Fitting Palestinian prisoners into the excitement of the Ben Zygier affair

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News consumers don’t really love the truth. They love sudden revelations, belated of course, so they can’t do anything about it − like the reports on Zygier, which will have to tide us over until the next wave of excitement.

By Yitzhak Laor | Feb.18, 2013 | 3:35 AM | 1.

Samer Issawi was sentenced by a military tribunal to nearly three decades in prison, freed after six years in the 2011 prisoner swap that secured the release of Gilad Shalit, and re-arrested in July and sent back to jail for another 20 years because he went from Jerusalem, where he lives, to A-Ram, on the other side of the road. Issawi has been on a saline drip to keep him alive since August.

Amira Hass has reported about another 13 Palestinian prisoners released in the Sahlit deal who were sent back to jail based on secret regulations, and “the evidence that the committee examined” was concealed from most of them. Our media are indifferent. Palestinian prisoners are always unknowns, including those on hunger strikes.

The Israeli media were not persistent in reporting the death of Ben Zygier either. Yedioth Ahronoth reporter Ronen Bergman admitted on television that his newspaper hadn’t really made an effort. Prisoner X is still engaging the public, with the help of comments like those of Channel 2’s Roni Daniel and Amnon Abramovich, who attempted to calm the nation by saying things like “He wasn’t important” and “He had important lawyers.”

What we keep hearing is the cliche that censorship is impossible in the era of social media. Impossible? The mid-2010 arrest of the Australian man reported to have been a Mossad agent didn’t make the rounds of social media, and neither did his late-2010 hanging death in a supposedly suicide-proof jail cell. His death was initially reported by Yedioth website Ynet, but immediately taken down upon orders from the military censor.

It was only on Tuesday, after an Australian television news report aired an investigation into the affair, that the story came to light here too.

Here are some questions about anonymous prisoners, we are told; they are but a sample of the quest to satisfy the public’s information consumption needs that dictates the media’s agenda. What do Israelis like to know about? A hunger strike by Palestinian prisoners? Scandals in the intelligence community? Secret legal proceedings? The suicide of one of “our” prisoners? Rank the adrenaline level of the media consumer and proceed accordingly.

http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/fitting-palestinian-prisoners-into-the-excitement-of-the-ben-zygier-affair.premium-1.504148