by Jonathan S. Tobin
The claim that Israelis are indifferent to the suffering in Gaza is false; its purpose is to demonize Jews while ignoring Palestinian support for genocide.
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| Family members of 1st. Sgt. Yuval Shoham, who was killed in battle in the Gaza Strip, leaving their home to his funeral in Jerusalem on Dec. 30, 2024. Photo by Chaim Goldberg/Flash90. |
For 15 months, Israelis and Jews around the world have watched in horror as much of the international media flipped the narrative of the terrorist invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Even before the Israel Defense Forces launched its counterattack into the Gaza Strip to eradicate the forces that had brazenly assaulted the one Jewish state on the planet, much of the press coverage—egged on by “progressive” ideologues in academia, culture and politics—were portraying the side that started a war with barbaric atrocities as the real victims while Israelis were depicted as the aggressors.
But in recent weeks, this troubling trend has taken on a new and even more disturbing character. Liberal corporate media outlets have begun to platform a new variation on the theme in which Palestinians are lionized and Israelis are demonized. Instead of just concentrating on smearing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as an “authoritarian” who is pursuing a war to hold onto office, or accepting misleading and downright false accounts of casualties and atrocities suffered by Palestinians in Gaza that allege the campaign against Hamas is a “genocide,” a new variation on the theme is taking hold.
As articles in The New York Times, The New York Review and the Israeli newspaper Haaretz demonstrate, the Jewish state’s foes are moving on to a broader and even more insidious canard. Rather than concentrating their fire on Netanyahu or the IDF, the slander is now being directed at the Israeli people as a whole. Their accusation is that there is something deeply wrong with a population that is willing to acquiesce to the supposedly horrible things being done in their name in Gaza.
By not adopting a bizarre and self-destructive forbearance, Israelis have failed the test of morality set for them by supposedly more enlightened Western liberals.
A new blood libel
The “deadly apathy” that these left-wing foes of Israel discuss is tone-deaf to the way that most citizens of the Jewish state have reacted to the post-Oct. 7 war. Israelis are expected to give a pass to the Palestinians for the genocidal ideology that drove them to murder, torture, rape and kidnap Jews as part of their desire to end Israel’s existence. In the view of those blasting Israeli citizens as lacking in a collective sense of morality, they must accept the barbaric atrocities committed by Hamas terrorists and other Palestinians as their due.
Rather than advocacy for a humanitarian goal, this is a new form of an age-old blood libel in which the Jews are singled out for opprobrium for sentiments that would be universal in any country put in a similar situation.
Israelis are aware that terror groups like Hamas have proclaimed their genocidal goal of destroying their state and engaging in the sort of mass slaughter for which Oct. 7 was merely the trailer. And the release this week of a video of Liri Albag, a 19-year-old IDF soldier who has sat in Gaza for 450 days after being kidnapped on Oct. 7, is just the latest evidence that it is Hamas that is guilty of cruelty and brutality, not Israel.
As such, the overwhelming majority of Israelis have come to the rational conclusion that any sane people would embrace—namely, that Hamas must not merely be defeated but prevented from ever having the opportunity to repeat their crimes, as they have promised they will if given the chance.
Yet to anti-Zionist Jews, such as the authors of many of these pieces denouncing Israeli “apathy” about Gaza, and other enemies of the Jewish state, this perfectly normal response to a horrific attack on their country and the brutal treatment of their fellow citizens is somehow proof that Israelis aren’t merely being misled but instead lack human decency or empathy.
This is just the latest example of how anti-Zionism is inextricably tied to hatred of Jews. Such arguments are not aimed at discrediting Israeli policies or tactics. It is a classic use of traditional antisemitic tropes whose purpose is to dehumanize Jews and justify the atrocities they are made to suffer. It is akin to the philosophy held by German Nazis who also sought the genocide of the Jews. In this way, a chorus of critics of alleged Israeli moral failure wishes to convince the world that those targeted for dispossession and death are less than human, and at the same time, the aggressors guilty of seeking the genocide of those attacking them.
