ABSTRACT
Press coverage of the intifada raised a great number of issues about the workings of modern foreign correspondents. Most of these issues were not unique to the intifada itself. Even by the standards, coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been disproportionately intense, and the intifada once again raised the long-standing question of why a country as small as Israel gets so much coverage. Israel is both an open democracy and an as yet incomplete "state-in-becoming." Many media critics have rioted the intense coverage given to Israeli actions that involve human rights and the almost nonexistent coverage given to greater incidents of human rights violations in other states—especially in the Arab world. The world of the Palestinians was seen as essentially anarchic and without an established, popularly elected chain of civilian authority—and therefore less immediately relevant to foreign, established societies.
