I can't stand these kind of takes that are based purely in anecdote. On what basis are you claiming we "hardly ever hear a peep about israel or saudi arabia"? How do you even measure that?
All this sort of stuff is claimed under Manufacturing Consent. Chomsky's point is often why don't we hear about these other incidents .. because the news isn't balanced and the government is trying to fashion a narrative and they use the media to do this by selectivly choosing what we hear and see.
Essentially, if you're a media outlet, you'll try hard to not piss off the hand that is feeding you, and Chomsky's assertion is that this is how the media manufactures consent (for all the horrible things the government does to defend the interests of those advertisers abroad).
Essentially, if your opinions are significantly different from those of most politicians (on the important topics), you're unlikely to rise up through the ranks in most major institutions.
Though with the Syrian conflict dying down, I'd expect others like Yemen to get more attention by filling the "war" slot in media.
Not only negative news about some countries don't emerge in the Western society, but also positive news debunking the falsehoods and stereotypes about the "blamed" countries don't show up neither: https://theintercept.com/2019/08/14/trump-iran-worst-lies
A major problem of our global society is that public perception is biased towards the "winners" and we learn the truth, if we are lucky, about their negative impact long after the damage was done. Example: the US invasion on Iraq was based on the false narrative about the weapons of mass destruction. Again, there were some news outlets that were telling the truth, but it was ignored.
The US tends to come out with almost no bullet holes from SA and Israel but when one is found it's a howitzer. Every time something related to them really blows up you get to how deep they went and it becomes almost unbelievable to assume there were no signs whatsoever to the US and no reporting could have been done by the media.
WaPo has a vested interest in covering SA especially after Khashoggi and the Bezos blackmail incident. But the US and rest of the media are not as vocal as say when talking about anything related to China or Iran, where every piece of gossip is news, where every allegation becomes a sanction. The point to take from here is that "punishment fitting the crime" seems to be a very fluid concept also at country level and the questions to worry about are "Why are some getting a free pass? What are the strings?".
[0] https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/09/counterintuit...