"Twitter has been a game changer for the public perception front"
Shortly after Israel began its ground invasion of Gaza, Anne Barnard,
a New York Times reporter who has covered wars for over a decade, stood
in the emergency room of the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City and watched
a 9-year-old girl die.
The girl was alone, without family, nameless. And
when the doctor finally pronounced her dead, Barnard and another
reporter wept.
And then she tweeted:
Israel’s wars are always fought on two fronts — the
actual on-the-ground one and the battlefield of world opinion. The
tricky part is that a victory on one front very often means a loss on
the other: Say a house is bombed, killing a man in charge of a rocket
launcher, but it also killed his family, including five children, whose
lifeless bodies appear on television that night.
It’s not clear what front should have priority — your
perspective on this will depend largely on whether you yourself are
cowering in a bomb shelter in a city targeted by that rocket launcher or
have the benefit of viewing all this from a safe distance.
getty images
New Way To War:
A foreign correspondent uses her phone after four Palestinian boys were
killed by Israeli shelling in front of hotel where many reporters were
staying.
