Image courtesy Medirect
The State of israel was proclaimed on May 14th 1948, so that makes it one year younger than I.
Since that time, there have been eighteen different episodes of conflict that Wikipedia classifies as "wars" involving Israel and its neighbours, including Six-Day war in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973. There have been many other episodes besides these two which resonate in my memory, but many of them have rumbled along in the background without making the news, routinely killing and maiming the participants.
In the course of these wars or skirmishes, around eleven thousand members of the IDF have been killed, and approximately 4000 Israeli civilians have also died. During the same period, reliable statistics recording Palestinian casualties have not been kept, but some data is available since 2008 indicating that over 120000 have died. This figure does not include those killed by the current Israeli activity in the Gaza strip.
The war in Vietnam was the first conflict televised daily into western living rooms, and many historians insist this exposure of the horrors of war to everyday citizens was largely responsible for the loss of support in both the USA and Australia which began to decline measurably in 1968.
This pattern of weariness with the conflict does not seem to have been reproduced in the Middle East. Those wars have endured throughout my lifetime. Perhaps we have become accustomed to them. I doubt that the people involved (Israelis and Palestinians) have.
And this tolerance for the slaughter by both sides, gentle reader, is a conundrum that I can't get my head around. Both sides of the conflict use the media megaphone to advance their respective causes. All this seems to achieve is division on the streets of our capital cities, and political point scoring.
Perhaps it's time to try a novel approach. Rather than using confronting imagery as a means to attract eyeballs and clicks, both corporate and public media could agree to help resolve conflict or at the very least, move it from a violent to a non-violent phase.
This, of course, will never happen so long as the media is conceptualised as a market, and the story will need to be sold to the highest bidder.
