Feelings over facts: how Hamas duped Western media
Yet Netanyahu’s position on Gaza before that horrific day was in line with what the left-wing leaders of Europe and Australia – now locked in battle with Netanyahu over support for a Palestinian state – believe Palestinians still need.
Under the headline ‘The Dream Palace of the Jews’, Tablet magazine editor-at-large Liel Leibovitz on July 23 wrote: “Israeli society, fragmented ..... (on) any subject imaginable, was in full agreement (before October 7) on one thing: the best way to handle the threat posed by Hamas in Gaza was by pursuing a cautious policy that focused on economic incentives … and revolved around the logic that the more prosperous Gaza grows, the harder it would be for Hamas to hold on to power.”
Leibovitz argues Netanyahu, his security agencies and the Israel Defence Forces all supported a European-style social democrat commitment of tens of millions of dollars a year to underwrite improved living standards in the Strip, which had been self-governing since Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s 2005 withdrawal.
The Hebrew daily newspaper, Israel Hayom, has reported Shin Bet’s internal security agency boss Ronen Bar, speaking two days before October 7, told his audience the way forward in Gaza was “delivering substantial humanitarian aid as an act of goodwill”.
At that very moment Hamas’s leadership, in tunnels only a few miles away, was preparing its bestial Sabbath assault on civilian communities in southern Israel.
This goes to the heart of the progressive misreading of the aims of modern Islamism.
Journalists and politicians who imagine Hamas as freedom fighters seeking to overthrow a colonial power are fools.
Like ISIS, Hamas has believed since its first founding document in 1989 in destroying Israel and killing Jews.
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke might be shocked that Simcha Rothman, the Knesset member whose visa he blocked last week, wants Hamas destroyed. But Rothman is right and Burke is pandering to the rise of political Islam in Labor electorates. Think the Muslim Votes group that fielded candidates at May’s election.
Journalists in Australia who cite the hundreds of thousands of anti-Netanyahu protesters on the streets of Israel last week as evidence Israelis don’t support the war against Hamas are wrong. Those protesters want Israel’s hostages back and an end to the war because they fear for the safety of their sons and daughters fighting in Gaza.
But they don’t want Hamas to survive in any form. Many critics of Netanyahu no longer agree with a “two-state solution” because they have realised what a Palestinian state would mean for the safety of Israel’s Jews.
An editorial in the centrist (by Israel’s standards) Jerusalem Post last Wednesday summed up the national mood.
“The idea of establishing a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria, which would effectively turn the centre of the country into a Gaza-envelope-like area, is one a majority of Israelis once entertained, but no longer. The Second Intifada disabused many of that notion, and Hamas’s October 7 massacre buried it even deeper.”
The Post argues France, Australia and others see a Palestinian state as the solution demanded by October 7.
“It is as if the world believes it can take steps that Israel views as profoundly inimical to its interests … it’s as if Israel has no agency of its own,” the Post said.
Remember Israel is a nuclear power with the strongest military presence in the entire Middle East. It destroyed Hezbollah in weeks and bombed Iran to its knees in a fortnight. It is a close US ally, something Australia may no longer be.
None of this is to suggest Netanyahu is above criticism. He has made many mistakes in Gaza, including adopting war aims that may be unattainable.
This column last week argued his lack of a formal strategy to rebuff false Hamas claims that Israel is deliberately starving Gazans was a trigger for rising anti-Semitism globally.
Nor was there anything to be gained by Netanyahu’s public attack on Anthony Albanese last week. Yet his letter criticising the PM for not dealing with the rise of domestic anti-Semitism did make some serious points that would have been better made privately.
Most thoughtful people wish the Palestinians a reprieve from the horrors of the past two years. But they also know much of the blame for what has happened to civilians in the Strip should be sheeted home to Hamas, which deliberately uses its people as human shields.
The approach of Albanese, Burke and Foreign Minister Penny Wong is about pacifying Muslim voters in Labor seats, but it risks the sort of Islamisation of domestic politics that is threatening social cohesion in the UK, France, Belgium, Holland and Germany.
Albanese needs to do more than simply keep repeating that there can be no role for Hamas in a future Palestinian state. The PM needs to show he understands the misinformation war Hamas is using in Western media. To date, he has only fed into concern about false images of children allegedly starving but in fact suffering genetic illnesses.
The Free Press in an August 18 investigation – ‘They Became Symbols for Gazan Starvation. But All 12 Suffer from Other Heath Problems’ – analysed photos of Palestinian children published by Western media to back the starvation myth. Every one was found to be suffering from other diseases.
Why can’t Albanese or his ministers ever admit Hamas hides behind its civilians and kills them if they object? The Arab League has been more forceful criticising such tactics than most European governments, Canada and Australia.
You could hear the frustration in Netanyahu’s voice in his exclusive interview with Sharri Markson on Sky News Australia last Thursday.
“When the worst terrorist organisation on Earth – these savages who murdered women, raped them, beheaded men, burnt babies alive in front of their parents and took hundreds of hostages – when these people congratulate the Prime Minister of Australia, you know something is wrong,” he said.
Readers wanting more insight into what Hamas is doing via the Western media can read for free another piece by Tablet’s Leibovitz, titled ‘Hamas Is Winning the Culture War’, published on August 11.
Leibovitz argues most Western activists do know Hamas is stealing aid and selling it for profit as well as shooting at its own civilians at aid depots.
They know the photos of starving kids are false.
“The point of the photographs was to provide onlookers with a fig leaf of an excuse to embrace the narrative of a terrorist organisation whose aims are in fact, openly, genocidal,” Leibovitz says.
“But what else is a good liberal-progressive person to do?
“All you need to do is look at the pictures and feel empathy with the hungry child. Only a monster could possibly confront such undeniable evidence of human suffering and respond with calorie counts and numbers of aid trucks.”
Or indeed point out what Netanyahu did with Markson: Israeli aid now amounts to more than a tonne of food for each and every Gazan.
Yet this is where Western journalism now sits. Feelings trump evidence. All Israel can do is finish the job in Gaza and make sure October 7 never happens again.
Unfortunately for long-suffering Palestinians betrayed by their own leaders for a century, Wong may be right: There may be no Palestinian state left.
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Journalists in Australia who regularly call Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the “butcher of Gaza” and a war criminal also blame him for the Hamas pogrom in southern Israel on October 7, 2023.