Anti-Semitism, the Media, and the “Cult of the Occupation”

The Western news media’s deeply ingrained habit of elevating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict above all other conflicts in the world, and of bias against Israel, has fostered what Matti Friedman terms the “Cult of the Occupation.” Israel’s military control of the West Bank (and, somehow, its non-occupation of Gaza) is held to be the root of the Middle East’s problems and the world’s greatest injustice. Such an absurd belief can stem from but one place: hatred of Jews, who are now seen, just as in older forms of anti-Semitism, as a living symbol of the major social and political concerns of the day: