ARTICLE

MATTI FRIEDMAN IN TABLET MAGAZINE: TELLING THE TRUTH ABUT THE MEDIA AND ISRAEL

An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth
A former AP correspondent explains how and why reporters get Israel so wrong, and why it matters
By Matti Friedman
Tablet Magazine (New York)
August 26, 2014

Is there anything left to say about Israel and Gaza? Newspapers this summer have been full of little else. Television viewers see heaps of rubble and plumes of smoke in their sleep. A representative article from a recent issue of The New Yorker described the summer’s events by dedicating one sentence each to the horrors in Nigeria and Ukraine, four sentences to the crazed génocidaires of ISIS, and the rest of the article—30 sentences—to Israel and Gaza.

When the hysteria abates, I believe the events in Gaza will not be remembered by the world as particularly important. People were killed, most of them Palestinians, including many unarmed innocents. I wish I could say the tragedy of their deaths, or the deaths of Israel’s soldiers, will change something, that they mark a turning point. But they don’t. This round was not the first in the Arab wars with Israel and will not be the last. The Israeli campaign was little different in its execution from any other waged by a Western army against a similar enemy in recent years, except for the more immediate nature of the threat to a country’s own population, and the greater exertions, however futile, to avoid civilian deaths.

The lasting importance of this summer’s war, I believe, doesn’t lie in the war itself. It lies instead in the way the war has been described and responded to abroad, and the way this has laid bare the resurgence of an old, twisted pattern of thought and its migration from the margins to the mainstream of Western discourse—namely, a hostile obsession with Jews. The key to understanding this resurgence is not to be found among jihadi webmasters, basement conspiracy theorists, or radical activists. It is instead to be found first among the educated and respectable people who populate the international news industry; decent people, many of them, and some of them my former colleagues.

While global mania about Israeli actions has come to be taken for granted, it is actually the result of decisions made by individual human beings in positions of responsibility—in this case, journalists and editors. The world is not responding to events in this country, but rather to the description of these events by news organizations. The key to understanding the strange nature of the response is thus to be found in the practice of journalism, and specifically in a severe malfunction that is occurring in that profession—my profession—here in Israel.

In this essay I will try to provide a few tools to make sense of the news from Israel. I acquired these tools as an insider: Between 2006 and the end of 2011 I was a reporter and editor in the Jerusalem bureau of the Associated Press, one of the world’s two biggest news providers. I have lived in Israel since 1995 and have been reporting on it since 1997.

This essay is not an exhaustive survey of the sins of the international media, a conservative polemic, or a defense of Israeli policies. (I am a believer in the importance of the “ mainstream” media, a liberal, and a critic of many of my country’s policies.) It necessarily involves some generalizations. I will first outline the central tropes of the international media’s Israel story—a story on which there is surprisingly little variation among mainstream outlets, and one which is, as the word “ story” suggests, a narrative construct that is largely fiction. I will then note the broader historical context of the way Israel has come to be discussed and explain why I believe it to be a matter of concern not only for people preoccupied with Jewish affairs. I will try to keep it brief.

HOW IMPORTANT IS THE ISRAEL STORY?

Staffing is the best measure of the importance of a story to a particular news organization. When I was a correspondent at the AP, the agency had more than 40 staffers covering Israel and the Palestinian territories. That was significantly more news staff than the AP had in China, Russia, or India, or in all of the 50 countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined. It was higher than the total number of news-gathering employees in all the countries where the uprisings of the “ Arab Spring” eventually erupted.

To offer a sense of scale: Before the outbreak of the civil war in Syria, the permanent AP presence in that country consisted of a single regime-approved stringer. The AP’s editors believed, that is, that Syria’s importance was less than one-40th that of Israel. I don’t mean to pick on the AP—the agency is wholly average, which makes it useful as an example. The big players in the news business practice groupthink, and these staffing arrangements were reflected across the herd. Staffing levels in Israel have decreased somewhat since the Arab uprisings began, but remain high. And when Israel flares up, as it did this summer, reporters are often moved from deadlier conflicts. Israel still trumps nearly everything else.

The volume of press coverage that results, even when little is going on, gives this conflict a prominence compared to which its actual human toll is absurdly small. In all of 2013, for example, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict claimed 42 lives—that is, roughly the monthly homicide rate in the city of Chicago. Jerusalem, internationally renowned as a city of conflict, had slightly fewer violent deaths per capita last year than Portland, Ore., one of America’s safer cities. In contrast, in three years the Syrian conflict has claimed an estimated 190,000 lives, or about 70,000 more than the number of people who have ever died in the Arab-Israeli conflict since it began a century ago.

News organizations have nonetheless decided that this conflict is more important than, for example, the more than 1,600 women murdered in Pakistan last year (271 after being raped and 193 of them burned alive), the ongoing erasure of Tibet by the Chinese Communist Party, the carnage in Congo (more than 5 million dead as of 2012) or the Central African Republic, and the drug wars in Mexico (death toll between 2006 and 2012: 60,000), let alone conflicts no one has ever heard of in obscure corners of India or Thailand. They believe Israel to be the most important story on earth, or very close.

WHAT IS IMPORTANT ABOUT THE ISRAEL STORY, AND WHAT IS NOT

A reporter working in the international press corps here understands quickly that what is important in the Israel-Palestinian story is Israel. If you follow mainstream coverage, you will find nearly no real analysis of Palestinian society or ideologies, profiles of armed Palestinian groups, or investigation of Palestinian government. Palestinians are not taken seriously as agents of their own fate. The West has decided that Palestinians should want a state alongside Israel, so that opinion is attributed to them as fact, though anyone who has spent time with actual Palestinians understands that things are (understandably, in my opinion) more complicated. Who they are and what they want is not important: The story mandates that they exist as passive victims of the party that matters.

Corruption, for example, is a pressing concern for many Palestinians under the rule of the Palestinian Authority, but when I and another reporter once suggested an article on the subject, we were informed by the bureau chief that Palestinian corruption was “ not the story.” (Israeli corruption was, and we covered it at length.)

Israeli actions are analyzed and criticized, and every flaw in Israeli society is aggressively reported. In one seven-week period, from Nov. 8 to Dec. 16, 2011, I decided to count the stories coming out of our bureau on the various moral failings of Israeli society—proposed legislation meant to suppress the media, the rising influence of Orthodox Jews, unauthorized settlement outposts, gender segregation, and so forth. I counted 27 separate articles, an average of a story every two days. In a very conservative estimate, this seven-week tally was higher than the total number of significantly critical stories about Palestinian government and society, including the totalitarian Islamists of Hamas, that our bureau had published in the preceding three years.

The Hamas charter, for example, calls not just for Israel’s destruction but for the murder of Jews and blames Jews for engineering the French and Russian revolutions and both world wars; the charter was never mentioned in print when I was at the AP, though Hamas won a Palestinian national election and had become one of the region’s most important players. To draw the link with this summer’s events: An observer might think Hamas’ decision in recent years to construct a military infrastructure beneath Gaza’s civilian infrastructure would be deemed newsworthy, if only because of what it meant about the way the next conflict would be fought and the cost to innocent people. But that is not the case. The Hamas emplacements were not important in themselves, and were therefore ignored. What was important was the Israeli decision to attack them.

There has been much discussion recently of Hamas attempts to intimidate reporters. Any veteran of the press corps here knows the intimidation is real, and I saw it in action myself as an editor on the AP news desk. During the 2008-2009 Gaza fighting I personally erased a key detail—that Hamas fighters were dressed as civilians and being counted as civilians in the death toll—because of a threat to our reporter in Gaza. (The policy was then, and remains, not to inform readers that the story is censored unless the censorship is Israeli. Earlier this month, the AP’s Jerusalem news editor reported and submitted a story on Hamas intimidation; the story was shunted into deep freeze by his superiors and has not been published.)

But if critics imagine that journalists are clamoring to cover Hamas and are stymied by thugs and threats, it is generally not so. There are many low-risk ways to report Hamas actions, if the will is there: under bylines from Israel, under no byline, by citing Israeli sources. Reporters are resourceful when they want to be.

The fact is that Hamas intimidation is largely beside the point because the actions of Palestinians are beside the point: Most reporters in Gaza believe their job is to document violence directed by Israel at Palestinian civilians. That is the essence of the Israel story. In addition, reporters are under deadline and often at risk, and many don’t speak the language and have only the most tenuous grip on what is going on. They are dependent on Palestinian colleagues and fixers who either fear Hamas, support Hamas, or both. Reporters don’t need Hamas enforcers to shoo them away from facts that muddy the simple story they have been sent to tell.

It is not coincidence that the few journalists who have documented Hamas fighters and rocket launches in civilian areas this summer were generally not, as you might expect, from the large news organizations with big and permanent Gaza operations. They were mostly scrappy, peripheral, and newly arrived players—a Finn, an Indian crew, a few others. These poor souls didn’t get the memo.

WHAT ELSE ISN’T IMPORTANT?

The fact that Israelis quite recently elected moderate governments that sought reconciliation with the Palestinians, and which were undermined by the Palestinians, is considered unimportant and rarely mentioned. These lacunae are often not oversights but a matter of policy. In early 2009, for example, two colleagues of mine obtained information that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had made a significant peace offer to the Palestinian Authority several months earlier, and that the Palestinians had deemed it insufficient. This had not been reported yet and it was—or should have been—one of the biggest stories of the year. The reporters obtained confirmation from both sides and one even saw a map, but the top editors at the bureau decided that they would not publish the story.

Some staffers were furious, but it didn’t help. Our narrative was that the Palestinians were moderate and the Israelis recalcitrant and increasingly extreme. Reporting the Olmert offer—like delving too deeply into the subject of Hamas—would make that narrative look like nonsense. And so we were instructed to ignore it, and did, for more than a year and a half.

This decision taught me a lesson that should be clear to consumers of the Israel story: Many of the people deciding what you will read and see from here view their role not as explanatory but as political. Coverage is a weapon to be placed at the disposal of the side they like.

HOW IS THE ISRAEL STORY FRAMED?

The Israel story is framed in the same terms that have been in use since the early 1990s—the quest for a “ two-state solution.” It is accepted that the conflict is “ Israeli-Palestinian,” meaning that it is a conflict taking place on land that Israel controls—0.2 percent of the Arab world—in which Jews are a majority and Arabs a minority. The conflict is more accurately described as “ Israel-Arab,” or “ Jewish-Arab” —that is, a conflict between the 6 million Jews of Israel and 300 million Arabs in surrounding countries. (Perhaps “ Israel-Muslim” would be more accurate, to take into account the enmity of non-Arab states like Iran and Turkey, and, more broadly, 1 billion Muslims worldwide.) This is the conflict that has been playing out in different forms for a century, before Israel existed, before Israel captured the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank, and before the term “ Palestinian” was in use.

