Okay, So Who Really Is The 'Other'?

Nadav Shragai, in his home organ, the liberal Haaretz, asserts that the claimed media and elite bias directed against the right is real in The left marked them

...the extended process of delegitimizing the settlers - which leads to genuine hatred of them - is hitting a peak. The left wing and the media have now labeled the settlers, as a group, as the abhorred Other that people are allowed to smack around.

...Someone who beats up Palestinians and damages their property should sit in jail. But are the settlers as a whole - all 300,000 of them - responsible for that? Are the Druze, as a group, responsible for the few who attacked their Jewish neighbors in Peki'in? Are all Israeli Arabs responsible for the events of October 2000?

What does Talia Sasson, the champion of the rule of law when it comes to illegal outpost construction, have to say about the tens of thousands of illegal buildings constructed by Bedouin and Arabs...Why is the press interested in how much money Israeli taxpayers have to pay for security at right-wing rallies, while the cost of left-wing rallies is irrelevant?

Why is there extensive media coverage when police refrain from raiding an outpost due to fear of clashes with settlers, but not when police refrain from chasing Arabs who steal cars, cattle and agricultural equipment along the seam line between Jewish and Arab neighborhoods and in Judea and Samaria? Take, for instance, the many articles about the body of the Palestinian shepherd whom the Palestinians accused the settlers of murdering - and the silence that greeted the news from the police laboratory that there had been no murder at all, that a dud shell caused the shepherd's death. Are the facts relevant only when they hew to the line?...

...From the perspective of the left and the media, settlers have become the ultimate Other, mainly because of the ideological threat that they, religious Zionists and anyone who identifies with them poses to those who pride themselves on an absence of ideology...

If you will recall (here, as a P.S.), Avner de-Shalit, head of the Department of Political Science at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, had taken just the opposite view:

In the name of patriotism

...Of course, we must not get carried away into making collective accusations. The attempt to harm Prof. Sternhell was not carried out by "the right" or "the settlers." But even if a "small handful" or "extremists" are responsible for it, it serves as a sad example of the state of Israeli society on the eve of Rosh Hashanah 5769 and testifies to the prevailing atmosphere.

That is because it reflects a society that on the one hand is frighteningly violent, and on the other does not exhibit enough will to confront violence. These patterns of violence, which are taken from the repertoire of the criminal underworld, include phone threats, written threats, and in the end a physical attack or attempted assassination. They are directed against the ideological "other" - someone whose views not only differ from those of the violent group, but who is not "one of ours." In this atmosphere, a person who criticizes the country in general or the settlement enterprise in particular is certainly not a good Jew, so he is "other," not only in his opinions but also in terms of the group he is affiliated with. From here it is a short path to threats and physical attack...