The best time to write about a political/military debacle is years later, when one can revisit the facts with “emotions recollected in tranquility.” For now, however, saying something is almost compulsory, and most of what is said will be emotional.
In response to the Hamas attack on Israel and an impending Israeli counterattack, media coverage will follow a familiar sequence. First will be reports about the Hamas attack, with terrorists hunting down and killing, or capturing and torturing Jewish civilians, and its emotional impact. Then will be reports about the Israeli counterattack, with its emphasis on siege tactics depriving the Gazan population the basics of life, with its emotional impact. Last will come reports of the clamor of voices from all sides for “peace-at-any-price” talks to stop the deaths and destruction. Only years later will calmer voices analyze and evaluate what has occurred, why, and to what end.
I ignore the editorial spin-meisters. On the one side, they have an agenda to advance, either to excoriate Israel for, or to exonerate Israel of, its many faults and failures. On the other side, they have an equal and opposite agenda to advance, either to excoriate Hamas for, or to exonerate Hamas of, its many faults and failures. The rigid parallelism is deliberate, because of rights and wrongs on both sides. What is uncertain is whether it is possible, and if so, how, to assess fairly the rights and wrongs on both sides of these political/military events How does one compare incremental, apartheid-like abuses of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and its control of Gaza over decades against the intermittent, small-scale Palestinian terrorist killings and raids, and infrequent but large-scale attacks like the current one over the same period? No fair-minded person can claim to achieve a solid, fair assessment.
For both sides cite a litany of accumulated abuses by the other side to justify either terrorist killings, raids, or attacks, now of unprecedented size and savagery, or police or military retribution. The problem with such citations is that every abuse on one side has an antecedent abuse on the other side. The logic of using past abuses to justify present abuses leads to an infinite regression which cannot achieve a conclusive determination of greater blame. Each side offers such justifications, but they actually justify nothing.
Ironically, in one important respect, Israel and Hamas share similar objectives. As its ever-expanding settlements suggest, Israel has sought and still seeks to acquire and annex all land in the West Bank under the doctrine of a “Greater Israel.” Achieving such an outcome would likely require exiling Palestinians or including them necessarily as second-class citizens in that larger state to preserve its Jewish identity. This objective is wrong far more as a matter of morality and legality than of politics. Israel must return to and live within its original internationally recognized boundaries, perhaps with some minor modifications for security concerns identified in the aftermath of the Six-Day War; the West Bank should be cleared of all Israeli settlements and established as a Palestinian state. Moreover, Israel’s Palestinian citizens should have full rights as citizens. As both its small- and large-scale attacks on Israel suggest, Hamas is determined to implement its charter, the destruction of Israel, the occupation of its land, and the death of its Jewish citizens, and thereby unilaterally reverse the United Nations's decision to create Israel 75 years ago. Israeli and Hamas objectives are similar, but they are not identical. Both wish to acquire land, but both would treat the inhabitants quite differently.
Thus, similarities end here, and moral and legal differences between Israel and Hamas begin. Israel’s reprehensible objective to divest people from their land is morally and legally different from Hamas’s despicable objective to dispatch civilians. Israel does not intend genocide; Hamas does. Great sufferings under Israeli occupation of the West Bank or Israeli control of Gaza cannot justify genocide. Nothing can. The media will try.
In coming weeks, media coverage of the Israeli-Hamas conflict will stress civilian casualties and human suffering in a “siege.” It will report civilian casualties in urban warfare in different ways. It will imply that Israelis do not try to avoid them but ignore that Hamas uses Gazan civilians as shields and puts them in harm’s way, often by placing military personnel or weapons in homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques. It will report without comment factually and morally perverse Hamas statements like the following: “Any targeting of innocent civilians without warning will be met regretfully by executing one of the captives in our custody, and we will be forced to broadcast this execution.” In this case, the media did not note that Israeli forces do not target “innocent civilians.” That Israeli forces give warning of attacks on mixed civilian/military buildings. That Hamas cannot claim to “regretfully” execute a captive Israeli (or American) when the execution is after and in retaliation for Israeli military operations. That Hamas is not “forced to broadcast this execution” but chooses to do so for public relations purposes. In its “fog of war,” the media will lose sight of the fact that, in its fanaticism to achieve its objectives—destroy Israel, kill Jews—, Hamas will sacrifice “innocent civilians,” Gazan or not, for its cause.
Even generally reliable media can issue seriously flawed (or biased?) reports. The Washington Post corrected an article “What is Hamas, and why did it attack Israel now?” by Niha Masih (9 Oct; updated 11 Oct) because “An earlier version of this article incorrectly described Hamas’s aim as the creation of a Palestinian state along the borders that existed before the 1967 war. Hamas does not recognize the existence of Israel and is committed to replacing it through armed struggle with a Palestinian state stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River.” Note that neither the article nor the correction identifies Hamas’s genocidal objective.
The media will not report facts which qualify exonerations of Hamas violence or sympathies for Gazan suffering. Gazans elected Hamas. They knew its objectives to seize Israel and kill Jews, they assented to genocide, and they have cheered Hamas attacks until Israeli counterattacks spoiled their celebrations and led them to pose as “innocent civilians” suffering at the hands of their more powerful enemy (unsaid: whom they provoked). It will not label as antisemitic those who exonerate Hamas, sympathize with Gazans, and ignore that Hamas and Gazans would make Jewish Israelis victims of genocide. Instead, it will allow them to hide behind the distinction, absurd in this case, between being anti-Israel and being antisemitic; in this case of genocide, there is no distinction: no Israel, no Jews; no Jews, no Israel.
No comments:
Post a Comment