The murderous terror assault by Hamas on Israel was the worst terrorist attack on a democratic country since 9/11. In fact, proportionate to population, the death toll from these attacks is about six times worse than 9/11. Those of us over 30 remember the Bali bombings of 2002, when Islamist terrorists killed 88 Australians. Imagine a terror attack on Australia which caused 4,000 deaths. That would be equivalent to what Israel has undergone in the past week.
One of the standard responses to this assault has been to assert that Israel has the right to defend itself. The United Nations Charter gives all sovereign states that right. Ukraine is exercising that right, right now, in the face of Russia's illegal invasion. But Ukraine's situation is very different to Israel's. Russia has launched a conventional military invasion, which Ukraine is resisting by conventional military means. Apart from Russia and its apologists, no-one seriously disputes Ukraine's right to resist Russia's invasion.
Israel, by contrast, has faced an attack by a non-state actor, Hamas, which has seized control of a territory, Gaza, contiguous to Israel, and used it to launch repeated missile offensives against Israeli cities, and now a full-scale terror assault on Israeli communities. In these circumstances, what does it mean to say that "Israel has the right to defend itself"? Does it mean that Israel can fight off (or kill) the terrorists that attacked it, but cannot touch them or their commanders in the territory they control? That is a recipe for endless repeats of what we have seen over the past week.
The right to self-defence is not a purely passive right, a right to react when attacked. The stated purpose of Hamas is the destruction of Israel and the death of every Jew in Israel – indeed every Jew in the world. The experience of the past decade, culminating in the events of last week, shows that Israel cannot defend itself against an existential threat of that kind unless Hamas is destroyed. That is the mission Israel has now undertaken.
Contrary to the repeated assertions of Israel's legion of critics, the Israel Defence Force does not deliberately target civilians.* It targets terrorist infrastructure. But because Hamas chooses as a deliberate strategy to embed its terrorist infrastructure among the civilian population of Gaza, Hamas cannot be destroyed without causing civilian casualties. Hamas fires its rockets from schools and hospitals and mosques, so that Israel will be forced to bomb these sites to stop the missile attacks. Hamas in fact wants civilian deaths in Gaza, so that it can display its "martyrs" in front of the world's media and anti-Israel NGOs like Amnesty.
Everyone who has repeated the statement "Israel has the right to defend itself" will now have to remain resolute in support of Israel’s decision to exercise that right in practice over the coming days and weeks. Whether Israel decides on a land invasion, or confines itself to air attacks, there will be a lot of deaths in Gaza. Israel's friends will need to stress, in the face a concerted anti-Israel propaganda campaign, that responsibility for every death that occurs in Gaza lies with Hamas, and also with the Iranian regime which sponsors and bankrolls Hamas.
* If you believe Israel does target civilians, or is engaged in "collective punishment" in bombing Gaza, consider this. Gaza is a densely populated urban area, with no air defences and no air-raid shelters (because Hamas does not allow them). Israel has among the most powerful and sophisticated armed forces in the world. It has complete control of the air over Gaza. If Israel chose, it could reduce the whole of Gaza to rubble in a few days and kill most of its population. Clearly that is not what Israel has chosen to do.
Although currently available statistics are not very reliable, they bear this out. According to al-Jazeera, Israel has dropped 6,000 bombs on Gaza this week, and has killed 2,700 people in doing so. That is, Israel has had to drop 2.2 bombs to kill one person. Does anyone seriously suppose that the Israeli Air Force is as incompetent as that kill-rate suggests? These figures can only mean that Israel is actively trying to avoid killing civilians.
Thanks again for all this. I wrote a comment this morning recommending your comments to the other commentators on this page. They are essential reading.
Thank you Susan for this close reading of the MSNBC reporting. What stood out to me was the lack of clarity in many of the comments, the elliptical sentences of the type skewered by Orwell in Politics and the English Language.
I share your doubts that an Israeli invasion is in the best interests of a safe and secure Jewish homeland. I use the word doubts, because the military and geopolitical issues seem so complex that I'm suspicious of anyone who has absolute certainty of what exactly Israel ought to do in response to the Hamas atyrocities.
The one thing I am certain of is that the Netanyahu coalition government's policies have been counter to the goal of creating conditions for a safe and secure Israel. His policy priority has been to stay out of jail.
I also feel overwhelmed by the complexity of the issues, and hope I didn’t sound like I know what I’m talking about when I reflected at the end on a ceasefire. I feel on sure ground when I’m deconstructing the media, but not about what should/could be done “on the ground” of the actual war. All I can do is play out various scenario in my head, and none of them seem very hopeful to me. Agree with you completely about Netanyahu.
On 7 October, about 2,900 Hamas* terrorists crossed into Israel from the Gaza Strip and proceeded to kill any and all Israelis they encountered: military or civilian, armed or unarmed, men, women, children and elderly. By the end of the day they had killed approximately 1,400 people, the great majority of them Israeli Jews, but including around 100 non-Jewish civilians and about 70 Arab-Israelis. About 350 of those killed were members of the Israeli military or police. The rest were civilians. Many of the dead were tortured before being killed. Many women were raped. Some people, including children, were beheaded or burned alive.
(* Some belonged to smaller groups such as Islamic Jihad and the PFLP, but they operated under Hamas command. “Hamas” is an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah, or Islamic Resistance Movement.)
Over 1,000 of the Hamas terrorists were killed by the Israeli military, police or armed civilians. About 500 were taken alive, most of them after being wounded (and receiving treatment in Israeli hospitals). The rest are assumed to have escaped back to Gaza, although some remained at large in Israel for days before being hunted down. As they retreated, the Hamas terrorists kidnapped about 240 people, including many non-Israelis, and took them as hostages back to Gaza.
Immediately after the 7 October attack, Israel began to bomb targets in Gaza associated with Hamas, particularly its missile-launching sites and its command centres. The pace of Israeli attacks increased through October, and at the end of the month Israel began ground operations at several points in the Gaza Strip. The Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry claims that over 9,000 people have been killed in the Israeli attacks. This number is probably an exaggeration, but there is no doubt that a large number of people in Gaza have been killed.
There are a number of points to be made about this.
1. It was absolutely certain and predictable that Israel would respond to the events of 7 October with massive military force. This is what Israel has always done in the past, and it was inconceivable that Israel would respond to the atrocities committed by Hamas in any other way. In the past, Israel has been content to “teach Hamas a lesson” with a bombing campaign, and then to yield to international pressure for a negotiated ceasefire. This time there was no such possibility. Israel immediately said that the aim of its operation was the complete elimination of Hamas, and that it will not settle for less. No Israeli government, and certainly not the current one, could have done anything else.
2. Hamas knew all of this when it decided to launch the 7 October attack. They knew that their attacks would attract a massive military response, and that thousands of people in Gaza would die as a result. Gaza is one of the most densely populated urban areas in the world. It has absolutely no air defences and no bomb shelters, because Hamas will not permit them. Hamas deliberately embeds its missile-launching sites and its command centres among the population of Gaza, including in and under schools, hospitals, mosques and apartment blocks. For instance, Hamas has placed a command centre under the Dar al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City. On top of this, Hamas is forcibly opposing any effort to evacuate civilians from areas Israel says it will attack, and in this it is being supported by the UN, in contradiction to the UN’s usual policy of trying to evacuate civilians from war zones.
