At first this reality was too bizarre for many Israelis to comprehend, coming at a time when the country has made almost unimaginable strides toward the Palestinians. Now there is no doubt that Israel's generosity has been interpreted by the Arab world as weakness. This use of passive phrasing, almost universal in media reports on the violence in Israel, is a way of deliberately expressing agnosticism about the cause of the fighting. It is a scandal.
Photos never lie, but captions do.
As the Times acknowledged in a tiny correction yesterday, the bloodied youth was not Palestinian, and he was not on the Temple Mount. He was a Jewish exchange student from the United States who had been pulled out of a taxi by a lynch mob in an Arab neighbourhood, beaten and stabbed. The policeman had shown up just in time to save his life.