800 Meters from Gaza

Thank you for your comments...i wont debate the journalistic merit of this piece. it is a profile of a man who lives in a dangerous place. thats the bottom line here. of course danger is all relative. someone who lives behind electrical fences, watchtowers, army patrols, and tanks in Golden Beach Florida I would call paranoid. However someone who lives like that 800 meters from violent extremist groups who don't recognize your existence, have sworn your destruction, have attacked you with rockets/artillery/guns, and have built a network of tunnels to attack you, is hardly paranoid. For any observer to state there is no immediate threat coming from the Gaza Strip ignores both historical and current military/political realities. It would be equally ignorant for an observer to state that there is no immediate threat from Israeli forces onto Gaza, as this would also ignore a cycle of violence that has been recurring since the early 1950's.

smorrisey, Gaza is a tense although semi-autonomous state with ordinary people having ordinary lives. Yes it is violent at times and yes certain sects of people in Gaza would love to see this kibbutz disappear. But it isn't a war zone, at least not right now, and the kibbutz isn't necessarily in a dangerous zone.

Though I think Jaron is one of the best CJ contributors I think the drama of this pod is dependent on the ignorance of the viewer about the region and the invented scary feelings when you conflate "kibbutz", "Gaza", and "800 meters" together. He is tugging on our emotions and not covering his bases to counter this emotional tinkering.

Essentially, I don't think it is good journalism because it doesn't interview enough people and doesn't widen the issue out. Get specific, go poly-vocal, and broaden it out to how the issue effects multiple poeple. Doing this would require more than one field day shooting and more planning.

Basically Jaron is keeping it paranoid, Zionistic, and a bit hyperbolic. A bit more work and he could have overcome these deficiencies.

This pod isn't Current Journalism and contains very little information of any journalistic worth. It seems that the threat is invented by conflating a scary "buzz phrase" Gaza with a Kibbutz when in fact there is no immediate threat--as per the informants remarks.