Since Amnesty and the BBC and so many others are commemorating the anniversary of Operation Protective Edge with anti-Israel rhetoric, I decided to update my ebook on that war.
The original ebook only covered the first three weeks of the war. This new edition adds many new and essential articles from the remainder off the war, articles that are essential in understanding context and recalling events that happened as they happened.
The book is now nearly 200 pages of essential reading.
From the introduction:
During the 2014 Gaza conflict, I had been frustrated by a sense of deja-vu. I was seeing the same mistakes made by journalists and “human rights” NGOs that we’ve seen on previous Israeli operations – a willingness to believe facts that are given by terror groups and to discount facts given by the IDF, a reticence to report on Hamas war crimes, the assumption of Israel’s recklessness and even accusations of the IDF targeting civilians, one of the most absurd idea that could be made (if the IDF wanted to kill Gazans, there would have been be tens of thousands dead the first week.)Among the stories I added were the lies of Ken Roth, background on international law and more.
Beyond that is another frustration. I am a blogger based in the US. I use tools to read the Arabic press and search through the Western media as well for details on the war. And I found lots of information that the professional reporters were missing, or often, that they were aware of but did not emphasize. Perhaps the most egregious was when the Washington Post mentioned that Shifa Hospital in Gaza was the de facto headquarters of Hamas – later verified by a French/Palestinian reporter who said that the Hamas terror group “Al Qassam Brigades” had an office, complete with armed fighters, next to the hospital emergency room. Clearly every reporter who entered that hospital to publish heart-rending stories of injured children (and they are indeed heart rending) noticed when armed Hamas militants are wandering around – but they were too afraid or too biased to think that this is an important enough story.
It has become more and more apparent that if Israel had not waged this war, Hamas would have been able to use their tunnels to perform a mass casualty terror attack against Israeli communities and kibbutzim adjacent to Gaza – a territory that Israel had naively believed would become less of a threat after a complete withdrawal of citizens and troops.
The ebook is available (as a PDF file) for a $25 donation to EoZ. You can order it from the upper-right section of the main blog page.
Thanks for your support over the years!