Some News Is Fit to Print

Cross-border exchanges between Israel and Hamas this past week served as the latest occasion for the New York Times to cover, and cover some more, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

True to form, Friday May 25th’s front-page featured prominently, for the second time in a week, a color photo of an Israeli strike against a Hamas compound in Gaza. Inside the front section, a major article detailed Israel’s crackdown on Hamas, focusing on the arrest of 33 Hamas officials in the West Bank.

The latest Israeli-Palestinian violence, as well as the intra-Palestinian violence, is certainly newsworthy.

The Times’s extensive coverage, however, overshadowed an exceptionally significant development in Lebanon: intense fighting between the Lebanese army and Fatah al-Islam, an Islamic terrorist group.

The fighting erupted Sunday when police raided suspected Fatah al-Islam hideouts in a Palestinian refugee camp in Tripoli, while searching for men wanted in a bank robbery. The Lebanese army fought with the terrorists and shelled their positions. The camp’s electricity, phone lines, and water were cut off. The violence claimed the lives of some 50 combatants and many civilians. Meanwhile, according to the United Nations Relief and Welfare Agency, 25,000 refuges have fled the camp.

With wall-to-wall coverage on radio and television of the Lebanon situation the night before, I eagerly anticipated what the Times would report the next morning. Yet, on May 25th, the Times yielded no news on the crisis—nothing on the fleeing refuges, the Lebanese army’s pending assault on the camp, or the potential Syrian role in the violence. Instead, we received the usual pictures and words: Israelis and Palestinians at each other’s throats, again.

No doubt, had the refugee camp been in Gaza or the West Bank, or had it been the Israeli army and not the Lebanese army, the Times would not have missed a day of coverage.

But the violence is not the only newsworthy item here. What about Fatah al-Islam’s goal, according to the Washington Post, of bringing “Lebanon’s 12 Palestinian refugee camps into compliance with Islamic law”? Or, the possibility, alleged by Lebanese security officers, that Fatah al-Islam acts at the behest of Syrian intelligence, and that the unrest is aimed at curtailing the Lebanese government’s effort to try suspects in the murder of Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister of Lebanon? Or that the people of Lebanon are, once again, held hostage by extremist elements that act against the wishes of Beirut?

With so much to report on, one wonders why the Times came up empty. When it comes to Arab-on-Arab violence, be it in Iraq, Lebanon, or Gaza, the Times seems slow to report “all that’s fit to print.” Which is why Steven Erlanger’s piece last week regarding Israel’s lack of trust in a credible Palestinian partner was a pleasant surprise, in that it acknowledged the effects of this violence on the Israeli psyche.

No one begrudges the Times and the rest of the mainstream media for reporting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with such zeal. And finding the proper balance when reporting the Middle East is admittedly a tough task. Needless to say, the Times is a serious newspaper with seasoned journalists.

But May 25th’s coverage smacks of misplaced fixation when it displaces intra-Arab violence, a truly widespread regional phenomenon, at the expense of Israeli-Arab violence, the knee-jerk news story.

Ari Fridman is the Legacy Heritage Fellow at the American Jewish Committee.