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https://scheerpost.com/2023/10/18/patrick-lawrence-decency-becomes-indecent/

Decency Becomes Indecent

At this point, Washington’s defense of Israel becomes as baldly obscene as the apartheid state’s long record of lawless aggression toward the Palestinian population.  

There have been many, very many singular moments among America’s purported leaders and assorted officials and commentators since Hamas staged its daring assault on southern Israel on the morning of Oct. 7. Let us consider a few of these moments and draw some conclusions. 

Let us look closely at what is being said and what the American public is now urged to think and accept as Israeli forces prosecute a campaign against Gaza’s 2.1 million people so extreme as to suggest ethnic cleansing is, as many have long argued, the ultimate Israeli project. 

“Well, there have been some members of Congress who have called for a ceasefire, and they have not gone as far as backing the administration’s call for support for Israel.” This was a reporter’s observation at a press conference last week that featured President Joe Biden’s press secretary, Karine Jean–Pierre, and Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser.

Jean–Pierre’s response merits careful parsing for the large implications we find in it. In my read it reflects Washington’s increasing desperation as Israel’s conduct toward Palestinians tips into a savagery no rational human being can defend.  

“So, look, I’ve seen some of those statements this weekend. And we’re going to continue to be very clear,” Jean–Pierre replied. “We believe they are wrong, we believe they’re repugnant, and we believe they’re disgraceful.”  

Let’s not miss what transpired in those few seconds. To call for a ceasefire as the Israeli Defense Forces level an entire city and turn a million human beings into refugees — murdering many children and noncombatants in the process — is humane by any serious definition. To describe such a call as wrong, repugnant, and disgraceful is to assert that what is ordinarily decent must now be cast aside as indecent. 

At this point, Washington’s defense of Israel becomes as baldly obscene as the apartheid state’s long record of lawless aggression toward the Palestinian population.     

‘Not Two Sides’

Pressing on in a tone that is combative and unmistakably defensive all at once, Jean–Pierre added, “Our — our condemnation belongs squarely with terrorists who have brutally murdered, raped, kidnapped hundreds — hundreds of Israelis. There can be no equivocation about that. There are not two sides here. There are not two sides.”

Not two sides, asserted twice. This, too, has implications we must consider.

Later at the same presser, another White House correspondent asked Jake Sullivan, “Is the goal the destruction of Hamas? … What is — where do you draw the line? Is there a red line of where do you draw that line of what you need to accomplish?” 

Good questions, if inarticulately posed. To which Sullivan replied, “I’m not here to — to draw red lines or issue warnings or give lectures to anybody.” 

Translation: No, we, the one nation with the power and influence to stop the most nakedly racist case of violence in the IDF’s long history of such aggression, will do nothing to prevent it.

Let us continue. 

Last Friday Akbar Shahid Ahmed, the foreign affairs correspondent at HuffPost, reported on an internal State Department memorandum advising diplomats and other officials to refrain from any suggestion that Israel moderate its bombing campaign or its planned ground invasion into Gaza. 

“In messages circulated on Friday, State Department staff wrote that high-level officials do not want press materials to include three specific phrases: ‘de-escalation/ceasefire,’ ‘end to violence/bloodshed’ and ‘restoring calm,’” Ahmed wrote. “The revelation provides a stunning signal about the Biden administration’s reluctance to push for Israeli restraint…” 

I would have liked an extended quotation of the memo’s text, but I am not the least bit doubtful that State circulated the instructions Ahmed described. By last Friday Antony Blinken, the Biden regime’s spineless secretary of state, had deleted messages calling for restraint that he had earlier posted on his X account. 

A headline atop an editorial in Saturday’s New York Times — signed, significantly, by the Editorial Board: “Israel Can Defend Itself and Uphold Its Values.” Under it, this assertion: “What Israel is fighting to defend is a society that values human life and the rule of law.”

In an interview with The New York Post Sunday, Chuck Schumer, the U.S. Senate majority leader, denounced U.S. demonstrators calling for Israel to stop its indiscriminate military campaign against Gazans and said Israelis must get “everything they need” — the objective being “to totally eliminate Hamas.” 

“Totally eliminate.” Does the phrase summon any echoes in history?  

On the halfway-humorous side, Lydia Polgreen, a Times columnist, published a piece last Friday under the headline, “Now Is the Moment for Biden’s Age to Be an Asset.”

And in the same line, Douglas Emhoff addressed Jewish leaders at the White House last Wednesday. With the incoherent president by his side, Emhoff  reassured them, “I know you’re all hurting…. But thank God we have the steady leadership of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris during this unthinkable time in our history.  Their moral compass, their calm and empathy are what we need in this time of crisis.”

