"The Israeli foray left many Palestinian civilians dead."

The telling and reprehensible shape of understatement. Say perhaps that rockets fired by militants from Gaza had killed five or ten Israelis in the past week. Would the New York Times have reduced that to a "Palestinian foray that left a few Israelis dead." Of course they wouldn’t — there would be obituaries within news articles on the Israeli dead, and longer reports on the anxieties of 100,000 living in Ashkelon. But 120 dead Palestinian — reportedly a third of them children, uninvolved save for the fact that they were born in the prison of Gaza under occupation, blockade and air strikes — are not eulogized, are reduced in the euphemism of "many Palestinian civilians dead," consistently in the context of Israeli air strikes aimed at curbing terrorist rocket fire — a "foray" into a strip of land populated by a million and half desperate and starved people.

Palestinian rockets are never framed as retaliation for an on-going blockade, or as violent resistance to a 40 year occupation. Israeli bombs however are tactical strikes with regrettable consequences, whether in Gaza or Lebanon.

None of this is new, whether the bias of different deaths accounting for different journalistic language or the outrage at such moral deficiencies in the New York Times and wider American press not to count Muslim or Arab lives as equal lives. It only echoes what Judith Butler wrote in 2002, that "a frame for understanding violence emerges in tandem with the experience, and that the frame works both to preclude certain kinds of questions, certain kinds of historical inquiries, and to function as a moral justification for retaliation."

The New York Times is barely concerned with reporting on experiences of Palestinians that do not include celebrating rocketry or fitting into an unexplainable "cycle of violence" — or, if you like, "The Chronic Crisis of Gaza: Air Strikes and Rocket Attacks." There are in fact discernible political and historical factors that have created this current crisis in Gaza — who funded Hamas during the first Intifada? Who stoked the recent civil war in Gaza? — but it’s easier, and beneficial to the twisted mathematics of one dead Israeli justifying 30 dead Palestinian kids, to skirt those in favor of the rhetoric of cycles, something chronic and unexplainable.

Last week Isabel Kershner in the Times called Katyusha rocket attacks on Israel "unprecedented" and advanced the view that they were "an escalation of the conflict." What did it call the mounting Israeli air strikes and new round of dozes of dead Palestinians, specifically 54 last Saturday? "Israel Takes the Gaza Fight to Next Level."

Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed since the so-called peace conference in November. But the Times continues to propel a view that only Israeli victims can escalate the conflict and that the Palestinian dead and injured should be the second or third detail in news stories. The peace process is doomed by homemade rocket fire on fields and scattered apartments, not by bodies pulled from buildings flattened by smart bombs. Palestinians dying that way ought to be normalized in how we view this "cycle of violence," as the Times covers it. Heed the Israeli army spokesman quoted last week: after all, Hamas fighters firing rockets at Israeli civilians are war crimes.

Last week’s Israeli air strikes on 10 year-old boys playing soccer were acts of state security. And please, if you can, forget about them quickly.