JACK GUEZ/AFP/Getty Images “Video cameras set up by International and Israeli media crews point toward the Gaza Strip from their vantage point on the Israeli side of the Israel-Gaza border….”

It is the last insult, of course. Not only must the over-worked Israeli government and its military arm deal with recent uprising in the Gaza strip, they must now contend with the televised facts of dead Palestinians. Despite getting a unanimous vote of support from the US Congress –a miracle of politics, in and of itself—there appear to be some gaps in the media coverage of current events such that—no matter who is fired and who is forced off the air because of an unfortunate interest in truth-telling– dead Palestinians are still showing up.

Dismayed by this turn of events, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu complained to reporters, tersely, that Hamas uses “telegenically dead Palestinians for their cause.”

Now English isn’t his first language, so I suppose this might excuse the awkwardness of the phrase, but I suspect Netanyahu’s pronouncement, unfiltered by a prescient press agent, was exactly what he wanted to say. Something like, “We are losing the public relations war because the Palestinians we kill have the temerity to show off their dead bodies as, well … dead.”

Of course, they have a shortage of dead Israelis as well, but apparently that’s a problem they don’t have a keen interest in fixing. What are you going to do?

But I must say, Israel, with the help of many a media outlet, has done yeoman’s work in channeling their message. Just looking back over the last few days, we can see how fast someone called NBC News shortly after a journalist reported on four Palestinian boys on a Gaza beach who were shelled into oblivion by a naval bombardment. The unfortunate journalist made the mistake of actually reporting what he saw. For this act of actual journalism, he was relieved of duty in the Gaza strip and brought home—ostensibly for security reasons—even though a less seasoned reporter (and one presumably less inclined to report the actual news) was shortly put in his place. After much media exposure, the deactivated reporter was sent back to cover Gaza, but half the world had to know about NBC’s decision before the matter was set straight.

So it goes. CNN pulled correspondent Diana Magnay from covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and reassigned her to Moscow on Friday, a day after she tweeted — and then deleted — that Israelis who were threatening her and were cheering at the bombing of Gaza were “scum.” Apparently, she made the mistake of having a conscience while reporting these events.

One final incident, last week, on ABC News, Diane Sawyer misidentified scenes of the aftermath of Israeli missile strikes in Gaza as destruction caused by Palestinian rocket fire. As Sawyer segued into the segment, she said, “We take you overseas now to the rockets raining down on Israel today as Israel tried to shoot them out of the sky.” Next to her was video footage not of Israelis or even Israel, but of Israeli airstrikes on Gaza. Sawyer then incorrectly described an image of a Palestinian family gathering belongings in the smoking debris of a missile-hit home in Gaza as “an Israeli family trying to salvage what they can.”

For a grace note on that report, Sawyer described another Palestinian woman surrounded by destroyed homes as “one woman standing speechless among the ruins,” with the implication that she was Israeli. It was a beautiful portrait. And a nearly perfect propaganda victory for Israel. You really can’t buy that kind of press.

Later, Diane Sawyer apologized and said it was an accident, wouldn’t happen again, and please don’t concern yourself with my multimillion dollar contract.

The real problem is that  these are not isolated incidents. Mistakes curiously pile up in favor of the ‘current news frame’….But social media is slowly making inroads. Communications are as fast as a twitter feed, so it becomes that much more difficult for state propaganda operations, or major news outlets with politically weighted boardrooms to slant the news. Eventually, the truth outs.

Israel is well aware of this, too. Like our own military, the IDF is concerned to present a good face to the general public. But if you look at their internal reports, abuse of Palestinians or Arab nationals is common place. The dehumanization of the Palestinian people takes place at the ‘edge of the sword’, where the military first makes contact with the population, and this attitude works its way back through their society. It’s been this way for years, and it’s a sad case. Israel knows it’s losing the propaganda war. That’s why they’ve been carpet bombing the web with complaints about media bias, and why Netanyahu complains about Hamas using dead Palestinians to promote their cause. But, you know, they can only do that when Israel provides the dead.