3. Hamas follows these policies with the specific intention of causing civilian deaths which it can then blame on Israeli “war crimes,” confident in the knowledge that the UN, many governments, large sections of the western media, and NGOs such as Amnesty and MSF will uncritically accept and repeat Hamas’s narrative. This has happened over and over again during the past 30 years, and Hamas was rightly confident that the same pattern would be followed this time. So we saw uncritical reporting (on the front page of the New York Times no less) that Israel had bombed the Al-Ahli Arab hospital, killing more than 500 people, when in fact the hospital was not bombed at all. This story is still being repeated despite conclusive proof that it never happened.
4. The term “civilian casualties” needs much more critical attention. Under international law, a civilian is any person who is not a member of the armed forces of a recognised state. Gaza has not been part of any recognised state since 1918, and Hamas is certainly not a recognised armed force. That means that everyone in Gaza is a civilian, including the estimated (by Reuters) 40,000 armed and trained members of Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups. It means that the 2,900 terrorists who crossed into Israel were civilians. We do not know how many of the people killed by Israeli air-strikes in Gaza were members of these organisations, and how many were “genuine” civilians, because Hamas draws no such distinction. Contrary to endless allegations, Israel does not “target civilians.” Israel targets terrorist infrastructure. But as a result of Hamas’s deliberate policy, this cannot be done without killing many genuine civilians. Responsibility for all these deaths rests absolutely with Hamas.
5. So far as we know, every one of the Hamas terrorists who crossed into Israel was born and raised in Gaza. They were educated in schools paid for and operated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the UN agency which was created in1948 to care for the 750,000 Arabs who left what is now Israel in the course of the Israeli War of Independence. Today UNRWA has an annual budget of $US1.6 billion and employs 30,000 people, most of them Palestinians. It is a vast, corrupt and self-perpetuating bureaucracy that controls the lives of 5.9 million descendants of the 1948 refugees, including two-thirds of the population of Gaza. Its schools – paid for in part by your taxes – have inculcated generations of Palestinian youth with hatred of Israel and of Jews (for most Palestinians, the two things are synonymous). Gaza has a very young population (75% under 30), most of whom have never left the Gaza Strip. They know nothing about the world except what Hamas and its friends in UNRWA tell them.
6. This in turn raises the issue of how much sympathy we are expected to have for the population of Gaza in the current situation. Hamas has about 40,000 active fighters, but they of course are surrounded by a much wider circle of supporters, probably including most of the adult population. An opinion poll earlier this year, conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, showed that 79% of Gazans “supported armed opposition to Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.” Well, if you support armed opposition to Israel, you cannot be surprised when Israel responds in kind, as it has always done. Hamas has ruled Gaza ever since it staged its coup against the Palestinian Authority in 2007. In the 16 years since, there has not been, so far as I am aware, any significant resistance to Hamas rule. It is sometimes said that resistance to Hamas is impossible, but the events of the Arab Spring and the popular uprisings in Iran show that this is not true.
7. Every time conflict breaks out between Israel and the Palestinians, Israel is accused of “targeting civilians,” “collective punishment” and (increasingly commonly) “genocide.” (This last charge is particularly bizarre. When Israel took possession of Gaza in 1967, it had about 400,000 inhabitants. Today it has 2.3 million. The Israelis must be very incompetent at committing genocide.) The other charge always levelled at Israel is “disproportionality.” Israel, it is said, responds to the terrorist murders of its citizens by killing a much larger number of Palestinians. But this accusation shows a remarkable lack of historical awareness. All modern wars have been marked by disproportionality. The German Luftwaffe’s blitz against Britain in 1940-41 killed 40,000 people – the allied bombing of Germany killed 600,000, mostly civilians. The Japanese killed 2,400 Americans at Pearl Harbor – the US air war against Japan killed well over a million, mostly civilians.
8. Israel’s response to the atrocities committed by Hamas should be considered in this light. As I noted above, Gaza is a crowded urban area with no air defences. Israel has one of the most powerful and sophisticated air forces in the world. If Israel really wanted to inflict collective punishment on the people of Gaza, it could reduce the entire territory to smoking rubble and kill most of the population in a matter of days. It has not done so, even though Israel has the most hard-line nationalist government in its history and even though most of the Israeli population is consumed with grief and anger following the 7 October attacks. If ever Israel wanted to commit genocide against the Palestinians, now would be the moment. But instead Israel is pursuing a measured military strategy with a strictly defined objective, the elimination of Hamas and its allies in Gaza. Once that is achieved, Israel will be more than happy to hand Gaza over to the Palestinian Authority, or Egypt, or the UN, or anyone else willing to take it.
Barbara, can I copy and post on my FB page? I can attribute to you or not, however you’d prefer. My email: bordo@uky.edu. Sometimes it gets clogged so a FB PM can be more reliable. Are we friends? We should be, so let me know how to get you on FB.
On Friday the IDF had a screening for reporters of the actual footage of the October 7 attacks in Israel.
No one at Friday’s screening in New York of the raw footage of Hamas’s atrocities during its Oct. 7 invasion of Israel will forget what they saw. The journalist next to us, at the Israeli consulate in New York, was crying. Mouths seemed to hang open, even after the rampage recorded by jubilant Hamas terrorists on their GoPros had ended, and Israeli officials tried to make sense of what we saw.
Why did the Hamas men, upon confronting the dead body of a teenage girl, start cheering? Why did they argue over who would get to decapitate a Thai guest worker they had shot, then proclaim “Allahu akbar” with every swing at his neck?
“Allahu akbar,” meaning “God is most great,” was on their lips over and over as they shot defenseless civilians, dragged corpses and pumped round after round into the dead. There it was again on the terrorists’ return to Gaza, “Allahu akbar” coming from crowds as a Hamas man pulled by the hair a battered hostage with pants bloodied around her groin.
This isn’t Palestinian nationalism, or a proper understanding of Islam. This is nihilistic jihad. “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it,” Hamas’s founding covenant declares. “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”
One of the Hamas men called his parents using the phone of a murdered Israeli woman, unable to contain his pride. “Put Mom on the phone,” he said. “Your son is a hero. . . . I killed 10 Jews with my own hands!” The phone recorded the call, so we can know his goal: “victory or martyrdom.”
Some Hamas men took their time to execute a terrified woman after cornering her and shining a flashlight on her face. One raided the fridge in front of the young children he had just wounded with a grenade that killed their father and brother. During the music-festival massacre, a terrorist paused to put a bullet through each of the porta-potties, one by one, lest a single girl escape.
There were also the shell-shocked faces, heavy breathing and stopped cries of young women hiding in bunkers and dumpsters, knowing they weren’t going to survive. Then came the photos: piles of bodies, bloodied and mutilated, babies burned, families burned together, some with hands tied.
The point of the screening, explained Aviv Ezra, Israel’s acting consul general, was to show that “this isn’t more of the same.” If you followed previous Gaza wars, you know what he means. Already Israel’s response has been subject to the same cries of moral equivalence, the same demands for a premature cease-fire, the same perversion of international law from its post-Holocaust purpose.
But there’s a difference this time. “There is no political solution with Hamas,” Mr. Ezra said, not after Oct. 7. Hamas in Gaza now “threatens the basic contract between Israel’s government and its citizens,” the never-again clause that Israel is a safe haven for the Jews.
As Israel continues its defense against Hamas in Gaza and around the world, its citizens will not forget the Hamas-recorded images of Oct. 7. Neither should the rest of us.
Rona, Thank you so much for this. Is there someplace where you can or already have posted it so it’s more widely seen? Those who weren’t at the screening have only heard a tiny bit from cable commentators.
