Yes, that's Boy George, reminding you not to forget: 'We Will Dance Again'
UPDATE: "I can’t stop thinking about them: the women and girls of the Israeli kibbutzim, who were raped on 7 October... Raped so brutally and so repeatedly that in some cases their pelvises broke from the weight of so many men. And then their throats were slit or they were shot in the forehead. I can’t forget the semi-naked corpse of Shani Louk, paraded around Gaza on the flatbed of a truck, as hordes of men cheered on her rapists and crowded around the jeep to spit on her body. I can’t forget the young woman, arms bound behind her back, hobbling from a slit Achilles tendon, a large bloodstain blossoming across her jeans where she was bleeding profusely from her vagina and anus, being led away, a prisoner of her rapists.
"I’m still in mourning for them.... "Some people have condemned the rapists’ actions. Some people have spoken out firmly and clearly. Thank you. And some people have condemned them in their hearts. Thank you, too. I oppose compelled speech. I don’t expect friends and relatives to post about this on their social media; I don’t want some kind of catechism to be imposed on ordinary people. We shouldn’t police each other’s hearts; we shouldn’t demand demonstrations of each other’s humanity. "But there are organisations whose job it is to speak up when injustice is done. And most of them have been either silent or worse—much worse...."
Three years ago today (our time) more than 1500 people were raped, tortured, brutalised, mutilated, kidnapped, murdered -- that's about 1200 murdered, 250 kidnapped, and uncountable number tortured, mutilated, raped.
The stories are still heart-breaking. Most I can't read. And I know I couldn't watch some of the worst of the horror.
These are just a few --a very few -- of some of the least horrifying ...
"A spectre haunts debates about governance: the idea of benevolent and efficient dictatorship. Where democratic leaders haggle, delay, and pander, the authoritarian ruler simply acts. Where elected governments bend to lobbyists and electoral cycles, a dictator [it's alleged] is in for the long haul. ...
"Beijing officials invoke it to explain the rise of China; climate activists to argue that the planetary emergency demands that we put democracy on pause; populists to suggest that current institutions are broken and that a fresh start and setting the popular will free requires a firm and unchecked hand. ...
"However, a large body of studies of how democracies and autocracies actually perform across regions, over centuries, and in domains ranging from economic growth to military effectiveness to environmental protection have questioned this story. They do not show autocracies to be superior—on the contrary, the autocratic temptation is, in most domains, a mirage, or even a trap. Not only are democracies morally preferable because they recognise the political equity and dignity of citizens; they also tend to work better. ...
"Countries that successfully consolidate free and fair elections face substantially lower risks of civil war ... Citizens who can kick out the opposition at elections are less inclined to take to the streets with weapons.
"[D]emocracies have been accused of weakness in warfare. ... Yet the long-term record is unambiguous: since 1815, democracies have won more than 80 percent of the wars they have fought. ...
"Democratic institutions protect property rights in a way that encourages the private investment that drives productivity. And the open circulation of ideas across universities, a free press, and competitive markets is not a distraction from growth but one of its primary engines. Studies show that, on average, democracies enjoy a modest but robust long-run growth advantage over autocracies, and that this advantage strengthens with the quality and longevity of democratic institutions.
"More telling than average growth rates, however, is the frequency with which disasters strike. Unchecked political authority not merely fails to deliver growth; rather, it periodically produces catastrophes. Mao’s Great Leap Forward between 1958 and 1962 killed tens of millions through an entirely man-made famine, a consequence of ideological fantasy insulated from the real world. The Soviet collectivisation campaign produced similar horrors two decades earlier. Comparable disasters in democratic states are virtually unknown—not necessarily because democratic leaders are wiser or more virtuous, but because they face institutional constraints and public scrutiny that make disastrous policies impossible to sustain.
"The most advanced economies in the world are democracies. The handful of countries that have joined the ranks of wealthy, high-technology societies over the past century, including South Korea, Taiwan, Israel, and Ireland, made at least the final leap under democratic governance. Singapore is the sole exception to this rule. Autocratic regimes can mobilise resources to achieve middle-income status, as China has done. But the transition to a knowledge-based economy requires the rule of law, the protection of intellectual property, and the freedom to challenge received wisdom—all of which are systematically undermined under dictatorship. ...
