Every blogger has his favorite blog posts. My list is a mix of evocative, witty or quirky posts. Some of them also had a long shelf life (that is, I frequently referred to it as the year progressed), or drew unusually positive feedback.

In no particular order:

1. Toulouse, Twitter, and the Media Incitement Factor

After the Toulouse massacre, a reader perfectly captured my thoughts, expressing them better than I would have. I learned an important lesson: there are times when feeling the pain is more appropriate than trying to make broad statements.

2. Gaza War in the Eyes of an 11 Year-Old Girl

My daughter was astonished to learn that Ismail Haniyeh spent the previous Gaza war hiding beneath the Shifa Hospital. The things kids say!

3. Disproportionate Coverage: The Flip Side

When Haaretz columnist Chemi Shalev raised a counter-intuitive point about the world’s excessive interest in Israel, it reminded me of a conversation from my old kibbutz days. Interestingly, some bloggers who picked up the post quoted my colorful friend instead of Shalev.

4. R.I.P. One-State Solution; Long Live 3-State Solution?

Thanks to Hamas, I don’t take the one-state solution seriously anymore. I referred readers back to this post a lot this year, and I’m mulling a followup.

5. Haaretz’s Cold Hierarchy of Importance

After publisher Amos Schocken tried to justify why Haaretz gave the Japanese tsunami greater prominence than the Fogel family massacre, I articulated in no-uncertain terms why he was wrong. I got a nice lift when a professional involved with the media here said my assessment hit the nail on the head.

6. Pipe Dreams

The BBC and some non-governmental organizations blamed Israel’s blockade for Gaza’s polluted drinking water. Just what were the “pipe dreams” behind these reports?

7. Blame Israel for HamasCare

The Guardian slammed Israel for the sad state of Gaza’s medical system. Ironically, its video was filmed in a hospital symbolizing everything warped about Hamas health care.

8. Yitzhak Shamir and the Ghoul Pool

When I realized the late prime minister outlived the author of The Independent’s obituary, I knew exactly what my headline would be.

9. Israel Made Me Beat My Wife, Part 2

One day after The Guardian blamed Palestinian domestic violence on “the occupation,” Nancy Zaboun was brutally murdered in broad daylight by her husband. West Bank women protested against spousal abuse and honor killings — not against Israel.

10. Gazans Name Babies After Iranian Missiles

This witty post is made by the accompanying photo.

(Image via Flickr/Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com)

I don’t want to let the curtain fall on 2012 without acknowledging that sometimes, Big Media gets the story right. While looking over content for the 2012 Dishonest Reporter Awards, I promised myself I’d follow up with a positive list. It’s my own subjective list, and I invite you to post your own list of articles in the comments section.

The fact that I limited this list to the top five (with some honorable mentions) isn’t a reflection of any paucity of good articles, commentaries, and videos. I just think five is enough. So in no particular order:

1. Arab Like Me

Lee Habeeb recalls the backlash he got for writing a pro-Israel column in a college newspaper. But he didn’t back down.

We are not a universal group. But some of us believe in a simple universal truth: that every Arab deserves to live in freedom, wherever he or she might call home. Some of us want Arab countries to be more like America and Israel, places where the individual can flourish.

Say those words to many Arabs and they are shocked and angered. Soon, words like imperialist are thrown about, and the subject turns to Israel. Always, it seems, it turns to Israel.

2. Witness: Jerusalem SOS

Al-Jazeera profiles Jewish and Arab volunteer medics working together in Jerusalem.

3. For the Life of Yahya

You’ll be inspired by the Boston Globe’s story of a six year-old Palestinian boy and his life-saving kidney transplant.

4. Calvinball in Cairo

Masterfully using Calvin and Hobbes as a metaphor, Foreign Policy’s Marc Lynch explains the Egyptian revolution.

For those who don’t remember Bill Watterson’s game theory masterpiece, Calvinball is a game defined by the absence of rules — or, rather, that the rules are made up as they go along. Calvinball sometimes resembles recognizable games such as football, but is quickly revealed to be something else entirely. The rules change in mid-play, as do the goals . . . The only permanent rule is that the game is never played the same way twice. Is there any better analogy for Egypt’s current state of play?

5. Arab Spring and the Israeli Enemy

Abdulateef Al-Mulhim, a retired Saudi navy commodore, made waves asserting that Arab hatred of Israel is misguided. This was republished in several papers.

The Arab world wasted hundreds of billions of dollars and lost tens of thousands of innocent lives fighting Israel, which they considered is their sworn enemy, an enemy whose existence they never recognized. The Arab world has many enemies and Israel should have been at the bottom of the list. The real enemies of the Arab world are corruption, lack of good education, lack of good health care, lack of freedom, lack of respect for the human lives and finally, the Arab world had many dictators who used the Arab-Israeli conflict to suppress their own people.

