Sometimes it amazes me what passes as journalism in this country, particularly in the English news outlets here.
The Jerusalem Post's Settler's Journal (Part 3) sets a new low. Datya Yitzhaki, photographed with her children in the Gaza settlement of Kfar Yam, waxes poetic about the difficult situation settlers face with the impending disengagement plan. For example, she writes:
"On November 11, Arafat was finally dead. On November 11, Yoav recovered from the chicken pox, and on November 11, a lily of the sea blossomed in our yard. Our home in Kfar Yam is situated on a sand dune almost at the water's edge. The brisk winds and ocean spray that gets in everywhere wreak havoc on ordinary plants, but there is one flower that amazes with its abundant blossoming each year anew – the lily of the sea."
How sweet. I'm glad to hear Yoav is feeling better. But it's a cheap literary device intended to put a human face on the situation.
So I guess the settlers are like the lily of the sea, unlike "ordinary" Israelis living outside the Strip for whom "the brisk winds and ocean spray" (i.e. threat of the Palestinians) would wreak havoc.
(It must be rough having a home on the beach.)
I have a certain amount of respect for anyone who writes. It demands a certain level of courage to put yourself out there, to open yourself up to criticism. But not everything is fit to be published, and that certainly includes material I've written. So how is it that Yitzhaki's sentimental crap gets in the Post? It's just a blatant attempt to put a human face on the "plight" of the settlers and is simply poor journalism, even as a personal account.
She describes the Gush Katif settlers as "well-meaning," while the kibbutz members have come from a "distorted moral world." Black. White. Things are a bit more complicated, no?
She uses the age-old trick of comparing lands captured in '48 to lands captured in '67. Come on. How many Palestinians live in the Gaza Strip? How many lillies of the sea, I mean Israeli settlers, are there?
I wonder if anyone fact checks her story? I'd like to know more about the private road the Kibbutz closed to the settlers, a move she suggests endangers the lives of women and children. (By the way, would they be so endangered if the women and children didn't live in the Gaza Strip?)
I'm doing what I told myself a few months I wouldn't do. I'm spending valuable time commenting on the right-wing propaganda in the Post. I just can't help myself.
(I abhor the left-wing propaganda on Haaretz too, at least the poorly-written variety, but naturally it doesn't get to me as much because I'm biased. I admit it.)
I'm sure Yitzhaki's piece is getting lots of readers, but just like Fox News this says nothing about its quality. The Post should stick (or should I say return) to the journalism business and leave such sentimental crap to be published on blogs, like mine.