"At a time when open societies face serious pressure from within and without, the temptation to admire their alternatives is understandable. But admiration is not a sound foundation for political judgment, especially not when it is based on a selective reading of the evidence. The autocratic temptation promises fortitude and efficiency—but too often, it only produces chaos and mismanagement; and, occasionally, it delivers disaster."
"Whenever I begin to debate certain issues such as the war in Iran or the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, I am confronted with the fact that the side I support has done some pretty stupid (sometimes evil) things. America supported the Shah, who was an oppressive dictator. Israel enabled the rise of Hamas by supporting Islamist social and charitable organizations within Gaza in order to create a counterweight to the secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). And then there allegations of even more sinister actions, ranging from the plausible to the ridiculous. It is easy to see why so many people retreat to a kind of neutrality. They shrug and say both sides have some valid points. Who can know which is worth supporting?
"Without a well-grounded philosophical framework, there really IS no way to know. ... if you’re not thinking conceptually, it might be hard to make a distinction between this group dropping bombs and that group dropping bombs.
"You might be tempted to view the conflict in terms of who is the underdog. Who is the David fighting Goliath? Of course, even on these terms, it’s pretty bizarre to view a nation of about 10 million (Israel) as the Goliath when they are facing down Iran (a nation of about 90 million) or the entire Arab world (around 500 million) or the entire Islamic world (perhaps as many as 2 billion).
"But regardless, this is the wrong way to look at the conflict. Instead, we should be thinking in terms of what kind of civilisation does each side represent? What values would we like a society to uphold — and which of these 'sides' [if any] better represents those values? ... it does mean understanding the fundamental distinction between [semi] free and unfree societies — between good societies that sometimes makes mistakes, and fundamentally bad societies that (like all societies) have many good people in them who are just trying to live their lives.
"Once you understand the distinction, you might come to understand that the only way to 'Free Palestine' or to truly support any of the “underdogs” in the world is to free them from the ideological chains of their terrible belief systems. Fundamentally, these people are not angry at the West because they have (sometimes legitimate) grievances about particular actions, but because they resent the example that even a semi-free society presents. While we can’t force people to be free or even to believe in freedom as an ideal, we can (and should) show them the utter futility of continuing to support the death cult of Islamism. It was only utter defeat that discredited Nazism in Germany and emperor-worship in imperial Japan — and allowed them to develop into much happier, freer, and more prosperous societies. That is what I wish for Palestine, Iran, and all the oppressed people of the world."
"Israel is not just targeting Iranian Revolutionary Guard commanders. They are specifically going after the officers who killed protesters -- the people who ran checkpoints and shot Iranians in the streets during the January uprisings when the regime massacred thousands of its own citizens.
"And they're calling them first. Victor David Hansen described one exchange [in the video from 10:03]: an Israeli contact reached an IRGC officer and told him he was a dead man. The officer's response: 𝘠𝘦𝘢𝘩, 𝘐'𝘮 𝘢 𝘥𝘦𝘢𝘥 𝘮𝘢𝘯 𝘸𝘢𝘭𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨. 𝘉𝘶𝘵 𝘐 𝘥𝘪𝘥𝘯'𝘵 𝘥𝘰 𝘢𝘯𝘺𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘸𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘨. He did do something wrong. He killed protesters. And Israel knows exactly who he is, where he is, and what he did -- because Iranians inside the country are feeding them the intelligence. Cell phones. Starlink. A population that hates this regime so deeply that ordinary citizens are calling in GPS coordinates of checkpoints from their apartment windows.
"This is what Israeli intelligence penetration of Iran actually looks like in practice. It's not just satellites and signals. It's millions of Iranians who want this regime gone and are willing to risk everything to make it happen."
In Auckland yesterday we woke to news that Iran's theocratic rulers were dead and dying.
Within hours, Iranians in Auckland had gathered to celebrate. (Yes, those are Israeli and US flags being waved below, and pictures of a dead Ayatollah being celebrated).
This was in complete contrast to the hand wringing going on in the homes of (to pick just two people) Helen Clark and Antōnio Guterres, who were quick to bemoan attacks on the regime that had slaughtered at least 35, 000 Iranian innocents -- which they'd ignored.
So too had Iranians in many other parts of the world. Not least in Iran. (Click through for posts and videos.)
