With Gaza, Journalists Fail Again
By Chris Hedges
The assault on Gaza exposed not only Israel?s callous disregard for
international law but the gutlessness of the American press. There were
no major newspapers, television networks or radio stations that
challenged Israel?s fabricated version of events that led to the Gaza
attack or the daily lies Israel used to justify the unjustifiable.
Nearly all reporters were, as during the buildup to the Iraq war,
pliant stenographers and echo chambers. If we as journalists have a
product to sell, it is credibility. Take that credibility away and we
become little more than propagandists and advertisers. By refusing to
expose lies we destroy, in the end, ourselves.
All governments lie in wartime. Israel is no exception. Israel waged an
effective war of black propaganda. It lied craftily with its glib, well-
rehearsed government spokespeople, its ban on all foreign press in Gaza
and its confiscation of cell phones and cameras from its own soldiers
lest the reality of the attack inadvertently seep out. It was the
Arabic network al-Jazeera, along with a handful of local reporters in
Gaza, which upheld the honor of our trade, that of giving a voice to
those who without our presence would have no voice, that of countering
the amplified lies of the powerful with the faint cries and pain of the
oppressed. But these examples of journalistic integrity were too few
and barely heard by us.
We retreated, as usual, into the moral void of American journalism, the
void of balance and objectivity. The ridiculous notion of being
unbiased, outside of the flow of human existence, impervious to grief
or pain or anger or injustice, allows reporters to coolly give truth
and lies equal space and airtime. Balance and objectivity are the
antidote to facing unpleasant truths, a way of avoidance, a way to
placate the powerful. We record the fury of a Palestinian who has lost
his child in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza but make sure to mention
Israel?s ?security needs,? include statements by Israeli officials who
insist there was firing from the home or the mosque or the school and
of course note Israel?s right to defend itself. We do this throughout
the Middle East. We record the human toll in Iraq, caused by our
occupation, but remind everyone that ?Saddam killed his own people.? We
write about the deaths of families in Afghanistan during an airstrike
but never forget to mention that the Taliban ?oppresses women.? Their
crimes cancel out our crimes. It becomes a moral void. And above all we
never forget to mention the ?war on terror.? We ask how and who but
never, never do we ask why. As long as we speak in the cold, dead
language of those in power, the language that says a lie is as valid as
a fact, the language where one version of history is as good as
another, we are part of the problem, not the solution.
?Bombs and rockets are flying between Israel and Palestinians in
Gaza, and once again, The Times is caught in a familiar crossfire,
accused from all sides of unfair and inaccurate coverage,? New York
Times public editor Clark Hoyt breezily began in writing his assessment
of the paper?s coverage, going on to conclude ?though the most
vociferous supporters of Israel and the Palestinians do not agree, I
think The Times, largely barred from the battlefield and reporting amid
the chaos of war, has tried its best to do a fair, balanced and
complete job?and has largely succeeded.?
The cliché that Israel had a right to defend itself from Hamas rocket
attacks?that bombs and rockets were ?flying between Israel and
Palestinians in Gaza??was accepted in the press as an undisputed truth.
It became the starting point for every hollow discussion of the Israeli
attack. It left pundits and columnists chattering about
?proportionality,? not legality. Israel was in open violation of
international law, specifically Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva
Convention, which calls on an occupying power to respect the safety of
occupied civilians. But you would not know this from the press reports.
The use of attack aircraft and naval ships, part of the world?s fourth-
largest military power, to level densely packed slums of people who
were hungry, without power and often water, people surrounded on all
sides by the Israeli army, was fatuously described as a war. The news
coverage held up the absurd notion that a few Hamas fighters with light
weapons and no organization were a counterforce to F-16 fighter jets,
tank battalions, thousands of Israeli soldiers, armored personnel
carriers, naval ships and Apache attack helicopters. It fit the Israeli
narrative. It may have been balanced and objective. But it was not
true.
The Hamas rockets are crude, often made from old pipes, and largely
ineffectual. The first homemade Qassam rocket was fired across the
Israeli border in October 2001. It was not until June 2004 that Israel
suffered its first fatality. There are 24 Israelis who have been killed
by Hamas rocket fire, compared with 5,000 Palestinian dead, more than
half of them in Gaza, at least a third of them children. This does not
absolve Hamas from firing rockets at civilian areas, which is a war
crime, but it does raise questions about the story line swallowed
without reflection by the press. I covered the Kosovo Albanians?
desperate attempts to resist the Serbs, which resulted in a handful of
Serb casualties, but no one ever described the lopsided Serbian
butchery in Kosovo as a war. It was called genocide, and it led to NATO
intervention to halt it.
It was Israel, not Hamas, which violated the truce established last
June. This was never made clear in any of the press reports. Hamas
agreed to halt rocket fire into Gaza in exchange for an Israeli promise
to ease the draconian siege that made the shipment of vital material
and food into Gaza nearly impossible. And once the agreement was
reached, the Hamas rocket fire ended. Israel, however, never upheld its
end of the agreement. It increased the severity of the siege. U.N.
agencies complained. International relief organizations condemned the
Israeli blockade. And there were even rumblings inside Israel. Shmuel
Zakai, an Israeli brigadier general who resigned as commander of the
Israel Defense Forces? Gaza Division and was forcibly discharged from
the military amid allegations that he leaked information to the media,
told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on Dec. 22 that the Israeli
government had made a ?central error? during the tahdiyeh, the six-
month period of relative truce, by failing ?to take advantage of the
calm to improve, rather than markedly worsen, the economic plight of
the Palestinians of the Strip. ? [W]hen you create a tahdiyeh, and the
economic pressure on the Strip continues,? Zakai said, ?it is obvious
that Hamas will try to reach an improved tahdiyeh, and that their way
to achieve this is resumed Qassam fire. ? You cannot just land blows,
leave the Palestinians in Gaza in the economic distress they?re in, and
expect that Hamas will just sit around and do nothing.?