A fake genocide claim
The widely held assumption that Israel’s war against its Iranian-backed foes has been more brutal than any other conducted in the modern era is a big lie. Israel responded militarily against a foe that infiltrated its border and criminally attacked its civilians; as such, responsibility for the ensuing ramifications lies with the guilty party: Hamas and those Palestinians complicit in the attack. All casualties from the war they started go back to them in one straight line. Hamas’s conduct of the war—in which they continue to attack Israeli civilians with rockets and missiles, and still hold on as many as 100 hostages—is also criminal because they deliberately endanger their own civilians. They do so by hiding behind Gazans in tunnels and secreting their strongholds, weapon caches and hostage prisons among them, and by causing damage from misfired projectiles that explode where they land.
As military historians and experts in the laws of war have pointed out, Israel’s army is more careful about trying to prevent civilian casualties that are inevitable in any war, especially one in which one side—the Palestinians—knowingly endangers their civilians to score propaganda points. The obviously conflated Palestinian casualty figures produced by the “Gaza Ministry of Health” mix Hamas combatants (who likely make up about half of the total of those killed or wounded) with civilians to convince a credulous world that just about everyone impacted in Gaza is a woman or a child. But Israel’s conduct in the Strip has produced fewer civilian casualties in terms of the percentage of the population than any other modern example of urban combat.
Those who mimic the terrorists’ talking points in the media and at pro-Hamas demonstrations profess to be astonished that most Israelis reject their canards out of hand. Even those who oppose Netanyahu believe that Hamas must be utterly destroyed not only to protect their security but to lay a future groundwork if there is to be a chance for peace between Jews and Palestinian Arabs, however remote that may be.
The once-dominant Israeli political parties on the left were largely marginalized by the failure of the Oslo Accords and the peace process that was initiated in 1993. Rather than accepting the concept of “land for peace,” the Palestinians and their leaders dismissed such offers. They rejected Israeli and American peace plans that would have given them a state, answering them with a terrorist war of attrition known as the Second Intifada that lasted five years from 2000 to 2005 and left more than 1,000 Israelis dead in its wake.
Israelis also remember that their nation withdrew every soldier, settler and settlement from the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2005. Instead of an incubator for peace, the Palestinians instead created an independent state in all but name there that soon became a vicious Islamist tyranny. The Hamas government that ran Gaza from 2007 to 2023 used the many billions of dollars in foreign aid they received to build a fortress that featured a terrorist tunnel network underneath Gaza that is the moral equivalent of the New York City subway system, instead of helping its Palestinian residents.
That is why to all but a small minority of Israelis, the events on Oct. 7 and the widespread support it received from Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere remains a conclusive argument that a two-state solution is a formula for endless war and the slaughter of Jews. That is also why—whether or not they wish to replace Netanyahu as prime minister—they are fully in favor of the war against Hamas in Gaza.
In adopting such an attitude, Israelis are behaving no differently than any country that has been assaulted by a deadly foe led by extremists like the fanatics that run and fund Hamas would have done.
Yet contrary to the “apathy” argument that portrays them as indifferent to the suffering of the Palestinians sacrificed by Hamas, the Jewish state has demonstrated great humanity with respect to their foes.
From the beginning of the current war, Israel has allowed a steady stream of supplies of food, fuel and other essential goods to be shipped into Gaza, including those areas where Hamas still prevails. The difficulty in getting food to Gazans is not due to hard-hearted Israelis obstructing the flow of aid but to the fact that Hamas and criminal Palestinian gangs have stolen the majority of the aid brought in by humanitarian groups, most of which are compromised by their connections to the terrorists.
What country would be expected to feed and aid those trying to kill their citizens while those enemies were still in arms and “resisting” its existence?
