Plucky little Israel or swaggering bully?

One of several concerns about Israel is the way the western media runs scared of criticising Israeli actions. The media know that to do so bring gallons of bile and opprobrium pouring onto their heads. The Israeli's and their supporters around the world are an extremely effective and influential pressure group. One word out of place and thousands of emails, phone-calls and letters hit HQ. In the US it can cost Senate and Representative seats - hence the mealy-mouthed statements from the States and general communal hand-wringing. 

It is possible to read alternative views. The first is by Avi Shlaim who is a professor of international relations at the University of Oxford. In an article written after the onslaught on Gaza last year he concluded, " This brief review of Israel's record over the past four decades makes it difficult to resist the conclusion that it has become a rogue state with "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". A rogue state habitually violates international law, possesses weapons of mass destruction and practises terrorism - the use of violence against civilians for political purposes. Israel fulfils all of these three criteria; the cap fits and it must wear it. Israel's real aim is not peaceful coexistence with its Palestinian neighbours but military domination. It keeps compounding the mistakes of the past with new and more disastrous ones."

For a current view, you can do a lot worse than Robert Fisk writing in the Independent:

"At least the Israelis have not demanded ransom. They just want to get journalists to win the propaganda war for them. Scarcely had the week begun when Israel's warrior "commandos" stormed a Turkish boat bringing aid to Gaza and shot nine of the passengers dead. Yet by week's end, the protesters had become "armed peace activists", vicious anti-Semites "professing pacifism, seething with hate, pounding away at another human being with a metal pole". I liked the last bit. The fact that the person being beaten was apparently shooting another human being with a rifle didn't quite get into this weird version of reality.

The amazing thing in all this is that so many Western journalists – and I'm including the BBC's pusillanimous coverage of the Gaza aid ships – are writing like Israeli journalists, while many Israeli journalists are writing about the killings with the courage that Western journalists should demonstrate. And about the Israeli army itself. Take Amos Harel's devastating report in Haaretz which analyses the make-up of the Israeli army's officer corps. In the past, many of them came from the leftist kibbutzim tradition, from greater Tel Aviv or from the coastal plain of Sharon. In 1990, only 2 per cent of army cadets were religious Orthodox Jews. Today the figure is 30 per cent. Six of the seven lieutenant-colonels in the Golani Brigade are religious. More than 50 per cent of local commanders are "national" religious in some infantry brigades.

There's nothing wrong with being religious. But – although Harel does not make this point quite so strongly – many of the Orthodox are supporters of the colonisation of the West Bank and thus oppose a Palestinian state."

Now that is good journalism. No fence-sitting. No hand-wringing. It looks beyond the norm and gives the reader a  new slant on familiar territory. No doubt the head office of the Independent is  under siege at this moment.