Why foreign journalists are not allowed into Gaza

The international media's cries that they should be allowed into Gaza are entitled nonsense. Here is why they should not be allowed in.

Why are foreign journalists not allowed in Gaza? I apologize for devoting an essay to answering such an inane question. I feel the need to do so because many anti-Israel types seem to think it is a brilliant knockdown point. It is nothing of the sort.

The Israeli Government is answerable to the Israeli citizenry, not to the New York Times, Le Monde, the BBC, or CNN. The media are not moral arbiters; just conglomerates that sell column inches and air time. Others are state-funded bureaucracies with manifest ideological agendas. Israel is under no obligation to prove anything to them.

Journalists exhibit almost imperial conceit when they insist that they have some natural right to stroll onto any battlefield.

In truth, there are many places and proceedings to which journalists are denied access: cabinet meetings, intelligence briefings, jury deliberations, corporate boardrooms, trade negotiations, Papal conclaves, nuclear command bunkers, sports team strategy sessions, Hollywood movie sets. The list is endless. No serious person imagines democracy has collapsed because reporters cannot barge into NATO’s war rooms.

Naturally, when it comes to Israel the rules are magically rewritten. The expectation is that the Jewish state must fling wide its gates and allow hostile scribblers to tramp about a war zone as though it were an open-air museum.