Hundreds Of Palestinian Attacks Per Week Not Newsworthy Until Israel Reacts

“We came this close to giving legitimacy to Jewish lives and presence in the Jewish homeland. Major violation of our company policy.”

Tel Aviv, June 26 – Media outlets based in Israel’s financial and commercial hub may continue not to report on the dozens of attempted murders by Palestinians each day, editors confirmed today, provided that no retaliation takes place, but if it does, the IDF, police, or private citizen actions to counter or prevent those attempted murders must become the story.

News organizations reiterated their guidelines this week amid concerns that some correspondents or stringers might let their professional standards slip, as almost happened several times last month. On those occasions, reporters filed stories about Palestinian firebomb, shooting, stoning, and other attacks on Israeli motorists in disputed territory, and the tone of those stories came too close for editors’ comfort to making the focus the Palestinian attack and not the implied brutality of the Israeli response.

CNN, The New York Times, Reuters, Agence France-Presse, the Associated Press, the British Broadcasting Corporation, and several other major international news outlets sent memoranda to their bureaus in Israel this week to order a refresher on the editorial guidelines, under which the daily rock barrages on Israeli motorists by Palestinian youths, plus the occasional Molotov cocktail, deserve no coverage unless added as background detail to a story about IDF soldiers shooting at Palestinians.

Those editorial rules required little reinforcement until recently, according to a source in the NY Times Jerusalem Bureau office. “Most of us knew it intuitively, or it was part of the culture,” she recalled. “But of late, personnel turnover, plus some residual rustiness from the way of doing things during the pandemic, made some lower-level writers forget to center Palestinian grievance in every story and give perfunctory, if any, acknowledgement, to Israelis rights or humanity.”

“We had a close call a few months back,” noted a Reuters staffer. “Word came in about a fatal shooting, and we were all set to go with all the details, but then it turned out we had it reversed and it was Jews who were the targets, and we had the tone all wrong. We came this close to giving legitimacy to Jewish lives and presence in the Jewish homeland. Major violation of our company policy.”

A miscommunication – caused by a faulty autocomplete in a texting app – in an inquiry for this article to the Associated Press office sparked some short-lived confusion this morning when a mis-rendered message from an AP gave the impression that the organization might report on Palestinian corruption, violence, intransigence, and manipulation of humanitarian groups without laying blame on Israel.

Please support our work through Patreon.
Buy In The Biblical Sense: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B92QYWSL