"The cascade of emotion and revulsion over the heinous tactics used by Hamas to deliberately target, kill, and kidnap Israeli civilians in surprise cross-border raids from Gaza last weekend has been remarkable to behold, and entirely appropriate.

Amid this outpouring of feeling and support, a short and blunt statement has been adopted so widely by U.S. President Joe Biden and other U.S. officials and politicians that it has almost instantly achieved the status of a stock phrase: “I stand with Israel.”

But one effect of an expression such as this that so thoroughly captures a well-justified sense of outrage—as in the case over the recent Hamas attacks—is that it can block out further thought, and especially the asking of hard and necessary questions. Those who violate the unwritten decorum established amid the shock of atrocities face the shushing disapproval of others that signals that now is not the time for deeper thought.

The unfortunate reality is that it has almost never been the right time for Israel or the Western countries that count as its steadiest supporters—led by the United States—to probe the hard questions that stem from the existence of millions of Palestinians who subsist in various states of what have come to seem, evermore, like permanent inequality and legal inferiority under Israel’s authority or control.

In the wake of Hamas’s crimes, we have been told with metronomic regularity that there can be no excuse for organized armed attacks against defenseless Israeli civilians—and that much is true. We are also told there can be no legitimate equivalency drawn between the actions of Israel and those of violence-prone nonstate enemies, including Hamas, Hezbollah, and other militant groups. This is a more complicated matter, given the role of both the Israeli state and Israeli settlers in killing Palestinians with relative impunity over the years. But even if one accepts this principle, neither of these notions encourage further thought. And this is precisely the time when further thought is most desperately required.

It should not require condoning the violent tactics of groups such as Hamas or the atrocities they commit to understand that Israel’s own behavior toward Palestinians has long been deeply troubling and problematic. It is not establishing a false equivalency or blithely writing off acts of terrorism to observe that Israel has not been willing to grant rights to Palestinians that would be recognized by a dispassionate observer as anything remotely approaching equal or fair. In fact, under the long rule of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as a string of his predecessors, meaningful conversations about a just dispensation for Palestinians have been largely off the table.
....
If Israelis can acknowledge these things, those who count themselves as true friends of the country should be able to do so as well, and far more openly. But at least insofar as openness about this nuance is concerned, this has been a persistent problem."
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/10/13/i-stand-with-israel-hamas-war-gaza-palestinians-human-rights-occupation/

Question: Is Western media part of the problem?

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