Emhoff, just a brief aside, is the vice-president’s spouse. 

On Monday evening the White House announced that Biden will travel to Israel Wednesday — not at his initiative but in response to a telephone call from Bibi Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. Biden’s purpose, as the Times described it in Tuesday’s editions, is “to bolster the country’s resolve to eradicate Hamas.” 

In other words, to endorse a military campaign against Gaza that grows more obscene by the day.  

A bottomless inventory of this stuff, these preposterous declamations, this bloviating, this full-frontal approval of criminal aggression, has accumulated since the Hamas incursion into Israel on Oct. 7. Let’s be clear about the intent of this extraordinary onslaught.

This is the most powerful campaign to manufacture consent in behalf of apartheid Israel in my lifetime, and that almost certainly includes yours. We need to ask why this is so. 

True, the perception-management blitz that assaults us daily is easily mistaken as nothing more than what we have had — routinely over many decades — from official Washington and the hack reporters and columnists regurgitating the orthodoxies.  A criminal regime is dressed up as the democracy of the Middle East, Palestinians act violently without cause or provocation, the Israeli state is rightfully defending itself and its citizens — innocent citizens, of course.  

History Is Erased

Above all, far above all, events are completely stripped of history. Never is there any mention, when events such as the Hamas assault occur, of all the savagery to which Palestinians have been subjected since al–Nakba, the Catastrophe of 1948. 

All the land-thefts, village bulldozings, olive-grove burnings, the arrests and tortures, the murders of children, and on and on: All this is airbrushed out of the picture. It is the most powerful of erasures, for what remains, as Karine Jean–Pierre so well put it, is only one side. All context is made invisible. History is erased. 

In the present case, we must recognize that the Hamas militias’ murders of noncombatant Israelis in the 20 towns and villages it assaulted on Oct. 7 cannot be excused or condoned. Those killings, by officials counts at least 1,300, were wrong no matter which way one turns the case. 

But neither can we accept official assertions that Hamas acted without provocation. Washington officials and the corporate media, which we must count official but for the ownership structure, remain silent in unison about the events that preceded the Oct. 7 assault. 

We read nothing of the scores of right-wing settlers, a freak-show of racist fanatics, who stormed al–Aqsa just prior to the Hamas intervention — an obvious and by the evidence intentional provocation. In its own way this news blackout, too, is wrong. 

Is what we get from the propaganda mills this time routine, more of the same? I do not think so. My reasoning begins with events that occurred two years ago. In May 2021, readers will surely recall, Israeli police attempted to restrict Palestinians’ access to al–Aqsa and the associated Dome of the Rock — this during Ramadan no less.   

“Then came Hamas’ retaliatory rockets fired into Jerusalem from Gaza after an ultimatum it issued to retreat from al–Aqsa was ignored,” I wrote in this space at the time. “And now we watch Israel’s fourth attack on Gaza in the past dozen years. And now we read in our corporate press of Israeli–Arab ‘clashes’ and of Israel’s ‘right to self-defense.’” 

Something happened amid those events, it seemed to me then and seems to me now. The deranged, at this point psychotic violence of the Israeli state — and many of its citizens — was too obvious to deny. The apologetics would return like an incoming tide, but neither official Washington nor corporate media was able to avoid some bold admissions of responsibility. The mainstream press even made occasional mention of history. 

There was a crack in the wall whose bricks were made long ago of denial and lies and erasures, this is to say. It suggested very strongly a turn in world opinion.

I recall these thoughts as I listen to Karine Jean–Pierre, Jake Sullivan, and the editorial writers at The New York Times. Their defenses of Israel and denials of the past have grown so ridiculously hollow that we are effectively invited not to believe what is right before our eyes. 

We are urged to think the decent is indecent, this is to say — and by the same token that the indecent is decent. 

Refusing to face reality, the propagandists and liars are left with but one alternative: to insist ever more loudly and aggressively and in ever shriller tones that the obviously false is true. And a certain desperation, to me pronounced, necessarily creeps into the official narrative when it seeks to pervert our perceptions so fundamentally.

It cannot hold and is not. From all I hear and read in various comment threads, some attached to the work of apologists at The New York Times and elsewhere, the façade of Israeli righteousness, the “self-defense” dodge, the subtraction of history — all this is weakening. Unmistakably, I would say. 

To turn this matter another way, Washington’s neoconservative cliques cannot indefinitely defend and prolong a foreign policy that is failing this spectacularly. 