The “ Israeli-Palestinian” framing allows the Jews, a tiny minority in the Middle East, to be depicted as the stronger party. It also includes the implicit assumption that if the Palestinian problem is somehow solved the conflict will be over, though no informed person today believes this to be true. This definition also allows the Israeli settlement project, which I believe is a serious moral and strategic error on Israel’s part, to be described not as what it is—one more destructive symptom of the conflict—but rather as its cause.

A knowledgeable observer of the Middle East cannot avoid the impression that the region is a volcano and that the lava is radical Islam, an ideology whose various incarnations are now shaping this part of the world. Israel is a tiny village on the slopes of the volcano. Hamas is the local representative of radical Islam and is openly dedicated to the eradication of the Jewish minority enclave in Israel, just as Hezbollah is the dominant representative of radical Islam in Lebanon, the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and so forth.

Hamas is not, as it freely admits, party to the effort to create a Palestinian state alongside Israel. It has different goals about which it is quite open and that are similar to those of the groups listed above. Since the mid 1990s, more than any other player, Hamas has destroyed the Israeli left, swayed moderate Israelis against territorial withdrawals, and buried the chances of a two-state compromise. That’s one accurate way to frame the story.

An observer might also legitimately frame the story through the lens of minorities in the Middle East, all of which are under intense pressure from Islam: When minorities are helpless, their fate is that of the Yazidis or Christians of northern Iraq, as we have just seen, and when they are armed and organized they can fight back and survive, as in the case of the Jews and (we must hope) the Kurds.

There are, in other words, many different ways to see what is happening here. Jerusalem is less than a day’s drive from Aleppo or Baghdad, and it should be clear to everyone that peace is pretty elusive in the Middle East even in places where Jews are absent. But reporters generally cannot see the Israel story in relation to anything else. Instead of describing Israel as one of the villages abutting the volcano, they describe Israel as the volcano.

The Israel story is framed to seem as if it has nothing to do with events nearby because the “ Israel” of international journalism does not exist in the same geo-political universe as Iraq, Syria, or Egypt. The Israel story is not a story about current events. It is about something else.

THE OLD BLANK SCREEN

For centuries, stateless Jews played the role of a lightning rod for ill will among the majority population. They were a symbol of things that were wrong. Did you want to make the point that greed was bad? Jews were greedy. Cowardice? Jews were cowardly. Were you a Communist? Jews were capitalists. Were you a capitalist? In that case, Jews were Communists. Moral failure was the essential trait of the Jew. It was their role in Christian tradition—the only reason European society knew or cared about them in the first place.

Like many Jews who grew up late in the 20th century in friendly Western cities, I dismissed such ideas as the feverish memories of my grandparents. One thing I have learned—and I’m not alone this summer—is that I was foolish to have done so. Today, people in the West tend to believe the ills of the age are racism, colonialism, and militarism. The world’s only Jewish country has done less harm than most countries on earth, and more good—and yet when people went looking for a country that would symbolize the sins of our new post-colonial, post-militaristic, post-ethnic dream-world, the country they chose was this one.

When the people responsible for explaining the world to the world, journalists, cover the Jews’ war as more worthy of attention than any other, when they portray the Jews of Israel as the party obviously in the wrong, when they omit all possible justifications for the Jews’ actions and obscure the true face of their enemies, what they are saying to their readers—whether they intend to or not—is that Jews are the worst people on earth. The Jews are a symbol of the evils that civilized people are taught from an early age to abhor. International press coverage has become a morality play starring a familiar villain.

Some readers might remember that Britain participated in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the fallout from which has now killed more than three times the number of people ever killed in the Israel-Arab conflict; yet in Britain, protesters furiously condemn Jewish militarism. White people in London and Paris whose parents not long ago had themselves fanned by dark people in the sitting rooms of Rangoon or Algiers condemn Jewish “ colonialism.” Americans who live in places called “ Manhattan” or “ Seattle” condemn Jews for displacing the native people of Palestine. Russian reporters condemn Israel’s brutal military tactics. Belgian reporters condemn Israel’s treatment of Africans. When Israel opened a transportation service for Palestinian workers in the occupied West Bank a few years ago, American news consumers could read about Israel “ segregating buses.” And there are a lot of people in Europe, and not just in Germany, who enjoy hearing the Jews accused of genocide.

You don’t need to be a history professor, or a psychiatrist, to understand what’s going on. Having rehabilitated themselves against considerable odds in a minute corner of the earth, the descendants of powerless people who were pushed out of Europe and the Islamic Middle East have become what their grandparents were—the pool into which the world spits. The Jews of Israel are the screen onto which it has become socially acceptable to project the things you hate about yourself and your own country. The tool through which this psychological projection is executed is the international press.

WHO CARES IF THE WORLD GETS THE ISRAEL STORY WRONG?

Because a gap has opened here between the way things are and the way they are described, opinions are wrong and policies are wrong, and observers are regularly blindsided by events. Such things have happened before. In the years leading to the breakdown of Soviet Communism in 1991, as the Russia expert Leon Aron wrote in a 2011 essay for Foreign Policy, “ virtually no Western expert, scholar, official, or politician foresaw the impending collapse of the Soviet Union.” The empire had been rotting for years and the signs were there, but the people who were supposed to be seeing and reporting them failed and when the superpower imploded everyone was surprised.

And there was the Spanish civil war: “ Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which do not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. … I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what had happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines.’ “ That was George Orwell, writing in 1942.

Orwell did not step off an airplane in Catalonia, stand next to a Republican cannon, and have himself filmed while confidently repeating what everyone else was saying or describing what any fool could see: weaponry, rubble, bodies. He looked beyond the ideological fantasies of his peers and knew that what was important was not necessarily visible. Spain, he understood, was not really about Spain at all—it was about a clash of totalitarian systems, German and Russian. He knew he was witnessing a threat to European civilization, and he wrote that, and he was right.

Understanding what happened in Gaza this summer means understanding Hezbollah in Lebanon, the rise of the Sunni jihadis in Syria and Iraq, and the long tentacles of Iran. It requires figuring out why countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia now see themselves as closer to Israel than to Hamas. Above all, it requires us to understand what is clear to nearly everyone in the Middle East: The ascendant force in our part of the world is not democracy or modernity. It is rather an empowered strain of Islam that assumes different and sometimes conflicting forms, and that is willing to employ extreme violence in a quest to unite the region under its control and confront the West. Those who grasp this fact will be able to look around and connect the dots.

Israel is not an idea, a symbol of good or evil, or a litmus test for liberal opinion at dinner parties. It is a small country in a scary part of the world that is getting scarier. It should be reported as critically as any other place, and understood in context and in proportion. Israel is not one of the most important stories in the world, or even in the Middle East; whatever the outcome in this region in the next decade, it will have as much to do with Israel as World War II had to do with Spain. Israel is a speck on the map—a sideshow that happens to carry an unusual emotional charge.

Many in the West clearly prefer the old comfort of parsing the moral failings of Jews, and the familiar feeling of superiority this brings them, to confronting an unhappy and confusing reality. They may convince themselves that all of this is the Jews’ problem, and indeed the Jews’ fault. But journalists engage in these fantasies at the cost of their credibility and that of their profession. And, as Orwell would tell us, the world entertains fantasies at its peril.

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/183033/israel-insider-guide

ARTICLE EXTRACTS

“YET WITHIN SIX YEARS OF PUBLISHING HIS BOOK, MY GRANDFATHER HAD TO FLEE GERMANY”

* Daniel Finkelstein (Times of London): “My grandfather was not a Zionist... He opposed the Zionists, fought them politically. He even wrote a book on the subject, which, within a few months of its publication in 1927, went through three editions… Yet within six years of publishing his book, my grandfather had to flee Germany... Six million of Europe’s nine million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, including my grandmother.”

* “It is impossible to view the death of so many [Palestinian] women and children without being aghast... It is a moral disaster... Yet it is also impossible to stop there. Just as it is not enough to stop after considering my grandfather’s case against the German Zionists without considering what happened to the alternative he was proposing.”

* “What are the choices for Israel? … The Palestinians must have a homeland, they have a right to a homeland… [But] establishing this Palestinian right, much as I passionately believe in it, will not be enough. It won’t be enough to ensure that Israel doesn’t have to wage unthinkable wars to protect itself [as it did before 1967]…. I, of course, supported Israel’s withdrawal from occupying Gaza. But unfortunately it has made things worse…”

* “No democratic government could survive [doing nothing in response to continuous rocket attacks on all its major cities]… Would the international community protect Israel, if Israel did not protect itself? … Jews are always being told they should learn the lesson of the Holocaust…. [One of them is] that world opinion didn’t save us. And that by the time the army liberated the camps, most of the people were already dead.”

 

“FOR JEWS IN WESTERN (AND MUSLIM) SOCIETIES ARE EXPECTED TO KNOW THEIR PLACE”

* Prof. Efraim Karsh (Jerusalem Post): “Let’s admit it: Israel can never win the media war against Hamas. No matter what it does, no matter how hard it tries. Not because the Islamist terror group that is raining missiles on its cities and villages and using its own hapless subjects as human shields is the underdog in this conflict, but because the sight of Arabs killing Jews (or other Arabs for that matter) is hardly news; while the sight of Jews killing Arabs is a man-bites-dog anomaly that cannot be tolerated.”

* “Imagine the following scenario: Thousands of foaming-at-the-mouth Jews rampaging through the streets of London and Paris to protest the blitz bombing of their co-religionists by a murderous al-Qaida/ISIS clone. They carry banners urging the killing of all Muslims wherever they are, hurl rocks and petrol bombs at the police, set fire to mosques, destroy Muslim properties and establishments, and attack all Muslims and Arabs coming their way.

* Sound incredible? No doubt. For Jews in western (and Muslim) societies are expected to know their place… to never fight fire with fire, to always understand the “other,” to ever be ready to please, appease… Not so Israel’s enemies.

