One of the most treacherous stories for The Miami Herald to cover is Israel, not because of the wars and terrorism there, but because of the passions among readers here.

An error or a perceived slight that might lead to an undermining of U.S. support for the Jewish state provokes strong reactions from South Florida's large Jewish community. That many in the community are old enough to remember the Holocaust, and some even to have experienced it, adds to local vigilance.

''As I see it, the coverage is unabashedly biased against Israel,'' Aimee Fried of Miami Beach wrote me recently in one of the better-argued letters. 'Just last week (Feb. 28th), your headline was `Baby killed, dozens hurt in airstrikes by Israel.' This, after Hamas has been repeatedly firing Kassam rockets at the Israeli towns of Sderot and Ashkelon, aiming deliberately to terrorize, injure and kill innocent Israeli civilians.''

At the same time, the growing numbers of Palestinians and Muslims in South Florida tug in the opposite direction. They add their voices to a common view abroad that the United States media are so pro-Israel that criticism of its actions is more open in Israel itself than in the United States. The U.S. media are accused of being at best cowed by American Jewish organizations, and at worst controlled by a Jewish conspiracy of media ownership.

''The Herald is biased towards Jews,'' Nidal Hussain, a local Palestinian leader, said in an interview this week. He cited stories he did not find in The Miami Herald but read in The Christian Science Monitor, The Economist and the website for National Public Radio on the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, the source of the rockets Ms. Fried wrote about. ``I know you guys try very hard to be fair, but you have a long way to go.''

So, on this 60th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel, with President Bush celebrating in Israel as I write, I decided to take a look at The Miami Herald's Israel coverage over the last three months.

There were 77 articles in which Israel and/or the Palestinians were mentioned in the first two paragraphs. That is considerable attention to a small region of seven million people, plus an additional four million Palestinians. By comparison, there were 319 articles on Cuba and 203 on Iraq.

Further breaking down the 77 stories, I found that only three mentioned Palestinians alone. This is a very imprecise measure of what the stories were about, but it does reflect a general trend I found. Not only did Israel get more attention, but more importantly, stories about the conflict between the two were overwhelmingly told from inside Israel, even if critical of Israeli actions.

This is partly understandable: Almost all of the foreign correspondents in the area, including The Miami Herald's shared McClatchy correspondent, Dion Nissenbaum, are based in Jerusalem. Compared with Gaza and the West Bank, Israel has far superior safety, communications, support services, cultural affinity and functioning government. Plus, it occupies the West Bank.

Reporting on what is happening inside Israel is of importance to more South Florida readers, too. According to the Association of Religion Data Archives, there were in 2000 an estimated 337,000 Jews in Miami-Dade and Broward Counties, compared with 13,000 Muslims. Shabbir Motorwala, an Indian Muslim member of the Miami-Dade County Commission's Asian American Advisory Board, estimates that the fast-growing number of Muslims originating from all countries may be as high as 45,000 today, but they remain clearly outnumbered by Jews, many of whom have direct personal ties with Israel.

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