No Jews, no news! Corollary: Oh! It’s just them.

It is commonly recognized among those who are fighting the anti-Israel propaganda machines that if Jews cannot be accused of being perpetrators of a specific instance of harm, then perpetration of that specific instance of harm is not news. In other words, no Jews, no news! That is almost as true in Israel among the extreme left as it is around the globe.

However, there is a corollary to this of which we saw evidence just this morning.

The corollary is: Outside the Green Line, OK, fine!

This morning, rocks were thrown at a school bus taking pupils to school in the Southern Jordan Valley, the Bik’a. You probably did not know that because after hearing of it I scoured the Web and found only two briefs, in Hebrew, telling us that. One was in Walla! and the other in Arutz 7. No Israeli English-language outlet saw fit to report on it, not even to the minimal extent we saw in these two breaking news reports.

So you likely do not know that a window was broken in the bus and that at least two elementary school pupils are now suffering from anxiety. You do not know that the school had to make preparations to be able to help all the pupils who were on the bus with the potential emotional fallout from the event — and probably also their school mates, many of whom may have suffered similar rock-throwing attacks in their short lives, or have family or friends who have.

And you do not know this because it is apparently not considered news. Why? Because it happened over there. Not here. Not us. There. On the other side of the Green Line.

If the bus was taking pupils to a school in Hadera or Petach Tikva or Haifa or Ramat Gan, you surely would have heard about it. You would have known the exact ages of the pupils, would have known how their schoolmates, teachers, parents, etc reacted to the event. You would have seen photos of the broken bus window.

Only later, as I was in the process of writing this piece did a full-length article appear in Hebrew on the Srugim website (whose readership is the national religious). They had obtained a videoclip of the moment a rock broke a side window in the bus. I wonder how much traffic that particular website gets.

This morning’s incident coincides with me learning about a new campaign by Shai Glick’s B’Tsalmo organization. He is requesting that the Commercial Television and Radio Authority (called HaReshut HaShniya, or Second Authority) devise a clear protocol for handling programming interruption in the wake of emergency events. What he means is, if regular programming is interrupted to report on terrorist attacks in Tel Aviv, for example, that regular programming should, by principle, also be interrupted for terror attacks in Judea and Samaria and the Jordan Valley.

For example, when Ronen Hananiya was killed by a terrorist in Kiryat Arba on 29 October, Channel 13 continued to air “Master Chef” as if nothing of any importance had happened at all. We all know that all regular programming would have been interrupted to report on an event of similar intensity had it taken place in Tel Aviv.

Perhaps it is not only MK Ofer Cassif who believes that the residents of the disputed territories are responsible for the attacks against them and, therefore, what happened that Saturday night was not really terrorism.

If a schoolbus stoning would be news if it happened on Highway 4, it is news when it happens on Highway 90. No?

Shai Glick, CEO of B’Tsalmo says:

We will act to ensure a unified code of ethics according to which residents of Judea and Samaria and all outlying areas do not fall in importance below those in the center of the country. Nobody is transparent.

Feature Image Credit: Pixabay public domain images