* “What makes this phenomenon particularly galling is that instead of clarifying in no uncertain terms the unacceptability of this bigotry in civilized societies, western elites have treated these recurrent hate fests [against Jews and Israelis] as legitimate, if at times excessive, manifestations of Muslim solidarity with the Palestinians, thus providing a safe environment for outright anti-Semitic attitudes and behavior. (As evidenced by the ongoing bloodbaths in Syria and Iraq, the notion of Muslim solidarity is a myth, with far more Muslims killed throughout history by their co-religionists than by non-Muslims.)”

* “Just as western politicians and the media have ignored Hamas’s indiscriminate missile attacks on Israeli civilians but jumped up and down over Israel’s military response, so they have been bending over backward since 9/11 to embrace their Muslim citizens … [Yet] it is Jews who feel vulnerable to attack, and who have faced the most violence, and whose institutions from synagogues to community buildings to Jewish newspaper offices have been under heavy police guard for years – no Muslim community in the West has had to undertake similar security precautions.”

 

“WAS SAINSBURY’S ANTI-SEMITIC? NO. BUT IT DOES SHINE A LIGHT ON THE MODERN PHENOMENON OF ACQUIESCENCE TO ANTI-SEMITISM”

* Brendan O’Neill (Daily Telegraph): “Were you outraged by a Sainsbury’s store’s decision over the weekend to hide away its kosher foods in an attempt to placate anti-Israel protesters? You should have been. For this incident, though seemingly a one-off, speaks to a profound problem in Europe today – the respectable classes’ acquiescence to anti-Semitism; their willingness to accept anti-Semitic sentiment as a fact of life and to shrug it off or, worse, kowtow to it.”

* “So does this mean Sainsbury’s is anti-Semitic? No… But it does shine a light on the modern phenomenon of acquiescence to anti-Semitism, the rank unwillingness of influential people and institutions to face up to anti-Semitic sentiment and their preference for moulding the world around it rather than challenging it. Imagine if a Sainsbury’s manager suggested that the best way to deal with a racist in his store was to remove the black employees who were offending him. There would be outrage. Yet this weekend, in central, apparently civilised London, a manager decided that the best way to deal with people possessed of a possibly anti-Semitic outlook was to hide away the Jew stuff, lest they see it and feel disgusted by it.”

* “Such official or institutional acquiescence to anti-Semitism is now widespread in Western Europe. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard people say that the problem of anti-Semitism isn’t all that bad, because they would rather just not talk about it. Or they say anti-Semitism is an understandable if slightly wrong-headed response to Israeli aggression in Gaza, excusing this poisonous prejudice as a kind of misfired political anger. In a world in which we are supersensitive to racism, in which a politician telling a less-than-PC after-dinner joke can expect to be harangued in the press and vilified on Twitter, it is simply extraordinary that more people are not exercised by the spread of anti-Semitic sentiment in Europe, by the smashing-up of synagogues, the vandalism of Jewish stores, the attacks on Holocaust memorials. This is the only prejudice that the opinion-forming set would rather not address.”

* “And in failing to do so, they effectively collude with it, granting it a special moral authority above all other prejudices. Everyone now knows that this is the one prejudice that respectable society won’t really challenge you for holding, and in fact will allow you to hold through making life easier for you.

* “But it does exist here [in Britain], and it is deeply entwined with a now widespread, highly emotional, often unhinged anti-Israel sentiment... Better to leave the anti-Semitism issue alone than invite scrutiny of Western Europe’s very own middle classes and left and the responsibility they might possibly bear for creating the conditions for contemporary anti-Israel-bordering-on-anti-Jew sentiment.”

* “A civilised, democratic society would confront anti-Semitism. Our acquiescence to anti-Semitism is calling into question both our claim to be civilised and our democratic credentials.”

 

THE POPE IS NOT NAÏVE, SO WHY THE DOUBLE STANDARDS?

* Lee Smith (Weekly Standard): “Yesterday Pope Francis endorsed military action to stop the Islamic State (formerly the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) from persecuting religious minorities, especially Christians and Yazidis, in Iraq. The pope’s statement is to be welcomed—albeit with serious reservations.”

* How is Hamas, a terrorist organization that targets Jews, a Middle East minority, different from ISIS, a terrorist organization that goes after Christians, Shia, Yazidis, and, presumably, if given the chance, Jews? Regarding ISIS, Francis reasoned that “where there is an unjust aggression, I can only say that it is licit to stop the unjust aggressor…I underscore the verb ‘stop.’ I’m not saying ‘bomb’ or ‘make war,’ just ‘stop.’“

* The pope is not naïve. What stops violence is not careful verb choice, but violence. So why is it licit to use violence to stop this unjust aggressor and not Hamas or, for instance, Bashar al-Assad?

* Last September the pope held a peace vigil to protest proposed U.S. military action against the Assad regime. “May the noise of weapons cease!” Francis proclaimed. “War always marks the failure of peace, it is always a defeat for humanity,” said the pope, just a few weeks after the Syrian regime launched a chemical weapons attack against civilians in a Damascus suburb.

* The Obama administration and Pope Francis are both correct—ISIS’ gory campaign is a real humanitarian catastrophe. The question is, why are they both blind to other grotesque insults to the innate dignity and freedom of others in the Middle East? Why does Francis elaborate a “Just War” argument to stop ISIS, and not Assad or Hamas? Is it only Christians and Yazidis who merit the care of the world and specifically the Catholic church, or aren’t Jews and Sunnis also created in the image of God?

 

FULL ARTICLES

“NO ALTERNATIVE”

Once again Israel finds it has no alternative
By Daniel Finkelstein
The Times (of London)
August 13 2014

The Gaza offensive has been a humanitarian and diplomatic catastrophe – but the other options were insupportable

My grandfather was not a Zionist. No, I should go further. He opposed the Zionists, fought them politically. He even wrote a book on the subject, A Critical Journey Through Palestine, which, within a few months of its publication in 1927, went through three editions.

Alfred Wiener had two objections to the Zionist idea. The first was simply – who on earth would want to live in Tel Aviv (or even, heaven forfend, a kibbutz) when they could live in Berlin? What sort of future was that for the Jews? Not one for him, certainly. It would be dangerous, impoverished and difficult.

The second was that he was an Arabist, a serious scholar of Arab history and culture, and thought that the Zionists were condescending to the Arabs, failing to take seriously enough their nationalist ambitions. He wondered whether it would ever be possible for a Jewish state in Palestine to live in peace.

He resented the Zionists for addressing the German Jew “as though he were in banishment”. Being a German and a Jew belonged together, he argued vehemently, and the Jews should stay in Germany. Germany, not Palestine, was their homeland. This, despite the fact that he was already adopting the role for which he is best known, as the leading archivist and campaigner against German antisemitism.

History has shown many of my grandfather’s worst forebodings to be correct. The Zionists had indeed underestimated Arab nationalism and the ambitions and rights of those people who already lived in Palestine. Life would indeed be difficult in Israel for the pioneers and peace impossible to come by.

Yet within six years of publishing his book, my grandfather had to flee Germany to live his life in banishment. The alternative to Zionism that he proposed turned out to be no alternative. Being a German and a Jew did not belong together. Six million of Europe’s nine million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, including my grandmother. In other words, he was right, but also spectacularly wrong.

This example conditions my response to the terrible events in Israel and Gaza these past few weeks.

It is impossible to view the death of so many women and children without being aghast, without seeing it as a dreadful failure. It is a moral disaster. It is a diplomatic catastrophe. Yet it is also impossible to stop there. Just as it is not enough to stop after considering my grandfather’s case against the German Zionists without considering what happened to the alternative he was proposing.

What are the choices for Israel? Let’s start at the end of one of Douglas Alexander’s press releases. The shadow foreign secretary finishes his statements on Gaza with the assertion that “Palestinian statehood is not a gift to be given, but a right to be recognised”. In so far as that means anything, I strongly agree with it. The Palestinians must have a homeland, they have a right to a homeland, in which they can live in prosperity and peace.

As most people agree, this should be broadly consistent with the borders that existed before the 1967 war. And Israel has made the creation of such a state considerably more difficult by its disastrously wrong and ill-considered decision to allow Jewish settlements to be built outside these borders.

Yet in this formulation, there lies a clue. And the clue tells you that establishing this Palestinian right, much as I passionately believe in it, will not be enough. It won’t be enough to ensure that Israel doesn’t have to wage unthinkable wars to protect itself.

The clue is in the idea of returning to the 1967 borders. Because there was a time when Israel lived within those borders, wasn’t there? It lived within them before 1967. And what happened? They had to fight successive wars, in 1948, 1967 and then again in 1973 to be allowed to live inside the borders. It was during the last two wars that it took the land as buffers against invasion. The war against Israel is not caused by the occupation. The occupation is caused by the war against Israel.

And for all that I support a Palestinian state, would its creation really mean peace in the Middle East even if it left Israel alone? The peace that emulates the internal affairs of which neighbour? Egypt? Syria? Lebanon? Iraq? Iran?

I, of course, supported Israel’s withdrawal from occupying Gaza. But unfortunately it has made things worse, not better, and has seen more innocent people die. The response to this has simply been to argue that Israel must “end the blockade”. And, naturally, anything that can safely be done to allow trade and relax restrictions should be done. It is, however, hardly possible to suggest to a country that its best response to a force that is firing rockets at it and building tunnels to allow invasion, is to remove limitations on movement of people and goods.

Alongside all this, there is, of course, another choice. That is to allow Hamas to fire rockets and build tunnels, and to do nothing. Israel would be required to put up with a few civilian deaths, the chance of many more and the need for everyone in the country to rush to air raid shelters all the time. Yet in return it would occupy the high ground and might expect the support of the international community.

To set out this option explicitly is to reveal its absurdity. No democratic government could survive advocating such a policy. And even if they could, it wouldn’t work. Let’s assume (a very big assumption) that failing to respond to Hamas did indeed seize the high ground. Would doing that help? Would the international community protect Israel, if Israel did not protect itself?

Ask the Palestinian refugees starved to death by Assad in a camp outside Damascus as we did nothing. Ask the minorities in Iraq. The West hasn’t the will to intervene and certainly wouldn’t do so before the Jews were being beheaded in the streets or being buried alive.

None of this, not one word, lessens my sorrow, my despair at every Palestinian life that has been lost. Things cannot go on like this. It is a tragedy, it is insupportable.

But Jews are always being told they should learn the lesson of the Holocaust. And yes, one of its most important lessons is that man is capable of great evil and we must struggle against that urge. Yet alongside it Jews learnt the lesson that world opinion didn’t save us. And that by the time the army liberated the camps, most of the people were already dead. Never again.