These dictators’ atrocities against their own people are far worse than all the full-scale Arab-Israeli wars.

Honorable mention

• As described by The Lede, someone cut together a 2009 CNN interview with Asma Assad (denouncing the IDF during the Gaza War) with footage from the Syrian bombardment of Homs:

The First Lady of Syria Discusses Death in Homs

• Ireland was a hotbed of BDS, but the Irish Times published a notable voice of reason:

Why the cultural boycott of Israel is a blunt and backward instrument

• Mark Steyn nails Big Media’s “four stages” of handling the Toulouse massacre:

Lather, Rinse, and Repeat

New York Times Israel bureau chief Jodi Rudoren is going to be kicking herself after posting this tweet:

A “Palestinian village inside Israel”?

Very sloppy.

Perhaps someone at the NY Times was hung over from a Mayan apocalypse party.

Less than a week after apologizing for saying that Israeli development in E1 would cut the West Bank in two, the New York Times repeated the mistake.

In today’s staff editorial.

The approvals follow an announcement late last month that Israel would continue planning for new development in the E1 area — a project northeast of Jerusalem that would split the West Bank and prevent the creation of a viable contiguous Palestinian state.

You can’t blame Jodi Rudoren for this fumble.

The  paper’s entitled to criticize E1. But even opinions have to be based on accurate info.

Unfortunately, corrections rarely get the same attention as the original (flawed) articles. If the NY Times publishes a correction, does it even make a sound in its own newsroom?

The Gray Lady has some ‘splaining to do. They’ll have to issue another correction.

I emailed public editor Margaret Sullivan. Stay tuned.

Related reading: Despite the hype, E1 doesn’t cut the West Bank in two.

Haneen Zoabi

Is it any wonder that Israel is perceived as a racist, apartheid and non-democratic state when articles such as Ben Lynfield’s latest appear in The Scotsman? Under the dubious sounding headline “Democracy fears as Arabs set to boycott Israeli poll,” according to Lynfield:

Most of Israel’s Arab citizens are poised to boycott next month’s parliamentary election, which could fuel tough questions about how democratic and representative the Jewish state is.

The feeling of alienation among the Arab minority was intensified yesterday after the Central Elections Committee – at the impetus of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party – voted to ban the candidacy of legislator Hanin Zoabi from the Arab nationalist Balad party.

In an article that mainly blames Israel for an Arab voting malaise, it is only in the penultimate paragraph that Lynfield concedes that the failure of the Arab parties themselves to unite around common issues is also responsible for the situation. But Lynfield failed to dig very deep at all, leaving out some vital context to the story.

• There are a plethora of special interest and sectoral parties in the Israeli political system. Yet, the radical left Hadash party is a mixed Arab-Jewish one while a significant proportion of the mainstream and Zionist Labor Party’s membership are Israeli Arabs. In addition to Labor, there are Arab MK’s in Kadima, Likud and even Yisrael Beitenu. Lynfield fails to account for the fact that large numbers of Israeli Arab voters do not vote solely for Arab parties.
• Lynfield fails to expand on the disillusionment with the Arab parties, which have often preferred to concentrate on representing Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza ahead of their own constituents within Israel itself. This is partially why no Israeli coalition in history has felt comfortable with giving these Arab parties a seat in government (although Israeli Arabs have held and continue to hold high positions in the political, legal and diplomatic fields).

• Regarding the banning of Hanin Zoabi, Lynfield fails to mention that, based on previous form, Israel’s supreme court will most likely reinstate Zoabi. The Central Elections Committee also voted down proposals to ban some Arab parties from running.

Overall, however, Lynfield paints a low Arab turnout in an election as a threat to Israeli democracy. The decision to boycott a free and fair election is ultimately a political decision taken by those Arabs who prefer to stay at home rather than exercise their rights at the ballot box. Indeed, in discussion with an Arab colleague recently, we remarked on the potential voting power of Israeli Arabs who make up some 20 percent of the country’s citizens – an enormously influential voting bloc if those Arabs decided to exercise that power.

While we have heard of neighboring states where an opposition or minority boycotts an election because it is neither free nor fair, this is not the case in Israel where minority rights are protected under the law. That Israeli Arabs are not a dominant force in determining Israeli government policies is down to one overriding factor – democracy itself.

Irish Times joins in

The Irish Times also reports on the barring of Haneen Zoabi from running for Knesset, failing to mention the likelihood that Zoabi will be reinstated by the Israeli Supreme Court.

