The Media’s Obsessive Coverage Ascribes to Israel a Negative Significance It Does Not Possess

An examination of the world media’s obsessive coverage of Israel can be found here: “Why global media obsess over Israel and ignore deadlier wars – opinion,” by Samuel J. Hyde, Jerusalem Post, January 13, 2026:

If news coverage were meant to be a rational analysis, this is not. Even if news were merely supposed to be the coverage of suffering, power, and danger on planet Earth, this would still be indefensible. You cannot plausibly cover Israel more than an entire continent without warping the reader’s sense of reality.This saturation coverage creates the illusion of centrality. It trains audiences to believe that whatever they see most frequently must be the most important event in the world. Israel becomes not just another country among many but a kind of moral index of the age – a stage upon which the world’s conscience is imagined to be tested and revealed.Meanwhile, catastrophes of far greater scale and brutality – such as the ongoing genocide in Sudan – flicker briefly, if at all, across the screen before disappearing into silence a week later.This is not accidental. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict occupies a peculiar and disproportionate place in the West’s political imagination, unmatched by conflicts that are deadlier or more brutal. Israel is small enough to be grasped symbolically, but complex enough to absorb endless projection.It is intimate, familiar, and endlessly legible to Western eyes in a way that “distant” tragedies are not. And so it becomes over-seen, over-examined, intensely dissected, and uniquely moralized until the examination itself becomes both activism and a substitute for understanding.The second distortion is conceptual. Israel’s wars are routinely framed as the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” as though the entire story were a localized struggle between two neighboring peoples, one strong and one weak, one powerful and one victimized. This framing is tidy, emotionally resonant, and yet profoundly misleading….

Indeed, the KGB suggested to the Palestinian Arabs the very invention of the “Palestinian people,” that dates to the mid-1960s, as a way for the conflict to be viewed in a different way. No longer would the war be seen as one of an Arab gang-up — involving close to 20 countries at the time (there are now 22 Arab states), or still worse, a gang-up of Muslim countries, of which there are 57 — against tiny Israel. Instead, the conflict was now presented as one in which the powerful state of Israel was maltreating the largely helpless “Palestinian people.” It was preposterous, but by dint of constant repetition, this view of the matter prevailed.

The problem is not whether a journalist chooses one word over another. It is that the story being told is already too small to hold the truth, and too large to escape moral projection. It magnifies Israel until it eclipses the region, and then isolates it until it bears responsibility for forces far beyond its control.

Here I beg to differ. To me, the choice of words is much more significant than the author of the piece, Samuel J. Hyde, believes. For audiences worldwide to hear from the BBC, Al Jazeera, AP, and all other mainstream media that “Israel is attacking Palestinians in the occupied West Bank” has a very different effect on that audience than does the report that “Israel is attacking Palestinians in Judea and Samaria.” The term “West Bank” dates back to 1950, when the government of Jordan decided to stop using the names “Judea and Samaria” because they were “too Jewish,” and instead came up with “West Bank.” And the word “occupied” is used both by those who with malice aforethought wish to deny an Israeli claim to that territory, and by those who are unthinkingly using that word without comprehending its effect.

The media’s obsessive coverage ascribes to Israel a significance — a negative significance — it does not possess. To wit, the media claims that if only Israel would make concessions, all manner of things would be well in the most violent region of the world. And the Israelis must also refer to the conflict’s real dimensions. It is not, and never was, a conflict between “two tiny peoples, each struggling for its homeland.” The ”peoples” involved are the Jews of Israel and the Arabs of 22 Arab states, further supported by a few dozen non-Arab Muslim states. That is the true context of what is now being presented as merely a conflict between “two peoples,” with Israel being much more powerful than the “poor Palestinians” who have done nothing to deserve the blows that Israel has been inflicting.