"The leader of Israel's opposition Labor Party, who guided the party to its worst election defeat in 55 years, resigned Sunday, throwing Israel's peace camp into further disarray."

So reads the beginning of an Associated Press story last week that passes for objective but betrays the kind of insidious bias that permeates most mainstream news reports from Israel. This particular story is certainly no worse than many, and may in fact be better than most, which makes it useful as an example of what's wrong with the usual reportage.

Our first clue that the story suffers from a biased subtext are the words "peace camp." Unencumbered by scare quotes, they imply that all those on the Israeli side willing to make peace with the Palestinians belong to this group. You can almost hear them now, singing "Kumbaya" and "Michael Row the Boat" from around their peace-camp campfire.

Meanwhile, huddled in a garrison on the outskirts, waiting to sabotage the peace, are the warmongering bad boys who prefer to kill for no reason. They're led, of course, by Ariel Sharon, Israeli's "hardline" prime minister, as the story's fifth paragraph calls him — again, without scare quotes. But according to the report, Labor's next leader may himself be more of a hardliner, leading to the possibility that the party could rejoin Sharon's governing coalition.[...]