After more than two years of Israel’s assault on Gaza, one might think that there would be appreciable improvement in the way the Palestinian-Israeli issue is understood and presented. But US press treatment of last week’s meeting between President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made it clear we still have a long way to go.
To be sure, in recent months we’ve seen increased coverage of the suffering of Palestinians, focusing on individual stories of the trauma Israel has inflicted on hundreds of thousands who’ve lost family members, homes and so much more. In fact, in the past week, there have been a number of such accounts including long-form pieces on: malnutrition in Gaza; tens of thousands of homeless Palestinians enduring cold winter rains; Jewish settler raids on West Bank villages; and even a pictorial on the enduring hope to return expressed by Palestinian refugees living in several Arab countries.
This sensitivity to Palestinian humanity is new and important. Even during much of the two-year long Israeli assault, Palestinians received short shrift. While tens of thousands of Palestinians were being slaughtered, most US reporting struggled to maintain a “balance” by allowing official Israeli sources to dissemble or obfuscate. For example, after bombing a hospital or an apartment building killing scores of Palestinian civilians, the Israelis would suggest that those killed were actually Hamas operati
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