It seems the only place these murdering bastards are mourned are in the homes and offices of people with Pro-Palestinian t-shirts in the cupboard and keffiyeh on their hat rack. These people "have no shame," observes Brendan O'Neill. "They said nothing when thousands of Iranians were slaughtered by the theocratic regime. Yet now they’re crying because some regime goons were killed in airstrikes. These people are just apologists for tyranny."
Given the Iranian regime's role in supporting world terrorism, Islamofascism and in trying to destroy western life (in every way possible) -- on raining death and destruction on the world for 47 years -- then if regime change is successful in Iran -- if! -- then it would be the single most momentous geopolitical change for the better since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
But as with Bush II's Iraq War, the question to come is: do they know what the hell they're going to do next. With this administration, that's unlikely (it hasn't even bothered to seek Congressional approval, which is constitutionally required). So it will need every circumstance to go the way of those Iranians celebrating above people. As Eliot Cohen says, "Something of an exercise in ambivalence here. I would like to see the Iranian regime go down hard -- and am not confident Trump knows what he is doing."
Let's hope with crossed fingers for a lion of freedom to arise from the attacks.
"In the first nine months after October 7, the New York Times published 6,656 articles about the Gaza War. That compared to 80 articles about the American-led battle to free Mosul ... Israel is covered by more full-time staff than all of sub-Saharan Africa combined ...
"This saturation coverage creates the illusion of centrality. It trains audiences to believe that whatever they see most frequently must be the most important event in the world. Israel becomes not just another country among many but a kind of moral index of the age – a stage upon which the world’s conscience is imagined to be tested and revealed.
"The Israeli-Palestinian conflict occupies a peculiar and disproportionate place in the West's political imagination, unmatched by conflicts that are deadlier. And so it becomes over-seen, over-examined, intensely dissected, and uniquely moralised until the examination itself becomes both activism and a substitute for understanding."
"If you've seen my 'Why I Stand With Israel' video, you would know that I really wasn't interested in talking about things outside of the US when I first started making content. But that changed on October 7th. ...
"So last week was the 2-year anniversary of October 7th. And it's crazy to think that 2 years have gone by because I don't feel really any better about the state of the world right now. Hamas killed so many of the hostages and hundreds of Israeli soldiers have died in battle since that day. And Hamas is still using innocent people, using children as human shields. They are publicly executing dissenters and promising that they're going to continue attacking Israel.
"And then there's the West Bank. People talk about the West Bank as if it's any better than Gaza. As if the Palestinian Authority hasn't allowed so many terrorist groups to just flourish under their control. ...
"And still, with all of this going on, people are pretending that Israel is the villain in this conflict. ...
"So, all this being said, I was very, very disappointed to see that ... President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu proposed another ceasefire deal to Hamas. People are trying to negotiate with jihadists again. Like they haven't tried to do that so many times during this conflict. I mean, we in America keep saying that we don't negotiate with terrorists, but apparently we do.
"This plan that Trump and Netanyahu proposed has 20 points.... I think this is a very terrible plan. To even contemplate granting amnesty to the people responsible for October 7th is disgusting. It is such an insult to the victims of that day. It is an insult to the soldiers who died in this battle. It is an insult to justice.
"I mean, this is essentially a surrender. Offering Gaza and the West Bank an independent state is admitting defeat because everyone knows that that is not actually going to solve this problem.
"[I]t baffles me how many people are still pretending that this conflict is about land. I don't understand why there is still this fantasy that if Israel just gave up enough territory, if they formally recognised a Palestinian state, if they loosened their military presence at their borders, there would just be peace and this conflict would end. Because the two-state solution is not a new idea. ...
"Despite decades of negotiations, concessions, and proposals, every offer for a Palestinian state has been rejected and met with violence because they do not want a state. ...
"This is not a dispute over borders or state recognition. This is a matter of ideology. What Israel is fighting against is the idea that they shouldn't exist as a state at all....
"Again, all we have to do is look at Gaza post-2005. They were essentially their own state. They had their own government. Israel was gone. And instead of building infrastructure and being productive, they decided to build rockets and commit October 7th.