 

“IT’S ANTI-SEMITISM, STUPID”

It’s Anti-Semitism, Stupid
By Efraim Karsh
The Jerusalem Post
August 11, 2014

Let’s admit it: Israel can never win the media war against Hamas. No matter what it does, no matter how hard it tries.

Not because the Islamist terror group that is raining missiles on its cities and villages and using its own hapless subjects as human shields is the underdog in this conflict, but because the sight of Arabs killing Jews (or other Arabs for that matter) is hardly news; while the sight of Jews killing Arabs is a man-bites-dog anomaly that cannot be tolerated.

Imagine the following scenario: Thousands of foaming-at-the-mouth Jews rampaging through the streets of London and Paris to protest the blitz bombing of their co-religionists by a murderous al-Qaida/ISIS clone. They carry banners urging the killing of all Muslims wherever they are, hurl rocks and petrol bombs at the police, set fire to mosques, destroy Muslim properties and establishments, and attack all Muslims and Arabs coming their way.

Sound incredible? No doubt. For Jews in western (and Muslim) societies are be expected to know their place: to act maturely, responsibly and compassionately, to never fight fire with fire, to always understand the “other,” to ever be ready to please, appease, and whenever necessary – turn the other cheek.

Not so Israel’s enemies. With a sickening unanimity that has become all too familiar over the past decades, whenever the Jewish state responded in strength to Palestinian terrorism – be it rocket attacks from Lebanon; West Bank-originated suicide bombing campaigns (euphemized as the Aqsa intifada); or rocket, missile and mortar attacks from the Gaza Strip – hordes of hateful, violent demonstrators flocked onto the streets of western cities throughout the world, not to call for peace or an end of violence on all sides but to demonize a sovereign democracy for daring to protect its citizens and to vilify and assault their own Jewish compatriots for no reason other than their different religious and/or ethnic identity.

“Today, non-Israeli Jews feel themselves once again exposed to criticism and vulnerable to attack for things they didn’t do,” the late New York University professor Tony Judt lamented amid the growing number of hate fests in the early 2000s. “The increased incidence of attacks on Jews in Europe and elsewhere is primarily attributable to misdirected efforts, often by young Muslims, to get back at Israel.”

Anti-Semites, of course, have never been short of excuses for assaulting and killing Jews, and infinitely larger numbers of Jews were exterminated shortly before the founding of the State of Israel than in the 66 years of its existence, not to mention the millions massacred in Europe and the Middle East since antiquity.

Neither did European Jew-haters await Israel’s establishment to unleash on the remnants of the Holocaust.

Anti-Semitic sentiments remained as pronounced as ever, especially in Eastern Europe, which witnessed a few vicious pogroms shortly after the end of World War II. Even in Germany, Jews found themselves attacked and abused in public with 60 percent of Germans condoning overt anti-Jewish acts of violence.

Yet if this bleak record failed to prevent an astute student of European history like Judt from falling for the canard that Israeli actions are the cause, rather than the pretext, for the worst wave of attacks on Jews and Jewish targets in Europe since the 1930s, why should one be surprised by its thoughtless dissemination by the international media? If it were not so appalling, one could even marvel in the irony that 80 years after being forced to wear yellow stars so they could be targeted for persecution, European Jews are being instructed to hide any signs of their Jewish identity, for their own protection.

What makes this phenomenon particularly galling is that instead of clarifying in no uncertain terms the unacceptability of this bigotry in civilized societies, western elites have treated these recurrent hate fests as legitimate, if at times excessive, manifestations of Muslim solidarity with the Palestinians, thus providing a safe environment for outright anti-Semitic attitudes and behavior. (As evidenced by the ongoing bloodbaths in Syria and Iraq, the notion of Muslim solidarity is a myth, with far more Muslims killed throughout history by their co-religionists than by non-Muslims.) Just as western politicians and the media have ignored Hamas’s indiscriminate missile attacks on Israeli civilians but jumped up and down over Israel’s military response, so they have been bending over backward since 9/11 to embrace their Muslim citizens and to accommodate their perceived needs and sensitivities while remaining willfully blind to the fact that it is Jews, not Muslims, whose lives have been most adversely affected by increasing hostile attitudes on the ground – after all it is the Jews, not Muslims of Europe, who are emigrating in record numbers to find a safe haven. It is Jews who feel vulnerable to attack, and who have faced the most violence, and whose institutions from synagogues to community buildings to Jewish newspaper offices have been under heavy police guard for years, because of events in the Middle East – no Muslim community in the West has had to undertake similar security precautions.

The truth of the matter is that since anti-Semites have never really distinguished among Zionists, Israelis and Jews (notwithstanding repeated protestations to the contrary), and since Israel is the world’s only Jewish state, it has been tacitly construed as epitomizing the worst characteristics traditionally associated with Jews and has attracted the full brunt of anti-Jewish bigotry and hatred hitherto reserved for individuals and communities, not least because it has reversed the millenarian Jewish condition of dispersal, minority status and powerlessness. If prior to Israel’s establishment Jews were despised because of their wretchedness and helplessness, they have hitherto been reviled because of their newly discovered physical and political empowerment.

So much so that 64 years after its establishment by an internationally recognized act of self-determination, the Jewish state remains the only state in the world whose right to self-defense, indeed to national existence, is constantly challenged.

In Lord Byron’s memorable words: “The wild dove hath her nest, the fox his cove, mankind their country – Israel but the grave.”

 

“EVERYONE NOW KNOWS THAT THIS IS THE ONE PREJUDICE THAT RESPECTABLE SOCIETY WON’T REALLY CHALLENGE YOU FOR HOLDING”

The kosher controversy at Sainsbury’s speaks to a profound problem: acquiescence to anti-Semitism
By Brendan O’Neill
The Daily Telegraph
August 18, 2014

Were you outraged by a Sainsbury’s store’s decision over the weekend to hide away its kosher foods in an attempt to placate anti-Israel protesters? You should have been. For this incident, though seemingly a one-off, speaks to a profound problem in Europe today – the respectable classes’ acquiescence to anti-Semitism; their willingness to accept anti-Semitic sentiment as a fact of life and to shrug it off or, worse, kowtow to it.

The kosher incident took place at the Sainsbury’s in Holborn in London. When a mob of anti-Israel protesters gathered outside the store, the manager took the extraordinary decision to take all kosher products off the shelves lest the protesters target them and smash them up. Kosher foods, of course, are Jewish not Israeli; they are part of the Jewish dietary requirement, not part of any kind of Israeli food corporatism. To shamefacedly hide away such foodstuffs in order to appease a gang of hot-headed Israel-haters is an attack on a religious people and their rights, not on the Israeli state. That in Britain in 2014 we have store managers taking kosher foods off public display should be of concern to anyone who hates prejudice and racism.

So does this mean Sainsbury’s is anti-Semitic? No. It doesn’t even show that anyone at the Sainsbury’s in Holborn is anti-Semitic. But it does shine a light on the modern phenomenon of acquiescence to anti-Semitism, the rank unwillingness of influential people and institutions to face up to anti-Semitic sentiment and their preference for moulding the world around it rather than challenging it. Imagine if a Sainsbury’s manager suggested that the best way to deal with a racist in his store was to remove the black employees who were offending him. There would be outrage. Yet this weekend, in central, apparently civilised London, a manager decided that the best way to deal with people possessed of a possibly anti-Semitic outlook was to hide away the Jew stuff, lest they see it and feel disgusted by it.

Such official or institutional acquiescence to anti-Semitism is now widespread in Western Europe. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard people say that the problem of anti-Semitism isn’t all that bad, because they would rather just not talk about it. Or they say anti-Semitism is an understandable if slightly wrong-headed response to Israeli aggression in Gaza, excusing this poisonous prejudice as a kind of misfired political anger. In a world in which we are supersensitive to racism, in which a politician telling a less-than-PC after-dinner joke can expect to be harangued in the press and vilified on Twitter, it is simply extraordinary that more people are not exercised by the spread of anti-Semitic sentiment in Europe, by the smashing-up of synagogues, the vandalism of Jewish stores, the attacks on Holocaust memorials. This is the only prejudice that the opinion-forming set would rather not address. And in failing to do so, they effectively collude with it, granting it a special moral authority above all other prejudices. Everyone now knows that this is the one prejudice that respectable society won’t really challenge you for holding, and in fact will allow you to hold through making life easier for you. Hate Jews? OK, we’ll just remove this kosher food for you so that you don’t have to look at such ghastly stuff. Translation: be an anti-Semite, we don’t mind.

Even when some people have challenged the new anti-Semitism, they have tended to do so in a back-covering fashion. Consider Owen Jones’ Guardian piece on the rise of Jew hatred. He admits there has been some anti-Semitism in Western Europe lately but then suggests that the real anti-Semitism is among far-Right groups in places like Greece and Hungary. This, too, is an attempt to distract attention from the scourge of anti-Semitism in Western Europe by effectively saying: “Look East – that’s where the vilest people are.” But a progressive should always start by challenging prejudice in his own society, and there is currently heaps of it in Western Europe. It can be seen, not only in the violent attacks on synagogues, but also in the targeting of Jewish cultural events and Jewish shops and the waving of banners and placards depicting Israelis as big-nosed puppeteers of global politics or as a warped people who take a perverse pleasure in killing children. I’ve seen such banners on the very pro-Palestine demos that Mr Jones has spoken at; no one confronted the people who were waving them. Again, we acquiesce to anti-Semitism; we turn a blind eye; we comfort ourselves with the fantasy that anti-Semitism is something that exists among gruff skinheads in Budapest, but not in polite, tolerant, caring Britain.

But it does exist here, and it is deeply entwined with a now widespread, highly emotional, often unhinged anti-Israel sentiment. This is one of the main reasons people don’t want to pick apart anti-Semitism in Western Europe – because to do so would involve asking some very awkward questions about why it is that Israel gets people angrier and more red-eyed than any other issue on Earth, and why some of the very same things that were once said about the Jews (they’re child-killers, they control global politics, they cause international instability) are now said about Israel. Better to leave the anti-Semitism issue alone than invite scrutiny of Western Europe’s very own middle classes and left and the responsibility they might possibly bear for creating the conditions for contemporary anti-Israel-bordering-on-anti-Jew sentiment.

A civilised, democratic society would confront anti-Semitism. Our acquiescence to anti-Semitism is calling into question both our claim to be civilised and our democratic credentials.

