A Wake Up Call

The truth about Israel's conduct in the war

Palestinian ‘journalist’ reporting from Gaza (Ifex)

One of the most revealing movies I have ever seen about the Holocaust was The Zone of Interest. It portrayed what life was like for the family of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, whose family lived just beyond the wall enclosing the camp. In short, life was pretty normal for his family. Had you not known that genocide was taking place just on the other side of that wall, you would have thought this was a simple story about the peaceful and loving domestic life of a German soldier and his family.

To my great dismay, when Jonathan Glazer - the Jewish director of the film - accepted the Oscar for Best International Feature Film, he publicly condemned Israel for its conduct in the war against Hamas, comparing the Palestinians in Gaza with the Jewish inmates at Auschwitz. He received applause from an audience consisting mainly of A-list actors and other important entertainment-industry figures.

The war had only been going on for a few months at the time. To say the least, I was both shocked and disappointed.

It has been all downhill since then. What was once broad support for the Jewish state has turned into a contest over who can bash Israel the most. While there has been an increase in closet antisemites on the right who now bash Israel as a euphemism for bashing Jews, most mainstream conservative Republicans generally still support the State of Israel.

On the left, however, bashing Israel has become far more mainstream. This can be seen in the recent gains made by far-left, anti-Israel candidates for public office. And by the many mainstream Democrats who have disavowed their relationship with AIPAC. It is almost as though there is a race to see who can reject AIPAC support the most.

AIPAC’s support used to be eagerly sought after by any politician who wanted Jewish support. That mattered more in terms of campaign donations than Jewish votes, since our percentage of the population is less than 2 percent. Governor J.B. Pritzker – who is Jewish - was quick to reject their support in any way, shape, or form, as were many mainstream Jewish Democrats who apparently felt the need to prove their anti-Israel bona fides.

The mainstream media has also been guilty of contributing to this through the way it had reported the war in Gaza. It repeatedly used images of carnage and destruction without bothering to explain what they were really about - trusting the bloody screens to tell their story for them. And since it was Israel dropping bombs in Gaza, along with reports of 76,000 civilian deaths coming out of there, Israel was seen as committing genocide. Even by those who did not use the word, the implication was clear, based on those images and the narrative coming from a variety of sources that were not friendly to Israel then and never were.

Had those reports been accurate, honest, and complete, Gaza would not be seen as the second coming of Auschwitz and the Jews as Nazi-like exterminators. And yet more and more Jews are beginning to believe the worst about their own people based on unexplained images of war and the perpetual lies being forwarded and repeated by the mainstream media. A lot of Jews are being gaslighted into believing these falsehoods. The idea that repeating a lie often enough makes people think it is true has never been more evident than it is now.

None of this is new. I have said it all before. But no one has said it better or with more detailed, accurate facts than the great Melanie Phillips in her recent article in JNS.

She corrects the record that falsely accused Israel of a variety of war crimes, showing that many of those accusations are not supported by the information now coming out. In short - the libels against Israel are falling apart.

Her article should be read in full. But here are a few excerpts that more than make this point:

The claim that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza—the mind-bending accusation that’s powered this whole obscene onslaught and which now trips off the tongues of countless numbers of people who clearly have absolutely no idea what the word even means—has now fallen apart.

It’s been totally disproved by statistics produced by Gaza’s own Hamas-led institutions. These record that, in a population of about 2 million, around 74,000 deaths were caused by the war (failing implausibly to note one single terrorist among that number). Yet during this period, they also record that some 121,000 babies have been born.

Since genocide means the intended destruction of a people in whole or in part, the fact that Gaza’s people produced a net gain for humanity of nearly 50,000 souls during this period of Israeli bombardment—not to mention Israel’s facilitation of repeated polio vaccinations to around 600,000 Gazan children—demonstrates that the genocide claim was ridiculous.

The related libel that Israel was starving Gaza and causing imminent famine has also been shown to be totally untrue. A newly released U.N.-led nutrition survey of Gaza’s children has found that acute malnutrition, which ranged from 0.2% to 0.8%, was lower than it was before the war when the rate stood at 0.8%. It was also well below the acute malnutrition rates reported in nearby countries such as Egypt (2.9%) or Jordan (2.0%).

Then there were the repeated claims that Israel was killing Gazan health workers and journalists. Yet over the past few weeks, more and more of these have been shown to have been combatants.

Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have named and celebrated as “martyrs” dozens of “healthcare workers” whom they have identified as military commanders and terrorist operatives who used hospitals as command centers. Far from selflessly treating the sick and injured under bombardment, these “healthcare workers” were using them as cannon fodder while duping the credulous West.

As for the “journalists” who were killed, far from bringing truth to the world, many of these were delivering lies designed to sanitize their true aim of exterminating Israel and murdering Jews.

Bit by bit, Western organizations purporting to speak on behalf of media operatives have been revealed as hopelessly complicit in this.

I wish I could say that Israel has finally been vindicated by these newly revealed facts and that all of these libels will now go away. But I doubt that they will. These new revelations will likely be ignored or disputed despite the new evidence supporting Israel’s case. Democrats will still double down on claims that Israel committed genocide and other atrocities in Gaza—or something very close to it.

But at least there is one responsible journalist telling the truth.

My hope is that at least some of us who have been duped into thinking the worst of our own people will now realize that the facts say otherwise. And that blaming Prime Minister Netanyahu for the conduct of the war is as non starter - since that conduct was largely supported by opposition parties. And in any case has been grossly mischaracterized by the media. Neither genocide nor any other war crimes were committed by Israel in its defensive war with Hamas. That is the unvarnished truth