Had the US not insisted on the 1949 ceasefire, Israel would certainly have driven the Arab armies out of Judaea and Samaria and of Gaza, and the territorial question as it now exists would never have arisen. As it was, Israel gained international recognition as the successor state to Mandatory Palestine, in theory (since no statement was made to the contrary) comprising the same territory as the Mandate.
But in fact, Israel never formally asserted a claim to these territories.
It is striking that during these 18 years between 1949 and 1967, no attempt was made to establish a State of Palestine in the areas still under Arab control. Jordan purported to annex the areas under its control, while Egypt administered Gaza without annexing it. During the 1950s Egypt sponsored a Palestinian government-in-exile in Gaza, but it exercised no authority in Gaza itself. During this period neither the UN nor any foreign government demanded the creation of a Palestinian state in these territories or criticized Egypt and Jordan for “occupying” these parts of the Palestinian homeland. Nor did the Palestinians themselves. When the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 1964, article 24 of its original charter specifically renounced any claim to administer these territories, so as not to antagonize the PLO’s Egyptian and Jordanian hosts.
The effect of the Six-Day War was therefore to erase the Green Line as even a de facto border, and to reunite the whole of Mandate Palestine under Israeli control. It would then have been open to Israel to declare that these territories were to be incorporated into Israel. But Israel did not do this. Instead, the then Israeli Labor government offered to return all of the captured territory, except East Jerusalem, to the Arab states in exchange for recognition and peace treaties. That was the foundation for UN Security Council Resolution 242 of November 1967, which called for “Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict,” in exchange for “Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.”
The Arab states, however, refused even to consider this offer. The September 1967 Khartoum conference of Arab states adopted a resolution which declared: “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it.” It can therefore be seen that Israel’s refusal to comply with Resolution 242’s demand for withdrawal followed, and was caused by, the Arab states’ refusal to comply with the necessary conditions for that withdrawal, namely recognition of Israel and the end of belligerency against it.
It will be noted also that Resolution 242 refers to “Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict,” and not “Withdrawal from *the* territories.” This wording was deliberate and the result of long negotiations. It was recognized by the Security Council that the 1949 armistice lines had no status as international borders and that they could not be accepted as a permanent border between Israel and an Arab state (whether Jordan or Palestine) to its east, since they gave Israel no security. This had been shown in June when Jordan had been able to shell Tel Aviv from territory then under its control only a few kilometers from the city. The resolution therefore did not require that Israel withdraw from *all* the territory it had captured, even if Arab recognition was forthcoming. In 1979 Israel showed that it was still willing to trade land for recognition when it withdrew from Sinai in exchange for a peace treaty with Egypt. (Sinai constituted 90% of the land captured by Israel in 1967.)
All this history serves to explain why demands for Israeli withdrawal “to the 1967 borders” are meaningless. The 1949 ceasefire lines were never “borders,” and even as ceasefire lines they ceased to exist 56 years ago. On the ground, as I saw when I was in Israel, these “borders” do not exist. Israelis drive from Tel Aviv to Ma’ale Adumim as easily as Europeans drive from Frankfurt to Strasbourg. There are many security barriers and checkpoints in Judaea and Samaria, but they do not correspond to the 1949 ceasefire lines.
Most importantly, of course, there are now over 700,000 Jewish Israelis – more than 10% of Israel’s Jewish population – living east of the former ceasefire lines, in Judaea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem. These are the so-called “settlers,” although a large number of them were born where they now live, and most of them are living in places which have 3,000 years of Jewish history.
I’m so glad to see you’ve made this and your other comments easier to read. This information, which is totally supported by everything else I’m reading, is so important. And so few people are aware. Do you have it published or available elsewhere?
thank you dear friend. You are one person who will not use the Y-slur or the K-slur - I'd have made quite the tidy sum in the last eleven weeks if i was paid each time :'(
You’re welcome! I don’t know how much clarity I actually have, but I do try to be as rigorous as possible in my critiques. That’s why I almost always get transcripts, even of the fictional tv shows. I don’t know what I’d do if they weren’t so immediately available nowadays. I remember the days when I’d be furiously writing down quotes as I watched tv. So glad I don’t have to do that anymore.
You can get transcripts almost immediately of everything. On tv, not movies in theatres unfortunately. I still have to take notes furiously then, and in the dark!
I really appreciated this piece. I don't know how you have the attention span or patience to read so many news transcripts, but I am grateful for your dedication; it helps me find shapes in "the fog."
Susan, this is absolutely "spot on." The media has no moral compass, they only care about getting the story out, first and to hell with true facts. They are obsessed with"both sides" of everything. We now accept alternative facts as somehow as truth somehow and its all up to how we see it. NO - IT IS NOT. There are FACTS and they have lost their way. This was horrible and I wonder what would have happened if they didn't have that particular Israeli guest at the time - it would NOT have even come up. The media has quickly become Judge and jury of everything from politics to war now. They tell the President what he should do and tell us daily how old he is and that nobody wants him. They covered Hillary Clinton with the intention of bringing her down and elevating Trump to the point where they coined the phrase "lesser of 2 evils." Its almost Anti-American that is being peddled in the media to create outrage, clicks and civil unrest in our Country. They do the same with Ukraine. Tell us every day they will lose support and they don't cover the people in Ukraine anymore. Joe Biden is calm, sincere and is truly what our Country needs now in this global unrest - which the media is only exacerbating on a daily basis with Israel and Hamas. Media needs to be held accountable for their coverage bias. They want to make money and every time there is any good news in the economy they say "inflation is coming down from 9%" and Joe Biden did Infrastructure and so much good bi-partisan legislation BUT "people don't feel it." Really??? When you put it like that, how can anyone argue. Everyone hates everything and everybody and the media keeps lighting that flame. We are all Americans, we all do better when we work together and if the media continues to divide us by party, race, sex, liberal, progressive, conservative, etc. we will fail as a democracy and as the America I have loved my entire life. Don't give them so much power - it is dividing us and killing us.
We are so on the same page I don’t have anything to add! Except perhaps to ask if you know my stuff on Hillary and the media’s coverage of her. There’s a few substack pieces here, but there’s also a book. The first book I’ve written that the mainstream press ignored completely. Wonder why…..
Hi Susan - Yes, I loved your book "the Destruction of iHllary Clinton." I know why the media never covered it as well. They will NEVER admit they were wrong in their coverage of Hillary. They were also wrong on the missile attack at the Gaza hospital - they almost started a full-scale war and now they act as though they are justified and not one outlet admitted how badly they screwed up. I also read Hillary's book on "what Happened." The media doesn't want to know or be reminded of their mistakes. Hillary should sue them for their criminalization of her good name and her character. Terribly biased coverage and there is proof. Sad today that it seems the truth and real facts don't matter, only the narrative. Media is forever both sides on every conflict - just look at Hamas, Palestinians and Jewish people - giving credibility to the crazy.
I slept all day yesterday—or tried to. Had been up from 2 finishing this piece, needing to get it all out of my mind and on the page. This piece, like most of my work, is focused on media coverage. I don’t get into the history or “issues”—I’m going to school as far as those are concerning—that is, cramming in an enormous amount of previously lacking knowledge, from Israeli podcasts and from Noa Tishby’s book. And now, I’ve got @Barbara Cox’s notes here as well! For those of you reading this, they are packed full of information and insight, all of which is supported by the other reading I’m doing, so I highly recommend you read them. The formatting (lack of formatting) makes it hard, but it’s worth it. I hope she makes her knowledge and expertise in the area more widely available—although I know it will give rise to the inevitable hate-grenades of responses. I also recommend @Eve Barlow’s stack today on Greta Thurnberg’s Nazi octopus. (How do you get names to highlight in these comments? The little “@“ doesn’t seem to do it)
The fifth point is that although Ottoman Syria, Mandate Palestine and later the State of Israel attracted a large number of Jewish settlers, almost none of them came from Britain, and none of them came as agents of or were sponsored by any of the colonial powers. In the early phase, most were refugees from the Russian Empire. In the 1930s, most (about 200,000) were refugees from Nazi Germany and other fascist regimes. After 1945 they included 700,000 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, from all over Europe. After 1948 they included 650,000 Jews expelled from the Arab countries and Iran. None of this migration was sponsored by any of the colonialist powers, and the British actively tried to prevent it both before and after World War II.
