“Whoever controls the media, controls the mind.”
-- Jim Morrison, musician
A perfect example of the utter one-sided execution of Israeli-Palestinian coverage in the United States occurred during the Gaza Palestinian slaughter of 2014, also known to Israel's army as Operation Protective Edge. Bill Maher, a zealous Zionist disguised as a social liberal, and the host of one of HBO’s signature programs Real Time with Bill Maher, conducted a panel discussion
The panel for the episode of the program that aired the week of July 21, during the middle of the “war.” The panelists, all Jewish, consisted of Jane Harman, a former member of the House of Representatives, with deep ties to the American-Israeli foreign intelligence communities, who, while in office, intervened on behalf of two pro-Israeli lobbyists accused of espionage; Nate Silver, a highly regarded sports and elections statistician who works as an editor-in-chief for ESPN and a correspondent for ABC News; and Jamie Weinstein, the senior editor of the Daily Caller, a DC-based conservative website.
Weinstein did most of the talking, with all panelists following the Zionist propaganda lines that Hamas fighters defending Gaza were using civilians as “human shields” and that Israel had a right to defend itself against the “rockets raining down on them.” Of course, again, as in 2009 when the Israel Defense Forces slaughtered civilians, Israel needed an excuse, one with catch-phrases which American politicians could readily repeat. There was absolutely no discussion or mention of the Palestinian perspective of the conflict.
Three Jews/Zionists defending the slaughter. No counterpoints allowed. This was a microcosm of Middle East coverage in the US media over the last decades.
When he and his commission released their UN report on the 2009 slaughter, Judge Richard Goldstone contributed an op-ed piece to the New York Times on September 17, 2009, where he referred to the fact he and his fellow commissioners were committed to conducting an objective, fact-based investigation. In his op-ed he placed most of the blame on Israel, finding “that in many cases Israel could have done much more to spare civilians without sacrificing its stated and legitimate military aims.”
The moral to the story came in his final two short paragraphs:
Pursuing justice in this case is essential because no state or armed group should be above the law. Western governments in particular face a challenge because they have pushed for accountability in places like Darfur, but now must do the same with Israel, an ally and a democratic state. Failing to pursue justice for serious violations during the fighting will have a deeply corrosive effect on international justice, and reveal an unacceptable hypocrisy. As a service to the hundreds of civilians who needlessly died and for the equal application of international justice, the perpetrators of serious violations must be held to account.
They weren’t, and the US of I made sure of it.
On the Institute for Middle East Understanding website, on January 4, 2012, under the heading Operation Cast Lead, an article references the UN investigation and points out “Israel refused to cooperate with the inquiry, denying the mission the opportunity to meet with Israeli officials or visit the West Bank.” In contrast, Goldstone’s team conducted 188 interviews, reviewed ten thousand pages of documents, thirty videos and 1200 photographs.
What the commission hoped not to ever see repeated: up to 1,419 dead Palestinians and five thousand more wounded, mostly civilians, with thirteen Israelis dead. More than 3,540 housing units destroyed and 2800 severely damaged. Twenty thousand Palestinians made homeless, many of them already refugees. $139 million in damage to Gaza businesses and to 107 United Nations Relief Works Agency installations. Eighteen schools destroyed and 262 more damaged.
After an investigation of the destruction of civilian infrastructure in Gaza, Human Rights Watch accused the Israeli military of violating the international ban on “wanton destruction” found in the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Amnesty International (a human rights organization, “independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion” founded in 1961, now with 2-plus million supporters and active in 150 countries) came to the same conclusion Goldstone did, and called on Israel to
ensure national, impartial and thorough investigations, in accordance with international standards, of the evidence indicating that its forces committed serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law during the conflict, including war crimes, and wherever there is sufficient admissible evidence, prosecute any alleged perpetrator in proceedings that fully respect international fair trial standards.
Nope.
Revise its interpretation of the rules and principles relating to the concepts of military objective, military advantage and proportionality, to ensure that these concepts are fully consistent with international humanitarian law.
Nope.
Ensure that the Israeli military comply fully with the duty to take precautionary measures when carrying out attacks, as well as in defense, and do not carry out attacks as a form of collective punishment.
Nope.
Publicly commit not to use artillery and white phosphorus weapons in densely populated areas.