"And it's not like Hamas hid their intentions before October 7th. Their founding charter openly talks about how much they want to kill the Jews in Israel. After they started this war, Hamas paraded the bodies of innocent, murdered Israelis through the streets as people cheered. And their leaders promised to repeat the attack of October 7th over and over again until Israel is destroyed.
"Now, let me be very clear here because a lot of people think that the issue is just Hamas and that if Israel was to get rid of Hamas that would end everything. But Hamas won the election for a reason. These ideas about destroying Israel are not fringe. They are mainstream culture in Gaza. In Gaza, the anti-Israeli indoctrination is so embedded in daily life. Children's television shows teach kids that they need to slaughter Jews. School curricula completely deny the existence of Israel and glorify martyrdom. Military-style youth camps train young boys to kill Jews from a young age. And public rallies they hold in the streets celebrate martyrs who blew up buses or stabbed Israeli civilians.
"Yes, Hamas is one of the main issues and one of the main obstacles to peace, but there's not going to be peace if Israel gets rid of Hamas and the citizens of Gaza just rally around another terrorist group to take their place once they're gone.
"Right now, Gaza is not very happy with Hamas. And a lot of people see this as this really great positive thing that we should be celebrating. But being angry at Hamas because they messed up Gaza is not the same thing as being angry at Hamas because they slaughtered innocent people and attacked a peaceful neighbour that they realise they shouldn't be attacking anymore.
"So, we'll see exactly what happens because right now it's kind of unclear where the Gazans stand. But most likely the reason that the Gazans are not happy with Hamas is because Hamas was not as effective at destroying Israel as they would have wanted. ...
"[And] support for Hamas skyrocketed in the West Bank after October 7th because the people of the West Bank don't see the Palestinian Authority as effective enough at destroying Israel. So all of this to say there is absolutely no way that Israel can give full independence to Gaza and the West Bank and expect there to be peace. It will lead to more slaughter. It will be a repeat of what happened when Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005....
"A lot of people have pushed back and have said, 'Look, all we want are the hostages back, and if Hamas breaks any of their agreements, then Israel will just continue to defend itself and they'll have the full support of the US. So what's the problem here?" Here's the thing. If I thought that this was true, if I thought that the plan was to get the hostages out, and then all bets are off, Israel is going to finish what it started, finish getting rid of jihadism in the area. I would be so on board with this plan. I am so for lying to Hamas to get the hostages back and then attacking them again. But I am almost 100% certain that that is not what is going to happen. And the issue here, like the real issue is that Trump is involved in this deal. ...
"Trump does not care about Israel. I mean, Trump really doesn't care about most things. The thing that Trump cares about is feeling good in the moment. ... his policy decisions are entirely based on who's going to make him feel good in the moment. Right now, Trump likes Israel because Netanyahu is being very nice to him. ... [But] He would drop Israel in a heartbeat. ...
"Trump's whole thing isn't about doing what's right. It's not about recognising the facts and acting accordingly. Trump cares about who's going to suck up to him the most.
"Having someone like that who is so unpredictable as part of this deal means that his support for Israel is unpredictable. He might say that he supports Israel one day and then full support the next. I mean even when it's come to Israel he has gone so back and forth with his support. When he was elected into office, he said that by his inauguration, all of the hostages needed to be released or else he was going to let all hell break loose on the Middle East. And that did not happen. Then in February, he made a similar threat saying all of the hostages needed to be released by a certain day or else he was going to just let Israel do what they needed to do and support them fully in destroying Hamas. And again, that did not happen. Even with this deal now, Trump threatened this 72-hour deadline on Hamas and they just blew right through it and nothing happened. ...
"He bullied Netanyahu into accepting this deal. Like Netanyahu has been so public with the fact that he does not want to allow the Palestinian Authority anywhere near this new Palestinian government.
"So long story short, people are pretending. They are pretending that if Gaza or West Bank attacks Israel, Trump is going to be there to help them and Israel cannot rely on Trump. ....
"I so understand wanting to get the hostages back, especially because we know that some of them are alive.
"I know that their families and their friends and just normal Israeli civilians want them back.
"I know that their loved ones and their friends and really just the average Israeli civilian or even just people with a heart want them back because we value human life.
"And I cannot imagine what they have had to experience being tortured for 2 years in captivity in Gaza.
"This is not how you do that. This is not how you get them back.
