Qana, and What You'll Never See on the News

Politics. Who knew I'd end up writing on it.

The deaths of 60 civilians at Qana on Sunday was a serious blow. I think every Israeli knows to stop and recoil from such a horror. While the Israeli army does not target civillians, and has actually refrained from firing in situations of reasonable likelihood of innocents in the crosshairs unless it's a "ticking bomb", Israel still cannot but take a certain degree of responsibility.

If I don't dwell more on this, however, it's only because anyone taking a marginal interest in this "crisis" has already been hearing all of this over and over from all the major news networks. No doubts cast, no question marks, no critical reading, no gray, nothing - Israel's guilty.

(Not just in the media: When I dared raise some questions in the office where I work, I was actually attacked by a (Jewish, Israeli, not particularly left-leaning) co-worker for being "heartless". This wouldn't be the first time that suggesting a picture is somewhere in the gray, proposing there's more than meets the eye, quite literally, is considered inappropriate because "innocent people are dying - what can you possibly say?".)

With the Qana incident, the news channels truly had no shame. When interviewing Israeli representatives, They stretched the fine line between interview and mafia-style interrogation awefully thin. Israel's guilt was so obviously glaring and one-sided to them, it was almost comical to watch. The news channels' glee was quite apparent in having again found a perfectly black scapegoat. Assuming unanimous global agreement for its aggresive indictment, mainstream media could dispense with the oh so boring "fair and balanced coverage".

Unfortunately, all that the news has really been giving us is a blow-by-blow account of reports on the ground and the most simplistic assumptions of causality - completely circumventing matters of intent, historical background, (il)legitimacy and ideological enmity. My humble opinion is that these count more than ever. It's obviously true that a reporter's job is to report the facts as they occur; but this can paint a very slanted picture of the big bully attacking the innocent little puppy...

This is in no small part a built-in problem. The major international news channels will give far more screen time to the pictures of destruction in Lebanon - so easy to get - than to its direct equivalent: the rocket firing at Israel. This is simply because Hezbollah won't let reporters film their daily firing from densely-populated civilian areas. after all, that would be bad for PR... To the viewer, these rockets are mere numbers occasionally running on the ribbon at the bottom of the screen, while the picture of the weeping mother in the rubble easily outweighs it.

With this pictures-as-complete-story mentality, it becomes easy to forget to use ones common sense. A common statistic regularly used as an indictment of Israel is how far fewer Israelis have died during the war than Lebanese, as if this scorecard mentality has ever been used anywhere else*. The problem is, though, that this isn't for lack of trying.. Hizbullah have fired nearly 2,000 rockets by now, which would have killed far more if it weren't for Israel's bomb shelters. Israel only has these shelters because we've been attacked so many times before, and so decided to effectively mandate them.. less Israeli deaths, then, should hardly be Israel's "fault". Lebanon, on the other hand, rarely bothered building shelters.. So holding death tolls as some kind of yardstick becomes very problematic. Meanwhile, the reality on the ground is that Hizbullah is firing over 100 rockets a day, often from civilian areas. This puts the Israeli army, in charge of defending its civilan population, in a serious bind. These rockets are potentially just as deadly as our attacks, it's only that Israel has invested far greater effort in minimizing its civilian deaths - effort it should not have ever been asked to invest. Hezbullah's tactics essentially cause the high Lebanese death toll.


Something else you won't see on the news: Hezbullah members have, in the past, actively threatened civilians lest they try to flee areas they're firing from. I consider this very relevant information that any news viewer should have when constructing his/her opinion on this war. But you'll never hear this watching any of the mainstream news channels. I'm baffled why.. Such dirty tactics, also commonly used in Gaza, have been ignored by mainstream media for years. the reason is simple - no picture, no story. Plus, reporters who were granted the privilege of close-hand reporting near terror groups are wary of giving a damaging report, lest these groups refuse to allow them access in the future. Israel's open press policy is commendable, and I completely support it, but when pitted against self-selecting reporting from the "other side", I can't say it hasn't harmed our image and international standing...Yet another of many ironies here in the Middle East.

The problem is, that beyond the picture-as-complete-story and self-selecting availability of news stories, Journalists continue to mirror these limitations instead of using their supposed expertise to try and balance it. In the countless hours since this incident, no one, on any of the three major international news channels (CNN, BBC, Sky News), asked an obvious question: what were those civilians still doing there? This was clearly a warzone - bombing had begun 8 hours before, and was resumed shortly before the incident. Leaflets warning the civilian population to leave had been dropped well in advance. The Israeli air force confirmed that Hezbullah were indeed firing rockets from the immediate proximity of that building. If I were there, I would've gotten the hell away at all costs; if I could, that is. Needless to say, I don't know and can't know what happened there. But what infuriates me is that not one reporter asked such an obvious question.

One can claim that the "built-in" limitations and biases in reporting on this war are just that - and that thus the networks and reporters are not to blame. But the fact is they consistently miss the opportunity to try and rectify these biases, even somewhat. With a growing trend of self-examiation and "behind the scenes" corners, there are plenty of platforms for any journalist who wants to point out some of the objective, non-visual points I've made so far.

