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Interview with Israeli-American journalist Joel Schalit: ‘Israel's government wants to put a formal end to democracy’ [1]
['Filip Noubel']
Date: 2023-10-26
JS: I don’t know any serious journalists or editors who pay attention to directives like that. Including on the right. That’s the sort of direction that gets a healthy laugh in most of the newsrooms I’ve worked in. This said, there is a high level of confusion about whether to call things like the present fighting in Israel/Palestine a war and to give this round of conflict a specific name.
Some of this is due to ignorance. Many editors and journalists don’t know that despite the fact that the Arab-Israeli conflict is 75 years old, there are specific wars that have transpired within that time frame. Hence, the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War, or the 1982 Lebanon War. The Arab-Israeli conflict may go back decades, but wars deserve to be historically and politically distinguished from each other. Naming helps.
For the present conflict, we decided to call it the Sukkot War [Sukkot refers to a Jewish religious holiday] because of when it began and how it was chosen by Hamas. El País, the biggest Spanish-language news media in the world, also uses Sukkot War. As difficult as it might be for a non-Jew to understand that, it’s not that impenetrable. Spanish media get it. But most don’t, and even the BBC and The Guardian can use several different names for conflicts they cover.
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[1] Url:
https://globalvoices.org/2023/10/26/interview-with-israeli-american-journalist-joel-schalitisraels-government-wants-to-put-a-formal-end-to-democracy/
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