The NYT Says Gaza Poverty Causes War With Israel. Sorry, But That Doesn’t Make Sense. - by Ira Stoll

...What is so special about the residents of Gaza that everyone expects them to respond to self-inflicted financial difficulties by starting a war with their neighbors? Since Israel’s enemies seem to attack Israel regardless of whether those enemies are prosperous or impoverished, and since impoverished people in other places manage to respond to poverty without resorting to wars of aggression, maybe the Times would be better off just scrapping this whole explanatory framework, or at least applying some more skeptical analysis before passing it along to Times readers.

Ira Stoll..
Algemeiner.com..
18 February '18..

One of the ways the New York Times demonstrates bias in news reports from the Middle East is with unstated, and unquestioned, assumptions.

In two recent articles, the assumption is that if economic conditions worsen in the Gaza Strip, the result will be attacks on Israel.

An example comes in this paragraph from a Times dispatch over the weekend:

Already beleaguered by Israel’s decade-old blockade of the strip, Gazans were made to suffer even more last year when the Palestinian Authority, run by Fatah, imposed harsh new restrictions in a power struggle with Hamas, its archrival. An attempt at reconciliation between the two last fall has since bogged down, and a standoff over salaries and revenue has sent the territory’s economy into free-fall, with many expecting a war with Israel as a result.

A front page Times report from earlier this month, also under the byline of the Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief, David Halbfinger, sounded some similar notes. It appeared under the print headline, “Gaza Is Near Financial Collapse, Prompting Fears of Violence”:

whether out of bluster or desperation, Gazans both in and out of power have begun talking openly about confronting Israel over its blockade in the kind of mass action that could easily lead to casualties and escalation…

One way or the other, “an explosion’s coming,” said Mr. Abu Shaaban, the cash-strapped Palestinian Authority pensioner. “We have only Israel to explode against. Should we explode against each other?”

The barely unstated assumption here is that economic difficulties in Gaza cause war with Israel.

Yet there are at least two big holes in this logic that the Times might discover if it probed more skeptically.

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