Friday, July 07, 2023
From Ian:
Melanie Phillips: The malevolent reporting on Israel’s Jenin operation
Melanie Phillips: The malevolent reporting on Israel’s Jenin operation
That’s why the demonization of the Jewish people pumped out by the P.A. is resolutely ignored. That’s why the Palestinian aim to destroy Israel is denied. As the anchor of a BBC TV politics show said to me when I appeared on it this week, such things were just “propaganda” of the kind pumped out by “both sides.”‘Shameful, far-fetched, completely detached from reality,’ Erdan says of UN head’s Jenin comments
This skewing of the entire narrative is more momentous than most people realize.
The word “Nazi” has become so badly misused to demonize any opponent of the left that it’s been robbed of much of its actual meaning. But in the case of the Middle East, it’s not a vacuous insult. It’s no exaggeration to view the Arab and Muslim war against Israel as a posthumous Nazi front.
In recent years, a group of scholars has been steadily uncovering the depth of the alliance between the Arabs of Mandatory Palestine and the Nazi leadership.
The German political scientist Matthias Kuentzel has argued that the Nazi Party intended to turn Muslims against Jews and Zionism.
Now Kuentzel writes in the journal Fathom that his new book, Nazism, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East, sets out what’s known about the pamphlet Islam and Judaism, which was first published in 1937 by the director of the Palestinian-Arab Bureau of Information in Cairo. The author is believed to have had many contacts with Nazi agents. During the Second World War, his pamphlet was printed and distributed in large numbers by German forces.
Kuentzel describes it as a shocking text that uses religion to incite Jew-hatred. He writes, “It contradicts the widespread assumption that Islamic antisemitism developed as a response to alleged Israeli misdeeds. It was not the behavior of the Zionists that prompted the publication of this hostile text, but rather the very first attempt to implement a two-state solution for Palestine. This fact suggests that Jew-hatred was a cause, not a consequence of the crises in the Middle East conflict.”
Anyone looking at today’s Palestinian propaganda can identify its Nazi heritage of images and tropes. That’s because the Palestinian cause is a latter-day version of the Nazi onslaught against the Jews.
In the West, this does more than merely conflict with the narrative about the Middle East promoted by the BBC, The New York Times and the liberal intelligentsia. The West doesn’t want to hear about the Holocaust. It doesn’t want to hear about antisemitism. It tells itself the Jews exaggerate them for their own ends.
This is why the truth about the Palestinian war of extermination is never acknowledged. This is why the Iranian pincer movement against Israel is never reported.
It’s because much of the West believes what antisemites have always told themselves: That the Jews are responsible for their own destruction. That terrible thinking is what we’ve heard amplified once again in this week’s reporting of the events in Jenin.
Two days after Israel completed a counter-terrorism operation in Jenin—during which it seized bombs, guns and hundreds of thousands of shekels in terror funds—António Guterres, secretary-general of the United Nations, blamed the Jewish state solely for using excessive force.Richard Kemp: The fact that the IDF killed no civilians in Jenin is a marvel
The U.N. leader was “deeply disturbed” by the operation, he said on Thursday at a press briefing at U.N. headquarters in New York City.
“Israel’s airstrikes and ground operations in a crowded refugee camp” were the worst violence in the area in years, “with a significant impact on civilians, including more than 100 injured and thousands forced to flee,” he added.
Guterres called on Israel “to abide by its obligations under international law, including the duty to exercise restraint and use only proportional force, and the duty to minimize damage and injury and respect and preserve human life.”
The airstrikes were “inconsistent with the conduct of law enforcement operations,” according to Guterres, who blamed Israel for disrupting utility services and for blocking access to medical care—both charges that Israeli officials vehemently deny.
When a reporter asked whether the criticism applied only to Israel or to the Palestinians as well, Guterres replied: “It applies to all use of excessive force, and obviously, in this situation, there was an excessive force used by Israeli forces.” He ignored a question about whether Israel had committed war crimes in Jenin.
‘Are the lives of Israeli civilians not important?’
The U.N. head’s remarks were “shameful, far-fetched and completely detached from reality,” said Gilad Erdan, Israeli ambassador to the United Nations.
Jenin civilians fled their homes because Palestinian terrorists had seized them, and terrorist elements were using schools, hospitals and mosques as weapons caches and operational centers, Erdan said.
The IDF defensive operation in Jenin — the most intensive military action in the West Bank since 2002 — has concluded after 48 hours of fighting without any civilian deaths. That is a remarkable achievement unparalleled in any comparable campaign worldwide. Twelve Palestinians were killed, at least eight of whom have been claimed as fighters by the terrorist groups involved.
In most high-intensity operations in urban areas, even those conducted by Western armies who adhere strictly to the laws of war, more civilians than fighters are killed, sometimes in a ratio of 3-5 to one. This is of course not deliberate but an unavoidable consequence of fighting an enemy among the population who themselves dress as civilians, occupy civilian buildings such as mosques, schools and hospitals as bases of attack, and use innocent civilians as human shields.
Israel’s enemies in Gaza and the West Bank go further still, using tactics that deliberately try to lure the IDF to kill their own citizens. You might wonder why any force that sets itself up as protectors of its people would do that. It is because they know they can never defeat or severely damage the IDF on the battlefield, and they can rely unfailingly on journalists, academics, international bodies and activists to blame Israel for these deaths, leading to vilification, condemnation and isolation.
This tactic was used in Jenin and as a consequence around 100 people were wounded, some of whom were civilians. Despite close surveillance, strict rules of engagement, extensive training in preventing civilian casualties and tight battle discipline, it would have been impossible in these circumstances to completely avoid any uninvolved civilians getting hit. To understand that you just have to put yourself in the boots of a young Israeli soldier in a fast moving and chaotic situation with explosives and gunmen potentially around every corner, bullets maybe with your name on scything through the air and every step you take liable to set off a lethal booby trap. Don’t forget, operating on their own turf, the terrorists had plenty of time to prepare the ground for the incursion they knew would come sooner or later.
