Although the war with Hamas is, naturally, dominating the news both within Israel and about Israel, another item has emerged that should not go unnoticed.
First, though, it will help to recap.
Things started to go wild around here back on June 12, when it turned out that three Israeli teenage boys had been abducted by Hamas terrorists in Judea (part of what is called the West Bank). The Israeli security forces launched a massive manhunt and began cracking down on Hamas throughout the West Bank. On June 30, the bodies of the three boys were found, and it turned out they had been shot dead shortly after the abduction.
A couple of days later, on July 2, another body was found in a forest near Jerusalem. This time it was the body of a Palestinian teenage boy named Mohammed Abu Khdeir, who, in the early morning hours of that day, had apparently been kidnapped and murdered by Jewish Israelis in a revenge attack.
It was six days later, on July 8, that the current Israel-Hamas war, which Israel calls Operation Protective Edge, erupted.
Naturally, countless mainstream media stories seized on the Abu Khdeir murder as part of an alleged “cycle” of violence that led to the war, implying an equivalency between the murders of the three Israeli boys and that of the Palestinian one. The picture conveyed was of two equally violent, irrational communities, Jews and Palestinians, spiraling downward into war.
Of course, the murders of the Israeli boys and of the Palestinian boy are morally equivalent in both being despicably evil. But apart from that, the MSM typically missed, glossed over, or downplayed some major, diametrical asymmetries connected to these crimes.