The corporate media have some strong financial motives for supporting the slaughter in Gaza, and they are acting on those motives. After all, arms merchants regularly advertise on news shows, not to directly sell their products, but to push a pro-war bias that sells more wars. More wars mean larger markets for the death merchants. Even worse, NBC and MSNBC are owned by GE (General Electric) which is an arms manufacturer.

Just as we must show the humanity of the Palestinians getting killed in Gaza, we also need to show the Israelis who are opposing this carnage. We need to promote human values and humane responses, rather than blindly accepting the pro-war propaganda.

To this end, I posted a message from an Israeli peace activist which deconstructs the narrative that is being shoved down our throats, one that treats Israelis and Palestinians as permanent and intractable enemies.

Pagan Sphinx is linking to a wonderful article by Amy Goodman on Truthdig which covers the Israeli peace movement from a journalistic perspective.

Here's an Israeli perspective you probably won't see on ABC News:

Israeli professor Neve Gordon is chair of the department of politics and government at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in southern Israel, the region most impacted by the Hamas rockets.

Speaking over the phone from Beersheba, Gordon said: “We just had a rocket about an hour ago not far from our house. My two children have been sleeping in a bomb shelter for the past week. And yet, I think what Israel is doing is outrageous. ... The problem is that most Israelis say Israel left the Gaza Strip three years ago and Hamas is still shooting rockets at us. They forget the details. The detail is that Israel maintains sovereignty. The detail is that the Palestinians live in a cage. The detail is that they don’t get basic foodstuff, that they don’t get electricity, that they don’t get water. And when you forget those kinds of details, all you say is, ‘Why are they still shooting at us?’ That’s what the media here has been pumping them with, then you think this war is rational. If you look at what’s been going on in the Gaza Strip in the past three years and you see what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians, you would think that the Palestinian resistance is rational. And that’s what’s missing in the mainstream media here.”

Here's some info about a peace march that won't get much press here in the US either (bolding mine):

Gordon attended a large peace march last weekend in Tel Aviv with more than 10,000 other Israelis. Longtime Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery was there. He called the invasion “a criminal war, because, on top of everything else it is openly and shamelessly part of Ehud Barak’s and Tzipi Livni’s election campaign. I accuse Ehud Barak of exploiting the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] soldiers in order to get more Knesset seats. I accuse Tzipi Livni of advocating mutual slaughter in order to become prime minister.” Israel’s elections will be in February.

It turns out that Jonathan Ben-Artzi, nephew of raging rightist and former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is one of many Israelis who opposes the war.

An item at the end of Ms. Goodman's piece is particularly disturbing (again bolding mine):

While Israeli planes drop pamphlets urging Palestinians to leave, the 1.5 million residents of the Gaza Strip, perhaps the most densely populated place on Earth, have no place to run, no place to hide. Calls for an immediate cease-fire are ignored by Israel and blocked by the U.S. government. It is not clear what the Obama administration will do—but the people of Gaza can’t wait until the inauguration. There must be a cease-fire now. And that’s just the beginning.

Those pamphlets are direct evidence of ethnic cleansing. This isn't about self-defense. The siege and now war in Gaza are about the Israeli government trying to drive out the Palestinians and take the land.