How should we watch the news?

https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/middleeast/100000009414689/palestinians-west-bank-war.html

This morning I went online to check the news. Prominently displayed on the title page of today’s NYT internet edition was a 5-minute video clip entitled “Palestinians in the West Bank are Living in the Shadow of the War in Gaza.” I clicked and watched, and I felt for the Palestinians portrayed in the video – a Palestinian cab driver from Bethlehem and a Palestinian mother from Hebron. They live under Israeli military occupation, as West Bank Palestinians have since the ’67 war, though the living conditions for Palestinians have apparently worsened in recent months, since the music festival at Kibbutz Be’eri ended in tragedy for many of its Israeli attendees.

NYT’s videotaped scenes reminded me of my own visits to Bethlehem, Hebron, and other cities in the West Bank and Gaza, many years ago. For one visit to Hebron in the late ‘80s, I was accompanied by a couple of local Palestinians. One pointed out to me how the metal railing placed in front of several shops, with an Israeli soldier posted at either end of the railing, had resulted in reduced numbers of Palestinians shopping there. My Palestinian guides looked disapprovingly at the soldiers, but when I looked at them, I recognized one. It was Amnon! He and I and two others had lived in the same room for several months in ’68-‘69, when we were all 12th grade students at Kibbutz Sasa, near the Lebanese border. So I walked over to Amnon and we spoke in Hebrew for a few minutes. He explained to me that he was serving in the milu'im – his annual military reserve duty. He didn’t want to be there, he said, but there was a legitimate concern that if the soldiers weren’t there, the result would likely be an attack on the few Jewish families who had moved into downtown Hebron after the ’67 war.

Watching the video clip, https://nyti.ms/45lXVEI, I was struck by how one-sided it was. There was nothing phony or false about it, but it was entirely filmed from the perspective of Palestinian residents of Hebron. No Israeli civilian, government official, or military officer was asked to explain the rationale for the restrictions placed on local Palestinian inhabitants.

Was there a legitimate rationale for the restrictions? To save lives perhaps? We don’t know, and the NY Times news team did nothing to find out, or, if they did find out, that information did not make its way into their video clip.