Many articles which continue to pore over recent events in Rafah and the lessons to be learned from them paint a picture as complex as it is grim, both for the actual future of Israel and the never-ending campaign of lies mounted against it. Amir Oren in Ha’aretz pulls no punches about the mistake the Israel Defence Force made in firing tank shells to warn off the Rafah demonstrators and which appear to have passed through an empty building and killed Palestinians by mistake:

‘When tank fire in a very populated urban area is approved, without non-lethal means of dispersing demonstrations, the result is terrible, as in Rafah. The General Staff did not bother to equip the forces with such means and to brief them to shift quickly between combat thinking and another kind of thinking - police thinking.’

Seven Palestinians died in this incident, of whom two were children. Israel-haters swiftly levelled the charge against Israel of ‘war crimes’. They represented the march as entirely peaceful, refusing to acknowledge that at its core were armed men who were as usual using civilians as human shields. Israel’s own fifth columnist left, who never pass up an opportunity to blame their own country for having the gall to try to defend itself, blamed the Gaza crisis not on the terrorists but on Israel for being there. But buried in Oren’s article was this:

‘When men obeyed the calls over the loudspeakers to turn themselves in to the IDF authorities (and to the intelligence people who wanted to question them), they were confronted by members of the terror organizations, who opened fire on them and killed two children. A senior officer in Gaza reported yesterday that the IDF have in their possession pictures of this incident, of Palestinians killing their children. He expressed amazement as to why the army has refrained from publishing them.’

Amazing indeed, if true. And subsequently, the IDF confirmed that this was indeed true:

‘An official IDF source confirmed Amir Oren’s 21 May story this afternoon to IMRA that two Palestinian children who died in the Rafah procession incident were murdered by Palestinian gunmen and that the IDF photographed the shooting. The official IDF source explained that the pictures have not been released to the media because information derived from the photographs would compromise security in the field at this time.’

Well, security considerations are of course something the rest of us can’t judge; but it’s nevertheless hard to credit that, given the immediate vilification of Israel over the killing of these children -- including hysterical condemnation from within Israel -- and the speed with which the IDF admitted its own error in killing the Palestinians on the march, they so comprehensively failed to defend themselves by publishing pictures which showed that the Palestinians themselves killed these children. It seems to be yet another example of Israel’s astounding and unbelievable inability or refusal to grasp that the bigger war it is fighting — and losing hands down — is the battle for public opinion.

Meanwhile, the global lie factory swung effortlessly into action, with false claims that hundreds of Gazan homes had been demolished during the week and thousands of Palestinians made homeless. Photographs used to support this claim turned out to depict houses demolished not during the past seven days but during the past three and a half years, as this article in the Jerusalem Post explained:

‘Describing the Palestinian propaganda launched by the terror organizations as a well-oiled machine, [Brig-Gen Shmuel] Zakai declared that almost all of the footage broadcast by the Palestinians to the world were of houses demolished during the past three and a half years, and not recently. “They recycled old footage in order to generate international pressure in an attempt to prevent the operation from taking place or minimize it as much as possible,” said Zakai. “If you add up the scores of homes destroyed in the last years, you are talking of scores, but they were destroyed because they were used to dig tunnels or as shelter by terrorists from which to launch attacks. None of those broadcast were destroyed in recent days, weeks, or months,” he said. ‘

Far from a massacre, the actual toll of the operation in Gaza was far more limited. As Ha’aretz reported today:

‘The Israel Defense Forces Gaza division commander Brigadier General Shmuel Zakai said on Monday the army killed 41 terrorists [and 13 civilians] and demolished 56 Palestinian homes during Operation Rainbow in Rafah, which began seven days ago.’

The Israel-haters made no acknowledgement of the fact that the whole operation was, as ever, entirely defensive. Palestinians have been using tunnels dug under houses in Rafah to try to smuggle in weapons of escalating reach and dangerousness: not just Kassam rockets, but Katyushas, RPGs and other missiles. The grotesque absence of balance in such reporting and the unchecked recycling of lies help legitimise further murderous attacks on Israelis as well as demonise and delegitimise Israel in the eyes of the world. Such gross abuses committed time after time by human rights groups such as Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and their Israeli counterparts have become a scandal which itself deserves investigation. As the website NGO Monitor observes:

‘In their highly politicized assessments, HRW and Amnesty use the rhetoric of international law selectively, failing to note that structures used by armed combatants lose their neutrality within a war zone. Instead, in a report released during Israel’s Gaza operations on 18 May - Israel and the Occupied Territories. Under the rubble: House demolition and destruction of land and property – Amnesty stated: “The grounds invoked by Israel to justify the destruction are overly broad and based on discriminatory policies and practices.” Amnesty went on to accuse Israel of “war crimes”. Similarly, in a press statement of May 20, Human Rights Watch, declared Israel’s actions as “part of the IDF’s policy of collective punishment, which international humanitarian law strictly forbids.” In both cases, the demonization of Israeli policy, without including the context of the Israeli actions, highlights the continued political exploitation of the rhetoric of human rights and the terminology of international law. It is also consistent with the active role of these groups at the 2001 Durban conference, and in other cases since then… The accusations of a “massacre” resurfaced following the incident in Gaza, with wildly inflated casualty claims presented by the Palestinians and repeated for many hours by the media and NGOs without serious question or independent verification. There was also no verification or investigation into IDF claims to have evidence that gunmen had been present at the demonstration, and the very real possibility that the mass march was a cover for attacks on Israeli soldiers, 13 of whom had been killed in attacks the week earlier.’

