From Occupied Palestine

Foreign reporter challenges GPO over visa policy
SHAHAR ILAN
Ha'aretz, 15 October 2006

Could a situation arise in which a senior foreign correspondent posted here is arrested as an illegal resident, jailed and then deported? This scenario seems fictional, but what is not fictional is the fact that Joerg Bremer, correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of the most important newspapers in the world, was in Israel for several weeks as an illegal resident. He left Friday for a vacation, and does not know whether he will be allowed back in. A correspondent for another world-class newspaper told Haaretz that he has been in Israel for the past year on a tourist visa, a status that ostensibly bars him from working.

Judge orders probe over Palestinian cameraman hurt in Bil'in
MERON RAPPAPORT
Ha'aretz, 10 October 2006

An Israel Defense Forces judge on Tuesday ordered the army to open an inquiry into the affair of a Palestinian cameraman wounded over the weekend after soldiers arrested him during a demonstration against the separation fence in the West Bank village of Bil'in.

To Israel with love
The Economist, 5 August 2006

Why America gives Israel its unconditional support

Anybody who doubts the size of the transatlantic divide over Israel should try discussing the Middle East conflagration in Britain and then doing the same in America. Everybody watches much the same grisly footage. But, by and large, people draw very different conclusions. The emphasis in Britain is overwhelmingly on the disproportionate scale of the response. Americans are much more inclined to give Israel the benefit of the doubt

Apocalypse near
MERAV YUDILOVITCH
Ynetnews, 4 August 2006 [Yediot Aharonoth]

Last week, a group of renowned intellectuals published an open letter blaming Israel for escalating the conflict in the Middle East. The letter, which mainly referred to the alignment of forces between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, caused a lot of anger among Ynet and Ynetnews readers, particularly due to its claim that the Israeli policy's political aim is to eliminate the Palestinian nation.

Israelis renounce membership in world journalist federation in protest at condemnation of Al-Manar strike
ASAF CARMEL
Ha'aretz, 21 July 2006

A group of Israeli journalists renounced their membership in the International Federation of Journalists yesterday, after the organization's general secretary refused to retract his condemnation of the Israel's bombing of Hezbollah's Al-Manar television station in Beirut.

They broke the public's heart
GIDEON LEVY
Ha'aretz, 3 July 2005

The media is to blame: For months, it portrayed the story of the "great sacrifice" the evacuated settlers must make.

For years, it ignored the injustices they inflicted on their neighbors and thus helped portray the settlers in a false light. The result: broad public sympathy for their bitter fate and shock over their brutal behavior, as if blocking roads or even the lynching of a Palestinian teenager is something new or unusual. But in the territories, the settlers have been violently blocking roads for years, and harsh brutality toward Palestinians is also nothing new. The only novelty is that suddenly they are showing this on television.

Are These Kazemi Images Offensive?
NAOMI KLEIN and AARON MATE
Globe and Mail, 15 June 2005

Even after Zahra Kazemi's death, the attacks on her don't seem to end. Just two months ago, Canadians were stunned by new evidence that the Montreal photojournalist was tortured to death while in Iranian custody. Ms. Kazemi was arrested in June of 2003 while taking photographs outside a prison in Iran, the country of her birth. She was raped and beaten, according to a doctor who fled Iran to tell the story.

Berkeley: KPFA pair give young Palestinians a voice
RICK DelVECCHIO
San Francisco Chronicle, 27 May 2005

[Listen to Ibdaa Radio 194 reports: click here]

The reporting and writing talents of the teenagers of Dheisheh, the Palestinian refugee camp, made a powerful impact on two East Bay radio journalists who recently spent time there to volunteer their know-how for a youth media project.

Our man in the territories
TOM SEGEV
Ha'aretz Magazine, 27 May 2005

No one knew until now what veteran television journalist Haim Yavin thought about the news he has been announcing for more than three decades, and he is so nonpartisan that one wondered whether he had an opinion of his own at all. Now, at 72, he is coming out of the closet: "Since 1967 we have been brutal conquerors, occupiers, suppressing another people," he says in Yoman Masa ("Diary of a Journey"), which he filmed in the West Bank.

"According to security sources": What remains of the Israeli media
TANYA REINHART
Yediot Aharonot, 24 May 2005

[Translated from Hebrew by Mark Marshall]

In the 1960s there were many jokes in Israel about the Voice of the UAR (United Arab Republic) from Cairo, which broadcasted news in broken Hebrew, written by spokesmen of the Egyptian regime. The absurdity of these broadcasts enhanced the credibility of the IDF spokesmen in our eyes. Today we ourselves are not all that far from the Voice of the UAR, and in fluent IDF Hebrew.