down the memory hole

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taint no such thing as black and white...

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world war III here we come.................

 

Down the Memory Hole

Israeli contribution to conflict is forgotten by leading papers

 

7/28/06

 

In the wake of the most serious outbreak of Israeli/Arab violence in years,

three leading U.S. papers—the Washington Post, New York Times and Los Angeles

Times—have each strongly editorialized that Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in

Lebanon were solely responsible for sparking violence, and that the Israeli

military response was predictable and unavoidable. These editorials ignored

recent events that indicate a much more complicated situation.

 

Beginning with the Israeli attack on Gaza, a New York Times editorial (6/29/06)

headlined " Hamas Provokes a Fight " declared that " the responsibility for this

latest escalation rests squarely with Hamas, " and that " an Israeli military

response was inevitable. " The paper (7/15/06) was similarly sure in its

assignment of blame after the fighting spread to Lebanon: " It is important to be

clear about not only who is responsible for the latest outbreak, but who stands

to gain most from its continued escalation. Both questions have the same answer:

Hamas and Hezbollah. "

 

The Washington Post (7/14/06) agreed, writing that " Hezbollah and its backers

have instigated the current fighting and should be held responsible for the

consequences. " The L.A. Times (7/14/06) likewise wrote that " in both cases

Israel was provoked. " Three days and scores of civilian deaths later, the Times

(7/17/06) was even more direct: " Make no mistake about it: Responsibility for

the escalating carnage in Lebanon and northern Israel lies with one side...and

that is Hezbollah. "

 

As FAIR noted in a recent Action Alert (7/19/06), the portrayal of Israel as the

innocent victim in the Gaza conflict is hard to square with the death toll in

the months leading up to the current crisis; between September 2005 and June

2006, 144 Palestinians in Gaza were killed by Israeli forces, according to a

list compiled by the Israeli human rights group B'tselem; 29 of those killed

were children. During the same period, no Israelis were killed as a result of

violence from Gaza.

 

In a July 21 CounterPunch column, Alexander Cockburn highlighted some of the

violent incidents that have dropped out of the mediaÂ’s collective memory:

 

 

 

Let's go on a brief excursion into pre-history. IÂ’m talking about June 20,

2006, when Israeli aircraft fired at least one missile at a car in an attempted

extrajudicial assassination attempt on a road between Jabalya and Gaza City. The

missile missed the car. Instead it killed three Palestinian children and wounded

15.

 

Back we go again to June 13, 2006. Israeli aircraft fired missiles at a van in

another attempted extrajudicial assassination. The successive barrages killed

nine innocent Palestinians.

 

Now we're really in the dark ages, reaching far, far back to June 9, 2006, when

Israel shelled a beach in Beit Lahiya killing eight civilians and injuring 32.

 

That's just a brief trip down Memory Lane, and we trip over the bodies of twenty

dead and forty-seven wounded, all of them Palestinians, most of them women and

children.

 

On July 24, the day before Hamas' cross-border raid, Israel made an incursion of

its own, capturing two Palestinians that it said were members of Hamas

(something Hamas denied—L.A. Times, 7/25/06). This incident received far less

coverage in U.S. media than the subsequent seizure of the Israeli soldier; the

few papers that covered it mostly dismissed it in a one-paragraph brief (e.g.,

Chicago Tribune, 7/25/06), while the Israeli taken prisoner got front-page

headlines all over the world. It's likely that most Gazans donÂ’t share U.S.

news outlets' apparent sense that captured Israelis are far more interesting or

important than captured Palestinians.

 

The situation in Lebanon is also more complicated than its portrayal in U.S.

media, with the roots of the current crisis extending well before the July 12

capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah. A major incident fueling the

latest cycle of violence was a May 26, 2006 car bombing in Sidon, Lebanon, that

killed a senior official of Islamic Jihad, a Palestinian group allied with

Hezbollah. Lebanon later arrested a suspect, Mahmoud Rafeh, whom Lebanese

authorities claimed had confessed to carrying out the assassination on behalf of

Mossad (London Times, 6/17/06).

 

Israel denied involvement with the bombing, but even some Israelis are

skeptical. " If it turns out this operation was effectively carried out by Mossad

or another Israeli secret service, " wrote Yediot Aharonot, IsraelÂ’s top-selling

daily (6/16/06; cited in AFP, 6/16/06), " an outsider from the intelligence world

should be appointed to know whether it was worth it and whether it lays groups

open to risk. "

 

In Lebanon, Israel's culpability was taken as a given. " The Israelis, in hitting

Islamic Jihad, knew they would get Hezbollah involved too, " Amal Saad-Ghorayeb,

a professor at BeirutÂ’s Lebanese American University, told the New York Times

(5/29/06). " The Israelis had to be aware that if they assassinated this guy they

would get a response. "

 

And, indeed, on May 28, Lebanese militants in Hezbollah-controlled territory

fired Katyusha rockets at a military vehicle and a military base inside Israel.

Israel responded with airstrikes against Palestinian camps deep inside Lebanon,

which in turn were met by Hezbollah rocket and mortar attacks on more Israeli

military bases, which prompted further Israeli airstrikes and " a steady

artillery barrage at suspected Hezbollah positions " (New York Times, 5/29/06).

Gen. Udi Adam, the commander of IsraelÂ’s northern forces, boasted that " our

response was the harshest and most severe since the withdrawal " of Israeli

troops from Lebanon in 2000 (Chicago Tribune, 5/29/06).

 

This intense fighting was the prelude to the all-out warfare that began on July

12, portrayed in U.S. media as beginning with an attack out of the blue by

Hezbollah. While Hezbollah's capture of two Israeli soldiers may have reignited

the smoldering conflict, the Israeli air campaign that followed was not a

spontaneous reaction to aggression but a well-planned operation that was years

in the making.

 

" Of all of IsraelÂ’s wars since 1948, this was the one for which Israel was most

prepared, " Gerald Steinberg, a political science professor at Israel's Bar-Ilan

University, told the San Francisco Chronicle (7/21/05). " By 2004, the military

campaign scheduled to last about three weeks that weÂ’re seeing now had already

been blocked out and, in the last year or two, itÂ’s been simulated and

rehearsed across the board. " The Chronicle reported that a " senior Israeli army

officer " has been giving PowerPoint presentations for more than a year to " U.S.

and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks " outlining the coming war with

Lebanon, explaining that a combination of air and ground forces would target

Hezbollah and " transportation and communication arteries. "

 

Which raises a question: If journalists have been told by Israel for more than a

year that a war was coming, why are they pretending that it all started on July

12? By truncating the cause-and-effect timelines of both the Gaza and Lebanon

conflicts, editorial boards at major U.S. dailies gravely oversimplify the

decidedly more complex nature of the facts on the ground.

 

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