 

ONE CHEER FOR POPE FRANCIS

One Cheer for Pope Francis
By Lee Smith
The Weekly Standard
August 19, 2014

Yesterday Pope Francis endorsed military action to stop the Islamic State (formerly the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) from persecuting religious minorities, especially Christians and Yazidis, in Iraq. The pope’s statement is to be welcomed—albeit with serious reservations.

As various experts noted, the Vatican is typically opposed to any sort of military action. James Bretzke, a priest and professor of moral theology at Boston College, told USA Today that “popes in recent history have all lined up against any military intervention, including World War I, World War II, the Vietnam War and, most recently, the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.”

Indeed, just last month Pope Francis issued a passionate plea for both Israel and Hamas to cease fighting in Gaza and put down their weapons. “Please stop,” the pope said in his weekly address from the balcony in Saint Peter’s Square. “Brothers and sisters, never war, never war! I am thinking above all of children, who are deprived of the hope of a worthwhile life, of a future.”

So why is this situation different? How is Hamas, a terrorist organization that targets Jews, a Middle East minority, different from ISIS, a terrorist organization that goes after Christians, Shia, Yazidis, and, presumably, if given the chance, Jews? Regarding ISIS, Francis reasoned that “where there is an unjust aggression, I can only say that it is licit to stop the unjust aggressor…I underscore the verb ‘stop.’ I’m not saying ‘bomb’ or ‘make war,’ just ‘stop.’“

The pope is not naïve. What stops violence is not careful verb choice, but violence. So why is it licit to use violence to stop this unjust aggressor and not Hamas or, for instance, Bashar al-Assad?

Last September the pope held a peace vigil to protest proposed U.S. military action against the Assad regime. “May the noise of weapons cease!” Francis proclaimed. “War always marks the failure of peace, it is always a defeat for humanity,” said the pope, just a few weeks after the Syrian regime launched a chemical weapons attack against civilians in a Damascus suburb. The videos of the aftermath of the attack and the testimony of the survivors documented what many would also consider a defeat for humanity—men, women, and children treated like insects by a vicious ruling order while the world looks the other way, while the servant of the servants of God convenes peace rallies.

Some experts argue that Francis is building his case for support of military action against the Islamic State in terms of “Just War” theory, but for others it is hard not to conclude that given his stand against violence to stop Assad or Hamas, the Vicar of Christ is either a relativist, or perhaps worse, has taken sides in a sectarian conflict.

Even before the Syrian conflict erupted in March 2011, the Alawite-led Assad regime has long portrayed itself as a protector of Christians and other minorities. Syrian regime allies have also put forth variations of the same argument, like the Lebanese patriarch of the Catholic Maronite church, Bechara al-Rahi, who when the Syrian uprising first broke out worried about the fate of Lebanon’s Christians if Sunnis took over in Syria. Indeed, many Christian clerics in Syria have come out openly on behalf of Assad and his murderous policies, a stark reminder that many of the Middle East’s men of faith are little more than spokesmen for the narrow interests of their sect or clan. It is natural and just to seek to protect your own, but there is no scriptural basis for petitioning Caesar to lay waste to the other tribe so that yours may thrive.

The concern then is that Pope Francis may be mistaking sectarian propaganda circulated by Middle Eastern clerics for a humanitarian plea. After all, as the Syrian regime and its spokesmen posit, the problem with the Middle East is the Sunni Arab majority—a danger not only to the region’s many minorities but also, as 9/11 made clear, Americans as well. According to this line of thinking, the United States should partner with Syria, as well as its allies, like the Islamic Republic of Iran and Hezbollah, for they all have issues with the regional Sunni majority.

As it turns out, the Obama administration has teamed up with Syria and its allies—but for strategic reasons, not sectarian ones. The White House is tilting toward Iran because it believes, foolishly, there is a grand bargain to be had with the clerical regime. Thus, in Lebanon, the White House has shared intelligence with units of the Lebanese armed forces penetrated by Hezbollah. In Iraq, the administration armed former prime minister Nuri al-Maliki to fight his Sunni rivals, and have just signed off on yet another Iranian-sponsored premier, Haidar al-Abadi. And now news comes today from a pro-Assad newspaper in Beirut, that the White House is sharing intelligence on ISIS with the Syrian regime.

The Obama administration and Pope Francis are both correct—ISIS’ gory campaign is a real humanitarian catastrophe. The question is, why are they both blind to other grotesque insults to the innate dignity and freedom of others in the Middle East? Why does Francis elaborate a “Just War” argument to stop ISIS, and not Assad or Hamas? Is it only Christians and Yazidis who merit the care of the world and specifically the Catholic church, or aren’t Jews and Sunnis also created in the image of God?

“FPA PROTESTS IN THE STRONGEST TERMS THE BLATANT, INCESSANT, FORCEFUL AND UNORTHODOX METHODS EMPLOYED BY THE HAMAS”

The following statement was released yesterday by the Jerusalem-based Foreign Press Association, an organization that spends most of its time criticizing Israel.

The question is why the BBC, CNN and others have failed to tell their viewers and readers about the Hamas intimidation that has forced many reporters to lie on behalf of Hamas. Could it be that many of these journalists enjoy (either consciously or perhaps sub-consciously) whipping up hatred against Israel back in their home countries?

www.fpa.org.il/index.php?categoryId=73840

Statements

The FPA protests in the strongest terms the blatant, incessant, forceful and unorthodox methods employed by the Hamas authorities and their representatives against visiting international journalists in Gaza over the past month.

The international media are not advocacy organisations and cannot be prevented from reporting by means of threats or pressure, thereby denying their readers and viewers an objective picture from the ground.

In several cases, foreign reporters working in Gaza have been harassed, threatened or questioned over stories or information they have reported through their news media or by means of social media.

We are also aware that Hamas is trying to put in place a “vetting” procedure that would, in effect, allow for the blacklisting of specific journalists. Such a procedure is vehemently opposed by the FPA.

August 11, 2014


www.fpa.org.il/?categoryId=74684

WHO WE ARE AND WHAT WE DO:

Established in June 1957 by 31 enterprising journalists, the Foreign Press Association in Israel -- known as the FPA -- attempts to fulfil the same task today as it did at its inception -- working to assist our members in covering the Middle East conflict…. The FPA is a legally registered private, non-profit organization operating solely on the basis of annual membership dues…. To date, the FPA numbers some 480 members representing TV, radio, photojournalists and print media from 32 countries reaching from Australia to Qatar, Africa to Europe, China to the USA.

 

CAUTION NEEDED WITH GAZA CASUALTY FIGURES, BY ANTHONY REUBEN HEAD OF STATISTICS, BBC NEWS

Tom Gross: In my article about the BBC of July 19, 2014, I wrote:

http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001470.html

“The numbers of dead reported are based primarily on Palestinian claims, and these need closer examination over time (as the Jenin “massacre” should have demonstrated to the media). Indeed if 80 % of Gazans killed in the last two weeks were random civilians, as the BBC and other Western media claim, it is odd that (according to for example, a careful analysis by al-Jazeera) the majority of fatalities are men of fighting age – this in a territory where more than half the population are aged under 15.”

I am glad that three weeks later, after slandering Israel hour by hour over that time, the Head of BBC statistics has also woken up (see item below) to the fact that al-Jazeera has been more accurate than the BBC, that has been badly misleading audiences about civilian casualties in Gaza. Because the BBC is highly respected (wrongly when it comes to the Middle East), other media around the world have copied the BBC as if it were really true that Israel has killed as many civilians as the BBC claims.

Even the article below, however, is very misleading and underplays by far, the extent to which the BBC has been providing false figures. I just don’t have time to outline this in detail here. Someone should write a book about it.

***

If you have limited time, I recommend that instead of reading the BBC and New York Times items below, both of which have many faults and only tell part of the story, you read the piece by Alan Dershowitz, who is a longtime subscriber to this list, and who sums up well many of the points I have been making in these dispatches, on my public Facebook page and in various media interviews.

-- Tom Gross

***

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-28688179

Last updated at 00:52 GMT
Caution needed with Gaza casualty figures
By Anthony Reuben Head of statistics, BBC News
August 8, 2014

War zones are not easy places to collect statistics.

In the Gaza conflict, most news organisations have been quoting from the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), which leads a group of humanitarian organisations known as the Protection Cluster.

Its recent report said that as of 6 August, 1,843 Palestinians had been killed and 66 Israelis and one Thai national since Israel launched Operation Protective Edge on 8 July.

Of those Palestinians, the status of 279 could not be identified, at least 1,354 were civilians, including 415 children and 214 women, the UN body reported.

So there were 216 members of armed groups killed, and another 725 men who were civilians. Among civilians, more than three times as many men were killed as women, while three times as many civilian men were killed as fighters.

The UN report carries a caveat with its figures: “Data on fatalities and destruction of property is consolidated by the Protection and Shelter clusters based on preliminary information, and is subject to change based on further verifications.”

There has been some research suggesting that men in general are more likely to die in conflict than women, although no typical ratio is given.

Nonetheless, if the Israeli attacks have been “indiscriminate”, as the UN Human Rights Council says, it is hard to work out why they have killed so many more civilian men than women.

Matthias Behnk, from OHCHR, told BBC News that the organisation would not want to speculate about why there had been so many adult male casualties, adding that because they were having to deal with a lot of casualties in a short time, they had “focused primarily on recording the casualties”.

“As such, we have not at this stage conducted a detailed analysis of trends of civilian casualties, for example in relation to the reasons why different groups are affected and the types of incidents, but hope to carry this out at some point in the coming future,” he said.

“However, even in the compiling of these preliminary figures, we cross-verify between different sources, not only media and several different human rights organisations, but also use other sources, including, for example, names of alleged fighters released by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and notices by armed groups in Gaza claiming someone as a member.”

A number of other news organisations have been considering the civilian-to-fighter ratio.

An analysis by the New York Times looked at the names of 1,431 casualties and found that “the population most likely to be militants, men ages 20 to 29, is also the most overrepresented in the death toll. They are 9% of Gaza’s 1.7 million residents, but 34% of those killed whose ages were provided.”

“At the same time, women and children under 15, the least likely to be legitimate targets, were the most underrepresented, making up 71% of the population and 33% of the known-age casualties.”

The list of names and ages of the dead published by al-Jazeera also found men aged between 20 and 29 to be significantly overrepresented.

The IDF say they have killed at least 253 Hamas operatives, 147 Islamic Jihad operatives, 65 “operatives of various organisations” and 603 “operatives whose affiliation is unknown”, although they also stress that this is not a final number.

