Explosion

Is the media telling the whole story regarding the Israeli–Palestinian conflict?

Hamas has carried out a vicious and horrifying terrorist attack against Israeli civilians. A 10 October 2023 NYT piece says: they “were killed waiting for the bus, dancing at a festival, doing morning chores and hiding as best they could”; searching “bullet-riddled houses, streets and lawns, Israeli soldiers are still finding them”; the “soldiers, retaking control of the kibbutzim, towns and settlements near the Gaza Strip that came under attack by Palestinian terrorists over the weekend, have recovered body after body after body”; “Hamas gunmen, hitting more than 20 sites in southern Israel, killed more than 1,000 people, including women and children, and abducted an estimated 150 more people”; and officials “from Israel, the United States, Europe and the United Nations have condemned the violence in the starkest terms, with the U.N. secretary general saying, ‘Nothing can justify these acts of terror and the killing, maiming and abduction of civilians’”.

The media correctly and accurately presents Hamas’s brutal attack as immoral, unjustified, and terroristic. But that doesn’t mean that the media is—regarding the attack and Israel’s response—presenting things in a principled, unbiased, and non-propagandistic light.

Uncomfortable Conversations

A serious and objective media wouldn’t merely adopt the propaganda line that’s convenient for the Israeli leadership—such a media would instead shine a very skeptical spotlight on those who want Hamas’s brutal attack to be talked about in a way that serves a particular political agenda.

An 11 October 2023 FAIR piece says: Hamas’s offensive has “been compared both to 9/11 and to the bloody 1973 war between Israel and a coalition of Arab nations”; an “Israeli military veteran in the New York Post (10/9/23), hardly considered a pro-Palestine publication, blamed Israel for ignoring warnings from Egyptian intelligence about ‘something big’”; an “editorial at Ha’aretz (10/8/23) put the blame squarely on Netanyahu, saying ‘he is the ultimate arbiter of Israeli foreign and security affairs’”; as “‘expected, signs of an outbreak of hostilities began in the West Bank, where Palestinians started feeling the heavier hand of the Israeli occupier,’ the editorial said”; an “article—which questioned why Netanyahu’s government, famously hard-nosed on security, failed to protect the people—was reprinted in the Jerusalem Post (10/7/23)”; and “Alon Pinkas (Ha’aretz, 10/9/23) wrote” that “‘Netanyahu should be removed as prime minister immediately—not “after the war,” not after a plea bargain in his corruption trial, not after an election’”.

A “Wall Street Journal editorial (10/7/23) used the Hamas offensive to downplay Netanyahu’s judicial power grab”; regarding the WSJ editorial, the “Journal also discounted any criticism of the ongoing Israeli blockade of Gaza”; the “New York Times editorial board (10/9/23) said that though Israelis were right to march against Netanyahu’s judicial restrictions, the Hamas attack changed the terrain, because ‘Israel’s military strength depends on its national unity, and Israelis have now come together to defend themselves’”; worse, “the Times gave column space (10/8/23) to Shimrit Meir, a former advisor to far-right Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, to cite Israel’s political division as military weakness, urging the country to close ranks”; Meir “said she hoped that Israel returned ‘to its senses, ending the political crisis and forming a unity government’”; “not only is Knesset opposition to Netanyahu’s internal policies now viewed as some kind of softness on the Hamas attack, but it was the nerve of the people to organize to protect their institutions that opened up the nation to the latest offensive”; the “Washington Post, to its credit, ran an op-ed (10/9/23) from a Palestinian journalist that didn’t necessarily put the blame squarely on Netanyahu, but called on the US to support Palestinian statehood”; however, “Post columnist David Ignatius (10/8/23) jumped in on the idea that the quarrel over the Supreme Court contributed to Hamas’ offensive”; “the Wall Street Journal ran fiercely jingoistic pieces from well-known American neoconservatives like Douglas Feith (10/9/23) and Daniel Pipes (10/8/23), while Mitch McConnell (10/9/23), the Republican Senate minority leader, called for more US support for Israel’s war effort”; and “far from questioning the Israeli government’s preparedness, law professor Eugene Kontorovich (10/8/23) said the US and others ‘must not only refrain from limiting Israel’s operation in Gaza but resolve to oust the genocidal regime in Tehran’”.