Please send your considered comments to The Scotsman - lettersts@scotsman.com and the Irish Times - lettersed@irishtimes.com

Jeffrey Gettleman

I don’t know much about Congo’s bloody civil war, M23 rebels, or Rwanda’s involvement in the mess. But I do know this: Israel has nothing to do with it.

Yet one African correspondent made an ugly analogy with the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

Tell that to Jeffrey Gettleman, the Nairobi-based NY Times’ East Africa bureau chief. In The World’s Worst War, prominently placed in the paper’s Sunday Review section, Gettleman writes:

But for years Tutsi-led Rwanda has tried to carve out a zone of influence in eastern Congo, using ethnic Tutsi militias and Tutsi businessmen inside Congo to do its bidding. Rwanda has a very disciplined, patriotic army that punches above its weight — the Israel of Africa. It was Rwanda’s invasion in 1996 that sent Congo into a tailspin it has yet to recover from.

For years, the United States and Rwanda’s other Western friends turned a blind eye to this meddling. Again, like Israel, Rwanda has succeeded in leveraging the guilt that other countries feel for not intervening in its genocide — in which almost a million people were killed when Hutu militias targeted Tutsis in 1994 — to blunt criticism of itself. But recently the United States and Britain have been presented with such a mountain of allegations about how Rwanda funneled arms into Congo and even directed the recent capture of Goma that they had no choice but to change tack. So the Western powers recently slashed aid to Rwanda because of Congo, sending a simple but forceful message: Get out.

Unspoken but understood is Gettleman’s contorted correlation: Just as Rwanda “leverages” world guilt over the Rwandan genocide in order to remorselessly dominate the Congolese, Israel “leverages” world guilt over the Holocaust in order to remorselessly dominate the Palestinians.

Makes me wonder about the rest of Gettleman’s dispatch.

The NY Times corrected the record on E1 construction. It’s a media precedent:

An article on Dec. 2 about Israel’s decision to move forward with planning and zoning for settlements in an area east of Jerusalem known as E1 described imprecisely the effect of such development on access to the cities of Ramallah and Bethlehem from Jerusalem, and on the West Bank. Development of E1 would limit access to Ramallah and Bethlehem, leaving narrow corridors far from the Old City and downtown Jerusalem; it would not completely cut off those cities from Jerusalem. It would also create a large block of Israeli settlements in the center of the West Bank; it would not divide the West Bank in two. And because of an editing error, the article referred incompletely to the possibility of a contiguous Palestinian state. Critics see E1 as a threat to the meaningful contiguity of such a state because it would leave some Palestinian areas connected by roads with few exits or by circuitous routes; the proposed development would not technically make a contiguous Palestinian state impossible.

Despite the hype, E1 doesn’t cut West Bank in two.

The Times of Israel reports on a video released on the Internet showing IDF soldiers in the West Bank being forced to retreat under a hail of Palestinian rocks:

The troops, from a company of combat engineers, told Maariv that their hands were tied by superiors, leading to the muddled effort to contain the rioting crowd without provoking further violence. The film showed soldiers first charging toward dozens of Palestinians but then abruptly turning and fleeing under a hail of hurled stones. Three soldiers were injured, with one suffering a broken hand.

The soldiers speculated that the presence of a large number of press photographers in the area persuaded commanding officers to deny permission.

“There are always a lot of photographers there, but this time there were even more and apparently in order to prevent certain images they decided to endanger us instead,” a soldier said of his commanders in the Maariv report.

While Israel can be proud of the fact that the IDF does not resort to using live fire and lethal force against Palestinian demonstrators, it is disturbing to know that Israeli soldiers are placing their lives at risk because the presence of the press at the scene influences even the use of non-lethal measures to defend themselves and restore order.

And that’s without assessing just how much influence the presence of the cameras had on encouraging Palestinians to throw stones and attack the soldiers in the first place.

Addressing this very issue, photojournalist Ruben Salvadori, in a revealing video, blew the lid on the dynamics between photojournalists and Palestinian stone throwers at the scene and gave HonestReporting an exclusive interview back in October 2011. It’s well worth revisiting in light of this latest incident.

The Committee to Protect Journalists issued a special report on jailed journalists. Turkey’s the biggest jailer; neither Israel nor Fatahstan or Hamastan made the CPJ’s top ten list (not even per capita).

This snippet has me wondering: How might Palestinian press freedom benefit from the PA’s boosted status at the UN?

Journalists who either disappear or are abducted by nonstate entities such as criminal gangs or militant groups are not included on the prison census. Their cases are classified as “missing” or “abducted.”

I’d like to think this opens new avenues of accountability — Hamas and Fatah don’t have great track records of respecting free expression and free journalism.

