The Myopia of The Western Lens, Part I

Children Of Israel Are Never Alone

Hey, tribe.

Last night, at a Purim party, I got into a conversation with a friend who spent more than three decades in the military and who has made a lifelong study of international politics. We were commiserating over the difficulty of making a dent in the prevailing narrative about this war — the one pervading our social, academic and artistic circles.

She voiced the despair we have surely all felt when faced with a non-Jew who is confidently moralizing at us while being absolutely wrong about any number of things. And by “wrong,” I don’t mean wrong according to my interpretation or admittedly partisan leanings. I mean factually, unequivocally, verifiably wrong.

I’m willing to bet we have all been faced with a basically well-intentioned person whose misconceptions are likely not driven by anti-Semitism — a situation we see as an opportunity to make inroads.

And yet, the task at hand is overwhelming.

“Where do I start?” my friend lamented, echoing a thought I have had a thousand times myself. “Where the hell do I even start?”

One particularly tricky aspect of navigating this terrain is that the western media is systemically biased against Israel. To read Israeli papers daily and compare the information within them — even the ones most scorchingly critical of Israel, like Ha’aretz — to the information presented in the U.S. is to be continually staggered by all that’s left out by the latter.

The few of us reading articles from both countries can see this, but most U.S. liberals don’t have any way of knowing what they don’t know. And part of the problem is that if you say that all, or nearly all, news outlets in the U.S. are biased against Israel, you risk sounding as deluded or crazy as a MAGA member.

This, in spite of the fact that progressives regularly accept and call out systemic media bias, or even systemic social bias, when it affects other minority groups.

For instance, we all know by now that misbehavior on the part of white people is described very differently from the same by Black people. When young white adults partake in drugs, it’s recreational and experimental, and when Black people do the same, they’re dealers, junkies and thugs.

When a wealthy white woman compulsively steals, it’s kleptomania and it’s something for her to write about in literary essays and discuss with her therapist. Whereas when a Black woman steals, she’s a thief.

For years, stock Black characters in movies were limited to Magical Negroes, violent criminals, expendable extras that were often the first to die in action flicks, and supportive sidekicks to central white characters.

When this was brought to the attention of liberals, the latter worked earnestly to correct the inequity, albeit sometimes too obviously and clumsily (for years, it felt as if there were no legal dramas on TV or in the movies where the judge wasn’t played by a Black woman).

In contrast, very few on the left are willing to acknowledge systemic anti-Israel bias in journalism, and the onus to prove it is on us, which is made infinitely more difficult by the fact that most Americans are viewing the conflict through a western lens and a very limited frame of reference.

To provide just one story that has been presented very differently by the Middle East than it has by the U.S., let’s compare and contrast the account of the current Israeli raid on Al-Shifa Hospital as told this week in the east vs. the west.

First, let’s look at the east.

An article in The Times of Israel reports: “The IDF said the number of confirmed members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad captured by troops at the Gaza medical center had risen to 500, out of over 800 suspects arrested since the raid began last week… Israel has said those arrested at Shifa include several “very significant” senior Hamas and PIJ commanders.”

IDF Spokesman Daniel Hagari elaborates: “170 terrorists were neutralized in or around the Shifa Hospital compound while firing at our forces. The IDF apprehended hundreds of terror suspects with confirmed ties to Hamas or Islamic Jihad, making this one of the most successful operations since the start of the war… a large number of these terrorists were involved in planning and executing the brutal massacre of October 7.”

This would certainly seem to indicate the raid was justified and worthwhile. But you don’t need to take Israel’s word for it. An article in Lebanon's Al-Akhbar newspaper, which makes no pretense of being objective and openly supports the region’s jihadists, quoted a Hamas official who regretfully underscored the accomplishments of Israel’s raid. “Nobody should underestimate the size of the infiltration carried out by the enemy army at Al-Shifa Hospital, nor underestimate the importance of the figures who were arrested or executed,” the source reported to the paper, which itself is linked to Hezbollah. He added hopefully: “There are indications that the resistance is still fine and that all the current losses can be absorbed and lived with.”

Let’s contrast this very important admission with the coverage by the New York Times during the last week. Many if not most articles about the raid were penned by Palestinian or Muslim journalists. One was Raja Abdulrahim, who has asserted that Hamas and Hezbollah are not terrorist groups but resistance fighters. Another was Hiba Yazbek, who has repeatedly expressed outrage when Israel has killed terrorists in the act of attacking Israelis. Many of these tweets have been deleted, but this one — in response to the death of known Hamas commander Saber Suleiman — remains up.

And a third journalist reporting on the Al-Shifa raid was Ameera Harouda, a Gazan who has been vocal about the terror and trauma she and her family have experienced from Israeli retaliation in the past.

In 2021, she was asked by a TV reporter: “Ameera, I don’t want to generalize, but from where you are there in Gaza, do Palestinians feel like Hamas represents them?”

And she answered that yes, Palestinians felt like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other such extremist factions did, in fact, represent them. You can listen to this clip here:

All these women have the perfect right to their loyalties, their perspectives, and the opinions shaped by their culture and their experiences. We should absolutely be able to hear from them in essays, op-eds, interviews, speeches, or any other kind of media piece that showcases the writer’s personal history or point of view. But choosing them to cover a conflict as a journalist, who is supposed to strive for objectivity? Would we allow an Israeli directly traumatized by October 7th to cover the conflict as a journalist?

Unsurprisingly, the NYT articles about the Al-Shifa raid are amost exclusively about the suffering endured by the Palestinians in or near the hospital. Nearly every inch of print space is devoted to the hospital’s reduced capacity, the unsanitary conditions, the sound of gunshots and explosions, the dwindling supplies, the limited food and water, the fear, the grief, the maggots. Hamas operatives are only mentioned briefly and tangentially, as if they have nothing to do with the situation, and then only in quotes dubiously attributed to the IDF.

And this is just one operation within the war. There are countless others treated in exactly the same way.

No one has helped me understand the way the U.S. media operates as a near-monolith regarding Israel more than journalist Matti Friedman, and tomorrow I will share with you much of what I’ve learned from him.

Until then, I send you love and strength. Chazak v’ematz.

Am Yisrael Chai.