National Post (National Edition)
IT’S COMPLICATED
EVEN RATIONAL PEOPLE LOSE THEIR MINDS WHEN ISRAEL COMES UP — HAMAS COUNTS ON IT
There is something about Israel that seems to make people lose their damn minds. It is a disturbing phenomenon. It is by no means confined to that vast and utterly useless constituency that pretends to be pro-palestinian, and draws liberally from the expansive resources of Western bourgeois activism, and yet has somehow failed to lift so much as an ounce from the crushing weight of suffering that burdens the backs of the desperate masses in Gaza.
It is a kind of craziness that is ubiquitous, too, within several United Nations’ agencies, most notably and paradoxically the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, but also in the very existence of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine. UNRWA sets the descendants of the Arabs tragically displaced by israel’ s war of national liberation 70 years ago into a distinct and perpetual category of international refugee, quite apart from the jurisdiction of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. UNRWA’S entire raison d’être gives every impression of being grounded in the delusion that the Jewish state of Israel is merely a temporary, racist, colonial settler state aberration which will one day just vanish, allowing the five million or so Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza to throng joyfully, at long last, through the streets of a Judenrein Tel Aviv.
In the most fashionable discourse, there is much room permitted for debate and the airing of differences of opinion, of course. Should Israel never be forgiven for standing up to several Arab armies and winning, in 1948, or should Israel never be forgiven for standing up to several Arab armies and winning, in 1967? Discuss.
The recent horrors at the demarcation line between Israel and Gaza — more than 100 people killed and thousands more wounded by Israeli sniper fire over a sevenweek period — have provided ample opportunity for the elucidation of crazy points of view, along with deranged and genuinely despairing expressions of grief and anger, across what you might call “both sides” of the Israel-palestinian cacophony.
Owing to the surfeit of propaganda and public relations exercises involved, you should not be too hard on yourself if you find it difficult to sort out what the hell has actually happened. Proper journalism is necessarily central to resolving the confusion, but the news media is also the conduit through which the most outrageous lies are most efficiently told. Expending some serious effort in the attempt to report, explain, provide necessary context and offer useful analysis is particularly and perhaps uniquely fraught with hazard in the matter of Israel and Palestine. As someone routinely dismissed as a shill for my shadowy Zionist paymasters, although sometimes vilified as a jihad-enabling Sharia Bolshevik, I can attest to this, personally.
This is not to say, by any stretch, that my esteemed comrade and colleague, the columnist Barbara Kay, has called me any such names, or that Barbara has lost her damn mind. But she upbraided me personally in the pages of the National Post yesterday, in ways that are instructive in the corrosive, life-of-its-own nature of propaganda.
A long story short, then. “Hamas is winning the propaganda war,” Kay quite justifiably concludes. But by way of evidence, she cites my own observations and arguments, which I laid out in a May 16 column in the Ottawa Citizen and the National Post, as “proof.” My case is accurately summed up by its Post headline, “Hamas is brutally putting Israel in an impossible situation and Israel will have to adapt,” and in the subhead, “If Hamas persists in luring Palestinians to martyrdom at the Gaza fence, the IDF’S rules of engagement become morally untenable.”
I won’t waste any time with the inside baseball involved in this, except to point out that I am well aware, and said so, that Hamas is grotesquely employing the deaths of Gazans in a kind of mass suicide-by-cop ritual. Kay takes me to task for concluding that Israel is bound by a solemn moral duty to refuse to go along with this macabre strategy, and perhaps — if Hamas persists in this — the Israel Defense Forces’ rules of engagement at the Gaza fence (first shoot to warn, then shoot to wound, then shoot to kill) should be revisited.
A great deal of what you might call a public relations effort on Israel’s behalf has been expended, much of it sadly in vain, to show the direct culpability of Hamas, the gruesome terror cult that rules Gaza, in the Gaza fence bloodletting. The extraordinarily high casualty count of the “May 14 massacre,” as the events of that day are now widely described, is a clear Hamas propaganda victory. The 62 dead and 2,770 injured, roughly 1,300 of whom were wounded by gunfire, makes May 14 bloodier than any single day during the 2014 Gaza war, even. As the Israel Defense Forces’ own Lt. Jonathan Conricus puts it: “The amount of casualties has done us a tremendous disservice, unfortunately, and it has been very difficult to tell our story.”
But it has not helped that the effort to explain the hideously cynical role Hamas has played in the deaths — by exhorting demonstrators to rush the heavily-defended Gaza fence, knowing full well the fatal consequences, by hiding its own armed operatives among unarmed pro- testers, and so on — has itself inadvertently depended upon Hamas propaganda. This headline, for instance, or a version of it, has appeared around the world: “Hamas admits 50 of the 62 protesters killed were its own militants.”
In fact, Hamas formally claimed 10 of the dead were its own. But then a Hamas official, Salah Bardawil, said in an interview that “In the last rounds of confrontations, if 62 people were martyred, Fifty of the martyrs were Hamas and 12 from the people. How can Hamas reap the fruits if it pays such an expensive price?” But Ahmed Abu Artema, the Gazan social-media personality who conceived of the protests in the first place cast doubt on the claim (“This is rhetoric ... the reporter provoked him with his question”). The IDF has identified only 24 terrorists, affiliated with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, among the dead.
It is not an easy thing, getting to the truth of all this, and coming to some rational judgments about the apportionment of blame for the horrible predicament Gazans are obliged to endure: a crushing hopelessness, a quarter of their meagre personal incomes spent on drinkable water, an unemployment rate approaching 50 per cent, the tyranny of Hamas, and no escape.
But who dog a zan sb lame for this? It’s not what you might think. In a March public opinion survey undertaken by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research, less than a third of Gazans blame Israel, which has maintained a strictly enforced cordon around Gaza ever since the bloody Hamas coup of 2007. Most properly blame Hamas, or its rival Fatah, or the Palestinian Authority. A similar poll undertaken a month earlier put support for Hamas among Gazans at nine per cent.
It’s complicated. Relying on propaganda won’t help you sort things out, and wellmeaning public relations exercises are no match for whatever it is — anti-semitism is commonly only a shout away — that causes outwardly reasonable people, when the matter turns to Israel, to lose their damn minds.
NOT AN EASY THING, GETTING TO THE TRUTH ... AND COMING TO SOME RATIONAL JUDGMENTS.