But I’m not holding my breath.

Cross-posted from J-Wire.

Twenty people – mostly members of Sydney’s Jewish community, plus a number of West Australians and Americans  - are currently participating in the inaugural NSW Jewish Board of Deputies-HonestReporting Advocacy Mission in Israel.

DAY 8: Report from George Foster.

The final day of the mission thankfully began at 10am to give time for packing and checking out but mostly a well deserved more relaxed start to the day. Gil Hoffman, chief political correspondent and analyst for The Jerusalem Post, began the day’s sessions. Gil is also very well connected to Israeli and Palestinian leaders and makes regular appearances on CNN and Al-Jazeera. He was quite surprised by Bob Carr’s response in summoning the Ambassador but he generally had a positive take on the negative international response to the E1 announcement saying that at least it gave the various Ambassadors world-wide a chance to explain Israel’s position first hand.

Despite the negative reaction he was hopeful that the international community would bring Abbas to the negotiation table. Gil emphasised that Netanyahu has committed himself to peace and has said so in many speeches, however he is equally adamant that Iran be dealt with first.

Apparently the deadline is set for June 2013 and it is no coincidence that Iranian elections are due to be held on 14 June. Netanyahu’s goal is to prevent war but if necessary Israel has the ability and legitimacy to launch an attack on Iranian sites but does not really wish to do so.

In terms of the Israeli elections he was sure that Netanyahu would win although economic issues will be more important in this election than previous ones. Gil believed that the coalition Netanyahu pursues will be more balanced on this occasion. Gil’s main message to us was that Israel was in need of our assistance in terms of educating people, advocacy and solidarity. It was certainly important for us to hear from such a well informed and prominent analyst.

The next speakers were Simon Plosker, Managing Editor, and Joe Hyams, CEO, of HonestReporting, who explained more of the manner in which HonestReporting functions. Joe pointed out a booklet available free from the HonestReporting website: The Israeli-Arab Conflict, and emphasised the importance of quick and even immediate responses when a crisis occurs such the Pillar of Defence operation. He also noted that compelling and emotive responses seem to get far better coverage than a litany of facts and figures. It was pleasing that the IDF now uses the social media to its full extent.

The group was then treated to David Olesker, Director of JCCAT, and an advocacy trainer, who has spoken at University campuses and other forums where he has been heckled and vilified just for standing up for Israel. David spoke about peer advocacy and the importance of “conceptual framing”. The success of any communication is in setting the conceptual framework which then will control the outcome. He spoke about “Elevator Conversations”, that is, the short conversations we all have with our contacts at work or even socially and about “bridging” where one refutes an allegation quickly and then moves on to your own agenda. David skilfully went through a couple of role plays with participants to illustrate how such interactions can be turned into positive advocacy for Israel. His most important point was that personal and human experiences carry a more powerful message than simply reiterating facts.

After a short explanation of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies roles and functions by Yair Miller, President, Col (Ret) Ben-Tzion Gruber gave a detailed and at times emotional presentation of the IDF’s Code of Ethics. He notes that often you have a very short time in a combat situation to make any decision but then illustrated his remarks with videos showing how the IDF will abort rocket strikes, even at the last minute, if there is any doubt that there will be collateral damage to the civilian population. This is particularly difficult in Gaza where the terrorists dress in civilian clothing and use human children as shields which he again illustrated with video clips. He pointed out that the IDF warn the population with leaflet drops, text messages and telephone calls when they intend to target a particular building which no other army in the world would do. He noted that in the recent Pillar of Defence offensive 1800 targets were hit by the Israeli Airforce with the loss of 177 people of whom 121 were terrorists. Yes there were civilians killed but this was extremely regrettable and the military mourn any loss of life. In the same 8 days there were 870 people killed in Syria.

The final stop of the mission was a very pleasant, if slightly sad, lunch at Gabriel’s Restaurant.

All participants expressed their gratitude to the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies and HonestReporting for such a stimulating, revealing, exciting and information packed mission.

There is no doubt that this mission is of vital importance and adds immeasurably to the ability of participants to advocate even better for Israel. There is no doubt that there is no mission quite like it available in Australia today.

All agreed that it was most meaningful to have been in Israel itself to witness and be part of the vibrant life Israeli’s live and the many problems they face. We look forward to the next mission and believe it will be even more successful if that is at all possible.

Dr George Foster is a TAI graduate, former Executive Member of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, Board member of the Sydney Jewish Museum and the Association of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Descendants.

See Day 1 here.

See Day 2 here.

See Day 3 here.

See Day 4 here.

See Day 5 here.

See Day 6 here.

See Day 7 here.

See Day 8 here.