Missing the Story

"Rice Visits West Bank City; U.S. Announces Aid"
A14, Sunday 11/9/08
By Isabel Kershner

The story of Jenin is: How do you take factions and individuals who've been ideologically and militarily anti-Israel and turn them into a security apparatus meant to work with Israel?

There's just enough in the article where an observant reader can sense this story, but Kershner doesn't focus on it. She makes an oblique reference to "security units in various uniforms" lining Jenin's streets as Secretary Rice's motorcade entered. These various uniforms in the PA security apparatus represent its different factions, some committed to violent struggle against Israel.

The second major problem is that, remarkably, the article has no comment from Israeli officials. Had they been approached, they likely would've asked the above question.

Another troubling part of the article occurs in the sixth paragraph when Kershner offers a breezy history of Jenin and employs the propagandistic and loaded term "resistance". She writes that Israelis see it as the capital of terrorism, and Palestinians see it as a symbol of resistance. She mentions the “bloody battle between Israeli forces and Palestinian gunmen in 2002," but neglects to write that this was an Israeli operation with the stated aim to arrest, or kill trying, those in Jenin sending militants into Israel to blow up civilians.

Most of the world officially saw this as terrorism. That it's called resistance is an unfortunate equivalence…on the Palestinians' part. It's completely appropriate for Kershner here to have passed judgment, as most nations of the world did.

The other point missing is that astute observors of the conflict, not to mention the Palestinian public, see understand the internal use of "resistance" as resistance to a deal with Israel, not simply violence against Israeli forces and civilians in the West Bank or inside Israel.

Kershner fails to mention the massacre myth purveyed by the Palestinian Authority during and after Israel's 2002 Operation Defensive Shield.

Finally, while she doesn't allow Israelis to speak, she lets Palestinian PM Fayyad score a major propaganda point – the unchallenged assertion that institution-building shouldn't precede an end to the occupation, and thus the official end to the conflict.