So we can see that the allegation that Israel was or is a “colonial settler state” does not stand up to any serious historical scrutiny. Palestine was never a British colonial possession. Britain was not interested in Palestine as a place for British settlement, even for British Jews, who had no desire to go there. Britain in any case ruled Palestine under an international mandate that precluded using it as a settler colony. The terms of the Mandate were that Britain should foster a “Jewish national home” in Palestine without dispossessing the resident Arab population, and before 1939 that policy was generally adhered to. The establishment of a Jewish sovereign state in Palestine was never British policy, and only came into consideration in the 1930s when it became apparent that conflict between Jews and Arabs could not be resolved in the borders of a single state.
I conclude by asking: even if Israel was once a colonial settler state – so what? Every country in the Americas began life as a colonial settler state. The populations of Argentina and Chile, in particular, are almost entirely European in ancestry. Fidel Castro, that great anti-colonialist, was the son of a Spanish colonial settler in Cuba. Canada, Australia and New Zealand were acquired by Britain specifically as settler colonies. Do these facts render these countries illegitimate, fit for abolition or destruction?
Denunciation of Israel as a colonial settler state is particularly strange coming from Australians, when Australia is the purest example of a colonial settler state. Its indigenous population was brushed aside, their land seized without compensation. Until well into the 20th century, it was settled almost exclusively by people from the British Isles, many of them through state-sponsored migration schemes. Non-European people were excluded by law, and even non-British Europeans were unwelcome. Its economy was tied to that of the colonial power, which remained its major source of imports and the market for its exports until the 1960s.
None of these things is true of Israel, or ever has been. The Israeli Declaration of Independence of 14 May 1948, after pointing out that “The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people,” declared that the Jewish community of the Land of Israel, “by virtue of our natural and historic right and on the strength of the resolution of the United Nations General Assembly, hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel, to be known as the State of Israel.”
If we are going to play the game of who has the better claim to historical legitimacy, I rather think that Israel comes out ahead.
The first point to make is that Israel is the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people, and that they exercised sovereignty there, with interruptions, for over a thousand years. King David made Jerusalem the capital of a Jewish kingdom in around 1000 BCE, and the Jews had existed as a religious and political entity (that is, a nation) for centuries before that. They probably emerged from the wider Semitic population as a monotheistic religious community (Isra-el, “those who contend with God”) in around 1500 BCE. Genetic studies show that the large majority of modern Jews are descended from the ancient Israelites. (Many Palestinians are also descended from them, but that’s another story.)
Jewish sovereignty in Israel ended with the Roman capture of Jerusalem in 70 CE, and the Jews became largely a people in exile, scattered across the Roman Empire and later across the whole of Europe and the wider world. But they never forgot their connection to the Land of Israel, and never gave up their belief that they would, in God’s good time, return there. At every Passover, they would say: “L’shana haba’ah b’Yerushalayim” (“Next year in Jerusalem”). Throughout the Middle Ages, pious Jews would travel to Israel, usually so that they could die and be buried there. There was always a Jewish presence in Israel. Hebron and Safed were centres of religious scholarship across the centuries, and Jerusalem had a Jewish majority from the mid 19th century.
The second point is that the Zionist movement from its inception had nothing to do with colonialism, and was not sponsored or supported by any of the colonial powers. The initial impetus for Zionism was the persecution of Jews in the Russian Empire, which led to a steady emigration of Russian, Polish and Ukrainian Jews. Most of the early pioneers of Zionism such as Chaim Weizmann (born in Poland) and Ze’ev Jabotinski (born in Odessa) were from the Russian Empire, as were the first four prime ministers of Israel.
Jewish migration to Israel began as early as the 1840s, but the “First Aliyah” (first ascent) is usually dated to 1881, when 25,000 Russian Jews arrived. These people were indeed settlers, but they were in no sense colonial. They were in fact what would now be called “asylum seekers.” None of the colonial powers were interested in Jewish settlement in Ottoman Syria. The Russian Empire was happy to be rid of its Jews, but didn’t care where they went. The movement was funded by wealthy European philanthropists such as Moses Montefiore, Baron de Hirsch and the Rothschild family.
The third point is that Jewish settlement in Israel was not based on dispossession of an indigenous population, as was the case in all the colonial settler colonies (most notably Australia). Every hectare of land obtained by the Zionist movement was legally bought from willing sellers, usually at above-market rates. Much of it was unproductive swamp and sand-dunes, which absentee owners were happy to sell. (The sellers included all the leading Arab notable families, such as the al-Husseinis and the al-Khalidis.) Where productive farmland was bought, Arab tenants were paid cash compensation, usually amounting to ten years’ income. There was no “land theft”, which neither the Ottoman nor the British authorities would have permitted. (All this is exhaustively documented in Arieh Avneri’s book “The Claim of Dispossession: Jewish Land-Settlement and the Arabs 1878-1948”.)
Thanks, Susan, for sorting through the misleading journalism, especially since I no longer watch TV/cable news. Hang in there despite lost subscriptions and trolls.
I’m used to it. Not the subscription thing—because there was no substack when I wrote my book and articles about Hillary—But the trolls and worse, the Bernie supporters on a deliberate campaign against me. I’ve been called much worse things(well, maybe not worse but more disgusting) than a supporter of genocide. And I’m sure not going to stop doing what I do at this stage in my life. Thanks for your support for it!
Also, why does the world generally quote "Palestinian officials" when they are either the Islamists of Hamas or the corrupt gangsters of Fatah as if they were the legitimate leaders of the Palestinian people? The Palestinian people have never had a say in what their "leaders" do in their name. Not even in 1948. Neither the 2005 election or the 1996 one in the Palestinian territories was free or fair. There has not been even a fake election since 2005. So-called "Palestinian officials/leaders" have as much worth as Adolph's pseudo-parliament Reichstag after 1933.
I make the point about “Palestinian official” language early in my piece. It’s infuriating that the mainstream press is oblivious to this (constant) misrepresentation in their reporting.
Susan, So many questions about the media coverage of the situation. As a former journalist and journalism teacher, I understand the struggle to get at the so-called facts when the information is filtered through layers. But I'm reminded of the experience of my stepfather who was serving in the as a military liaison/information officer in Viet Nam at a time when the role of media coverage was questioned. My stepfather told me about an exchange he had with his commanding officer, who gave him the order that "No more negative stories about the US will be released or confirmed by this office." Thoroughly disillusioned, he applied for early retirement and came home to West Texas to build (by hand) a passive solar home in the desert. After a long career in the military, he returned with a broken heart about the way he had been silenced and ordered to participate in the deployment of the "fog of war." War journalism is tough for many reasons, one of which is the need to the attackers to garner consensus by demonizing others.
Veronica: Thanks so much for the paid subscription and the lovely message!
