Israel's Don Corleone?

"Shiva, Gangland Style, Behind Burly Guards and Security Cameras"
A10, Friday 11/21/08
By Isabel Kershner

This piece goes under the rubric of heralding the shortcomings and weaknesses of the Jewish State in the NYT's coverage of the recent car-bomb assassination of crime boss Don Alperon. Building on a shorter article on the subject earlier this week, the reporter continues to excessively dramatize the influence and ubiquity of organized crime in Israel, begging the question of why such an issue is commanding so much attention in the first place.

In dramatizing the issue, Kershner compares Don Alperon to Don Corleone, creating the impression that Israeli organized crime is as powerful and dangerous as Italian-American mafia of old. While Israel does have difficulties with such crime, it reaches nowhere near the levels of Russia or Italy, making it comical that the Israeli "mafia" is receiving press coverage while infinitely more significant organized crime in other parts of the world is generally ignored.

Underscoring how dangerous organized crime in Israel, Kershner mentions how "a 31-year-old Israeli woman was shot dead in front of her husband and two young children when she got in the way of a botched mob hit on a beach in Bat Yam, south of Tel Aviv. Mr. Amira [another crime boss] was believed to have been the real target." It was not that this woman "got in the way" to obstruct the assassination attempt but that the assassins accidentally shot an innocent bystander and missed their actual target. Such an example shows the incompetence of Israeli organized crime more than it demonstrates the threat of such criminals to the population at large.

Overall, this piece is extremely hyperbolic and correspondingly has a hyperbolic conclusion, quoting one of Alperon's sons who has sworn to take vengeance on his father's killers, declaiming that "There won’t even be a head left to bury." Palestinians blowing up Jews is pedestrian - but Jews blowing up Jews - now that's a story.

Given that Israel is inundated with foreign journalists, it is natural that such an event would receive disproportionate coverage. Nevertheless, this is not an excuse for poor and misleading coverage of such an event that does not accurately reflect the reality on the ground. The reality being that Israel has a relatively low crime rate and one of the lowest murder rates in the world (2.29 murders per 100,000 people in 2006, in comparison to 7.5 in the US).