Any editor will tell you that no international issue attracts more critical scrutiny than coverage of Israel and the Palestinians. Supporters make an impassioned case that Israel—a democratic state, a creation of the Holocaust, and a refuge from anti-Semitism—cannot be faulted for responding with force and even brutality to relentless siege. Much of the world sees the Palestinians as refugee victims, occupied and therefore virtuous. Trying to find a measure of reason in this emotional maelstrom challenges the media as nothing else does. In the sixty years since the founding of Israel, that has never been more apparent than it is now.

The wars against Hezbollah and Hamas, the implosion of the Palestinian authority, the descending chaos in Iraq, and Iran’s revived global ambition create as grim a canvas as the region has ever had. The sense of tragedy was highlighted the other night on a sentimental PBS tribute to Walter Cronkite, which featured his 1977 interviews with Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachem Begin that led to Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem and his thrilling speech to the Knesset. Prodded by Cronkite and ABC’s Barbara Walters, Sadat’s pilgrimage showed that peace in the Middle East was, after all, possible. This moment of television diplomacy seemed also to prove that the media, with then new-fangled satellites allowing immediate replay, were peacemakers.

Four years later, Sadat was assassinated. Begin sank into a terminal depression after Israel’s first invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Then, in 1993, came the unforgettable tableau of Yitzhak Rabin and Yassir Arafat in a handclasp on the White House lawn. Again, amidst a panoply of cameras, peace was at hand. Two years later, Rabin was shot dead. Arafat, an improbable media darling for the rest of the decade (remember the young wife and baby?) hung on until death, a Nobel peace laureate who left his people where he found them, unable or unwilling to convert progress to peace and prosperity.

Today, two years after Arafat’s death and with Israel’s last founding warrior Ariel Sharon in a six-month coma, the prospect that the imagery of embrace may, again, replace the carnage seems remote. What we must finally recognize is that the rage in the Middle East—Arab and Jew, Sunni and Shiite, fundamentalist and pragmatist—is intractable as other world conflicts are not. Remember when Germany, Japan, and Italy were the Axis of Evil? The Soviet Union has been gone for nearly a generation. Today’s Red China has a capitalist’s soul. The Balkans, Kashmir, Sudan, central Africa all erupt in awful violence, but for all the misery they represent, the Middle East seems in a class of its own.

For the American-based media, coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian story represents an excruciating problem. In the rest of the world, the image of Israel has gradually been corroded by the consequences of forty years of occupation on the West Bank and Gaza. The country is a vibrant democracy with a deeply imbedded dream of peaceful co-existence with its neighbors. Yet, when security and dominance of its borders are at stake, Israel suspends the pleasantries. The image of Israel for the rest of the world focuses on that ferocity. There are now hundreds of satellite channels in Arabic that provide nonstop, live coverage of Israeli bombardments. The indignities Israel has imposed on the Palestinians are a permanent undertone in the European press, where Palestinian corruption and self-destructiveness tend to be excused.

All of this is now on display in coverage of the conflicts in Lebanon and Gaza. Watching live reports of childrens’ deaths in Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon is heartbreaking. The rate of civilian casualties among Arabs is at least ten times as high as among Israelis, and that statistic is hammered relentlessly around the world.  It is perhaps time to face a media reality: the pervasive and irreversible visibility of events in war and occupation creates a dynamic that has effects of its own. Persecution and retaliation are now televised and cannot, therefore, be easily disputed as propaganda. Israel faces a dilemma that becomes ever more pressing with each development in media technology: How to balance the fundamental issue of national survival with the dreadful things sometimes necessary to secure it. The historic and political case for Israel’s place in the midst of a deeply volatile and insecure region where hundreds of millions of people are taught to despise it is no different now than it was at the time Israel was created in 1948. But making that case when real-time media shows havoc and bloodshed is very hard.

Beginning with Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem, the Middle East narrative, for all the ups and downs, seemed to be heading towards a resolution, at least, of Israel’s conflict with its neighbors. In recent years, the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon and Gaza, the planned withdrawal from the West Bank, and the construction of the security wall along the national frontier forecasted a future of de jure partition. Instead, there is war. The media coverage is so confused because a thirty-year narrative has been disrupted, perhaps permanently. And the time when the media had a role as mediator and explainer, taking advantage, say, of the nobility of Sadat and Begin, appears to be over. The impact of bloody, live imagery overwhelms any other possible story line. Aside from more catastrophic violence, no one can any longer say what the outcome of the struggle will be or which side will prevail. All the media can really do is watch.