05-Nov-15: Lessons about life from a hospital emergency room

Shaarei Zedek Medical Center, Jerusalem: A slice of
Israel and its people

Jerusalem's Shaarei Zedek Medical Center, one of the city's major hospitals, is - for a variety of reasons - a place we have come to know well. We're not the first to have observed that what goes on there is in some ways a microcosm of Jerusalem's varied, bustling, uplifting/upsetting life, and Israel's too.

One of the Israeli news programs has just put to air a ten minute segment, a distillation of a couple of days of observing life in the SZMC trauma department during these very difficult days of stabbings, rammings and shootings. Someone has now helpfully augmented it with English-language sub-titles. It's embedded below.

In criticizing much of the media coverage - and media values - that characterize the way events in this complicated and dramatic part of the world gets to audiences far from here, we have said, and believe, reporters and their editors and producers need to go visit a hospital, basically any hospital, in Jerusalem primarily (though we think the same holds for the hospitals of any other city in Israel) and watch what goes on there. It's an education.

We hope this clip gets plenty of pass-along viewers. It throws light on some of the larger questions of life and the Arab/Israel conflict in ways that ordinary news reporting almost never does.

There's more to say - we hope to complete this later today.