Nope.
Provide full reparations for the consequences of its unlawful acts and omissions.
Not a chance.
Immediately end the blockade on the Gaza Strip, which is collectively punishing the entire population of Gaza, in breach of Israel’s obligations under international humanitarian and human rights law.
Nope.
The stark conclusion presented by Amnesty International in July 2009 was that “Impunity (exemption from punishment) for war crimes in Gaza and southern Israel are a recipe for further civilian suffering.”
And so it happened all over again, in a similar fashion and on a larger scale, in 2014. During the five-year interim between the slaughters, the two main Palestinian factions, Fatah and Hamas, twice managed to merge two governing bodies into one unity government, in 2011 and 2014. Much of the world, although leery of Hamas’ involvement, was willing to cautiously accept the arrangements and view them as diplomatic opportunities. On both occasions Israel’s power block and Prime Minister Netanyahu used Hamas’ presence as an excuse to end potential peace talks. In fact, when the first unity government was announced in 2011, Israel murdered two Hamas activists in what was called a “premeditated escalation.”
If and when Hamas militants responded, Israel could always use the US media, as we have seen, to blame Hamas for the escalation. Israel’s maneuver was successful, with both sides conducting a variety of smaller-scale attacks that led to a 2012 ceasefire brokered by Egypt. Mission accomplished for Netanyahu; peace talks stalled.
In June of 2014, the Palestinians agreed to another unity government. While the rest of the world again agreed to diplomacy with the new faction, Netanyahu announced he wouldn’t negotiate with the new government and would introduce punitive measures.
Israel refused to lift a long-term embargo and blockade for supplies to Gaza. Hamas, or a radical splinter group attempting to undermine Hamas’ legitimacy, then escalated matters by kidnapping and killing three Israeli teenagers. At that point, Operation Protective Edge was under way in early July and lasted seven weeks.
The statistics of damage and destruction far exceed those from five years earlier. As for death, 1,462 Palestinian civilians were killed, 551 of them children, along with six civilians in Israel. One hundred thousand Gazans were left homeless.
In its full report two years after the operation, Amnesty International said both Israeli and Palestinian armed groups committed war crimes during the hostilities:
On what became known as “Black Friday” [August 1, 2014], Israel launched an unrelenting onslaught against civilians in Rafah, a city in the southern Gaza Strip. Between 1 and 4 August, Israeli forces killed at least 135 civilians, including 75 children, in Rafah, and there is strong evidence they committed war crimes. The heavily populated area was bombarded by artillery fire and other imprecise explosive weaponry in attacks which were indiscriminate and disproportionate.
It’s believed this particular massacre was revenge for the capture of one Israeli soldier in the area.
Wiping out innocent school children never seems to bother Israel. In fact, doing so has apparently become part of the Israel Defense Forces doctrine. The IDF’s supporters refer to it as “the world’s most moral army,” a description that takes the brazen gall of its public relations machine to an unfathomable level.
On page 303 of his 2013 book Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, Max Blumenthal tells the story of entering a book shop in Jerusalem in 2010 to peruse a book called Torat HaMelech, or The King’s Torah. It is a manual that purports to use Jewish law to commit violence. He writes (with asides in parentheses):
According to the authors, Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira and Rabbi Yosef Elitzur, non-Jews are “uncompassionate by nature” and may have been killed in order to “curb their evil inclinations.” “If we kill a gentile who has violated one of the seven commandments (of Noah) … there is nothing wrong with murder,” Shapira and Elitzur insisted. (Shapira), citing Jewish law as his source (or at least a very selective interpretation of it),declared, “There is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation they may be harmed deliberately, and not only during combat with adults.”
Blumenthal goes on to explain that the book was written as a directive for army personnel seeking religious guidance during conflict, and that the authors urge ruthless treatment for non-Jews and maintain that an enemy population is fair game for slaughtering. He later tells of standing in a hotel conference room audience of 250 settlers and hardline right-wingers at a presentation of Israel’s top fundamentalist rabbis and listening in astonishment as government-backed religious leaders spoke out in support of Torat HaMelech.