The murderous terror assault by Hamas on Israel was the worst terrorist attack on a democratic country since 9/11. In fact, proportionate to population, the death toll from these attacks is about six times worse than 9/11. Those of us over 30 remember the Bali bombings of 2002, when Islamist terrorists killed 88 Australians. Imagine a terror attack on Australia which caused 4,000 deaths. That would be equivalent to what Israel has undergone in the past week.
One of the standard responses to this assault has been to assert that Israel has the right to defend itself. The United Nations Charter gives all sovereign states that right. Ukraine is exercising that right, right now, in the face of Russia's illegal invasion. But Ukraine's situation is very different to Israel's. Russia has launched a conventional military invasion, which Ukraine is resisting by conventional military means. Apart from Russia and its apologists, no-one seriously disputes Ukraine's right to resist Russia's invasion.
Israel, by contrast, has faced an attack by a non-state actor, Hamas, which has seized control of a territory, Gaza, contiguous to Israel, and used it to launch repeated missile offensives against Israeli cities, and now a full-scale terror assault on Israeli communities. In these circumstances, what does it mean to say that "Israel has the right to defend itself"? Does it mean that Israel can fight off (or kill) the terrorists that attacked it, but cannot touch them or their commanders in the territory they control? That is a recipe for endless repeats of what we have seen over the past week.
The right to self-defence is not a purely passive right, a right to react when attacked. The stated purpose of Hamas is the destruction of Israel and the death of every Jew in Israel – indeed every Jew in the world. The experience of the past decade, culminating in the events of last week, shows that Israel cannot defend itself against an existential threat of that kind unless Hamas is destroyed. That is the mission Israel has now undertaken.
Contrary to the repeated assertions of Israel's legion of critics, the Israel Defence Force does not deliberately target civilians.* It targets terrorist infrastructure. But because Hamas chooses as a deliberate strategy to embed its terrorist infrastructure among the civilian population of Gaza, Hamas cannot be destroyed without causing civilian casualties. Hamas fires its rockets from schools and hospitals and mosques, so that Israel will be forced to bomb these sites to stop the missile attacks. Hamas in fact wants civilian deaths in Gaza, so that it can display its "martyrs" in front of the world's media and anti-Israel NGOs like Amnesty.
Everyone who has repeated the statement "Israel has the right to defend itself" will now have to remain resolute in support of Israel’s decision to exercise that right in practice over the coming days and weeks. Whether Israel decides on a land invasion, or confines itself to air attacks, there will be a lot of deaths in Gaza. Israel's friends will need to stress, in the face a concerted anti-Israel propaganda campaign, that responsibility for every death that occurs in Gaza lies with Hamas, and also with the Iranian regime which sponsors and bankrolls Hamas.
* If you believe Israel does target civilians, or is engaged in "collective punishment" in bombing Gaza, consider this. Gaza is a densely populated urban area, with no air defences and no air-raid shelters (because Hamas does not allow them). Israel has among the most powerful and sophisticated armed forces in the world. It has complete control of the air over Gaza. If Israel chose, it could reduce the whole of Gaza to rubble in a few days and kill most of its population. Clearly that is not what Israel has chosen to do.
Although currently available statistics are not very reliable, they bear this out. According to al-Jazeera, Israel has dropped 6,000 bombs on Gaza this week, and has killed 2,700 people in doing so. That is, Israel has had to drop 2.2 bombs to kill one person. Does anyone seriously suppose that the Israeli Air Force is as incompetent as that kill-rate suggests? These figures can only mean that Israel is actively trying to avoid killing civilians.
Thanks again for all this. I wrote a comment this morning recommending your comments to the other commentators on this page. They are essential reading.
Thank you Susan for this close reading of the MSNBC reporting. What stood out to me was the lack of clarity in many of the comments, the elliptical sentences of the type skewered by Orwell in Politics and the English Language.
I share your doubts that an Israeli invasion is in the best interests of a safe and secure Jewish homeland. I use the word doubts, because the military and geopolitical issues seem so complex that I'm suspicious of anyone who has absolute certainty of what exactly Israel ought to do in response to the Hamas atyrocities.
The one thing I am certain of is that the Netanyahu coalition government's policies have been counter to the goal of creating conditions for a safe and secure Israel. His policy priority has been to stay out of jail.
I also feel overwhelmed by the complexity of the issues, and hope I didn’t sound like I know what I’m talking about when I reflected at the end on a ceasefire. I feel on sure ground when I’m deconstructing the media, but not about what should/could be done “on the ground” of the actual war. All I can do is play out various scenario in my head, and none of them seem very hopeful to me. Agree with you completely about Netanyahu.
No, not at all. No one really does in terms of how this will all play out. A ceasefire would be a good thing. May it come sooner than later.
On 7 October, about 2,900 Hamas* terrorists crossed into Israel from the Gaza Strip and proceeded to kill any and all Israelis they encountered: military or civilian, armed or unarmed, men, women, children and elderly. By the end of the day they had killed approximately 1,400 people, the great majority of them Israeli Jews, but including around 100 non-Jewish civilians and about 70 Arab-Israelis. About 350 of those killed were members of the Israeli military or police. The rest were civilians. Many of the dead were tortured before being killed. Many women were raped. Some people, including children, were beheaded or burned alive.
(* Some belonged to smaller groups such as Islamic Jihad and the PFLP, but they operated under Hamas command. “Hamas” is an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah, or Islamic Resistance Movement.)
Over 1,000 of the Hamas terrorists were killed by the Israeli military, police or armed civilians. About 500 were taken alive, most of them after being wounded (and receiving treatment in Israeli hospitals). The rest are assumed to have escaped back to Gaza, although some remained at large in Israel for days before being hunted down. As they retreated, the Hamas terrorists kidnapped about 240 people, including many non-Israelis, and took them as hostages back to Gaza.
Immediately after the 7 October attack, Israel began to bomb targets in Gaza associated with Hamas, particularly its missile-launching sites and its command centres. The pace of Israeli attacks increased through October, and at the end of the month Israel began ground operations at several points in the Gaza Strip. The Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry claims that over 9,000 people have been killed in the Israeli attacks. This number is probably an exaggeration, but there is no doubt that a large number of people in Gaza have been killed.
There are a number of points to be made about this.
1. It was absolutely certain and predictable that Israel would respond to the events of 7 October with massive military force. This is what Israel has always done in the past, and it was inconceivable that Israel would respond to the atrocities committed by Hamas in any other way. In the past, Israel has been content to “teach Hamas a lesson” with a bombing campaign, and then to yield to international pressure for a negotiated ceasefire. This time there was no such possibility. Israel immediately said that the aim of its operation was the complete elimination of Hamas, and that it will not settle for less. No Israeli government, and certainly not the current one, could have done anything else.
2. Hamas knew all of this when it decided to launch the 7 October attack. They knew that their attacks would attract a massive military response, and that thousands of people in Gaza would die as a result. Gaza is one of the most densely populated urban areas in the world. It has absolutely no air defences and no bomb shelters, because Hamas will not permit them. Hamas deliberately embeds its missile-launching sites and its command centres among the population of Gaza, including in and under schools, hospitals, mosques and apartment blocks. For instance, Hamas has placed a command centre under the Dar al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City. On top of this, Hamas is forcibly opposing any effort to evacuate civilians from areas Israel says it will attack, and in this it is being supported by the UN, in contradiction to the UN’s usual policy of trying to evacuate civilians from war zones.