Spokesman Capt Eytan Buchman told BBC News that “the UN numbers being reported are, by and by large, based on the Gaza health ministry, a Hamas-run organisation”.

He said that part of the reason for the discrepancy between the figures was “when militants are brought to hospitals, they are brought in civilian clothing, obscuring terrorist affiliations”.

“Hamas also has given local residents directives to obscure militant identities,” he said.

“It’s important to bear in mind that in Operation Cast Lead [the last Israeli ground offensive in December 2008-January 2009], Hamas and Gaza-based organisations claimed that only 50 combatants were killed, admitting years later the number was between 600-700, a figure nearly identical to the figure claimed by the IDF.”

In conclusion, we do not yet know for sure how many of the dead in Gaza are civilians and how many were fighters. This is in no sense the fault of the UN employees collecting the figures - their statistics are accompanied by caveats and described as preliminary and subject to revision.

But it does mean that some of the conclusions being drawn from them may be premature.

 

HAMAS’ PHONY STATISTICS ON CIVILIAN DEATHS

Hamas’ Phony Statistics on Civilian Deaths
By Alan Dershowitz
Gatestone Institute
August 7, 2014

www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4585/hamas-phony-statistics-on-civilian-deaths

It’s a mystery why so many in the media accept as gospel Hamas-supplied figures on the number of civilians killed in the recent war. Hamas claims that of the more than 1800 Palestinians killed close to 90% were civilians. Israel, on the other hand, says that close to half of them were combatants. The objective facts support a number much closer to Israel’s than to Hamas’.

Even human rights group antagonistic to Israel acknowledge, according to a New York Times report, that Hamas probably counts among the “civilians killed by Israel” the following groups: Palestinians killed by Hamas as collaborators; Palestinians killed through domestic violence; Palestinians killed by errant Hamas rockets or mortars; and Palestinians who died naturally during the conflict. I wonder if Hamas also included the reported 162 children who died while performing child slave labor in building their terror tunnels. Hamas also defines combatants to include only armed fighters who were killed while fighting Israelis. They exclude Hamas supporters who build tunnels, who allow their homes to be used to store and fire rockets, Hamas policemen, members of the Hamas political wing and others who work hand in hand with the armed terrorists.

Several years ago I came up with a concept which I call, the “continuum of civilianality”—an inelegant phrase that is intended to convey the reality that who is a civilian and who is a combatant is often a matter of degree. Clearly every child below the age in which he or she is capable of assisting Hamas is a civilian. Clearly every Hamas fighter who fires rockets, bears arms, or operates in the tunnels is a combatant. Between these extremes lie a wide range of people, some of whom are closer to the civilian end, many of whom who are closer to the combatant end. The law of war has not established a clear line between combatants and civilians, especially in the context of urban warfare where people carry guns at night and bake bread during the day, or fire rockets during the day and go back home to sleep with their families at night. (Interestingly the Israeli Supreme Court has tried to devise a functional definition of combatants in the murky context of urban guerrilla warfare.)

Data published by the New York Times strongly suggest that a very large number—perhaps a majority—of those killed are closer to the combatant end of the continuum than to the civilian end. First of all, the vast majority of those killed have been male rather than female. In an Islamic society, males are far more likely to be combatants than females. Second, most of those killed are within the age range (15-40) that are likely to be combatants. The vast majority of these are male as well. The number of people over 60 who have been killed is infinitesimal. The number of children below the age of 15 is also relatively small, although their pictures have been shown more frequently than others. In other words, the genders and ages of those killed are not representative of the general population of Gaza. It is far more representative of the genders and ages of combatants. These data strongly suggest that a very large percentage of Palestinians killed are on the combatant side of the continuum.

They also prove, as if any proof were necessary to unbiased eyes, that Israel did not target civilians randomly. If it had, the dead would be representative of the Gaza population in general, rather than of the subgroups most closely identified with combatants.

The media should immediately stop using Hamas-approved statistics, which in the past have proved to be extremely unreliable. Instead, they should try to document, independently, the nature of each person killed and describe their age, gender, occupation, affiliation with Hamas and other objective factors relevant to their status as a combatant, non-combatant or someone in the middle. It is lazy and dangerous for the media to rely on Hamas-approved propaganda figures. In fact, when the infamous Goldstone Report falsely stated that the vast majority of people killed in Operation Cast Lead were civilians and not Hamas fighters, many in Gaza complained to Hamas. They accused Hamas of cowardice for allowing so many civilians to be killed while protecting their own fighters. As a result of these complaints, Hamas was forced to tell the truth: namely that many more of those killed were actually Hamas fighters or armed policemen. It is likely that Hamas will make a similar “correction” with regard to this conflict. But that correction will not be covered by the media, as the prior correction was not.

The headline—”Most of those killed by Israel were children, women and the elderly”—will continue to be the conventional wisdom, despite its factual falsity. Unless it is corrected, Hamas will continue with its “dead baby strategy” and more people on both sides will die.

 

A SERVICE FOR HAMAS

A Service for Hamas
By Adi Schwartz
August 6, 2014

www.adi-schwartz.com/a-service-for-hamas/

Sitting in my living room for the last month and watching European and American TV coverage of the war between Hamas and Israel was a confusing experience. While sirens were going off in my residential suburb of Tel Aviv, signaling rockets coming in from Gaza, I never saw the Palestinians shooting them. In fact, I never saw on TV any armed men in Gaza, or their rifles or their launching pads – only epic scenes of rubble and destruction. And yes, lots of children and elderly women.

That’s a bit odd, given the fact that Palestinians launched some 3,000 rockets since the beginning of the war, killed more than 60 Israelis and wounded hundreds. But who shot the rockets? Who was killing Israeli soldiers? While we saw Israeli tanks maneuvering near the border, we never saw Palestinian combatants.

Foreign journalists who left Gaza this week admitted the obvious: Hamas controlled every image coming out of the Palestinian territory, not allowing photographers and reporters to document military activity, or even to show wounded Hamas men in hospitals. Adamant on winning a PR battle, the Palestinians used intimidation methods and would not allow any snapshot that could damage their image as harmless and defenseless victims.

Gabriele Barbati, an Italian reporter for the TV station TgCom24, tweeted upon leaving the Palestinian territory last week: “Out of Gaza, far from Hamas retaliation”. He then refuted the Palestinian version of an incident in which 10 children were killed on July 28th. According to Barbati’s own account, a misfired Hamas rocket – and not an Israeli bombing – was responsible for the killing, and Hamas militants “rushed and cleared debris”. While the Palestinian version that accused Israel for the killing was circulating in all major media outlets, Barbati’s account was not (in a phone conversation, he declined to elaborate on the “Hamas retaliation” he was fearing).

A Spanish journalist coming out of Gaza this week admitted in a private conversation that he saw Hamas fighters very close to the hotel where he, and many other foreign journalists, were staying. “If ever we dare pointing our camera on them,” he said, “they would simply shoot and kill us.” He refused to go on-the-record.

Another example of this overwhelming absence of realistic representation of what really went on in Gaza came from France, where the daily Libération published on July 24th a first-person account of a French-Palestinian journalist, who was intimidated by Hamas armed men and ordered to leave immediately the Palestinian territory. Of all places, his interrogation took place in a hospital, a few meters from the emergency room, affirming Israeli claims that Hamas uses hospitals and other civilian compounds. This account was taken off the French newspaper’s website a few days later, per the journalist’s request.
In 15 years of work as journalist in Israel, I met professional, honest and truth-seeking foreign reporters, who are doing their job in a difficult environment. However, many tend to hide the fact that their accounts are heavily flawed, since Hamas would not allow any other outcome. Others tend to bring with them their biases – personal, journalistic or ideological.

First, there is a basic fear for safety, working under a fundamentalist Islamic regime, which is stifling free speech. No difficult questions can be asked, and real investigative journalism is simply impossible. In the words of a senior journalist for one of Europe’s biggest newspapers, “what I can write from Tel Aviv I cannot do from Gaza”.

This can be especially true for women reporters, such as the Dutch TV journalist, Annet Röst, who told me how she was harassed in Gaza a few years ago by a large group of men. She was eventually saved by the Palestinian police.

But sometimes problems run even deeper, as the story of a Spanish correspondent in Israel, proves. Upon sending one of his stories to the newsroom, where the editor found it not sympathetic enough to the Palestinians, he was asked: “Why are you so objective?”
Consciously or not, some foreign journalists sympathize with the Palestinian side. For them, Israel is the oppressor and Hamas is the victim. With this post-colonial worldview, Israel is always at fault, and the Palestinians are always their victims, no matter what. The fact that Hamas does not recognize Israel in any border, and that its stated goal is to destroy the Jewish state, is never mentioned in their reports.

Despite many cases of misinformation in the past (such as reports of “massacres” on board the Marmara in 2010 and in Jenin in 2002), many international reporters still tend to air anti-Israeli accusations very quickly. While questioning every Israeli statement, they treat Palestinian communiqués as if they were the Bible. There is no possible way currently to know exactly how many of the Palestinian casualties are civilians, and still most reporters simply repeat Hamas’ official statements, that “most victims are women and children”. In previous cases this was proved to be wrong.

The bottom line is that what’s coming out of Gaza these days is not free press. What’s been shown is what Hamas wants the media to show – not how it operates from within residential areas, not how it stores weapons in mosques and clinics, and not the vast network of tunnels it built in order to attack Israel.

Gaza was indeed bombed by the Israeli army, and civilians were getting killed. But by not showing the true nature of Hamas’ war against Israel – with all its cowardice and cruelty – the context that could explain Israel’s actions was missing. That’s not only a disservice for Western viewers and readers, but a great service – intentional or not – for Hamas’ propaganda machine.

Update: in the last 24 hours, accounts are getting out of Gaza documenting launching of rockets from heavily populated areas. One such example is this Indian TV’s footage, and another example is this France24 report.

 

CIVILIAN OR NOT? NEW FIGHT IN TALLYING THE DEAD FROM THE GAZA CONFLICT

(New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren is also a subscriber to this list, having written to me last year and asked me to add her.)

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Click at this link to see some of the graphs accompanying the article below:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/06/world/middleeast/civilian-or-not-new-fight-in-tallying-the-dead-from-the-gaza-conflict.html

Civilian or Not? New Fight in Tallying the Dead From the Gaza Conflict
By Jodi Rudoren
New York Times
August 6, 2014

GAZA CITY — Inside the Health Sciences Library at Al-Shifa Hospital here, a small team spent the war crunching numbers. Stuck to their laptops were a statistician, a graphic designer, a data-entry specialist and an issuer of death certificates, some of whom spent nights sleeping in their straight-backed chairs.

