insistence in the media "on describing… events in Gaza as 'a cycle of violence'".
Writing in Haaretz during the November 2012 Israeli assault, Dershowitz appeared to have entered into a competition for least relevant analogy ever: "It would be as if the media described lawful police efforts to stop illegal drug-related murders as a 'cycle of violence'."
As I've hinted before, police don't usually pulverise apartment buildings as a means of stopping a drug-induced homicide. Beyond the analogy's aesthetic deficiencies, it's ludicrous to suggest an Israeli exemption from responsibility for cyclical violence that began with the very founding of the state of Israel on policies of ethnic cleansing and mass murder.
Thanks in part to media apologists for Israel who harbour a blatant disdain for chronological accuracy, Palestinian resistance to the Zionist project has been criminalised while Israel's offensive provocations are permitted to pass as self-defence.
Without rewinding the timeline to 1948 and setting the record straight, the Israeli space-time monopoly can't be broken.
The New York Times' rendering of recent violence on the border between Gaza and Israel is a shining example of the chronological sleights of hand that have come to characterise mainstream reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Isabel Kershner's December 24 dispatch, "Killing and Retaliation at Gaza-Israel Border Continue Violent Cycle", sets up the timeline as follows:
The seeming cause-and-effect relationship is emphasised by two photographs appearing side by side at the top of the article. On the left: the body of the sniper victim. On the right: the body of the three-year-old Palestinian girl cast as unintended collateral damage in the photograph's caption: "A shell killed her as Israel, responding to the sniper attack, struck targets it associated with militant groups."
Buried in a paragraph in the second half of the article, however, is the following detail: "On Friday, Israeli forces fatally shot a Palestinian man who approached the border fence separating Gaza from Israel."
As it turns out, the Friday in question occurred four days prior to the Tuesday sniper fire and military assault.
The Israeli daily Haaretz adds further specifics to the manipulated chronology:
Tampering with timelines
This is not the first instance in which the Times has deployed a truncated timeline in order to excuse Israeli attacks on Gaza.
When over 100 civilians were slaughtered in November 2012, the paper supplied the following explanation for the start of the conflict:
This particular Saturday was November 10. The disingenuousness of the "retaliation" alibi was exposed by Max Ajl in an essay for Jacobin magazine:
As for previous bloody interruptions of the holiday season, these include Operation Cast Lead - the 2008-09 Israeli initiative that exterminated approximately 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them civilians.
Advertised in the media as retaliation for Hamas' alleged breaking of the ceasefire then in effect, Cast Lead was in fact a retaliation against Hamas' retaliation against Israel's breaking of the ceasefire. A relatively unadulterated cause-and-effect timeline appears in a Guardian article dated November 5, 2008:
Back to the beginning
Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz - proponent of extrajudicial killings, torture, and variousstrategies for increasing the suffering of Palestinians - has taken issue with an alleged insistence in the media "on describing… events in Gaza as 'a cycle of violence'".
Writing in Haaretz during the November 2012 Israeli assault, Dershowitz appeared to have entered into a competition for least relevant analogy ever: "It would be as if the media described lawful police efforts to stop illegal drug-related murders as a 'cycle of violence'."
As I've hinted before, police don't usually pulverise apartment buildings as a means of stopping a drug-induced homicide. Beyond the analogy's aesthetic deficiencies, it's ludicrous to suggest an Israeli exemption from responsibility for cyclical violence that began with the very founding of the state of Israel on policies of ethnic cleansing and mass murder.
Thanks in part to media apologists for Israel who harbour a blatant disdain for chronological accuracy, Palestinian resistance to the Zionist project has been criminalised while Israel's offensive provocations are permitted to pass as self-defence.
Without rewinding the timeline to 1948 and setting the record straight, the Israeli space-time monopoly can't be broken.
