Journalists ignorant of Israel’s history

Former IDF spokesman Peter Lerner told Patricia Karvelas on RN Breakfast last Wednesday that the IDF had killed or captured 14,000 fighters. Picture: AFP

More than nine months into Israel’s war in Gaza, much of the world’s media still has not understood Gazan civilians are the deliberate victims of Hamas’s tactics and continue to report without scepticism everything coming from journalists inside the city, who are largely Hamas members or sympathisers.

Of course the death toll of 40,000 Palestinians – 2 per cent of Gaza’s population – is far too high. So too is the destruction of hospitals, schools, mosques and private homes.

Yet journalists have known for decades that Hamas fights all its Gaza campaigns from tunnels deliberately hidden under civilian facilities. The more tragic the circumstances of the dead the better for the terrorist death cult to boost support in the West.

Former IDF spokesman Peter Lerner told Patricia Karvelas on RN Breakfast last Wednesday that the IDF had killed or captured 14,000 fighters. Yet in much of the Arab and Iranian media the war is covered as if Hamas is winning. Odd, since the IDF has lost 350 soldiers. 

The calculation in the Islamic world is about damage to the image of Israel. It is a foolish misreading of Israeli public opinion, military power and economic strength. As this column argued on June 16: “Much of the media, many university leaders and some of our politicians ... (are) allowing themselves to be used in an Iranian-sponsored propaganda war to entrench Islamic fundamentalism.”

Closer to the truth about Hamas’s prospects was former Palestinian Authority Minister for Prisoners’ Affairs Ashraf Al-Ajrami, who wrote in the Palestinian daily newspaper Al-Ayyam on July 3 that Hamas was deluded. He argued October 7 would not liberate Palestinians “but cause them harm that will last for generations’’.

Hamas would precipitate “a new Nakba greater than that of 1948”. While Israel was undoubtedly being damaged by the global peace movement it was not going to collapse and the real price for Hamas’s ill-considered actions on October 7 would be paid by Palestinian civilians for years to come. 

Former IDF spokesman Peter Lerner. Picture: ABC

It’s not the sort of analysis you hear on the ABC or read in The Guardian. But such reassessments are being published in the northern hemisphere, even by the BBC.

On July 4 BBC online published a story by Middle East correspondent Lucy Williamson and Gaza correspondent Rushdi Aboualouf: ‘Hamas faces growing public dissent as Gaza war erodes support’.

“Open criticism of Hamas has been growing in Gaza, both on the streets and online. Some have publicly criticised Hamas for hiding hostages in apartments near a busy marketplace or firing rockets from civilian areas,” they wrote.

They quote one resident saying, “They ask what the 7 October attacks were for – some say they were a gift to Israel.”

The New York Times is also being forced to examine Hamas’s tactics. 

In a piece published by the Times on July 13 and republished by the SMH and Age on July 15, the NYT  examined Hamas’s use of civilians and civilian sites as cover. The Times story – “Hamas’s tactics explain why Israel has been forced to strike so much civilian infrastructure, kill so many Palestinians and detain so many civilians” – could have run any time since the war started, as many such pieces did here.

Yet most of the coverage in the West remains one-sided. Think of all the over-hyped warnings about famine in Gaza in March and April when the UN’s own aid dashboard – published in this column online on April 7 – showed the IDF was letting through more aid trucks daily than before the war. Did your preferred news source report early this month new official aid data confirming there never was a famine? 

An Israeli soldier pictured in May, kneeling inside the section of a tunnel during operations the army said were to rescue hostages and destroy underground tunnels in the Gaza Strip. Picture: Israeli Army / AFP

If much of the world’s media have failed to come to terms with Hamas’s tactical aims in Gaza, none seem to have understood the wider strategic aims of Hamas’s supporters – Iran, Qatar and Turkey. All seek a return to former imperial glory and all want to exclude non-Muslims from the Middle East. All are profoundly anti-Semitic governments.

Western dupes schooled in identity politics side with Palestinians they imagine are indigenous to the area between the river and the sea. They lack historical background.

Islam is a religion, not an ethnicity, and a recent religion to boot. Jews, direct descendants of the original Canaanite inhabitants of the area, are an ethno-religious grouping.

The forebears of many of today’s Palestinians came to the Levant as part of the Arab conquests after the birth of Islam in 610 AD. These conquests also took much of northern Africa, but no one would claim such Arabs were ethnic Africans. 

Many other ethnic groups, neither Jewish nor Islamic, have been driven out of the Middle East since World War 1 as Muslim intolerance surged. Think of the hundred of thousands of Kurds killed, the Christan Assyrians driven from the region, the persecution of Maronite and Yazidi Christians in Lebanon and Iraq or the pogroms against Copts in Egypt. Most of those groups live peacefully within Israel and vote there.

The UN lists characteristics of indigeneity. Self-identification is number one. Jews self-identify as indigenous to Israel. Some Palestinians do but they also self-identify as Arab. Yet Arabs are not indigenous to the area.

Jews speak Hebrew, the same language used by the Israelite descendants of the original Canaanites. They called themselves Jews in ancient times. Many Palestinians migrated in the 19th and 20th centuries from Egypt, including the late PLO chief Yasser Arafat. Many prominent Palestinian family names indicate their origins: al-Masri (Egypt),  al-Husseini (Arabia), al-Kurd (Kurdish).

Almost all the major cities of Israel have Jewish names that predate by many centuries the birth of Mohammed. The only Arab-founded city in all of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank is Ramle, the original administrative centre under Arab Islamic rule, not Jerusalem. Even modern Ramallah was built on top of an ancient Jewish town that predates Islam. 

But it’s more than just ahistorical delusions by activist Palestinian supporters. 

Much of the Western left recoils at the imperial ambitions of Vladimir Putin in Ukraine but seems unaware Arab, Turkish and Persian leaders have been working to restore past imperial glories.

Many Palestinians migrated in the 19th and 20th centuries from Egypt, including the late PLO chief Yasser Arafat.

Fathom Journal in June published “Imperial rollback in the Middle East: A necessity for regional peace”. The author, Olga Kirschbaum-Shirazki, Canadian academic and co-founder of the Tel Aviv Review of Books, asks why so many who see the end of the German, Hungarian, Spanish, Portuguese and Soviet empires as positives are blind to imperial aspirations in the Islamic world.

She argues the Mullahs in Iran seek a return to Persian glory, Turkey’s President Erdogan imagines a new Ottoman era and some Arab states – think Qatar’s funding of Hamas – hope for a return to former Arab glories. All want the Islamic world free of other religions. 

“Palestinian maximalism is an extension, under a different name, of the Arab imperialism present in all post World War 1 states, which claimed that where Arab Muslims are a significant part of the population, they should rule,” Kirschbaum-Shirazki writes. 

Of course Gaza is a tragedy. But more journalists need to understand the fundamentalist groups and regimes backing Hamas are not concerned with improving life on the Arab street, let alone peace with Israel.