3. Hamas follows these policies with the specific intention of causing civilian deaths which it can then blame on Israeli “war crimes,” confident in the knowledge that the UN, many governments, large sections of the western media, and NGOs such as Amnesty and MSF will uncritically accept and repeat Hamas’s narrative. This has happened over and over again during the past 30 years, and Hamas was rightly confident that the same pattern would be followed this time. So we saw uncritical reporting (on the front page of the New York Times no less) that Israel had bombed the Al-Ahli Arab hospital, killing more than 500 people, when in fact the hospital was not bombed at all. This story is still being repeated despite conclusive proof that it never happened.
4. The term “civilian casualties” needs much more critical attention. Under international law, a civilian is any person who is not a member of the armed forces of a recognised state. Gaza has not been part of any recognised state since 1918, and Hamas is certainly not a recognised armed force. That means that everyone in Gaza is a civilian, including the estimated (by Reuters) 40,000 armed and trained members of Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups. It means that the 2,900 terrorists who crossed into Israel were civilians. We do not know how many of the people killed by Israeli air-strikes in Gaza were members of these organisations, and how many were “genuine” civilians, because Hamas draws no such distinction. Contrary to endless allegations, Israel does not “target civilians.” Israel targets terrorist infrastructure. But as a result of Hamas’s deliberate policy, this cannot be done without killing many genuine civilians. Responsibility for all these deaths rests absolutely with Hamas.
5. So far as we know, every one of the Hamas terrorists who crossed into Israel was born and raised in Gaza. They were educated in schools paid for and operated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the UN agency which was created in1948 to care for the 750,000 Arabs who left what is now Israel in the course of the Israeli War of Independence. Today UNRWA has an annual budget of $US1.6 billion and employs 30,000 people, most of them Palestinians. It is a vast, corrupt and self-perpetuating bureaucracy that controls the lives of 5.9 million descendants of the 1948 refugees, including two-thirds of the population of Gaza. Its schools – paid for in part by your taxes – have inculcated generations of Palestinian youth with hatred of Israel and of Jews (for most Palestinians, the two things are synonymous). Gaza has a very young population (75% under 30), most of whom have never left the Gaza Strip. They know nothing about the world except what Hamas and its friends in UNRWA tell them.
6. This in turn raises the issue of how much sympathy we are expected to have for the population of Gaza in the current situation. Hamas has about 40,000 active fighters, but they of course are surrounded by a much wider circle of supporters, probably including most of the adult population. An opinion poll earlier this year, conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, showed that 79% of Gazans “supported armed opposition to Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.” Well, if you support armed opposition to Israel, you cannot be surprised when Israel responds in kind, as it has always done. Hamas has ruled Gaza ever since it staged its coup against the Palestinian Authority in 2007. In the 16 years since, there has not been, so far as I am aware, any significant resistance to Hamas rule. It is sometimes said that resistance to Hamas is impossible, but the events of the Arab Spring and the popular uprisings in Iran show that this is not true.
7. Every time conflict breaks out between Israel and the Palestinians, Israel is accused of “targeting civilians,” “collective punishment” and (increasingly commonly) “genocide.” (This last charge is particularly bizarre. When Israel took possession of Gaza in 1967, it had about 400,000 inhabitants. Today it has 2.3 million. The Israelis must be very incompetent at committing genocide.) The other charge always levelled at Israel is “disproportionality.” Israel, it is said, responds to the terrorist murders of its citizens by killing a much larger number of Palestinians. But this accusation shows a remarkable lack of historical awareness. All modern wars have been marked by disproportionality. The German Luftwaffe’s blitz against Britain in 1940-41 killed 40,000 people – the allied bombing of Germany killed 600,000, mostly civilians. The Japanese killed 2,400 Americans at Pearl Harbor – the US air war against Japan killed well over a million, mostly civilians.
8. Israel’s response to the atrocities committed by Hamas should be considered in this light. As I noted above, Gaza is a crowded urban area with no air defences. Israel has one of the most powerful and sophisticated air forces in the world. If Israel really wanted to inflict collective punishment on the people of Gaza, it could reduce the entire territory to smoking rubble and kill most of the population in a matter of days. It has not done so, even though Israel has the most hard-line nationalist government in its history and even though most of the Israeli population is consumed with grief and anger following the 7 October attacks. If ever Israel wanted to commit genocide against the Palestinians, now would be the moment. But instead Israel is pursuing a measured military strategy with a strictly defined objective, the elimination of Hamas and its allies in Gaza. Once that is achieved, Israel will be more than happy to hand Gaza over to the Palestinian Authority, or Egypt, or the UN, or anyone else willing to take it.
Barbara, can I copy and post on my FB page? I can attribute to you or not, however you’d prefer. My email: bordo@uky.edu. Sometimes it gets clogged so a FB PM can be more reliable. Are we friends? We should be, so let me know how to get you on FB.
On Friday the IDF had a screening for reporters of the actual footage of the October 7 attacks in Israel.
No one at Friday’s screening in New York of the raw footage of Hamas’s atrocities during its Oct. 7 invasion of Israel will forget what they saw. The journalist next to us, at the Israeli consulate in New York, was crying. Mouths seemed to hang open, even after the rampage recorded by jubilant Hamas terrorists on their GoPros had ended, and Israeli officials tried to make sense of what we saw.
Why did the Hamas men, upon confronting the dead body of a teenage girl, start cheering? Why did they argue over who would get to decapitate a Thai guest worker they had shot, then proclaim “Allahu akbar” with every swing at his neck?
“Allahu akbar,” meaning “God is most great,” was on their lips over and over as they shot defenseless civilians, dragged corpses and pumped round after round into the dead. There it was again on the terrorists’ return to Gaza, “Allahu akbar” coming from crowds as a Hamas man pulled by the hair a battered hostage with pants bloodied around her groin.
This isn’t Palestinian nationalism, or a proper understanding of Islam. This is nihilistic jihad. “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it,” Hamas’s founding covenant declares. “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”
One of the Hamas men called his parents using the phone of a murdered Israeli woman, unable to contain his pride. “Put Mom on the phone,” he said. “Your son is a hero. . . . I killed 10 Jews with my own hands!” The phone recorded the call, so we can know his goal: “victory or martyrdom.”
Some Hamas men took their time to execute a terrified woman after cornering her and shining a flashlight on her face. One raided the fridge in front of the young children he had just wounded with a grenade that killed their father and brother. During the music-festival massacre, a terrorist paused to put a bullet through each of the porta-potties, one by one, lest a single girl escape.
There were also the shell-shocked faces, heavy breathing and stopped cries of young women hiding in bunkers and dumpsters, knowing they weren’t going to survive. Then came the photos: piles of bodies, bloodied and mutilated, babies burned, families burned together, some with hands tied.
The point of the screening, explained Aviv Ezra, Israel’s acting consul general, was to show that “this isn’t more of the same.” If you followed previous Gaza wars, you know what he means. Already Israel’s response has been subject to the same cries of moral equivalence, the same demands for a premature cease-fire, the same perversion of international law from its post-Holocaust purpose.
But there’s a difference this time. “There is no political solution with Hamas,” Mr. Ezra said, not after Oct. 7. Hamas in Gaza now “threatens the basic contract between Israel’s government and its citizens,” the never-again clause that Israel is a safe haven for the Jews.
As Israel continues its defense against Hamas in Gaza and around the world, its citizens will not forget the Hamas-recorded images of Oct. 7. Neither should the rest of us.
Rona, Thank you so much for this. Is there someplace where you can or already have posted it so it’s more widely seen? Those who weren’t at the screening have only heard a tiny bit from cable commentators.
Feel free. I borrowed it from a newspaper report.
