In this week’s look at media coverage, one story really brought to light the lack of crucial context in American media coverage of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.  How columnists and editorialists can write about events in Israel-Palestine as if they took place in a vacuum is a mystery.

Though many people use the term “cycle of violence,” many more discuss events without looking at what that cycle actually involves and how it got started.

On March 6, a Palestinian entered a Jewish seminary in Jerusalem and killed eight students.  He injured dozens more and was finally killed himself.

While many in Gaza celebrated this, it did not in any way counterbalance the loss of more than 20 Palestinian students in Israel’s siege this past week, nor the 100 more Palestinians who perished at Israel’s hands.

Some media commentators were shocked by Palestinian exuberance over this slaying.  Nolan Finley of The Detroit News, to cite an extreme example, wrote “They (the Jewish students) were innocents studying to be men of peace. And Palestinians danced in the streets over their deaths.”

His Sunday, March 9 column was an exercise in the power of denial.  He wrote the piece without accounting for — or even mentioning — Israel’s four-decade-long occupation of the Palestinians. 

Ignoring the occupation makes any analysis pointless since it is the defining dynamic between Israel and the Palestinians. 

Perhaps Finley has no clue what living under occupation is like: foreign soldiers, tanks, and helicopters constantly monitoring you. Travel between and within towns constrained by checkpoints, walls, roadblocks and thousands of yards of barbed wire.  Short trips take hours.  And that is the mild side of this occupation.

People living under occupation live under a cruel form of oppression.  They have little to no rights under occupation regimes.  Most Palestinian families have had one or more prisoners held by Israel. Why?  For doing what any people would do — seeking the ejection of foreign occupiers.

Finley shows a blindness to this when he claims Israel’s massacre of over 120 Palestinians — a third of them children — was “motivated only by self-defense.” An occupying army killing occupied peoples cannot claim self-defense as a moral justification for the use of force.  They are in an offensive position, they are the invaders.

Though Israel was founded by force by mostly European settlers, Finley dares to suggest that the native Palestinians are the “aggressors.”  How can the occupied be the aggressive party?  It simply makes no sense.

Finley also wrote without a sense of irony, “The Palestinians have used violence to further their political goals without consequence.”  And Israel uses non-violent tactics, right?  It was by putting their bodies in front of tanks that Israel was able to divide Palestine into Occupied Territories? 

If Finley is concerned about the political effects of violence, he is looking in the wrong direction. Israel used its coercive control to nullify the 2006 Palestinian elections that put Hamas in power.  It used gunships to enforce the suffocating embargo in Gaza that nearly drove the Palestinians there to starvation.

In more historical terms, it is a well-known fact that many of the Zionist organizations working to establish a Jewish state in Palestine were considered “terrorists” by the British and world powers.   The bombing of the King David hotel and the assassination of a U.N. official are just two examples.

Finley also fails to bring up the Israeli settlers. That is no surprise since their existence undermines his point that critics of the wall act as if “there’s something unfair about not opening your doors to your would-be killers.”

The doors that opened up led to Israeli settlements throughout the West Bank.  Settlements are going up and expanding on appropriated Palestinian land.  They are one huge reason Palestinians reject the occupation. Yet, to Finley, they do not exist.

Finley should read Gideon Levy’s article, “Heads to the right,” in last week’s Haaretz.  (The article is reprinted on page 4. Levy talks about the seminary where this bloodshed occurred.  It is a flagship enterprise of militant, religious Zionism.  It is a key institution for Israeli settler ideology.

And it sits near Deir Yassin, the Palestinian village where a massacre in 1948 wiped out the Palestinian population in the name of Zionism. Why is it that writers in Israel can point out that the seminary “was a fascist institution,” but those in America fail to even consider that?

Does this make the killing justified?  No, clearly not.  The killing of unarmed people, especially students, no matter their views, is never justified and should be condemned.  If Palestinians celebrate this, how can they condemn when Israel does it?

Palestinian reactions are not as important, however, as U.S. foreign policy in making change.  I often regret that because of power differences, American public opinion is more crucial than the opinions of those people suffering. 

With that power comes a special responsibility to understand the experiences and perspectives of both sides.  However, the U.S. media, as outside observers, have not done so.  The title of Finley’s writing, “Excusing Mideast terror breeds more,” could also describe the problem with his failure to address the Israeli occupation.