There are three million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip and West Bank including Jerusalem, one million Palestinians living inside the borders of Israel, and another four million Palestinian refugees living elsewhere in the world, including the United States. The footage in question depicted between 20 and 40 individuals.
The Palestinians in the footage were mostly young children. Most of their behaviour in the footage appeared to be no different from how Palestinian children always behave when foreign journalists turn up in their towns, crowding and smiling at the camera and giving the victory sign that has been a symbol of Palestinian steadfastness under Israeli military occupation since the first Intifada in 1987. There is not a single reporter with any experience of carrying a camera into the Palestinian West Bank under any circumstance who couldn't get similar footage on any day they visited the occupied territories.
Where genuine rejoicing at the attacks was indeed apparent in the footage, anchors interpreting the footage made no effort to offer any context or background to the images, nor any attempt to separate those Palestinians portrayed from Palestinians as a whole. A comparable situation would be television anchors angrily reacting to scenes of the 1991 riots in Los Angeles, lamenting that "blacks do not respect law and order", while failing to note the preceding attack on Rodney King or endemic racial profiling of the black community in the U.S. by police forces.
The overwhelming number of Palestinians, like people of all nationalities, were sickened by the events in New York and Washington. Palestinians with relatives in New York and Washington spent much of yesterday worriedly trying to phone to check they were safe, exactly as many Americans did. Palestinian citizens of the United States will also turn out to be among the victims of the tragedy. Whatever a group of 20-40 Palestinian children happened to be doing yesterday morning in Nablus, East Jerusalem, or Ein Al-Hilweh Refugee Camp in Lebanon is no more representative of all Palestinians than the Klu Klux Klan rally -- which happened recently just down the road from where I live, in St. Paul, Minnesota -- is representative of all Americans.
In addition, there is an all-important context of brutalisation -- that anchors completely failed to note -- which explains why even a single person would find any cause to celebrate yesterday's terrible carnage:
For the last year now, Palestinian civilians have been living through a nightmare in which Israeli occupation forces have been nightly shelling their towns using tanks, helicopters, and other heavy weapons. Palestinians do not need a subscription to Jane's Defence Weekly to learn the origin of many of these weapons when they can pick up shell casings from the floors of their homes and from their backyards with MADE IN THE U.S.A. stamped on them. Weaponry used against Palestinians during the Intifada, much of which has been supplied to Israel by the United States or covered at some level by U.S. aid includes:
Heavy weapons:
F-16 fighter planes, Apache and Cobra attack helicopters, and Reshef patrol boats to attack Palestinian buildings and vehicles; and
Armoured pile drivers and armoured bulldozers to destroy Palestinian homes and agricultural land.
Heavy ammunition:
Naval and tank artillery including 76mm, 105mm and 120mm high explosive rounds;
M114 TOW rockets and Hell-Fire air-to-ground missiles; Shoulder-fired, anti-armour Light Anti-tank Weapons (LAW) rocket launchers firing 84mm or 90mm rockets; M203 and MK19 grenade launchers;
40-90 mm mortars; and
A modified version of the M494 105mm, an anti-personnel cluster bomb.
Smaller ammunition:
5.56 mm bullets for M-16 machine guns;
7.62 mm high velocity bullets for general purpose machine guns and Galil sniper rifles;
12.7 mm bullets for Browning machine guns and Barret sniper rifles; and
The "less lethal" rubber-coated and plastic-coated metal bullets.
