“Tiny Eritrea,” Un-Tiny Israel
Sometimes a word is worth a thousand pictures — if attitudes could be pictured, that is.
The Washington Post foreign service, in an article headlined “Ethiopia, Eritrea on Verge of Border War, Report Says” (November 6), told readers that “Eritrea, a tiny [emphasis added] country with one of the largest armies in Africa, has about 12,000 troops near the disputed border ….”
Eritrea, according to the CIA World Fact Book, is “slightly larger than Pennsylvania,” encompassing 121,320 square kilometers (nearly 40,000 square miles), with a population of 4.9 million people.
Israel, the Fact Book relates, is “slightly smaller than New Jersey,” encompassing 20,770 square kilometers (about 7,000 square miles) with 6.4 million people. (Israeli census figures estimate the population at just over 7 million.)
Other “tiny” countries, according to Post foreign news coverage in the past three years, include the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan (47,000 square kilometers, “about half the size of Indiana,” in the CIA’s description, or more than twice as large as Israel); Israel’s neighbor to the north, Lebanon (10,000 square kilometers, “about 0.7 times the size of Connecticut”); and Albania, Gambia, Luxembourg, and Malta.
But not Israel. In an “Outlook” section (The Post’s Sunday commentary pages) interview, former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said “Israel is a tiny country.”An “Outlook” essay asserted that the Jewish state’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, wanted to secure nuclear weapons for his “tiny, poor and often friendless” country. But as beheld in the eyes of The Post’s foreign news staff, the Jewish state, if not actually large, is at least untiny.
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