Gaza can wait

Even the Gaza Strip flare-up was shoved aside after a Malaysian plane was downed near the Ukraine-Russia border on Thursday, with smoke billowing everywhere. This story is just overwhelming. Where do you start? How do you report the crash of a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 crashing, less than five months after the company lost contact with another "Triple Seven" on its way to China. Even our crazy Middle East could not generate such a captivating story. With Malaysia Airlines once again dominating the headlines, Gaza can wait.

In fact, interest in the Hamas-Israel conflict was already in decline by the time the Kuala Lumpur-bound flight, which took off from Amsterdam, disappeared from the radar screen. While the U.K.-based Guardian newspaper dedicated part of its front page to the killing of the four Gazan children on Thursday, The Daily Telegraph (among other publications) had no mention of this story on its front page. Perhaps people have just grown tired of the news coming out this region. The international media can just turn its head away from the news, but we have no such luxury. The news coming out of Ukraine Thursday provided more drama, more fire, more dead.

No wonder the fighting here was well below the fold. Think about it. If we, Israelis, could not figure out when a cease-fire would be announced, just imagine how hard this was for news consumers in Stockholm, Paris, Los Angeles or Berlin.

L'Express did not drop coverage of the Gaza Strip and the death of the four children but it posted President Barack Obama's condolences over the Malaysian crash on its website. Overall though, it was a slow news day for the site. The successful thwarting of a terrorist attack was not too exciting (or, alternatively, did not fit the narrative the international media was trying to tell), so it chose to report on the "pacifist Israelis who have not given up." This allowed the world to see the new Israeli hero: not the one who fights for security, but the one who fights against the fighters.

No wonder former U.S. President Bill Clinton warned Thursday that Israel was "isolating itself from world opinion." Clinton knows that the world doesn't like wars and that it does not like uniforms. But at least he had the common decency to say that "in the short to medium term, Hamas can inflict terrible public relations damage on Israel by forcing it to kill Palestinian civilians to counter Hamas" because Hamas has "a strategy designed to force Israel to kill their own [Palestinian] civilians so the rest of the world will condemn them [the Israelis]."

Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Thursday that Israel has tried to carry out a Palestinian genocide since its inception in 1948. And this is the Erdogan who, according to international media, was supposed to be working on a cease-fire-

But there was one common feature in the coverage of the conflict and the crash: In both cases, heaven can wait.