The week of May 12th was not what you'd call a quiet news week. There was the small business of an
earthquake in China to report on. On that background, the
Guardian's editorial decision to mark the 60th anniversary of the state of
Israel with its
A Week in Gaza series, already a little puzzling (I mean, would it be so controversial to mark the anniversary of something by reporting about that something?), became frankly obscene. Not that I lack sympathy for the plight of the
Palestinian civilians virtually incarcerated in the
Gaza strip; but surely their spot on the front page of a major national newspaper can at least occasionally be ceded to, oh I don't know, millions of displaced and missing Chinese?
Anyway, at the time I didn't really say anything about that, just got angry about it to myself - not just because of the biased focus on Israel (like it only exists to oppress Palestinians), but also because it makes me so mad to live in a society where information about the rest of the world is simultaneously tightly controlled and heavily distorted. But I get tired of hearing myself complain about this media bias in the UK, to the point where rational criticism begins to sound like shrill whining even to me. There's such a narrowing of discourse on this subject that there's simply no platform for critique, however well reasoned; any opinion that is not unequivocally anti-Israel stands out as partisan.
But I digress. This morning I was delighted to see the following headline on the front page of the online edition of the Grauniad: "Hizbullah hands over Israeli bodies". Yippee! Thought I. Those would be the bodies of 2 soldiers the morbid retention of which was cause for the 2006 Israel/Lebanon war; finally having them back will provide closure in Israel, and well done those thoroughly decent chaps at Hizbullah for handing them over just in time for helping out the nascent Syria negotiations.
Er, not quite. Actually the two caskets were handed over in return, among other things, for five live terrorist prisoners. It was, in fact, an exchange, not a gesture of goodwill on the part of Hizbullah. Some would say, not an especially equal exchange, either.
But then Israel is a democracy where public opinion holds sway; and public opinion is overwhelmingly in favour of the proper burial of the country's military dead, at whatever price. Hizbullah don't have to bother themselves with such petty consideration, or with pesky niggles about truth, or even common decency:
A sign next to a large photograph of an Israeli woman crying read "Israel is shedding tears of pain". Another nearby banner read "Lebanon is shedding tears of joy."
It does make one want to throw one's hands in the air and exclaim: "children! we are at war with teenagers!". But when the the Guardian decided to editorialise, the spin they put on the headline (I call it spin, in Israel it's probably being called an outright lie right now) was calculated to make Hizbullah look more attractive to a Western liberal mindset than they are, and Israel less.
Why?