On Monday, July 29, the front page of The Washington Post displayed an image of people mourning at a young child’s funeral. Underneath it, the article headline read: “Israel Hits Targets in Lebanon.”
Given the title, it should have been safe to assume that the photo depicted the bloody result of Israel’s attack in Lebanon. This photo, however, actually captures Israelis mourning an 11-year-old girl, Alma, killed while playing soccer by Hezbollah rockets fired from Lebanon at Majdal Shams, a Druze village in northern Israel.
The small caption beneath the photo states: “Relatives on Sunday mourn Alma Ayman Fakher Eldin, one of 12 victims of a strike on a soccer field in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. While Israel and the United States blame Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group denies connection to the attack.”
This equates the accounts of two sovereign governments with that of a terrorist militia. Further, it negates the pride of many Druze in their Israeli citizenship, which many demonstrate through military service and civic participation in Israel’s government.
This mistake is too astounding to be mere negligence. Unfortunately, it appears to be part of a pattern of deliberate anti-Israel biased reporting from The Washington Post, which Jewish Insider noted as early as November and the National Review took note of in January.
Errors such as these undermine the credibility and the integrity of this publication, especially when viewed in a long line of similarly misleading, one-sided articles. One can only deduce that the photo was deliberately placed to deceive the audience.
While one looks to give a revered news publication the benefit of the doubt, in this case, there is no misconstruing the intent of publishing this heart-wrenching photo alongside a blatantly anti-Israel headline, since one of the authors of the article – Heidi Levine – is also the photographer of the inappropriately displayed photo.
While The Washington Post published a statement regarding its problematic photo and captioning, it hardly qualifies as an apology: “The headlines should have noted that the Israeli strikes were a response to a rocket strike from Lebanon that killed 12 teenagers and children in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights,” the correction continued. “The photo depicted mourning for one of those victims as the caption noted.”
Even with this clarifying statement, the damage to Israel’s public perception has already been done. Thousands of people glanced at a headline with a provocative photo and concluded that Israel had committed “yet another” atrocity against Arabs. No correction, especially one as meager as this, will undo the bias that has been etched into peoples’ minds.
The article is also missing an essential line of inquiry: Why did Hezbollah inflict such terror on the Israeli city of Majdal Shams? That is the real, untold story. Rather than publishing a singular article that highlights the plight of Israelis and what their diverse community endures as a result of being surrounded by hostile territories run by terrorist organizations and proxies for Iran, the Washington Post favored publishing yet another piece blaming Israel for the ongoing suffering in the region.
These ‘errors’ can be severely consequential in promoting antisemitic bias and hate.
Misleading articles such as this one hurt not only Israel but also American Jews, who have been enduring a surge in antisemitic hate. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) states that between October 7 and the end of 2023, “5,204 incidents – more than the incident total for the whole of 2022” were recorded, and “52% of the incidents after October 7 (2,718) included references to Israel, Zionism, or Palestine”. To suggest that anti-Israel bias is unrelated to the ongoing scourge of antisemitism defies credulity, especially given the growing incidence of anti-Jewish hate masquerading as anti-Zionism.
The use of the photo chosen by the Washington Post photo is a disgrace to the memory of 11-year-old Alma who was murdered, the 11 other children who died alongside her, the Druze community, and the Israeli community as a whole. Further, it is a disgrace to journalism itself.
The Washington Post and countless news organizations can and must do better. Educating its reporters and editors on the basic histories of the region and the context for the ongoing conflicts would be a helpful start. Training on antisemitic tropes and how anti-Israel bias plays into antisemitism around the world would be an important step, as well.
The writer is the cantor and spiritual co-leader of East End Temple in Manhattan.
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