By Tuesday, this is what they had come up with: 1,865 “martyrs” from “Israeli aggression” since July 6: 429 under age 18, 79 over 60, 243 women. The Palestinian Ministry of Health does not categorize victims as civilian or combatant, but others do: The United Nations — which had a lower death toll, 1,814 — said that at least 72 percent were civilians, while two Gaza-based groups put the percentage at 82 (Al Mezan Center for Human Rights) and 84 (the Palestinian Center for Human Rights).

Israel has a very different assessment. The military says it took the lives of 900 “terrorists,” but it did not provide specifics beyond the 368 cases listed in 28 entries on its blog. Politicians have been saying that 47 percent of the dead were fighters, citing a study by an Israeli counterterrorism group that is impressive in its documentation, using photographs and Internet tributes, but analyzes only the first 152 casualties, when the assault was exclusively from the air.

Even as the war appears to draw to a close, the battle over casualty statistics rages on. No other number is as contentious as the ratio of civilians to combatants killed, widely viewed, including in Israel, as a measure of whether the commanders in the field acted proportionately to the threat posed by militants — or, in the eyes of Israel’s critics, committed war crimes.

“There are big problems in the numbers because there are such huge numbers,” said Samir Zaqout, who runs a team of 10 Al Mezan field workers who interview relatives, neighbors and doctors to compile dossiers on each attack. “We do our best in this horrible situation to be very clear.”

Palestinians and their supporters contend Israel massacred innocents with indiscriminate assaults with heavy weapons, citing numerous strikes that killed multiple family members in their homes and several that hit schools sheltering those who had sought refuge.

Israel, in turn, says that Hamas, the militant group that dominates Gaza, purposely sacrifices its own citizens by fighting in their midst, in order to raise the world’s ire against Israel. It says that the ratio of combatants killed in a densely populated urban environment supports its assertion that it conducted the attacks as humanely as possible.

To combat the heart-wrenching photographs of dead children, Israel has published extensive video images of warplanes aborting missions to avoid collateral damage, and provided summaries of warnings it gave residents before attacking buildings.

Accurate accounting for this bloody battle is problematic, especially since the fighting just stopped. Mr. Zaqout of Al Mezan expects that scores more bodies will be pulled from the rubble, many of them militants, in places like Shejaiya, Rafah and Beit Hanoun that saw the hottest combat.

An analysis of the statistics provided by both sides suggests that a majority were probably noncombatants. Through last Thursday, according to a New York Times analysis of a list provided by the Health Ministry, more than a third were women, children under 15 or men over 60.

But the difference between roughly half the dead being combatants, in the Israeli version, or barely 10 percent, to use the most stark numbers on the other side, is wide enough to change the characterization of the conflict.

It seems unlikely that there will ever be a definitive breakdown both sides accept: Israel contends that some of the casualties were caused by errant Hamas rockets or mortars. Human rights groups acknowledge that people killed by Hamas as collaborators and people who died naturally, or perhaps through domestic violence, are most likely counted as well.

Then there is the question of who counts as a “combatant.”

There are uniformed men actively firing weapons. But Hamas also has political figures, members of its security service and employees of its ministries. In some eyes, anyone affiliated with the organization, which professes a goal of destroying Israel, is a combatant.

“Israel has a very liberal definition of who qualifies,” said Sarah Leah Whitson of Human Rights Watch. “Israel’s labeling of certain individuals as ‘terrorists’ does not make them military targets as a matter of law.”

But the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, the Israeli group that analyzed the first Palestinian deaths, accused the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry of “concealment and deception” in order “to create an ostensibly factual infrastructure for a political, propaganda and legal campaign against Israel.”

The Times analysis, looking at 1,431 names, shows that the population most likely to be militants, men ages 20 to 29, is also the most overrepresented in the death toll: They are 9 percent of Gaza’s 1.7 million residents, but 34 percent of those killed whose ages were provided. At the same time, women and children under 15, the least likely to be legitimate targets, were the most underrepresented, making up 71 percent of the population and 33 percent of the known-age casualties.

The portion that were female rose steadily over that period, to 27 percent July 26-31. There were six infants under age 1 on the list, and 82 children ages 1 to 5. The oldest victim, Muhammad Mazin Faraj Daher, was 99.

Some have not yet been identified, and may never be. “Some of the bodies are just in pieces,” said Julie Webb, 61, a New Zealander who has lived in Gaza for three years and assists the Health Ministry. Others, like Syrian refugees, have not been verified because they are not in the Palestinian population registry.

Though her team in the hospital library is not involved in counting combatants, Ms. Webb doubts that many have been missed. “The resistance factions claim their dead, and they have big funerals,” she said. “They would never hide it, because it’s a thing of pride.”

News reports generally rely on the United Nations’ estimate of civilians killed. Matthias Behnke, a United Nations official, said those numbers came from cross-referencing research by several human rights groups, though he declined to say how many, which ones or what methods they used.

“Getting information about people who are dead is not that complicated because everybody knows everybody” in Gaza, Mr. Behnke said. “Organizations go out and collect information independent of each other. That is quite a good basis for doing the analysis.

“We are by no means saying these figures are absolute and final,” he added. “They will be subject to verification.”

At Al Mezan’s office here, Mr. Zaqout and his aides were using highlighters to update handwritten logs on Tuesday evening. He said he did not rely on the Health Ministry data, though it had improved since Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in 2008-9, when telephone, cellular and wireless Internet networks were cut off.

Instead, his 10 field workers collect names directly from Gaza’s 13 hospitals (four have been closed because of bombing) and five morgues, and go to the site of virtually every strike to conduct interviews and fill out detailed questionnaires in support of war-crimes accusations. Surviving children might deny that their father was a fighter, but a medical worker might say he arrived at the emergency room with a weapon in hand.

“Each incident that we have which the Israelis targeted for airstrike, always we have this kind of thinking that maybe there is a fighter,” Mr. Zaqout said. “When we’re talking about the fighters who are fighting on the border or the tunnels, we couldn’t know, because their bodies are not coming to the hospital. I think these numbers will increase in the next days.”

ARTICLES

ANTI-SEMITISM ON RISE ACROSS EUROPE ‘IN WORST TIMES SINCE THE NAZIS’

Anti-Semitism on rise across Europe ‘in worst times since the Nazis’
By Jon Henley
The Guardian (UK) (news article)
August 8, 2014

In the space of just one week last month, according to Crif, the umbrella group for France’s Jewish organisations, eight synagogues were attacked. One, in the Paris suburb of Sarcelles, was firebombed by a 400-strong mob. A kosher supermarket and pharmacy were smashed and looted; the crowd’s chants and banners included “Death to Jews” and “Slit Jews’ throats”. That same weekend, in the Barbes neighbourhood of the capital, stone-throwing protesters burned Israeli flags: “Israhell”, read one banner.

In Germany last month, molotov cocktails were lobbed into the Bergische synagogue in Wuppertal – previously destroyed on Kristallnacht – and a Berlin imam, Abu Bilal Ismail, called on Allah to “destroy the Zionist Jews … Count them and kill them, to the very last one.” Bottles were thrown through the window of an antisemitism campaigner in Frankfurt; an elderly Jewish man was beaten up at a pro-Israel rally in Hamburg; an Orthodox Jewish teenager punched in the face in Berlin. In several cities, chants at pro-Palestinian protests compared Israel’s actions to the Holocaust; other notable slogans included: “Jew, coward pig, come out and fight alone,” and “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas.”

Across Europe, the conflict in Gaza is breathing new life into some very old, and very ugly, demons. This is not unusual; police and Jewish civil rights organisations have long observed a noticeable spike in antisemitic incidents each time the Israeli-Palestinian conflict flares. During the three weeks of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in late 2008 and early 2009, France recorded 66 antisemitic incidents, including attacks on Jewish-owned restaurants and synagogues and a sharp increase in anti-Jewish graffiti. But according to academics and Jewish leaders, this time it is different. More than simply a reaction to the conflict, they say, the threats, hate speech and violent attacks feel like the expression of a much deeper and more widespread antisemitism, fuelled by a wide range of factors, that has been growing now for more than a decade.

“These are the worst times since the Nazi era,” Dieter Graumann, president of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, told the Guardian. “On the streets, you hear things like ‘the Jews should be gassed’, ‘the Jews should be burned’ – we haven’t had that in Germany for decades. Anyone saying those slogans isn’t criticising Israeli politics, it’s just pure hatred against Jews: nothing else. And it’s not just a German phenomenon. It’s an outbreak of hatred against Jews so intense that it’s very clear indeed.”

Roger Cukierman, president of France’s Crif, said French Jews were “anguished” about an anti-Jewish backlash that goes far beyond even strongly felt political and humanitarian opposition to the current fighting: “They are not screaming ‘Death to the Israelis’ on the streets of Paris,” Cukierman said last month. “They are screaming ‘Death to Jews’.” Crif’s vice-president Yonathan Arfi said he “utterly rejected” the view that the latest increase in antisemitic incidents was down to events in Gaza. “They have laid bare something far more profound,” he said.

Nor is it just Europe’s Jewish leaders who are alarmed. Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, has called the recent incidents “an attack on freedom and tolerance and our democratic state”. The French prime minister, Manuel Valls, has spoken of “intolerable” and clearly antisemitic acts: “To attack a Jew because he is a Jew is to attack France. To attack a synagogue and a kosher grocery store is quite simply antisemitism and racism”.

France, whose 500,000-strong Jewish community is one of Europe’s largest, and Germany, where the post-war exhortation of “Never Again” is part of the fabric of modern society, are not alone. In Austria last month, a pre-season friendly between Maccabi Haifa and German Bundesliga team SC Paderborn had to be rescheduled after the Israeli side’s previous match was called off following an attempted assault on its players.

The Netherlands’ main antisemitism watchdog, Cidi, had more than 70 calls from alarmed Jewish citizens in one week last month; the average is normally three to five. An Amsterdam rabbi, Binjamin Jacobs, had his front door stoned, and two Jewish women were attacked – one beaten, the other the victim of arson – after they hung Israeli flags from their balconies. In Belgium, a woman was reportedly turned away from a shop with the words: “We don’t currently sell to Jews.”