In his book Judaism, Zionism and the Land of Israel, a pro-Israel propaganda publication, author and rabbi Yotav Eliach tells of being handed his Bible and a rifle. Using the fiction of time travel, he describes what he would take along to show Jews at different times and places around the world:
I would tell them about the Knesset, the Israeli flag, and the menorah, which is the emblem of the Jewish State. I would tell them about the IDF and what it has accomplished since 1948. I would show them my own swearing-in ceremony when I received my Tanach [Hebrew bible] and M16.
Here’s more of what the IDF has accomplished since 1948, even in just the last few months, summed up succinctly by Gideon Levy in his article “The Israeli Army, Seeking Mild Sentence for Unlawful Shooting, Encourages Soldiers to Kill Innocent Palestinians.” This was published by Haaretz on August 18, 2020:
A criminal shooting, for no reason, of a Palestinian whose car had gotten stuck, and then the unbearable shooting death of a man who had only stopped to help him. An execution on a cold and rainy night. It was one of those stories that enrage because it keeps being repeated. The shooting was done in cold blood by someone who wasn’t in any danger, standing safe in a reinforced guard-post from which he shot like a madman, aiming at a young man who did nothing but try to flee for his life. Six bullets pierced the body of Ahmad Manasra, just as he was returning from the wedding of a friend. The soldier could have predicted that nothing bad would happen to him. The Israel Defense Forces allows him to shoot at will, so long as he’s shooting a Palestinian. The IDF is telling its soldiers to keep it up, kill innocent people, its fine. Not a hair on your head will be harmed.
Levy describes the “grotesque” military court system that prepared to approve a plea agreement for the soldier with a sentence calling for three months of community service. For cold-blooded murder:
The United States is up in arms about the killing of George Floyd. Israel yawns about the killing of Ahmad Manasra. Who even heard about it?
Definitely wasn’t allowed into the news cycle in the United States of Israel.
Levy mentions that it seems the only place to turn would be the International Criminal Court at The Hague. The ICC was sanctioned by Donald Trump in May of 2020 for its investigation of American war crimes in Afghanistan. Israel, again, a regular target of the ICC for obvious reasons, fully supported Trump’s move.
As for the international reaction to the massive 2014 slaughter, it was similar to that of 2009, summed up in a New York Times article dated November 23, 2014 titled “Europe Takes Stronger Measures, Albeit Symbolic, to Condemn Israeli Policies. By Steven Erlanger:
Last week, European Union foreign ministers issued a statement that condemned the growing violence in the Israeli-Palestinian relationship, Israeli expropriation of land near Bethlehem in the West Bank, and plans for new settlement construction, and urged Israel to change its policy on Gaza.
Urging Israel to change obviously does nothing. Voting diplomatically to condemn Israel does nothing. The United States vetoes UN resolutions and Israel once again laughs it off. Which simply leads to more Israeli bad behavior.
Between the 2009 and 2014 slaughters came the infamous boat massacre. In late May 2010, a flotilla of international activists in six vessels attempted to reach the Gaza Strip from Turkey. They were hoping to bring provisions as well as building and medical supplies to a Palestinian population being starved of basic human needs.
The aid activists represented forty to fifty different countries and included academics, human rights group representatives, clergymen and a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Five vessels made the approach by sea (one boat had broken down and had to turn back). Based on the experience of previous human rights flotillas to Gaza, the activists assumed the worst that could happen to them would be an Israeli navy escort into shore and the confiscation and potential distribution of the supplies. Prime Minister Netanyahu and his military leaders had other ideas. They planned a raid with commandos from Zodiac boats and Blackhawk helicopters. It was time to make an example of these peaceniks and put an end to these flotillas.
As the Zodiacs arrived, those aboard the flotilla threw bottles at the Israeli military. The commandoes who repelled from helicopters onto the main relief ship the Mavi Marmara were met by crew members who defended themselves with metal sticks and knives. That’s when the indiscriminate firing of live weapons and the executions began. Nine passengers were killed, dozens injured. Any soldiers that were injured were taken below deck by passengers and treated immediately for injuries.