Had the US not insisted on the 1949 ceasefire, Israel would certainly have driven the Arab armies out of Judaea and Samaria and of Gaza, and the territorial question as it now exists would never have arisen. As it was, Israel gained international recognition as the successor state to Mandatory Palestine, in theory (since no statement was made to the contrary) comprising the same territory as the Mandate.
But in fact, Israel never formally asserted a claim to these territories.
It is striking that during these 18 years between 1949 and 1967, no attempt was made to establish a State of Palestine in the areas still under Arab control. Jordan purported to annex the areas under its control, while Egypt administered Gaza without annexing it. During the 1950s Egypt sponsored a Palestinian government-in-exile in Gaza, but it exercised no authority in Gaza itself. During this period neither the UN nor any foreign government demanded the creation of a Palestinian state in these territories or criticized Egypt and Jordan for “occupying” these parts of the Palestinian homeland. Nor did the Palestinians themselves. When the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 1964, article 24 of its original charter specifically renounced any claim to administer these territories, so as not to antagonize the PLO’s Egyptian and Jordanian hosts.
The effect of the Six-Day War was therefore to erase the Green Line as even a de facto border, and to reunite the whole of Mandate Palestine under Israeli control. It would then have been open to Israel to declare that these territories were to be incorporated into Israel. But Israel did not do this. Instead, the then Israeli Labor government offered to return all of the captured territory, except East Jerusalem, to the Arab states in exchange for recognition and peace treaties. That was the foundation for UN Security Council Resolution 242 of November 1967, which called for “Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict,” in exchange for “Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.”
The Arab states, however, refused even to consider this offer. The September 1967 Khartoum conference of Arab states adopted a resolution which declared: “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it.” It can therefore be seen that Israel’s refusal to comply with Resolution 242’s demand for withdrawal followed, and was caused by, the Arab states’ refusal to comply with the necessary conditions for that withdrawal, namely recognition of Israel and the end of belligerency against it.
It will be noted also that Resolution 242 refers to “Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict,” and not “Withdrawal from *the* territories.” This wording was deliberate and the result of long negotiations. It was recognized by the Security Council that the 1949 armistice lines had no status as international borders and that they could not be accepted as a permanent border between Israel and an Arab state (whether Jordan or Palestine) to its east, since they gave Israel no security. This had been shown in June when Jordan had been able to shell Tel Aviv from territory then under its control only a few kilometers from the city. The resolution therefore did not require that Israel withdraw from *all* the territory it had captured, even if Arab recognition was forthcoming. In 1979 Israel showed that it was still willing to trade land for recognition when it withdrew from Sinai in exchange for a peace treaty with Egypt. (Sinai constituted 90% of the land captured by Israel in 1967.)
All this history serves to explain why demands for Israeli withdrawal “to the 1967 borders” are meaningless. The 1949 ceasefire lines were never “borders,” and even as ceasefire lines they ceased to exist 56 years ago. On the ground, as I saw when I was in Israel, these “borders” do not exist. Israelis drive from Tel Aviv to Ma’ale Adumim as easily as Europeans drive from Frankfurt to Strasbourg. There are many security barriers and checkpoints in Judaea and Samaria, but they do not correspond to the 1949 ceasefire lines.
Most importantly, of course, there are now over 700,000 Jewish Israelis – more than 10% of Israel’s Jewish population – living east of the former ceasefire lines, in Judaea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem. These are the so-called “settlers,” although a large number of them were born where they now live, and most of them are living in places which have 3,000 years of Jewish history.
I’m so glad to see you’ve made this and your other comments easier to read. This information, which is totally supported by everything else I’m reading, is so important. And so few people are aware. Do you have it published or available elsewhere?
thank you dear friend. You are one person who will not use the Y-slur or the K-slur - I'd have made quite the tidy sum in the last eleven weeks if i was paid each time :'(
Thank you for your moral clarity and rigorous critique.
You’re welcome! I don’t know how much clarity I actually have, but I do try to be as rigorous as possible in my critiques. That’s why I almost always get transcripts, even of the fictional tv shows. I don’t know what I’d do if they weren’t so immediately available nowadays. I remember the days when I’d be furiously writing down quotes as I watched tv. So glad I don’t have to do that anymore.
I didn’t know you could get transcripts. I pictured furious note-taking.
You can get transcripts almost immediately of everything. On tv, not movies in theatres unfortunately. I still have to take notes furiously then, and in the dark!
Brilliant. Thank you.
You’re welcome! So glad you like the piece.
Very important.
I really appreciated this piece. I don't know how you have the attention span or patience to read so many news transcripts, but I am grateful for your dedication; it helps me find shapes in "the fog."
Susan, this is absolutely "spot on." The media has no moral compass, they only care about getting the story out, first and to hell with true facts. They are obsessed with"both sides" of everything. We now accept alternative facts as somehow as truth somehow and its all up to how we see it. NO - IT IS NOT. There are FACTS and they have lost their way. This was horrible and I wonder what would have happened if they didn't have that particular Israeli guest at the time - it would NOT have even come up. The media has quickly become Judge and jury of everything from politics to war now. They tell the President what he should do and tell us daily how old he is and that nobody wants him. They covered Hillary Clinton with the intention of bringing her down and elevating Trump to the point where they coined the phrase "lesser of 2 evils." Its almost Anti-American that is being peddled in the media to create outrage, clicks and civil unrest in our Country. They do the same with Ukraine. Tell us every day they will lose support and they don't cover the people in Ukraine anymore. Joe Biden is calm, sincere and is truly what our Country needs now in this global unrest - which the media is only exacerbating on a daily basis with Israel and Hamas. Media needs to be held accountable for their coverage bias. They want to make money and every time there is any good news in the economy they say "inflation is coming down from 9%" and Joe Biden did Infrastructure and so much good bi-partisan legislation BUT "people don't feel it." Really??? When you put it like that, how can anyone argue. Everyone hates everything and everybody and the media keeps lighting that flame. We are all Americans, we all do better when we work together and if the media continues to divide us by party, race, sex, liberal, progressive, conservative, etc. we will fail as a democracy and as the America I have loved my entire life. Don't give them so much power - it is dividing us and killing us.
We are so on the same page I don’t have anything to add! Except perhaps to ask if you know my stuff on Hillary and the media’s coverage of her. There’s a few substack pieces here, but there’s also a book. The first book I’ve written that the mainstream press ignored completely. Wonder why…..
Hi Susan - Yes, I loved your book "the Destruction of iHllary Clinton." I know why the media never covered it as well. They will NEVER admit they were wrong in their coverage of Hillary. They were also wrong on the missile attack at the Gaza hospital - they almost started a full-scale war and now they act as though they are justified and not one outlet admitted how badly they screwed up. I also read Hillary's book on "what Happened." The media doesn't want to know or be reminded of their mistakes. Hillary should sue them for their criminalization of her good name and her character. Terribly biased coverage and there is proof. Sad today that it seems the truth and real facts don't matter, only the narrative. Media is forever both sides on every conflict - just look at Hamas, Palestinians and Jewish people - giving credibility to the crazy.
