US Press
Washington reads a prison indictment and its own fight over Israel
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
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What the American press put in front of its readers on Tuesday and Wednesday, and what a Palestinian reader should take from it.
The New York Times carried the Ketziot indictment as news, reporting that Israeli authorities had charged twelve guards over the beating death of a Palestinian prisoner. The paper called the prosecution rare and set it against what it described as widespread reports from rights groups about mistreatment in Israeli detention, where activists say scores of Palestinians have died since October 2023.
The same paper's Jerusalem analysis on Wednesday argued that Netanyahu's Israel is looking for a fight in every direction, and that a prime minister facing a hard re-election contest may need a security crisis to hold his job. It is an American paper stating as analysis what Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank experience as the weather.
The Times also went to Nazareth. Its report on Mansour Abbas's recruitment of Yoav Segalovitz — the Jewish former lawmaker known in Israel for work on crime in Arab towns — asked whether the move could finally get Ra'am into a governing coalition.
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency and the Times of Israel both noted what makes it unusual: Segalovitz is the first lawmaker in decades to leave a Zionist party to run on an Arab-led slate, in a technical alliance rather than a membership.
Politico and The Hill spent two days on the Republican party's own argument about Israel, after the vice-president declined at a closed-door donor summit to break with Tucker Carlson, and Nikki Haley told him to choose a side.
Axios and the Washington Post filled the rest of the file with Iran. Axios reported the first American strikes on Iranian government tankers under a tanker-for-tanker policy, and a Pentagon six months into that war with fewer senior leaders and fewer critical weapons. The Post reported Syria positioning itself as the route around a blocked Strait of Hormuz.
Set the file side by side and the proportion is the story. Palestine reached the American front pages this week twice: as a prison death that took almost three years to become a charge sheet, and as a seat calculation in an Israeli election. The war that fills the columns is the one being fought over shipping lanes.