"We've seen what happens with these 'hostage exchanges,' right? We've seen what happens when hostages are exchanged for prisoners. They're going to release 2,000 prisoners from Israeli prisons. Just a reminder, Sinwar, one of the masterminds behind October 7th, was released in a hostage exchange.
"And let's be real about what happened. pulling out of Gaza, participating in this exchange, relying on these other countries to support and defend Israel, like that's just going to cause more deaths. It's going to cause more October 7ths like Hamas has promised. And unfortunately, when that happens, I keep saying this, but the world is not going to stand by Israel....
"So for Israel to survive, they are going to have to go it alone right now and for the foreseeable future. Which means they are probably going to have to abandon all of these deals that they have made with the US, with these UN, European countries and with all of these Arab countries because they are not going to stand by Israel when, not even if, when Gaza and the West Bank attack again.
"But I think Israeli leadership has shown that they are not willing to do that. ... it seems right now like Netanyahu and the Israeli government are more worried about international approval than they are about saving the lives of their citizens. So, Israel really just needs to find the strength to do what needs to be done to destroy this terrorist threat, to destroy the infrastructure in Gaza and the West Bank that allows for these attacks to happen and to destroy the bloodthirsty anti-semitic culture that is thriving there. But they cannot do that if they are still pretending that the two-state solution is going to solve this problem.
"They can't do that if they are still pretending that Hamas will willingly demilitarise and accept Israel as a state. They cannot do that if they are pretending that they have allies in countries that do not care about Israeli safety. But that is what needs to happen here.
"So I really just don't think this conflict is going to end anytime soon."
"I think the consequences of this will be very bad.
"There will be even more Muslim terrorism worldwide. It evidently works.
"There will be more use of tactics like taking hostages and livestreaming murders and torture for political effect by non-Muslim groups and states, too. These tactics evidently work.
"Those people who think that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians still won’t get to see what actual genocide looks like, but Israel will be more willing than before to kill Palestinian civilians in order to destroy Hamas. Israel has lost a major motive for restraint. ...
"I do not wish for any of this. I just think it is what is likely to happen."
"Comparing the world today with that of 24 years ago, I am tempted to say that bin Laden lost the war on terror but is winning the clash of civilisations. ...
"It is not just that the West has been successfully penetrated by an antagonistic civilisation that fundamentally rejects the fundamental division between religion and politics - church and state - that lies at the heart of both Christianity and Judaism. The West is also being geopolitically outmanoeuvred by 'the rest' in just the way Huntington foresaw*.
"Contrast the global order after 9/11 with the global order today. We have come a long way since NATO secretary-general George Robertson’s statement on September 11, 2001 - 'Our message to the people of the United States is . . . "We are with you." '
"In the past three years, Zbig Brzezinski’s worst-case scenario has come about. 'Potentially, the most dangerous scenario,' he wrote in 'The Grand Chessboard' (1997), would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an ‘antihegemonic’ coalition united not by ideology but by 'complementary grievances' Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, that grand coalition has come into being, with North Korea as a fourth member. The 'Axis of Upheaval' (China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea) are now cooperating in military, economic and diplomatic ways. Moreover, the Trump administration’s combative treatment of American allies (the European Union, Japan, South Korea) and neutrals (Brazil, India, and Switzerland), not least with respect to trade policy, is alienating not only the traditionally nonaligned but also key partners.
'The upshot is that Israel is now virtually alone in fighting against the Islamists, so that even the United States wants plausible deniability when, as this week, the Israeli Air Force strikes the leadership of Hamas in the Qatari capital, Doha.
'The point is that the clash of civilisation continues. Now ask yourself: Who’s winning?
... "[C]omparing the world today with that of 24 years ago, I am tempted to say that bin Laden lost the war on terror but is winning the clash of civilisations. That’s not to say his particular brand of Salafist jihadism is winning; it can even be argued that it’s in decline. Bin Laden’s creed was always too uncompromising to form alliances of convenience. By contrast, the pro-Palestinian 'global intifada' is much more omnivorous, and can easily absorb the old left (Marxism and pan-Arabism) and the new (anti-globalism and wokeism). ...