Blumenthal summarizes this carnage in Goliath as well, in chapter 20 at page 105. I have added definitions in parentheses:
As soon as the Israelis gained control of the Marmara, they rushed to the ship’s kitchen and gathered up all of the knives they could find. Then they laid them out beside keffiyehs [scarf, Arabian headdress], Qurans [Islamic religious texts], and any object that might convince the average Western news consumer that the flotilla was in fact a covert terrorist convoy. As the soldiers followed apparent orders to prepare the groundwork for a massive propaganda campaign, [activist Lubna] Masarwa noticed that “letters written by hundreds of children to children in Gaza were on the floor, under the soldiers’ boots. I realized that we must not be human in the eyes of the Israeli soldiers when I saw them joking with each other—one of them was petting his dog—after they had just killed people in cold blood.”
Blumenthal cites that an IDF officer later sold laptops that were stolen from the vessels, while stolen passenger credit cards were used by soldiers for drunken nights out on the town.
With the tenth fatality, a Turkish activist who died days later, relations between Israel and its only Islamic semi-ally were strained to say the least.
The United Nations report stated “the circumstances of the killing of at least six of the passengers were in a manner consistent with an extra-legal (beyond the authority of the law), arbitrary and summary execution.”
The only error the Israeli military found following its investigation was that its navy, army and intelligence services had misjudged the resistance on board. Ethan Bronner’s article in the New York Times on July 12, 2010 was titled “Israeli Military Finds Flotilla Killings Justified”:
An Israeli military investigation into its naval takeover of a Gaza-bound flotilla six weeks ago found that it was plagued by errors of planning, intelligence and coordination but that the killing of nine Turks on board were justified, according to an official summary of the findings released Monday.
Netanyahu would eventually apologize officially in 2013 to Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan and a financial settlement and agreement were reached in 2016.
Extra-legal summary executions of innocent internationals by IDF soldiers is not unusual. In May of 2003, thirty-four-year-old British cameraman James Miller was shot in the neck, murdered by an Israeli soldier while working on a documentary about the suffering of Palestinian children. In a 2006 inquest, experts testified that the shooting was “deliberate” and Miller’s family charged the Israeli government and military with a cover-up.
Vikram Dodd wrote in the Guardian on April 5, 2006 under the headline “Shooting of British Cameraman by Israeli Soldier Cold-blooded Murder, Inquest Told”:
Mr. Cobb-Smith, a former British army officer and UN weapons inspector, said Mr. Miller and his colleagues would have been visible to the Israeli soldiers, who had night vision goggles. The sky was cloudless, the moon was shining and electric lights were shining from nearby houses. “My conclusion is this was calculated and cold-blooded murder, without a shadow of a doubt,” Mr. Cobb-Smith told the jury at St. Pancras coroner’s court in London.
The Israeli government declined to take part in the inquest and they skirted the legalities. According to Dodd’s story, the Israeli embassy in London said:
After a very thorough investigation using laboratories in Israel and abroad and after reviewing all the available evidence, it was not possible to reach a reliable conclusion that could provide a basis for proceedings under criminal law
Two months prior to Miller being shot, twenty-three-year-old American activist Rachel Corrie was murdered by a bulldozer on March 16, 2003. She had gone to Palestine to protest the demolition of residents’ homes by the Israeli military. As part of its seventeen-year commemoration of the calamity on March 16 of 2020, the independent Turkish news website Anadolu Agency included a story by Vakkas Dogantekin called “American Hero Rachel Corrie Killed by Israel Remembered”:
Corrie believed that her western features and blonde hair would deter the bulldozer, but she was wrong. She was crushed to death when the Israeli bulldozer ran over her repeatedly, according to eye witnesses. The people of Gaza described her as a “martyr” and staged a massive funeral for their American friend. No US senator attended her funeral. An Israeli investigation into her death concluded that it was an accident.
Of course it did. And no way, in 2003, would a politician from the United States of Israel dare attend the funeral of an American citizen supporting Palestine. That would have brought condemnation and a quick political death.
Corrie’s parents filed a civil lawsuit against Israel while seeking just a single US dollar in symbolic damages. The Israeli courts eventually threw the case out. The Palestinians named a street after her in Gaza and with her family in attendance dedicated a memorial in Nablus in the West Bank in 2008. Iran named a street after her in Tehran. Vakkas Dogantekin noted:
An Irish aid ship that set out for Gaza in 2010 named itself after Rachel, and her story has been told in several documentary films portraying the plight of Palestinians.
But again, ultimately, as with the slaughters of 2009 and 2014, the Israelis were not blameless but neither were they held to account.
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