In Italy, the Jewish owners of dozens of shops and other businesses in Rome arrived to find swastikas and anti-Jewish slogans daubed on shutters and windows. One slogan read: “Every Palestinian is like a comrade. Same enemy. Same barricade”; another: “Jews, your end is near.” Abd al-Barr al-Rawdhi, an imam from the north eastern town of San Donà di Piave, is to be deported after being video-recorded giving a sermon calling for the extermination of the Jews.

There has been no violence in Spain, but the country’s small Jewish population of 35,000-40,000 fears the situation is so tense that “if it continues for too long, bad things will happen,” the leader of Madrid’s Jewish community, David Hatchwell, said. The community is planning action against El Mundo after the daily paper published a column by 83-year-old playwright Antonio Gala questioning Jews’ ability to live peacefully with others: “It’s not strange they have been so frequently expelled.”

Studies suggest antisemitism may indeed be mounting. A 2012 survey by the EU’s by the Fundamental Rights agency of some 6,000 Jews in eight European countries – between them, home to 90% of Europe’s Jewish population – found 66% of respondents felt antisemitism in Europe was on the rise; 76% said antisemitism had increased in their country over the past five years. In the 12 months after the survey, nearly half said they worried about being verbally insulted or attacked in public because they were Jewish.

Jewish organisations that record antisemitic incidents say the trend is inexorable: France’s Society for the Protection of the Jewish Community says annual totals of antisemitic acts in the 2000s are seven times higher than in the 1990s. French Jews are leaving for Israel in greater numbers, too, for reasons they say include antisemitism and the electoral success of the hard-right Front National. The Jewish Agency for Israel said 3,288 French Jews left for Israel in 2013, a 72% rise on the previous year. Between January and May this year, 2,254 left, against 580 in the same period last year.

In a study completed in February, America’s Anti-Defamation League surveyed 332,000 Europeans using an index of 11 questions designed to reveal strength of anti-Jewish stereotypes. It found that 24% of Europeans – 37% in France, 27% in Germany, 20% in Italy – harboured some kind of anti-Jewish attitude.

So what is driving the phenomenon? Valls, the French prime minister, has acknowledged a “new”, “normalised” antisemitism that he says blends “the Palestinian cause, jihadism, the devastation of Israel, and hatred of France and its values”.

Mark Gardner of the Community Security Trust, a London-based charity that monitors antisemitism both in Britain and on the continent, also identifies a range of factors. Successive conflicts in the Middle East he said, have served up “a crush of trigger events” that has prevented tempers from cooling: the second intifada in 2000, the Israel-Lebanon war of 2006, and the three Israel–Hamas conflicts in 2009, 2012 and 2014 have “left no time for the situation to return to normal.” In such a climate, he added, three brutal antisemitic murders in the past eight years – two in France, one in Belgium, and none coinciding with Israeli military action – have served “not to shock, but to encourage the antisemites”, leaving them “seeking more blood and intimidation, not less”.

In 2006, 23-year old Ilan Halimi was kidnapped, tortured and left for dead in Paris by a group calling itself the Barbarians Gang, who subsequently admitted targeting him “because he was a Jew, so his family would have money”. http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/IlanHalimi.html

Two years ago, in May 2012, Toulouse gunman Mohamed Merah shot dead seven people, including three children and a young rabbi outside their Jewish school. And in May this year Mehdi Nemmouche, a Frenchman of Algerian descent thought to have recently returned to France after a year in Syria fighting with radical Islamists, was charged with shooting four people at the Jewish museum in Brussels.

If the French establishment has harboured a deep vein of anti-Jewish sentiment since long before the Dreyfus affair, the influence of radical Islam, many Jewish community leaders say, is plainly a significant contributing factor in the country’s present-day antisemitism. But so too, said Gardner, is a straightforward alienation that many young Muslims feel from society. “Often it’s more to do with that than with Israel. Many would as soon burn down a police station as a synagogue. Jews are simply identified as part of the establishment.”

While he stressed it would be wrong to lay all the blame at the feet of Muslims, Peter Ulrich, a research fellow at the centre for antisemitism research (ZfA) at Berlin’s Technical University, agreed that some of the “antisemitic elements” Germany has seen at recent protests could be “a kind of rebellion of people who are themselves excluded on the basis of racist structures.”

Arfi said that in France antisemitism had become “a portmanteau for a lot of angry people: radical Muslims, alienated youths from immigrant families, the far right, the far left”. But he also blamed “a process of normalisation, whereby antisemitism is being made somehow acceptable”. One culprit, Arfi said, is the controversial comedian Dieudonné: “He has legitimised it. He’s made acceptable what was unacceptable.”

A similar normalisation may be under way in Germany, according to a 2013 study by the Technical University of Berlin. In 14,000 hate-mail letters, emails and faxes sent over 10 years to the Israeli embassy in Berlin and the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Professor Monika Schwarz-Friesel found that 60% were written by educated, middle-class Germans, including professors, lawyers, priests and university and secondary school students. Most, too, were unafraid to give their names and addresses – something she felt few Germans would have done 20 or 30 years ago.

Almost every observer pointed to the unparalleled power of unfiltered social media to inflame and to mobilise. A stream of shocking images and Twitter hashtags, including #HitlerWasRight, amount, Arfi said, almost to indoctrination. “The logical conclusion, in fact, is radicalisation: on social media people self-select what they see, and what they see can be pure, unchecked propaganda. They may never be confronted with opinions that are not their own.”

(Additional reporting by Josie Le Blond in Berlin, Kim Willsher in Paris, John Hooper in Rome and Ashifa Kassam in Madrid)

 

OBSESSIVE GAZA COVERAGE IS FANNING ANTI-SEMITISM

Obsessive Gaza coverage is fanning antisemitism
The media must beware of fuelling an anti-Jewish backlash with over-the-top comparisons to the Holocaust or likening Gaza to a concentration camp
By Eylon Aslan-Levy
The Guardian (UK) (opinion article)
August 8, 2014

It is no longer possible to deny that Europe still has a “Jewish problem”. In France, synagogues have been firebombed. In Germany, chants of “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas!” have been heard. The British Jewish community, too, is reporting a spike in antisemitic incidents – most thankfully non-violent – in a nasty spillover of anger over Gaza. “Free Gaza” was spray-painted onto a Brighton synagogue; a “child murderers” sign affixed to a synagogue in Surrey. This nastiness permeates polite society too: in sympathising with David Ward MP’s pro-Hamas comments, former Lib Dem MEP Edward McMillan-Scott derided the Board of Deputies of British Jews as “a frightful bag of disputatious Jews”.

Perhaps no wonder that Newsweek’s cover story last week had the chilling headline: “Exodus: why Europe’s Jews are fleeing once again”.

Critics of Israeli policy might say that only Zionists, not all Jews, should be facing reproach for the operation in Gaza. But the anti-Jewish backlash – aimed at Jewish, not specifically Zionist, targets – has, ironically, reminded many Jews precisely why they need a safe and secure Jewish homeland in the first place – the essence of Zionism.

Why has the conflict in Gaza caused such a frightening reaction on the streets of Europe? One answer is that the media attention has been excessive, exaggerated beyond all reasonable proportions, and it is this which encourages outbursts of anger by appealing to the public’s emotions. Tiny Israel ranks fifth in the list of foreign countries most reported on by the Guardian. Gaza is an important news story – but the wall-to-wall coverage leaves many scratching their heads. Nobody seems to recall similar attention devoted to the far greater civilian casualties of the UK’s operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Why the disproportionate coverage of Israel? “Jews are news” many say, with a shrug. But this obsession with Israel’s conduct tacitly encourages the easy slide into hostility towards Jews.

First, the reporting gives the false impression that the situation in Gaza, though tragic, is uniquely horrific. Compare it to the silence surrounding Isis’s frightening rampage through Iraq: Mosul has been emptied of its ancient Christian community; hundreds of thousands of Yezidis have been cleansed from Nineveh province. Compare it also to coverage of the plight of Palestinians in Syria, where thousands of Palestinians have been killed and the Yarmouk refugee camp remains under siege. How many newspaper front pages have been devoted to these events?

The problem is not helped by hyperbole: one report on Sky News even compared the Gaza operation to the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Moreover, the flood of heartbreaking images of dead children addles the brain: Israel’s protestations that it does more than any other army to avoid civilian casualties are simply laughed off. Israel is painted as irredeemably evil; its friends, accomplices in crime. I cannot count the number of times I have been told that if I am a Zionist – which means no more than believing that Israel has a right to exist – that means I must support the murder of children.

Second, much of the media have failed to seriously engage with Israel’s moral and strategic dilemmas, assuming instead that Israel deliberately seeks civilian casualties. Perhaps it is taken for granted that liberal democratic Israel should be held to higher standards than an internationally recognised terrorist group. But the incessant opprobrium can easily give the impression that Israel alone is at fault – as if Hamas were not indiscriminately firing missiles at Israeli civilians, and digging tunnels to abduct or massacre them. This induces people to see the conflict in black and white: Palestinians, good; Israelis, bad. Hence the curious paradox whereby Israel’s detractors no longer expect better of Israel – they think it kills children for sport – but still assign it a disproportionate share of the blame, giving Hamas a free pass. The anti-Jewish backlash follows, as Jews are perceived as supporting action that is patently and unquestionably wrong.

Sometimes the hyperbole gets close to incitement. When people accuse Israel of “genocide”, invoking the Holocaust or likening Gaza to a “concentration camp” or wielding placards that equate the Star of David – a Jewish symbol as well as an Israeli one – with the swastika, they reveal a deep ignorance of both the past and present. As Dave Rich of the Community Security Trust has argued: “It’s a totally false comparison that plays on Jewish sensibilities in order to provoke a reaction. Another word for that is Jew-baiting.”

It is no less disturbing to find the casual use of classically antisemitic tropes for example accusations that the Jews control the media or governments or that they thirst for gentile blood. The Everyday Antisemitism Project, which I established two weeks into the current round of conflict to expose this phenomenon, overflows with examples of anti-Israel rage expressed through traditional anti-Jewish stereotypes and tropes.

Sometimes these tropes are applied euphemistically to “Zionists”, but the euphemism isn’t fooling anyone. To Jews, aware that these have been the staple motifs of Jew-hatred over many years, they press too many buttons.

Of course Israel deserves criticism: it would not be such a vibrant democracy without it. But those rightly concerned by civilian deaths should be careful not to allow emotion to override their reason, to treat the conflict in simplistic terms, or to slip into language and images associated with classical antisemitism. The lessons of history are all too plain when the perceived iniquities of a certain population develop an obsessive grip on the public imagination.