Hamas could have ended this war at any point since October 2023 by releasing the hostages and accepting Israeli offers in which the terrorists would be allowed safe passage out of Gaza. They hold on because they believe that their propaganda will convince the West to turn on Israel and someday hand it to them on a silver platter. Those who participate in pro-Hamas demonstrations are not just engaging in antisemitism with their “from the river to the sea” and “globalize the intifada” chants. Like the journalists who accept the false narrative in which Israel is branded as the villain in the war that began on Oct. 7, they are helping to prolong the war.
Progressives believe that they can turn America against Israel. Through their dominance of the education system, culture and much else, they have tried to indoctrinate a generation of youth to accept the toxic myths of intersectionality and critical race theory. In doing so, they have sought to convince the country that not only was America an irredeemably racist nation but that Israel and the Jews were “white” oppressors. Those who accept this false ideology wrongly believe that Israel is a “settler-colonial” and “apartheid” state that has no right to exist. That leads them to ignore the truth about the conflict and to think that Israel is always in the wrong and the Palestinians are always right, no matter what either side actually does. That is a prime factor in enabling the slanders of Israel as well as the whitewashing of Palestinian brutality and intransigence.
Antisemites are frustrated
Israel’s foes are not only deeply frustrated by the military success of the IDF against the Iranian-sponsored terrorists of Hamas and Hezbollah as well as the defeat that Tehran has suffered (largely as a result of the Jewish state’s actions against its proxies in Lebanon) in Syria. They are also unhappy about the victory of President-elect Donald Trump. The prospect of Trump and a host of other ardent supporters of the Jewish state taking office in two weeks is a decisive defeat for those who seek to isolate Israel.
But as another Times article recently noted, Palestinians and their foreign cheerleaders have not lost hope. This doesn’t mean that they are ready to live in peace with Israel or reject a vision of their national identity that is firmly linked to endless war on the Jews. Rather, they believe that sooner or later their victories in a propaganda war in which Israel is delegitimized will ultimately allow them to fulfill their fantasy of extinguishing the one Jewish state on the planet.
Corporate media and other outlets that spread the claim that Israelis are immoral for supporting their country’s defensive war against genocidal terrorists are engaging in antisemitism. But they are also helping to perpetuate a self-destructive mindset that means more bloodshed and suffering for both Jews and Arabs.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, a senior contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Newsweek
and a contributor to many other publications. He covers the American
political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle
East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts. He hosts the JNS “Think
Twice” podcast, both the weekly video program and the “Jonathan Tobin
Daily” program, which are available on all major audio platforms and
YouTube. Previously, he was executive editor, then senior online editor
and chief political blogger, for Commentary magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger.
He has won more than 60 awards for commentary, art criticism and other
writing. He appears regularly on television, commenting on politics and
foreign policy. Born in New York City, he studied history at Columbia
University.
Source: https://www.jns.org/liberal-media-mainstreams-a-blood-libel-about-israeli-apathy/
1 comment:
All too sadly true but strangely Mr Tobin fails to discuss what part Aljazeera has played throughout. They indeed seem to be one of the main "conductors" of this truly massive anti Israel/Jews PR campaign never witnessed since the Second World War in its scale & breath.
They too operate by increments to "fit the occasion" and now follow the demonisation of Israel but as yet omitting the in English the use of the word "Jews" (which is heard in Gaza interviews). Whilst not wanting to go in any depth their use of "buzz words" is interesting. Examples are softer their perception of "Hostages" to "Captives" religiously used by all correspondents probably on pain of dismissal for failure ?, The recent inclusion of the description "Palestine" at the end of each report t in an effort to convey the illusion there is such a legitimate country already. Their reporting of casualties as only "Palestinians and mostly women & children always in "residential areas" (as if Hamas is operating from above ground prepared positions or bunkers) to the near total exclusion of Hamas and any actions conducted by them. Clearly J. Goebbels would have been proud of Aljazeera and happy they follow his "play book" to the letter
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