In all the short, faux-confident sentences — “There are not two sides here,” etc . — I urge you, readers, to hear anxiety and apprehension. You can claim the sky is not blue and it does not get dark at night only so long before no one listens and opinion turns decisively against you.

I had an interesting conversation over the weekend with Christian Müller, a prominent Swiss journalist for many years and now the publisher and editor of GlobalBridge.ch, a German-language current-affairs publication. Is this the moment, we wondered together, when the international defense of Israel crumbles and the apartheid state stands effectively alone, the U.S. its only defender? 

It is our question, and there are signs of it. I mentioned comment threads here and there. There are also the Europeans, whose enthusiasm for the Israeli project shows serious signs of weakening. Over the weekend Gideon Rachman, a Financial Times columnist and long a reliable friend of Israel, quoted European diplomats saying ruefully — and of necessity anonymously — “We may be about to see a massive ethnic cleansing.”

Such remarks are not those of sanguine allies of a regime that is obviously out of control. 

I answer my friend Christian with a qualified negative. No, public opinion and the support Israel has long enjoyed among the Western powers is not on the brink of tipping over. The Hamas incursion into Israel and the Israeli response will not prove decisive in this way. 

But if we think in terms of a gradual evolution toward justice, the winds blow unmistakably in the right direction. They have gathered force gradually for some years now. The horrific events of 2021 were pivotal, we can see, but they were not the decisive turning point some of us thought we saw at the time. 

It is the same now. The offensive pretense of Israeli innocence has never been more thoroughly exposed as fraudulent, never more obviously a matter of moral irresponsibility. It will nonetheless require more time before the lights go on and the great, grotesque game of charades we call “democratic Israel’s self-defense” is over. 

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https://scheerpost.com/2023/10/18/chris-hedges-israels-culture-of-deceit/

Israel’s Culture of Deceit

Israel, which always seeks to blame Palestinians for the atrocities it carries out, is the least trustworthy source about the bombing of the hospital in Gaza. 

Israel was founded on lies. The lie that Palestinian land was largely unoccupied. The lie that 750,000 Palestinians fled their homes and villages during their ethnic cleansing by Zionist militias in 1948 because they were told to do so by Arab leaders. The lie that it was Arab armies that started the 1948 war that saw Israel seize 78 percent of historic Palestine. The lie that Israel faced annihilation in 1967, forcing it to invade and occupy the remaining 22 percent of Palestine, as well as land belonging to Egypt and Syria. 

Israel is sustained by lies. The lie that Israel wants a just and equitable peace and will support a Palestinian state. The lie that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. The lie that Israel is an “outpost of Western civilization in a sea of barbarism.” The lie that Israel respects the rule of law and human rights. 

Israel’s atrocities against the Palestinians are always greeted with lies. I heard them. I recorded them. I published them in my stories for The New York Times when I was the paper’s Middle East Bureau Chief.

I covered war for two decades, including seven years in the Middle East. I learned quite a bit about the size and lethality of explosive devices. There is nothing in the arsenal of Hamas or Islamic Jihad that could have replicated the massive explosive power of the missile that killed an estimated 500 civilians in the al-Ahli Arab Christian hospital in Gaza. Nothing. If Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) had these kinds of missiles, huge buildings in Israel would be rubble with hundreds of dead. They don’t. 

The whistling sound, audible on the video moments before the explosion, appears to comes from the high velocity of a missile. This sound gives it away. No Palestinian rocket makes this noise. And then there is the speed of the missile. Palestinian rockets are slow and lumbering, clearly visible as they arch in the sky and then tumble in free fall towards their targets. They do not strike with precision or travel at close to supersonic speed. They are incapable of killing hundreds of people.

The Israeli military dropped “roof knocking” rockets with no warheads on the hospital in the days leading up to the Oct. 17 strike, the familiar warning given by Israel to evacuate buildings, according to al-Ahli hospital officials. Hospital officials also said they had received calls from Israel saying “we warned you to evacuate twice.” Israel has demanded that all hospitals in northern Gaza be evacuated.

Following the strike on the hospital, Hananya Naftali, a “digital aide” to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, posted on X, formerly Twitter: “Israeli Air Force struck a Hamas terrorist base inside a hospital in Gaza.” The post was quickly deleted.

Since the Oct. 7 incursion into Israel by Palestinian resistance fighters, which reportedly left some 1,300 Israelis dead, many of them civilians, and saw some 200 kidnapped as hostages and taken to Gaza, Israel has carried out 51 attacks on healthcare facilities in Gaza that have killed 15 healthcare workers and injured 27, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Out of 35 hospitals in Gaza, four are not functioning due to severe damage and targeting. Only eight of the 22 UNRWA primary healthcare centers are “partially functional,” the WHO says.

