The Headline You Never Saw in the Mainstream Press: Israel Attacked Gaza on U.S. Election Day

By Jim Lobe and Ali Gharib, IPS News. Posted January 8, 2009.

It further noted that Hamas began firing rockets and missile shells "in retaliation" to which Israel responded by closing its border crossings and sharply tightening its siege against Gaza. From that point, the ceasefire that had effectively held for the previous four and a half months was never fully restored.

That version of events was not entirely missing from the U.S. press. Indeed, a New York Times "analysis" published Dec. 19 acknowledged that "(w)hile this (escalation) did not topple the agreement, Israel's decision in early November to destroy a tunnel Hamas had been digging near the border drove the cycle of violence to a much higher level."

But the Times itself, like virtually all of the U.S. media, had missed the likely impact of the Nov. 4 attack on the ceasefire's fate at or even shortly after it took place. In its late edition Nov. 5, the newspaper ran a 422-word article datelined Jerusalem that reported Israel's military operation and the fact that Hamas had retaliated with mortar fire.

One day later, the Washington Post devoted a similar amount of space to a Reuters report whose headline suggested that the truce had been put at risk by the previous day's exchanges.

But while the U.S. media, distracted by an historic election at home, largely skipped over the significance of the Nov. 4 Israeli raid, several English-language foreign news organizations did publish articles on the event, suggesting that the raid could very well have doomed the ceasefire.

A story in the British newspaper the Guardian on Nov. 6 said the truce was "in jeopardy" after the strike. Another British paper, the Independent, said on the same day that the ceasefire "was foundering yesterday after Israeli special forces entered the besieged territory and fought Hamas."

A piece for the Canadian news service Canwest on Nov. 6 said that "the fragile peace [of the ceasefire] was shattered overnight by an Israeli raid in Gaza." The Age newspaper of Australia also headlined its story on the raid itself as "Ceasefire in danger of collapse."

AP's Nov. 5 and 6 stories used similar wording in its stories, but they went largely unpublished in the U.S. where media attention was focused virtually exclusively on the historic election results.

The Nexis search found no reference to the raid in the transcripts of any television public-affairs broadcast during the period, a particularly significant omission given the fact that about 70 percent of U.S. citizens say their main source of international news comes through that medium.

"(T)hat Nov. 4 raid, in very real sense, hardly exists in the mainstream media's collective memory," said Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)'s activism director Peter Hart, noting that Israel may have been aware that the election would drown out coverage of its raid.

"It does not take much effort to go back and find it, but reporting contextual information that would undermine Israel's rationale for these attacks is not exactly the kind of thing the U.S. corporate media do very often. The fact that there are only a handful of exceptions is telling -- the dominant narrative in the press is unsurprisingly one that supports the Israeli position."

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Jim Lobe is the Washington bureau chief for Inter Press Service.

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