Israeli “media have begun looking closely at the Israeli government’s actions to understand how and why this happened”; however, “top US editorial boards are elsewhere, failing to ask questions about intelligence failures and Netanyahu’s hand on the wheel”; instead, “they urged Israelis to put aside the concerns they’ve had about democracy, which brought throngs of liberal and left-wing Israelis into the streets to denounce the Netanyahu government’s neutering of an independent judiciary—a decision that has been likened to the ‘sham democracy’ of Hungary (Foreign Policy, 8/3/23)”; and while “Israelis, including those in the media class, ponder if their country is run by inept and corrupt leadership, much of the US media skip all this and insinuate that now is no longer the time for debate, but a time to brush aside uncomfortable conversations in the face of war”.

Unsurprising Attack, Predictable Dynamics

I find it disturbing when the media obscures the distinction between understanding an atrocity and justifying it—it’s an extremely basic and obvious distinction, so you know that the discourse has reached a genuinely Orwellian low if the media can actually pull this off. Hawks want to (1) exploit enemy atrocities for political gain and (2) avoid any serious discussion—of the atrocities’ context—that might illuminate the hawks’ own ugly contribution and make them look bad.

The 9 October 2023 WaPo piece—referred to above—points out how predictable this explosion was. The piece says: the “carefully planned attacks on Saturday produced atrocities that cannot be denied or justified”; what “happened in Israel on Saturday should not have surprised anyone”; “Palestinian officials had repeatedly spoken of an explosion if there was no political progress on alleviating their people’s suffering”; King Abdullah II of Jordan had said—at the UN—that “‘it will be impossible to converge on a political solution to this conflict’” without “‘clarity on where the Palestinians’ future lies’”; “Egyptian intelligence had reportedly warned Israel of a catastrophe unless there was political progress”; “Palestinian leaders, Jordan’s king and Egyptian officials knew that without hope, something would give”; the “last public talks between Israelis and Palestinians ended in 2014, and at the time, U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry” blamed the Israelis for the collapse of talks; and since “then, no talks have taken place, even while three U.S. presidents—Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden—have invoked the empty mantra of a two-state solution”.

This “absence of a political process was compounded by the recent stoking of religious tensions”; three “days before the Hamas attack, Jordan, the recognized custodian of the holy places in Jerusalem, sent a letter to the Israeli Embassy in Amman protesting the fact that Jewish ‘visitors’ had begun praying loudly on the grounds of the al-Aqsa Mosque”; at “the same time, Israeli police imposed an age restriction preventing young Palestinian Muslim men from entering the mosque itself”; while “secular Palestinian leaders might be open to a political compromise, religious leaders are much less flexible when matters of faith are in question”; “Israeli Jewish nationalists were upending a carefully orchestrated status quo agreement on Muslim holy sites, and their actions have hurt the Christian community in Jerusalem, as well”; last “month in Rome, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, raised the situation with Pope Francis and mentioned it in news conferences and during his first homily”; and he “even said that Gaza was an ‘open prison’—a statement that angered Israelis who have been blindly complacent for so long that they were unable to hear advice even from their friends”.

People “always want to be free of occupation and of colonial foreign settlements on their land”; “Palestinians have been unable to liberate their land using political means”; negotiation “efforts by Mahmoud Abbas, president of the secular Palestinian Authority, have come up empty, as has nonviolent activism to boycott Israel”; as “a result, religious Palestinians have been left with little choice but to attempt to address their own people’s oppression”; there “is no mystery about what must happen next”; even “though it is lower than before, support for the two-state solution among both Israelis and Palestinians is higher than for any other alternative”; “having a Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel requires recognition by the United Nations”; the “United States has repeatedly wielded its veto against the very same issue to which it pays lip service”; as “soon as the violence ebbs, President Biden should courageously recognize an independent and democratic Palestinian state living in peace side by side with a secure Israel”; such “a move would need no congressional blessing”; once “a Palestinian state under occupation is recognized by the U.N. Security Council, productive talks between representatives of the state of Israel and representatives of the state of Palestine can then begin in earnest”; and this “kind of proposal might seem fanciful at the moment, but there is no other way forward”.

