Under the circumstances, it's a notably benign-sounding term for an army that shoots down protesters. Early this month, tilted by the usual spin, American news stories highlighted the specious ultimatums issued by Prime Minister Ehud Barak as he demanded that Palestinians end the violence - while uniformed Israelis under his authority continued to kill them. Of course, amid all the nifty Orwellian touches, the proper behavior of people whose homeland remains under occupation has never quite been spelled out. But U.S. media coverage has reflexively mimicked the themes coming out of the White House and State Department. For American journalists on mainstream career ladders, it's prudent to avoid making a big deal about Israel's human rights violations, which persist without letup in tandem with Israel's occupation of land it captured in the 1967 war.
Many pundits are fond of cloaking the occupiers in mantles of righteousness.
And we hear few questions raised about the fact that the occupiers enjoy the powerful backing of the United States. The silence is usually deafening, even among journalists who write opinion columns on a regular basis. The U.S. government's economic and military assistance to Israel adds up to a few billion dollars per year. Occasionally, I've written columns criticizing U.S. media for strong pro-Israel bias in news reporting and spectrums of commentary. Every time, I can count on a flurry of angry letters that accuse me of being anti-Semitic.