Has Israel Gone Too Far?

Or is the mainstream press incapable of reporting this war?

Now that it’s been longer than 150 days for the Israel-Gaza war, which is a sub-conflict between Shia Persian Iran and the Sunni Arab Gulf, I’m hearing from smart, moderate friends that enough is enough. Israel has killed far too many Palestinian civilians. It’s lost the PR war if not the actual war. Time to end it. Invading Rafah, where Hamas has amassed several battalions among a million civilians, is the red line.

How do these folks know? They cite what the mainstream press calls the Gaza Health Ministry and the Wafa News Agency. Both are communications services fully owned and controlled by warring Palestinian governmental factions — Hamas in Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank, respectively, in a region with no free speech, no independent press, no voting rights, no minority rights, no women’s rights, no LGBTQ rights, no children’s rights, no environmental regulations and no other aspects of modern liberal governance. Hamas and Fatah make Truth Social look like the gold standard for news accuracy, but their press releases aren’t interrogated by mainstream American news organizations or ignored as they’d do to, say, One American News Network or even the The New York Post. Palestinian propaganda numbers are simply passed on with little to no commentary, beyond the rare “Hamas-controlled…” preamble.

Presumably, most American subscribers then take Hamas and Fatah propaganda at face value, because they’re conveyed by trustworthy American sources, and reflexively kick each time they see a big number.

In the Russia-Ukraine war, the same American news groups don’t directly quote Russian press releases without heavy caveats, if they cite them at all. For example, Russian doesn’t call it a war. Russia also claims to be defending itself from an eventual NATO attack. The New York Times wisely doesn’t cover Russian propaganda, but, for the Middle East, the Times has become a publishing platform for a radical Islamic theocracy. It’s an odd choice for a news organization with reporters on the ground and a commitment to free speech.

The double standard is glaring, and excused either by the ignorance of highly-educated and well-trained reporters, or by the old rubric of antisemitism. Is it antisemitic to publish Hamas statistics? Is it pro-Ukrainian to deny Russian airtime?

The biggest issue, beyond daily press obfuscations like mentioning the killing of a senior Hamas member hiding in an UNRWA facility that doesn’t mention that UNRWA has thousands of Hamas members, is the oft-quoted statistic of 30,000 Palestinian casualties, as conveyed by… Hamas. This seems to mean that 30,000 innocent children and women have been killed by (bloodthirsty/male/straight/white) Jews, but even a casual observer would note that at least one Hamas combatant must have been killed by now. The IDF estimates 12,000, a stat rarely covered by the press and if it is, it’s immediately buried. Also, thousands of civilians have most likely been killed by Palestinian combatants. We’ll never know, because no one with the resources to answer the question is asking.

Why not?

When the greatest investigative organizations in the English-speaking world are cowed by, manipulated by, or in support of a relatively small Islamic terror group in far away Israel, I wonder how they'll handle the multimillion dollar steamroller of a Trump campaign here at home.

As awful as a single civilian death is, the reality that the IDF perpetuates war crimes is belied by the roughly 1:1.5 ratio of killed combatants to civilians, in a war where antagonists hide among civilian populations. I wish I knew more about this — is Hamas over-reporting their numbers, is the IDF under-reporting theirs? Who counts as a civilian if a non-Hamas family keeps an Israeli hostage? Are 17-year-old combatants considered children? Is UNRWA fully controlled by Hamas, which has the monopoly of violence in Gaza? What’s a typical civilian death count in asymmetric war with tunnel infrastructure and a shared border?

What if there’s no precedent for this kind of war? Why is it that in every war in the history of the world there are displaced refugees, but not now? (Gazans have nowhere to go because no Arab neighboring states will accept them, yet Syrians were welcome to Turkey, Germany and beyond during that civil war. 200,000 displaced Israelis may never go home again either, since home is near a border. They aren’t welcome by Arab states. Why?)

My bigger point: why aren’t American news sources asking these questions?

This reminds me of 2016, when trusted new organizations were captured by the Trump campaign with perseverating coverage summarized by: “what about her emails?” That one line of absurd posturing dominated coverage for nearly a year. James Comey didn’t help, but the press could have done a better job of contextualizing the fundamental irrelevance of the attack. Instead they doubled down.

The mainstream press in 2016 didn’t understand the story of the campaign: a hard right autocrat captured a political party and ran against a centrist candidate who used feminism as a meaningful figleaf for preserving the status quo. This twisted, completely-missing-the-point coverage is happening once again about Israel.

I think most people can agree that not much has changed sine 2016. The mostly liberal press, which normally wouldn’t consider itself anti-disability, could write about Biden’s bad knees slowing his walk, instead they focus on his age, as if he’s to blame for his arthritis. Coverage of Israel suffers from the same problem. The press is either easily manipulated by autocrats (Hamas, MAGA) or victim of their own standard of objective news gathering, because objectivity is impossible.

The press is stuck in a doom loop of both-sideism, false-equivalency and promoting terrorist propaganda that ultimately makes them irrelevant. To many, this also happened with Covid coverage. Media hysteria focused on death-count infographics and worse-case scenarios, so it missed the larger story: the virus was very deadly… for old people. Infants and children were fine. Most adults were fine. But when you only cover exceptions, you miss the big picture.

I’m not the only person in America who has stopped reading the mainstream press when I want coverage of Israel. I now rely on Dan Senor, Richie Torres, Michael Oren, The Times of Israel, Hillel Fuld and others like @jewishoncampus to understand the war there and antisemitism here. The Times (I’m a subscriber so I focus on them as a synecdoche for the corps) isn’t a reliable source.

Is that a slippery slope? If coverage of the Israel-Palestine war is lost, what other stories aren’t we seeing?

As they say in Washington, where a man with a speech impediment runs for a second term, optics beat policy. The optics for Israel are bad. They’re killers who delight in murder. They must be stopped in our quads, at our venues, in our schools and by our political assemblies. How do we know? We see it on TV, in the news and our social feeds.

Who shapes these anti-Jewish optics? Who aims the lens? Who writes the stories? In an academia saturated with DEI thinking that has made us all aware of structural racism and implicit bias, how come systemic antisemitism is ignored?

---

Should Israel declare a unilateral cease-fire before it attacks Rafah and let Hamas regroup? Should Queers for Palestine, which has coopted the keffiyeh from homicidal homophobes to make a selectively-racist fashion accessory, replace military analysis? Should Jews denounce themselves to be palatable to liberals?

Do we demand that Italian-Americans advocate for Italy to be disbanded because it has an extremist Prime Minister? Should Italy cease to exist because it’s on stolen Hapsburg land? Sounds absurd, but for Israel, this is the framework we see every day.

I wish better questions were asked by reporters so I don’t have to read about the IDF killing people waiting for aid trucks or sheltering in hospitals, only to learn it never happened.

I think the news can do better, it’s not a lost cause.

The irony of course is that if Trump manages to seize power and bans the media, I’ll think of this as a golden era of journalism. Flawed, but redeemable.