I slept all day yesterday—or tried to. Had been up from 2 finishing this piece, needing to get it all out of my mind and on the page. This piece, like most of my work, is focused on media coverage. I don’t get into the history or “issues”—I’m going to school as far as those are concerning—that is, cramming in an enormous amount of previously lacking knowledge, from Israeli podcasts and from Noa Tishby’s book. And now, I’ve got @Barbara Cox’s notes here as well! For those of you reading this, they are packed full of information and insight, all of which is supported by the other reading I’m doing, so I highly recommend you read them. The formatting (lack of formatting) makes it hard, but it’s worth it. I hope she makes her knowledge and expertise in the area more widely available—although I know it will give rise to the inevitable hate-grenades of responses. I also recommend @Eve Barlow’s stack today on Greta Thurnberg’s Nazi octopus. (How do you get names to highlight in these comments? The little “@“ doesn’t seem to do it)
The fifth point is that although Ottoman Syria, Mandate Palestine and later the State of Israel attracted a large number of Jewish settlers, almost none of them came from Britain, and none of them came as agents of or were sponsored by any of the colonial powers. In the early phase, most were refugees from the Russian Empire. In the 1930s, most (about 200,000) were refugees from Nazi Germany and other fascist regimes. After 1945 they included 700,000 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, from all over Europe. After 1948 they included 650,000 Jews expelled from the Arab countries and Iran. None of this migration was sponsored by any of the colonialist powers, and the British actively tried to prevent it both before and after World War II.
So we can see that the allegation that Israel was or is a “colonial settler state” does not stand up to any serious historical scrutiny. Palestine was never a British colonial possession. Britain was not interested in Palestine as a place for British settlement, even for British Jews, who had no desire to go there. Britain in any case ruled Palestine under an international mandate that precluded using it as a settler colony. The terms of the Mandate were that Britain should foster a “Jewish national home” in Palestine without dispossessing the resident Arab population, and before 1939 that policy was generally adhered to. The establishment of a Jewish sovereign state in Palestine was never British policy, and only came into consideration in the 1930s when it became apparent that conflict between Jews and Arabs could not be resolved in the borders of a single state.
I conclude by asking: even if Israel was once a colonial settler state – so what? Every country in the Americas began life as a colonial settler state. The populations of Argentina and Chile, in particular, are almost entirely European in ancestry. Fidel Castro, that great anti-colonialist, was the son of a Spanish colonial settler in Cuba. Canada, Australia and New Zealand were acquired by Britain specifically as settler colonies. Do these facts render these countries illegitimate, fit for abolition or destruction?
Denunciation of Israel as a colonial settler state is particularly strange coming from Australians, when Australia is the purest example of a colonial settler state. Its indigenous population was brushed aside, their land seized without compensation. Until well into the 20th century, it was settled almost exclusively by people from the British Isles, many of them through state-sponsored migration schemes. Non-European people were excluded by law, and even non-British Europeans were unwelcome. Its economy was tied to that of the colonial power, which remained its major source of imports and the market for its exports until the 1960s.
None of these things is true of Israel, or ever has been. The Israeli Declaration of Independence of 14 May 1948, after pointing out that “The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people,” declared that the Jewish community of the Land of Israel, “by virtue of our natural and historic right and on the strength of the resolution of the United Nations General Assembly, hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel, to be known as the State of Israel.”
If we are going to play the game of who has the better claim to historical legitimacy, I rather think that Israel comes out ahead.
So how does this relate to the history of Israel?
The first point to make is that Israel is the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people, and that they exercised sovereignty there, with interruptions, for over a thousand years. King David made Jerusalem the capital of a Jewish kingdom in around 1000 BCE, and the Jews had existed as a religious and political entity (that is, a nation) for centuries before that. They probably emerged from the wider Semitic population as a monotheistic religious community (Isra-el, “those who contend with God”) in around 1500 BCE. Genetic studies show that the large majority of modern Jews are descended from the ancient Israelites. (Many Palestinians are also descended from them, but that’s another story.)
Jewish sovereignty in Israel ended with the Roman capture of Jerusalem in 70 CE, and the Jews became largely a people in exile, scattered across the Roman Empire and later across the whole of Europe and the wider world. But they never forgot their connection to the Land of Israel, and never gave up their belief that they would, in God’s good time, return there. At every Passover, they would say: “L’shana haba’ah b’Yerushalayim” (“Next year in Jerusalem”). Throughout the Middle Ages, pious Jews would travel to Israel, usually so that they could die and be buried there. There was always a Jewish presence in Israel. Hebron and Safed were centres of religious scholarship across the centuries, and Jerusalem had a Jewish majority from the mid 19th century.
The second point is that the Zionist movement from its inception had nothing to do with colonialism, and was not sponsored or supported by any of the colonial powers. The initial impetus for Zionism was the persecution of Jews in the Russian Empire, which led to a steady emigration of Russian, Polish and Ukrainian Jews. Most of the early pioneers of Zionism such as Chaim Weizmann (born in Poland) and Ze’ev Jabotinski (born in Odessa) were from the Russian Empire, as were the first four prime ministers of Israel.
Jewish migration to Israel began as early as the 1840s, but the “First Aliyah” (first ascent) is usually dated to 1881, when 25,000 Russian Jews arrived. These people were indeed settlers, but they were in no sense colonial. They were in fact what would now be called “asylum seekers.” None of the colonial powers were interested in Jewish settlement in Ottoman Syria. The Russian Empire was happy to be rid of its Jews, but didn’t care where they went. The movement was funded by wealthy European philanthropists such as Moses Montefiore, Baron de Hirsch and the Rothschild family.
The third point is that Jewish settlement in Israel was not based on dispossession of an indigenous population, as was the case in all the colonial settler colonies (most notably Australia). Every hectare of land obtained by the Zionist movement was legally bought from willing sellers, usually at above-market rates. Much of it was unproductive swamp and sand-dunes, which absentee owners were happy to sell. (The sellers included all the leading Arab notable families, such as the al-Husseinis and the al-Khalidis.) Where productive farmland was bought, Arab tenants were paid cash compensation, usually amounting to ten years’ income. There was no “land theft”, which neither the Ottoman nor the British authorities would have permitted. (All this is exhaustively documented in Arieh Avneri’s book “The Claim of Dispossession: Jewish Land-Settlement and the Arabs 1878-1948”.)
Thanks, Susan, for sorting through the misleading journalism, especially since I no longer watch TV/cable news. Hang in there despite lost subscriptions and trolls.
I’m used to it. Not the subscription thing—because there was no substack when I wrote my book and articles about Hillary—But the trolls and worse, the Bernie supporters on a deliberate campaign against me. I’ve been called much worse things(well, maybe not worse but more disgusting) than a supporter of genocide. And I’m sure not going to stop doing what I do at this stage in my life. Thanks for your support for it!
Also, why does the world generally quote "Palestinian officials" when they are either the Islamists of Hamas or the corrupt gangsters of Fatah as if they were the legitimate leaders of the Palestinian people? The Palestinian people have never had a say in what their "leaders" do in their name. Not even in 1948. Neither the 2005 election or the 1996 one in the Palestinian territories was free or fair. There has not been even a fake election since 2005. So-called "Palestinian officials/leaders" have as much worth as Adolph's pseudo-parliament Reichstag after 1933.
I make the point about “Palestinian official” language early in my piece. It’s infuriating that the mainstream press is oblivious to this (constant) misrepresentation in their reporting.
Susan, So many questions about the media coverage of the situation. As a former journalist and journalism teacher, I understand the struggle to get at the so-called facts when the information is filtered through layers. But I'm reminded of the experience of my stepfather who was serving in the as a military liaison/information officer in Viet Nam at a time when the role of media coverage was questioned. My stepfather told me about an exchange he had with his commanding officer, who gave him the order that "No more negative stories about the US will be released or confirmed by this office." Thoroughly disillusioned, he applied for early retirement and came home to West Texas to build (by hand) a passive solar home in the desert. After a long career in the military, he returned with a broken heart about the way he had been silenced and ordered to participate in the deployment of the "fog of war." War journalism is tough for many reasons, one of which is the need to the attackers to garner consensus by demonizing others.