Jennifer Lowenstein’s “Shame of It All” piece in Counterpunch, provides a literal (though minor) counterpunch to the MSM coverage of the Israel’s removal of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip.
I do not remember ever seeing the MSM doing such in-depth “pain and anguish” stories about Palestinians. Nor, as Lowenstein points out, does MSM report that:
Sharon’s unilateral “Disengagement” plan is not ending the occupation of Gaza. The Israelis are not relinquishing control over the Strip. They are retaining control of all land, air and sea borders including the Philadelphi corridor along the Gaza/Egypt border where the Egyptians may be allowed to patrol under Israel’s watchful eye and according to Israel’s strictest terms. The 1.4 million inhabitants of Gaza remain prisoners in a giant penal colony, despite what their partisan leaders are attempting to claim. The IDF is merely redeploying outside the Gaza Strip, which is surrounded by electrical and concrete fences, barbed wire, watchtowers, armed guards and motion censors, and it will retain the authority to invade Gaza on a whim. Eight thousand Palestinian workers working in Israel for slave wages will soon be banned from returning to work. Another 3,200 Palestinians who worked in the settlements for a sub-minimum-wage have been summarily dismissed without recourse to severance pay or other forms of compensation. Still others will lose their livelihoods when the Israelis move the Gaza Industrial Zone from Erez to somewhere in the Negev desert.
PS: One of the most powerful representations of the Palestinian experience under Israeli occupation is graphic journalist Joe Sacco’s Palestine, which won the American Book Award in 1996. The single-volume collection of this “cartoon journalism” includes an introduction by Edward Said.
Based on several months of research and an extended visit to the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the early 1990s (where he conducted over 100 interviews with Palestinians and Jews), Palestine was the first major comics work of political and historical nonfiction by Sacco, whose name has since become synonymous with this graphic form of New Journalism. His other journalism in the form of comics include: Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-95 (with an introduction by Christopher Hitchens) and Notes From A Defeatist.
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