A 10 October 2023 piece says: “Israel has waged war on Palestinians for decades”; the “deep and lasting human consequences of Israel’s terrifying, perpetual war on Palestinians—prosecuted with indiscriminate cruelty by an occupying army and its de facto proxies, fanatical settler militias—have been plain for anyone willing or inclined to see, for generations”; there’s been a “wholesale imprisonment of a people penned like cattle behind walls and barbed wire fences, where water and electricity, food and fuel, are switched on and off on a colonial power’s whim”; human “rights groups based in Jerusalem, London and New York have published report after report that establishes, as a matter of international law, that Israel has, for a long time, been guilty of apartheid—a state-sanctioned, systemic policy to impose ethnic supremacy over besieged Palestinians with brutal, grinding efficiency”; implicit “in those dense, meticulously chronicled studies was what amounted to a blazing flare intended to seize finally the flighty attention of complicit Western governments and media”; and “Israel’s deliberate, organised oppression is not only unsustainable, it disfigures both the oppressor and the oppressed”.

I think that the idea of both oppressors and oppressed becoming disfigured gets right to the core of things. Two predictable tendencies have unfolded as Israel’s occupation has dragged on—an increasing dehumanization of Palestinians and also an increasing inhumanity on the part of Israel. Noam Chomsky says in a 25 July 2018 Truthout interview: threats “to Netanyahu are primarily from his right”; this “is quite a change from the time when Israel conquered Palestinian lands” in “1967, and soon set forth on its illegal settlement programs”; the “change was predicted early on by those who understood the natural dynamics of crushing people under your jackboot”; one “commentator who was particularly outspoken was the respected Israeli sage Yeshayahu Leibowitz”; and he “condemned the occupation bitterly, not because of concern for the Palestinians, for whose fate he expressed only contempt, but because of the predictable effect on Jews, who, he warned, would become ‘Judeo-Nazis’ as they carried out the tasks of repression and displacement”.

To Live Under a Boot

I recommend the following three sources regarding Israel’s actions:

• the 12 January 2021 B’Tselem paper “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid”

• the 27 April 2021 Human Rights Watch report “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution”

• Norman Finkelstein’s 2018 book Gaza

The first source says: the “Israeli regime does not have to declare itself an apartheid regime to be defined as such, nor is it relevant that representatives of the state broadly proclaim it a democracy”; what “defines apartheid is not statements but practice”; as “painful as it may be to look reality in the eye, it is more painful to live under a boot”; the “harsh reality described here may deteriorate further if new practices are introduced—with or without accompanying legislation”; nevertheless, “people created this regime and people can make it worse—or work to replace it”; that “hope is the driving force behind this position paper”; fighting “for a future based on human rights, liberty and justice is especially crucial now”; and there “are various political paths to a just future here, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, but all of us must first choose to say no to apartheid”.

The second says: about “6.8 million Jewish Israelis and 6.8 million Palestinians live today between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River, an area encompassing Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), the latter made up of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip”; “Israeli authorities have deprived millions of people of their basic rights by virtue of their identity as Palestinians”; these “longstanding policies and systematic practices box in, dispossess, forcibly separate, marginalize, and otherwise inflict suffering on Palestinians”; in “the OPT, movement restrictions, land expropriation, forcible transfer, denial of residency and nationality, and the mass suspension of civil rights constitute ‘inhuman[e] acts’ set out under the Apartheid Convention and the Rome Statute”; under “both legal standards, inhumane acts when carried out amid systematic oppression and with the intent to maintain domination make up the crime against humanity of apartheid”; collectively, “these policies and practices in the OPT severely deprive Palestinians of fundamental human rights, including to residency, private property, and access to land, services, and resources, on a widespread and systematic basis”; when “committed with discriminatory intent, on the basis of the victims’ identity as part of a group or collectivity, they amount to the crime against humanity of persecution under the Rome Statute and customary international law”; and separately “from the inhumane acts carried out in the OPT, the Israeli government violates the rights of Palestinians inside Israel on account of their identity”.

And the third says: what “has befallen Gaza is a human-made human disaster”; in “its protractedness and in its starkness, in its unfolding not in the fog of war or in the obscurity of remoteness but in broad daylight and in full sight, in the complicity of so many, not just via acts of commission but also, and especially, of omission, it is moreover a distinctively evil crime”; in “all likelihood, the lethal trends prefiguring Gaza’s exhaustion as a viable habitat won’t be checked”; “Gaza has not yet crossed the threshold of no return”; “one would have to be blinder than King Lear to believe that diplomatic negotiations in and of themselves might yet yield fruit”; when “the current phase of the ‘peace process’ was inaugurated in 1993, 250,000 illegal Jewish settlers resided in the occupied Palestinian territory”; “by 2016, 600,000 settlers resided in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem)”; the “bitter fruit it yielded in Gaza requires no further comment”; “it is no more likely that Hamas’s strategy of armed resistance can achieve substantive results”; a “strategy of mass nonviolent resistance, by contrast, might yet turn the tide”; and “Gaza’s richest resources are its people, the truth, and public opinion”.

