Washington Post defends picture of dead Gaza child after complaints from ‘Jews in large numbers’
Mondweiss calls attention to a story about a photograph published by the The Washington Post in connection with an Israeli rocket that struck a house and killed a young infant:
Jewish groups and American Jews in large numbers wrote to the ombudsman and to Post editors, protesting the photo as biased... [They] asked why The Post didn’t balance the photo of the grieving father with one of Israelis who had lost a loved one from the Gaza rocket fire. That’s a valid question.
The answer is that The Post cannot publish photographs that don’t exist. No Israeli civilian had been killed by Gaza rocket fire since Oct. 29, 2011, more than a year earlier.
This little side-story is telling: it suggests that many Americans missed the stunningly disproportionate nature of the November conflict. As the ombudsman of The Post puts it:
I think we can all agree that the Gaza rocket fire is reprehensible and is aimed at terrorizing Israeli civilians. It’s disruptive and traumatic. But let’s be clear: The overwhelming majority of rockets fired from Gaza are like bee stings on the Israeli bear’s behind... Gaza, meanwhile, is almost entirely urban and densely populated; bombs there will kill civilians no matter how precisely targeted...
Palestinian health ministry sources estimate that 100 to 133 Gazans were killed, including militants. Amnesty International puts the civilian Gazan death toll at 66. In Israel, four civilians and two soldiers died.