"At the same time, Western civilisation today is so much more divided than it was 24 years ago. The public response to 10/7 illuminated the divisions. Whereas older voters generally remain more pro-Israel than pro-Palestinian, younger cohorts have swung the other way. Perhaps that’s because to Gen-Z, 9/11 is a faint memory - as distant as the Cuban Missile Crisis and Kennedy’s assassination were to my generation. But it’s also because the Islamists have done such a good job of co-opting the campus radicals, somehow overriding the cognitive dissonance in slogans such as “Queers for Palestine,” while at the same time tapping the antisemitism that still lurks on the far right. ...
"Walking the streets of New York this week, I felt old. To my children, my students, and my employees, 9/11 is not a memory. It is not even an historical fact. It is something people argue about on social media. ...
"It has taken me all these years to understand that 9/11 really was a clash of civilisations. And it has taken me until this week finally to face the reality that ours is losing."
* Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntiongton, whose seminal essay on “The Clash of Civilizations” was published in 1993, aligning with the Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis, who had long argued that Islam was chronically unable to modernise.
Here's a NOT PC post from 15 years ago, quoting the great Thomas Sowell, that could have been written yesterday ...
Two sentences that sum up the Israeli-Gaza conflict
If two sentences could sum up the Israeli-Gaza conflict, it would be these from Thomas Sowell:
"Since everybody seems to be criticising Israel for its military response to the rockets being fired into their country from the Gaza strip, let me add my criticisms as well. The Israelis traded land for peace, but they have never gotten the peace, so they should take back the land.... "Those who think 'negotiations' are a magic answer seem not to understand that when A wants to annihilate B, this is not an 'issue' that can be resolved amicably around a conference table."
AND another post from 20 years ago talking about that 'land-for-peace' deal ...
Rewarding terror
Israeli settlers are being forcibly removed from their homes. And Hamas leaders view the forced removal of Israeli citizens from their own property as a Hamas victory, and as an endorsement of their tactics of terror.
Says an ebullient Ahmed al-Bahar, a leading Hamas thug in Gaza,
"Israel has never been in such a state of retreat and weakness as it is today following more than four years of the intifada. Hamas's heroic attacks exposed the weakness and volatility of the impotent Zionist security establishment. The withdrawal marks the end of the Zionist dream, and is a sign of the moral and psychological decline of the Jewish state."
Another spokesman for Hamas terror says of the property eviction that it is "due to the Palestinian resistance operations. … and we will continue our resistance." Talk about rewarding terrorists.
And you'll be as pleased as Cox and Forkum to note that the evictions have brought Hamas leaders together and out of hiding in a bid for control of the Gaza Strip, which puts them in direct conflict with the Palestinian Authority, who have recently been making moves of moderation.
Israel is playing into the hands of Hamas, and in the process is betraying the property rights of its own people and the moderates in the Palestinian Authority. Shame.
"News consumers worldwide were galvanised over the weekend by disturbing photos like those of the Gazan child Muhammad al-Matouq, who appeared on the front page of Britain’s 'Daily Express' and then on that of 'The New York Times' and elsewhere as the symbol of Israel’s cruel starvation of innocents. After the photographs were seen around the world it became clear that the child in fact suffers from cerebral palsy and other conditions unrelated to starvation. The suffering child ended up being less the intended symbol of Israeli evil than of how genuine misery can be put to use by practitioners of narrative war. ...
"[This is not new.] A few weeks into the Gaza war that began on October 7, 2023, we Israelis learned from every major press outlet in the West that we’d just bombed a hospital and killed hundreds of people. The devastated Al-Ahli hospital was on front pages around the world, with a New York Times headline reporting 'at least 500 dead.' Furious protests erupted, and a mob burned a synagogue in Tunisia.
"The story was fake. A misfired Palestinian rocket had landed near the hospital, which was intact.
Around the same time, we started reading that Israel’s response to the October 7 terror attack—a war that Palestinians started, and which had barely begun at the time—was actually a 'genocide,' an ideological slur thrown at Israel by Soviet propagandists, Arab dictators, and the Western left beginning in the 1970s. ...
"Reports of impending hunger engineered by Israel in Gaza have been commonplace not just since the beginning of this war but for at least a decade and a half, since Hamas seized the territory and Israel and Egypt imposed a blockade that supposedly turned Gaza into an 'open-air prison.' The famine never materialised. Now we hear claims that this same period of supposedly extreme deprivation was actually a Gazan idyll that Israel has cruelly destroyed in this war.