Even if it is discovered that the civilians were there of their free will - for some crazy reason I have yet to guess - why doesn't the mainstream international media clearly and regularly present the other important fact: that Hizbullah literally fire rockets from civilian centers? the closest I've heard to this is the occasional mention that they mix with the general population - which sounds almost harmless, when it's anything but - but never that they fire from those areas. What is Israel expected to do in response?

With Hezbullah daily exploiting Israel's moral stance, who is really to blame for a catastrophe of this sort? The one firing in self-defense to try to save his own life, or the one attacking whilst using an innocent bystander as a shield?



* To take an extreme example, in WWII over 2 million German civilians were killed. How many US civilians killed? a nice, round 0. Disproportionate use of force, I say!

Horrible Report on Teachers Salaries - Declawed (somewhat)

I'm writing on a topic that was in the news! Allright! I celebrate this fact, since I've been reading other bloggers do this with a fair degree of envy.. "They've SO got their shit together", I'd figuratively say, "they're well enough informed and opinionated to draw out a complete theory, analysis and/or rebuttal in an organized, linear fashion". Now I'm doing it too... well, trying anyway..

Ynet burst out with a report revealing the ostensibly shameful salaries teachers earn in this country (Israel, in case you've been napping). The reader shockingly learns that an Israeli teacher in the major cities earns "half of what a teacher in Canada does, a third of one in Germany, and almost a sixth!! of a Swiss teacher's salary". Now first of all, let me be the first to agree that teachers salaries are, without question, pitifully low, and that this does indeed indicate a very real mistake in our national priorities. The horrifics and injustices of our educational system have been covered at length in the media, and I need not elaborate.


This report, however, is fundamentally flawed; and while I have a background in economics (and media..and music, while we're at it), it doesn't take a single econ lesson to understand why. For one thing, it doesn't adjust for prices, or the "value of money", so to speak, in each country.

What does $100 mean? If you were living in, say, Zaire, you could probably buy a mansion and a masseuse for life for around $100. In London, this will buy you a bite-sized muffin and maybe a candy wrapper (well, it sure felt that way when I was there). So by their same calculation, I'm sure you could find an Israeli teacher earns several times more, probably by a factor well northwards of ten, than a teacher in Burundi.. we just know that doesn't mean much. These ratios have to be tempered somewhat so as to be comparable in any meaningful way. Now how we temper figures like these can get tricky - do we use the ratio of consumer prices? or possibly GDP per capita? or average wage, or minimum wage, or cost of building materials, or minimal health package.. What factors in to comparing the meaning of money or standards of living is immensely complicated, and quite a heated topic for argument among economists.

But luckily, there is some kind of usable standard to compare money, that most economists do agree on. It's not perfect, it's quite "mainstream" if you will, but it's something.. it's called PPP (Purchasing Power Parity). I'll skip the econ lesson, let's just say it's something like a measurement of the average prices of "everything" in a given country. So that if I earn 100$ in a country where the PPP is half that of another, I can buy twice as much as in the other country.

So, if we apply the PPP ratios to the first big figure, we'll find that the salary the Israeli is earning isn't worth 50% of what a Canadian is, it's effectively 78%. Big difference! The six-fold ratio given for Swiss teachers of Israelis is trimmed to four-fold by this same calculation; the three-fold ratio for German teachers to a little below 2 and a half.

So, it's looking a little better now, but still not great, I know. And this is no surprise, since we already know the education system here is going to shit. But, bear in mind all we've done is level the playing field a bit so that we can even begin to talk about the same dollar when comparing a salary.

What we still haven't adjusted for is the state of the local economy. I mean, all Israel can realistically try to do is bump teachers up on the list of national priorities, but we can't just miraculously start paying them like the Swiss.. So we have to ask how a teacher ranks, salary-wise, compared to other employees in his or her own country. We can't really do much more than that. Remember the average Israeli plain earns a lot less that a German. If Israel just decided "hey, we have to match wages to those in Europe", it would be tantamount to a 5-year-old declaring he can now play basketball as well as Michael Jordan. Not happening.

So I compared German and Israeli teachers to their countries' average salary. This is deeply flawed, and wouldn't get me a passing grade in Elementary Economics for Hedgehogs, but it's something, it's a heuristic. the Israeli teacher is earning 69% of his country's average salary, and the German earns 87%*. Not quite the three-fold difference they were talking about, is it?

All in all Israeli teachers, compared to other workers in Israel, are a little worse off than teachers in Germany, but not by a factor anywhere near three! Feel free to do the same with Switzerland and Canada - It may not seem that way, but I have a life..

The real issue here is that Israel as a whole may be approaching third-world-country status, and that's another kettle of fish entirely. But the degree to which Israeli teachers are screwed salary-wise, and they are screwed, is significantly less than the headline would have you believe.


* The stats given in the article present an Israeli teacher earning the equivalent of $1117 a month, and a German earning $3575. Yet the average salaried employee in Israel earns $1621, whereas the German earns $4113.