A great rebuke to Robert Fisk by Dan Gordon at the American Thinker shreds his absurd claims about the Lebanon war by the simple application of the facts. But those who make such objectionable claims about Israel’s behaviour are, alas, quite impervious to the application of reason. Sections of the media have constructed an utterly diabolical story about Israel which mere facts can never shake, as Gordon illustrates by this telling anecdote from the scene of an earlier and similar blood libel:

I was an eyewitness to a classic example of this in Jenin, in 2002. Western journalists and United Nation envoys were in an uproar over an alleged Israeli massacre of a thousand Palestinians. There were grisly, supposed eyewitness, accounts of Israeli bulldozers shoveling hundreds of corpses of helpless Palestinian refugees into mass graves. There were stories of Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian children in front of their parents and then throwing their bodies into wells and sewage pits. Comparisons were made to ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, to Nazi war crimes and the term genocide was spoken with righteous indignation.
The truth turned out to be somewhat less Baroque. There was a battle not a massacre. In that battle some fifty Palestinian combatants were killed, as were twenty three Israeli soldiers. The battle was a ferocious one and in the Arab press there were glowing tales of the fifty Palestinian fighters who fell in glorious combat against the Zionist enemy they valiantly slaughtered. But to the majority of Western journalists the facts became a footnote on the inside pages, reported weeks after the front page banner line headlines screamed about the supposed massacre.

There was one journalist, Sheila McVicker of CNN, who was so openly hostile in her attitudes toward Israel that an Israeli Army medical officer, a gentle man who was head of pediatrics at Hadasa Hospital, inquired quietly as to the source of her anger at Israel. He tried to explain to her that Jenin was not the shelter of helpless refugees, rather it was exactly what its residents proclaimed it to be: the suicide bomber capital of the world. Hundreds of Israeli men, women and children, almost all of them civilians, had been murdered by the suicide bombers dispatched from Jenin. That is why a battle took place there. After close to thirty people were blown to bits at a Passover dinner in Israel, the Israeli military took action against those who dispatched the suicide bombers, trained them, armed them and sent them out to murder again and again.

‘Maybe,’ demanded Ms. McVicker, ‘You should ask yourself why they became terrorists.’
‘I do,’ said the good doctor. ‘It’s something I ask myself all the time. Why would someone from Jenin choose to come to Jerusalem or Hadera to commit suicide just so they could kill a few Jews along the way? Why would they choose death over life?’

‘I can sum it up for you,’ said Ms. McVicker defiantly, ‘I can sum it up in one word: occupation,’ she said spitting the word out, as if it left a foul taste in her mouth.

‘But my dear, Ms. McVicker,’ the good doctor said, ‘Jenin hasn’t been occupied for nine years. In nine years there has not been the footprint of one Israeli soldier in Jenin. Jenin is ruled by the United Nations and the PLO.’

Ms. McVicker did not reply. She turned on her heel as if she had been spat upon and stormed off. How dare this man respond with facts? How dare he contradict the narrative to which she was so firmly committed?

Now history is surely about to repeat itself once again. Israel’s occupation of Gaza ended with disengagement. The Palestinians have been left alone to get on with constructing the civil society to furnish the state that the world assumes they want so badly. They have not done so. Instead, they are descending into the chaos and anarchy of civil war, while equipping themselves with ever more fearsome rockets and other weapons in order to attack Israel with ever greater ferocity. Moreover, Iran is helpfully training them to become an army to wage war all the more professionally upon Israel from the land it has vacated, just like Hezbollah was used to attack it from Lebanon. Israel will have no option but to go back into Gaza to try to protect its citizens from such aggression. And how will the western media report this when it does so? Undoubtedly by screaming once again about Israeli atrocities and war crimes, just as they did over Jenin and Lebanon.

What has happened in Lebanon and Gaza dramatically exposes the utter hollowness of the ‘occupation causes resistance’ argument. In both cases, the ending of occupation merely facilitated even greater aggression. Instead of ‘land for peace’, the real deal is land for war. But when it comes to the reporting of the Middle East, the western media can be relied upon never to allow the facts to get in the way of a steaming prejudice.