Too much reporting about Gaza is presented by people who have no clue about Israel, its history and purpose.
The Jewish state is motivated by a central creed: “Never again”. Yet on October 7, 2023, a fascist Islamic death cult, not much different from ISIS, crossed the border into Israel from Gaza to take the lives of 1200 innocents on a Sabbath morning and capture 260 hostages, many from a young people’s dance party for peace.
Western reporting seems to indicate most journalists don’t know that Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005, and left the strip to govern itself. Hamas won an election in 2007, set about murdering its rivals from the Palestinian Authority and then refused to have another election.
For this behaviour, Hamas won the support of Iran and Qatar. Yet Israel was subjected to historically inverted arguments that it was an apartheid state committing genocide.
Arabs living inside Israel have their own members of the Knesset and the right to vote.
Israelis today are sceptical of the two-state solution they supported 30 years ago. Why? October 7 happened after 18 years of Gazan self-rule going back to Ariel Sharon’s withdrawal from the former Egyptian territory.
This columnist spent three weeks in May on a private, personally paid trip to Israel to visit a daughter who has been living in Tel Aviv since 2013, and to meet her first child, a son born on Christmas Eve.
What stands out in every corner of Tel Aviv, the small towns of the rural north and the desert communities south of Be’er-Sheva is a country united behind a single aim: “Bring them home”.
Stickers picturing the remaining hostages, those already returned and the dead of October 7 adorn thousands of bus stops, park benches and lamp posts. Many large residential blocks feature multistorey “Bring Them Home” posters down the sides of buildings. Many cars have such stickers on their rear windows.
Israel was founded in 1948, after the passing of UN Resolution 181 to protect descendants of the original inhabitants of the land of Israel, following the murder of six million Jews in industrial-scale death camps during World War II. The country will do everything in its power to save every Jew.
ABC Radio National’s Sally Sara on Wednesday morning presented a discussion of the two-state solution that featured Gershon Baskin, an Israeli who helped to negotiate the release of Gilad Shalit in 2011.
Sara did not mention that among the 1000 Palestinian prisoners traded for that single kidnapped Israeli soldier was Yahya Sinwar, the architect of October 7.
Anyone who witnessed the 1976 Entebbe rescue in which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother was killed, or the tracking down of the Munich Olympics’ Black September killers who murdered 11 Israelis in the Games village, should understand that Hamas knew what would happen when it kidnapped young and old people, women and babies and took them into Gaza.
Israel was always going to act.
This column discussed Israel’s attitude on October 14 2023, arguing Israel “will struggle with the idea of not bowing to the blackmail of hostage taking”.
This is the conundrum in Israel: the desire to bring home the hostages safely, even if it comes at the cost of allowing Hamas’s survival. Yet there is little Israel can do to force Hamas’s hand.
Hamas is winning the global media war by deliberately sacrificing Palestinian civilians.
Israelis do lament those civilian deaths. But they also mourn the loss of more than 850 young soldiers, men and women, from the Israel Defence Force in pursuing Hamas.
Israelis also feel the loss of support from former allies – such as Australia. But they understand the political purpose of Hamas’s strategy to hide in tunnels under hospitals and schools.
What Israelis don’t understand is why so many Western journalists can’t tell the truth about this strategy. They see the willingness of Western journalists to believe the most ridiculous anti-Israeli propaganda as pure anti-Semitism.
Think of last month’s foolish and false story that 14,000 Palestinian babies could die in 48 hours unless Israel lifted its aid blockade. News organisations such as the BBC, the Guardian and The New York Times that ran it prominently buried their subsequent corrections.
This story was the result of a UN staffer deliberately feeding the media a false narrative, yet journalists remain as incurious about the role of the UN as most have been since it was revealed as many as a dozen UN workers participated in the October 7 massacre.
It turns out the UN child famine scare was based on an assessment that 14,000 children aged from six to 59 months were expected to be affected by malnutrition between April 2025 and March 2026 if aid remained cut off. Aid has in fact begun flowing again.
This is just the latest in 18 months of misreporting of alleged Gaza famine. A famine never eventuated, as this column has argued several times using the UN’s own aid daily dashboard, which has shown aid levels have often been higher in the last year than before the war.
Why the willingness to believe Israel would deliberately starve civilians, especially by people who could not condemn the rape and murder of October 7? Smells like anti-Semitism.
Those looking for a detailed explanation about how Western journalists got the famine story wrong for more than a year, should check Michael Ames’s piece, headlined ‘The Gaza Famine Myth’, published by The Free Press on May 7.
Suffice to say, the thousands of Palestinians marching back to northern Gaza at the start of the latest ceasefire in January were far from starving. The Middle East Media Research Institute has even published a video of bustling Gazan markets full of food and produce as recently as the past week.
This newspaper’s chief international correspondent Cameron Stewart got the latest famine media beat-up right in his reporting on Thursday. New aid distribution protocols were designed by Israel and the US to prevent Hamas from looting food aid, one of its main sources of income for weapons purchases.
None of that registered at the national broadcaster. ABC AM on Friday seemed surprised Israel was pushing Gazans south and did not mention the new aid protocols were to stop Hamas stealing food.
Discussing the IDF’s latest Operation Gideon’s Chariots, Netanyahu on May 21 outlined the reasons for the new aid arrangements. He foreshadowed moving the population south to where Hamas’s tunnel network has been destroyed and then dismantling what is left of Hamas in central and northern Gaza.
The tragedy for the Palestinians, who should have accepted the territory offered by the UN in 1947, is that yet again they will cede land as they did after the failed attacks by Israel’s neighbours in 1948, 1967 and 1973. Hamas’s billionaire leaders meanwhile have begun talks in Qatar “to accept limited deportations of its military commanders”, veteran Israeli journalist Ehud Yaari reported on Wednesday.
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