Israel, we know from papers such as Haaretz, started planning this
assault last March. The Israeli army deliberately broke the truce when
it carried out an attack on Nov. 4 that killed six Hamas fighters. It
timed the attack, the heavy air and naval bombardment and the invasion
of Gaza to coincide with the waning weeks of the Bush administration.
Israel knew it would be given carte blanche by the White House. Hamas
responded to the Nov. 4 provocation in the way Israel anticipated. It
fired Qassam rockets and Grad missiles into Israel to retaliate. But
even then Hamas offered to extend the truce if Israel would lift the
blockade. Israel refused. Operation Cast Lead was unleashed.
Henry Siegman, the director of the U.S./Middle East Project at the
Council of Foreign Relations, noted correctly that Israel ?could have
met its obligation to protect its citizens by agreeing to ease the
blockade, but it didn?t even try. It cannot be said that Israel
launched its assault to protect its citizens from rockets. It did so to
protect its right to continue the strangulation of Gaza?s population.?
There were a few flashes of integrity in the American press. The Wall
Street Journal ran a thoughtful piece, ?How Israel Helped to Spawn
Hamas,? on Jan. 24 that was unusual in view of the acceptance in U.S.
press coverage that Hamas is nothing more than an Islamo-fascist
organization that understands only violence. And some journalists from
news organizations such as the BBC did a good job once they were
finally permitted to enter Gaza. Jimmy Carter wrote an Op-Ed article in
The Washington Post detailing his and the Carter Center?s efforts to
prevent the conflict. This article was an important refutation of the
Israeli argument, although it was ignored by the rest of the media. But
these were isolated cases. The publishers, news executives and editors
largely accepted without any real protest Israel?s ban on coverage and
allowed Israeli officials to fill their news pages and airtime with
fabrications and distortions. And this made the war crimes carried out
by the Israeli army easier to commit and prolong.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who is acutely aware of Israel?s violations
of international law, has already begun to reassure his commanders that
they will be protected from war crimes prosecution.
?The commanders and soldiers that were sent on the task in Gaza should
know that they are safe from any tribunal and that the State of Israel
will assist them in this issue and protect them as they protected us
with their bodies during the military operation in Gaza,? he said.
Israel?s brutal military tactics, despite the lack of coverage in the
American press, have come under intense international scrutiny. Human
rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch,
blame the high civilian death toll on indiscriminate firing and
shelling, as well as the use of white phosphorus shells in civilian
areas. Israel has admitted using white phosphorus in Gaza but insists
the chemical, used for smoke screens and to mark spots to be shelled or
bombed, was not used directly against civilians.
Hamas is an unsavory organization. It has made life miserable for many
in Gaza and carried out a series of death-squad-style executions of
alleged opponents. But Hamas, elected to power in 2006, also brought
effective civil control to Gaza. Gaza, ruled by warring factions,
warlords, clans, kidnapping rings and criminal gangs, had descended
into chaos under Mahmoud Abbas? corrupt Fatah-led government. Hamas,
once it assumed power, halted suicide bombing attacks on Israel. It
ended rocket fire into Israel for almost a year. It upheld its
agreement with Israel. Hamas? willingness to negotiate with Israel,
albeit through Egyptian intermediaries, led al-Qaida, which has been
working to make inroads among the Palestinians, to condemn the Hamas
leadership as collaborators.
Israel and the United States carried out an abortive and desperate
attempt to overthrow Hamas by arming and backing a Fatah putsch in June
2007. They wanted to install the pliant Abbas in power. Hamas resisted,
often with violent brutality, and expelled Abbas and the Fatah
leadership from Gaza to the West Bank. Israel has now decided to do the
dirty job itself. It will not work. Israel broke and discredited Yasser
Arafat and Fatah in much the same manner. Abbas and Fatah have no
authority or credibility left. Abbas is seen by most Palestinians as a
pliant Israeli stooge. Israel is now destroying Hamas. Radical Islamic
groups, such as al-Qaida, far more violent and irrational, stand poised
to replace Hamas. And Israel will one day look wistfully at Hamas just
as it does now at Fatah. But by then, with Israel surrounded by radical
Islamic regimes in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and even Jordan, as well as
fighting a homegrown al-Qaida movement among the Palestinians, it may
be too late.
The Israeli government bears the responsibility for its crimes. But by
giving credibility to the lies and false narratives Israel uses to
justify wholesale slaughter we empower not only Israel?s willful self-
destruction but our own. The press, as happened during the buildup to
the Iraq war, was again feckless and gutless. It bent to the will of
the powerful. It abandoned its sacred contract with its readers,
listeners and viewers to always tell the truth. It chattered about
nothing. It obscured the facts. It did this while hundreds of women and
children were torn to shreds by iron fragmentation bombs in a flagrant
violation of international law. And as it failed it lauded itself for
doing ?a fair, balanced and complete job.?
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