"Very little of what is reported here, in other words, is what it seems. This is nothing new. Over the years, Israelis have been accused of fake massacres and rapes. The country’s actions are lied about almost daily by people describing themselves as journalists, analysts, and representatives of the United Nations, often using statistics that are themselves untrue. ...
"But one of the most awful prices [ of being unmoored from objective reality] was made clear this past week, with reports of acute hunger in Gaza.
"In a blizzard of ideological fiction, how are sane citizens in Israel, or anywhere else, supposed to know what’s true and to do the right thing? It’s not an exaggeration to say, as we’re seeing right now, that the answer to this question can be a matter of life and death. ...
"[O]ur plight as journalists is only marginally better than that of the average citizen. ... [T]here [are] nearly no trustworthy sources regarding reality in Gaza—certainly not the “Gaza Health Ministry,” which answers to Hamas; or Palestinian reporters intimidated by Hamas; or the international organisations, like the UN refugee agency UNRWA, embroiled in various forms of collaboration with Hamas. All of the above are engaged in a successful information campaign that uses Palestinian suffering, real and imagined, to catalyse international anger and tie Israel’s hands.
"The international press isn’t the answer. During my years as a reporter and editor for the Associated Press, I saw coverage altered by Hamas threats to our staff, while this fact was concealed from readers. I know firsthand that nearly no information coming from Gaza can be taken at face value.
"But neither can ... Israelis trust [their] own government, which has regularly misled the public ....
"And we can’t trust much of the information from the army, which regularly spins information overtly or by omission. ...
"When I asked ... a senior government official, with connections at the highest levels here and abroad—if people are starving in Gaza, he answered honestly, 'I don’t know.' ...
"Ohad Hemo, the Palestinian affairs reporter for [Israel's] Channel 12 News, the country’s most widely watched news programme ... report[ed] last Wednesday [that f]ood warehouses serving Hamas fighters are still full, ... and the crisis wasn’t only Israel’s fault. However ..."there is hunger in Gaza, and we need to state this loud and clear.” ... [A] senior figure in the Israeli military told one of my colleagues at the end of last week that while there isn’t mass starvation as claimed by pro-Hamas propaganda, Gaza really is on the brink this time.
"This explains why Israel, in panic mode, began air-dropping aid this weekend, along with Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, and has declared 'humanitarian pauses' to let food reach civilians—essentially unilateral ceasefires without any reciprocation from Hamas. There are now indications that food prices are dropping and that some of the scarcity is being addressed, but the situation for many civilians remains dire.
"Israel says Hamas bears the responsibility, as the group has diverted aid both to hoard for its fighters and to sell to finance the war—and then cynically uses Palestinian suffering as a propaganda tool. ... [Earlier this year] Israel began trying to conclusively break Hamas’s control of food by providing it through a new organisation, American-run and Israeli-affiliated, called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
"Because the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is an acute threat to its power, Hamas has been doing what it can to foment unrest around its distribution sites, kill its workers, and intimidate people accepting its food. ... —[which] has often meant chaotic scenes of thousands of men descending on the distribution sites and picking them clean, coming into dangerous and sometimes fatal contact with Israeli soldiers who are understandably scared of disguised Hamas fighters and unprepared for the kind of mass chaos they’re expected to control.
"It’s impossible to know how many Palestinians have been killed in these incidents, because Hamas numbers are part of the group’s information war. ...
"An experienced Israeli civilian involved in the aid efforts, from an organization that works both with international aid groups and the Israeli military, said on Friday that mass starvation is not yet the reality but could be in the near future. ...
"You might have thought that hunger in Gaza would work against Hamas, forcing the group to have mercy on its own civilians and accept the ceasefire desired by Israel and the U.S. and currently under discussion in Qatar. But Hamas knows that the opposite is true: The disaster they’ve engineered in Gaza fuels the global campaign against Israel. ...
"One of the terrible facts of this war is that the Palestinians who started the war, and who constructed the twisted battlefield on which it has been fought, won’t act to save their own people. Starvation and death serve the Hamas plan. That means that Israel must decide how far it wants to push—and when to stop."