As if such demonisation and lies were not bad enough, Israel is being goaded over an utterly impossible and lethal predicament in which it finds itself. It cannot stay in Gaza, which is sapping it militarily, psychologically and morally. Yet leaving it will make it more likely that the Palestinians there will attack Israel with ever more lethal weapons. So it is in a terrible trap. Michael Oren in the Wall Street Journal gets it right:

‘Threatened with destruction since its birth, Israel exists thanks to an unwritten agreement between the state and its citizens. Israelis allow the state to send them off to battle, and perhaps to die, but only when a solid majority of them believe that their vital security is at stake. If most Israelis consider a confrontation unnecessary or avoidable, they will simply refuse to fight. Such is the situation in Gaza today where a commanding majority of the population is no longer willing to risk their--or their children's--lives defending 7,500 settlers from the million Palestinians surrounding them. They do not regard Gaza as part of their spiritual and historical homeland, nor see how Israel can remain within the densely populated strip and retain its Jewish and democratic character. By insisting on perpetuating the status quo in Gaza, then, the right threatens to undermine the implicit pact that binds Israeli society--which enables the state to survive.

‘The left, on the other hand, holds that the recent deaths of 13 Israeli soldiers in Gaza were a direct result of the government's settlement policy and its refusal to seek Palestinian partners for peace. The 13, however, died not defending settlements but destroying tunnels used to smuggle explosives into Gaza, and the factories that produce Qassam rockets. Those explosives killed 10 Israelis in a suicide-bomber attack on the coastal city of Ashdod, and the rockets have struck Jewish towns and villages outside of the strip. Israel's withdrawal from Gaza will do nothing to lessen these threats--on the contrary, it will almost certainly enhance them, enabling the Palestinians to acquire even deadlier missiles capable of hitting Tel Aviv.

‘Clearly Israel cannot remain in Gaza, but neither can it negotiate a phased withdrawal. The evacuation that the bulk of Israelis demand, therefore, can only be accomplished unilaterally while acting to maintain Israel's deterrence power. Israel will also have to reserve its freedom to frustrate weapons smuggling into Gaza by land and by sea, and to strike at terrorist targets inside the strip. Though proposals have been raised for deploying international peacekeepers in Gaza, such a force will surely lack the mandate and the means for effectively rooting out terror, and will probably serve to shield the Palestinians as they continue firing at Israel. Someday a Palestinian leadership may emerge that is capable of ensuring a quiet border, but until it does, there can be no substitute for preserving Israel's ability to defend itself, by itself, from Gaza.

‘One can only sympathize with the anguish of fathers who have lost their sons in Gaza--I, too, have a son serving in the territories--but that compassion must not obscure Israel's course. At all costs, Israel must avoid repeating its hasty retreat from Lebanon in May 2000, which emboldened the Palestinians to launch their terror war four months later. Rather, Israel must withdraw from Gaza but in a way that cannot be interpreted as a victory by the Palestinians and that allows the IDF to continue operating freely. The challenge Israel now faces in Gaza is thus similar to America's in Iraq: how to pull out gradually, prudently, all the while maintaining the message that terror will never go unpunished.’

Some challenge. And Israel is struggling with this mortal dilemma in the teeth of indifference or vilification by the rest of the world, which turns a blind eye to the Rafah tunnels and their deadly traffic and blames Israel instead for trying to destroy them; which screams for Israel to withdraw from Gaza and then blames it for doing so; which turns a blind eye to Palestinian incitement and mass murder of Jews and instead accuses Israel of war crimes when it tries to defend its citizens; which airbrushes butchered Israelis out of the picture altogether while dwelling obsessively on every Palestinian tree that is uprooted; which dismisses what Israel says as lies while promulgating gross Palestinian lies and libels as facts; which puts Israel in the dock for failing to meet impossible standards of warfare, while totally ignoring the real war crimes and atrocities committed by those who are trying to destroy it; and which denies that the Palestinians are indeed trying to destroy Israel, and blames it instead for the wickedly unjust red herring of frustrating a Palestinian state, which the Palestinians themselves have frustrated for more than half a century – and all this malice and malevolence towards Israel is because much of the world itself, in sentiments it now increasingly and openly avers, actually wants the Jewish state destroyed.

Posted by melanie at May 24, 2004