For the second time in under a week, The Guardian’s Jerusalem correspondent Bethan McKernan has shoehorned an obvious error into one of her pieces.
Reporting on the recent riots on the Gaza border, McKernan and Palestinian journalist Hazem Balousha’s latest joint byline once again accuses Israel (and Egypt) of laying siege to the Gaza Strip for the past 16 years.
Yet, as we pointed out earlier this week, the word “siege” means to surround an area or place with the eventual purpose of being able to capture it. And given the fact that Israel unilaterally withdrew from the coastal enclave as part of the 2005 Disengagement, it is quite clear there are no plans to retake the territory.
HonestReporting has contacted The Guardian to request that the mistake be corrected, specifically by giving editors a helpful dictionary definition of the word and pointing out that sieges don’t normally involve one side facilitating the transport of humanitarian goods to the other — as Israel does in the case of Gaza.
Among the many problems in this @guardian story is @mck_beth‘s continuing use of the word “siege” to describe the Gaza blockade.
A siege is defined as cutting off essential supplies to force a surrender. The Gaza blockade allows essential items in. It is not a “siege.” https://t.co/zJTQBWc5kj pic.twitter.com/l7vSunW28c
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) October 5, 2023
Alas, the imaginary siege on the Strip is not the only problem in the piece.
McKernan and Balousha repeatedly refer to the Hamas-orchestrated violence that led to the closing of the Erez Crossing as “demonstrations,” which is a rather muted way of describing the turmoil at the border fence, in which rioters hurled Molotov cocktails and fired incendiary balloons toward Israel.
Additionally, those who participated in the violence are downgraded to mere “protesters,” as opposed to rioters whose actions heaped further economic misery on the impoverished enclave by preventing 18,500 innocent Gazan workers from commuting to their jobs in Israel.
Meanwhile, the apparent trigger for the riots is reported thus:
The protests were ostensibly organised in response to an uptick in visits by Jewish groups to Jerusalem’s sensitive al-Aqsa compound, ongoing Israel Defence Forces (IDF) raids targeting armed Palestinian cells in the occupied West Bank, and the economic misery caused by the Israeli-Egyptian siege of Gaza, now in its 16th year.”
First, the fact that McKernan and Balousha are giving any kind of credence to the absurd notion that Palestinians are rioting in Gaza because of a supposed uptick in visits by Jews to a holy site in Jerusalem is outrageous.
Indeed, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority frequently use the claim that the al-Aqsa Mosque is under some kind of threat to both induce and justify rioting by Palestinians, such as when PA President Mahmoud Abbas helped prompt a “stabbing Intifada” when he said “filthy” Jewish feet were “desecrating” Al-Aqsa.
Second, it would be helpful for some less-informed Guardian readers if McKernan and Balousha actually said why Jewish groups are visiting the “al-Aqsa compound,” which is that the compound is also known as the Temple Mount and is the holiest site in the world for Jews.
Third, it should have been mentioned that the “economic misery” is not simply the result of the Israeli-Egyptian blockade — it is the result of a terrorist group sworn to Israel’s destruction gaining control of the Strip forcing the introduction of the blockade in the first place.
While we don’t expect The Guardian to alter the piece to spell out the violent reality of the Gaza riots, we do expect them to use language correctly. It’s basic journalism.
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