The Ongoing Attack

I don’t understand how the fact that Hamas carried out a horrifying terrorist atrocity means that Israel now—somehow—has either the legal or the moral right to slaughter civilians.

A 10 October 2012 CNN piece says: a “humanitarian crisis is swiftly unfolding in Gaza, as trapped residents, many cut off from food and electricity, face a fourth day of Israeli airstrikes”; “Nadine Abdul Latif, 13, of Gaza City’s Al Rimal neighborhood, said she and her family were told by neighbors and relatives to leave on Monday after Israel said it would target the area”; “they decided to stay as ‘we have no safe place to go to,’ she said”; the “Gaza strip—the coastal enclave that Hamas controls—has been pummeled by airstrikes since Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a ‘complete siege’ on the area, including halting supplies of electricity, food, water and fuel to the enclave”; “Israeli fighter jets struck more than 200 targets in Gaza overnight, the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement”; “Tariq Al Hillu, a 29-year-old resident of Al Sudaniya in northern Gaza, described complete chaos when airstrikes struck his neighborhood Sunday morning”; and his “neighbors were trapped under the rubble, and he could hear their calls for help, he said”.

The “United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Monday warned that the humanitarian situation in Gaza was already ‘extremely dire before these hostilities’ and ‘now it will only deteriorate exponentially’”; “Human Rights Watch (HRW) criticized Gallant’s call for a complete siege as a form of ‘collective punishment’ and a ‘war crime’”; “Omar Shakir, the regional director of HRW, told CNN the comments by Gallant were ‘abhorrent’ and accused Israel of using starvation as ‘a weapon of war’”; and “Shakir also condemned Hamas’ attacks on Israel, saying the ‘deliberate targeting of civilians, indiscriminate attacks, and taking of civilians as hostages’ also ‘amount to war crimes under international humanitarian law’”.

Omar Ghraieb writes in a 12 October 2023 CNN piece: in “Gaza, we have all been glued to the news for the last five days, watching in disbelief as strikes and counterstrikes have been exchanged and the death counts on both sides of the border mount”; Gaza is an “impoverished coastal enclave that some call the world’s largest open-air prison”; Gaza has been “under a suffocating blockade for more than 15 years”; “I write, and the world watches as violence, blood and darkness descend upon us”; what “I see in Western media—erasing Israel’s occupation, its blockade and our suffering—bears no resemblance to what I see out my window”; the “world ignores our plight and denies our humanity, blaming us for our own oppression”; the “bias and selective outrage of Western governments isn’t new”; and they “have never seen or cared about us as we have suffered under Israel’s occupation, violence and discrimination, year after year, decade after decade”.

A 12 October 2023 CNN piece says: medical “and relief workers are pleading for safe passage for the 2 million civilians in Gaza as Israel pounds the enclave with airstrikes and imposes a complete siege”; time “is running out for the residents crammed into the increasingly battered 140-square-mile territory under Israeli and Egyptian blockades, as supplies of food and water run low”; families “are desperately searching for shelter as missiles flatten buildings and towers”; medical “supplies are in dire shortage”; “most of the enclave has already lost power, after the fuel that generates electricity ran out on Wednesday”; at “least 1,500 Palestinians, including 500 children, have so far been killed in Gaza, and over 6,000 others injured, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health”; “Gaza’s health infrastructure is close to a breaking point, Dr. Ashraf Al-Qudra, a spokesperson for the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, said Thursday”; all “beds are occupied, and there is no room for new patients in critical condition, Al-Qudra said”; and the International Committee of the Red Cross “said hospitals in Gaza ‘risk turning into morgues’ amid power cuts”.

I expect that Israel will—in gut-wrenching fashion—turn the Gaza Strip into a morgue. And we should expect horror—nothing except horror—until international law is finally implemented, the vicious and brutal occupation is finally ended, and the occupation’s wretched machinery finally ceases to showcase “the natural dynamics of crushing people under your jackboot”.