The brazenness of Israeli lies stunned those of us who reported from Gaza. It did not matter if we had seen the Israeli attack, including the shooting of unarmed Palestinians. It did not matter how many witnesses we interviewed. It did not matter what photographic and forensic evidence we obtained. Israel lied. Small lies. Big lies. Huge lies. These lies came reflexively and instantly from the Israeli military, Israeli politicians and Israeli media. They were amplified by Israel’s well-oiled propaganda machine and repeated with a cloying sincerity on international news outlets. 

Israel engages in the kinds of jaw-dropping lies that characterize despotic regimes. It does not deform the truth, it inverts it. It paints a picture that is diametrically opposed to reality. Those of us who have covered the occupied territories have run into Israel’s Alice-in-Wonderland narratives, which we dutifully insert into our stories — required under the rules of American journalism — although we know they are untrue.

Israel has invented an Orwellian lexicon. Children killed by Israelis become children caught in crossfire. The bombing of residential districts, with dozens of dead and wounded, becomes a surgical strike on a bomb-making factory. The destruction of Palestinian homes becomes the demolition of the homes of terrorists. 

The Big Lie — Große Lüge — feeds the two reactions Israel seeks to elicit — racism among its supporters and terror among its victims. The Big Lies fosters the myth of a clash of civilizations, a war between democracy, decency and honor on one side and Islamic terrorism, barbarism and medievalism on the other. 

George Orwell in his novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” called the Big Lie “doublethink”. Doublethink uses “logic against logic” and “repudiate[s] morality while laying claim to it.” The Big Lie abolishes nuances, ambiguities and contradictions that can plague conscience. It is designed to create cognitive dissonance. It permits no gray zones. The world is black and white, good and evil, righteous and unrighteous. The Big Lie allows believers to take comfort — a comfort they are desperately seeking — in their own moral superiority even as they abrogate all morality. It feeds, what Edward Bernays called, the “logic-proof compartment of dogmatic adherence.” All effective propaganda, Bernays writes, targets and builds upon these irrational “psychological habits.”

Israeli supporters thirst for these lies. They do not want to know the truth. The truth would force them to examine their racism, self-delusion and complicity in oppression, murder and genocide. 

Most importantly, the Big Lie sends an ominous message to the Palestinians. The Big Lie states that Israel will wage a campaign of mass terror and genocide and never take responsibility for its crimes. The Big Lie obliterates the truth. It obliterates the dignity of human thought and human action. It obliterates facts. It obliterates history. It obliterates comprehension. It obliterates hope. It reduces all communication to the language of violence. When oppressors speak to the oppressed exclusively through indiscriminate violence, the oppressed answer through indiscriminate violence. 

The cartoonist Joe Sacco and I watched Israeli soldiers taunt and shoot small boys in the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza. We interviewed the boys and their parents afterwards in the hospital. In a few cases we attended their funerals. We had their names. We had the dates and locations of the shootings. 

Israel’s response was to say that we were not in Gaza. We had made it up.

The Israeli Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, Defense Minister and Israeli Defense Force (IDF) spokesperson immediately blamed the killing of the Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022, on Palestinian gunmen. Israel disseminated footage of a Palestinian fighter they said shot and killed the journalist, who was wearing a flak jacket and helmet marked “PRESS.”

Benny Gantz, who was at the time Defense Minister, stated that “no [Israeli] gunfire was directed at the journalist,” and that the Israeli army had “seen footage of indiscriminate shooting by Palestinian terrorists”.

This lie was peddled until video footage examined by B’Tselem, The Israeli Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, identified the location of the Palestinian gunman depicted in the video. The video, the human rights organization found, was taken in a different location from where Shireen was killed.

When Israel is caught lying, as it was with the murder of Shireen, it promises an investigation. But these investigations are a sham. Impartial investigations into the hundreds of killings by soldiers and Jewish settlers of Palestinians are rarely carried out. Perpetrators are almost never brought to trial or held accountable. The pattern of Israeli obfuscation is predictable. So is the collusion of nearly all of the corporate media along with Republican and Democratic politicians. U.S. politicians decried the murder of Shireen and dutifully repeated the old mantra, calling for a “thorough investigation” by the army that carried out the crime.

A few months later, Israel admitted that there was a “high possibility” that an Israeli soldier killed the journalist by accident, but by then the eruption of street protests and rage over the killing of the journalist was over and her murder largely forgotten. 

By the time the conclusive proof comes out about the bombing of the hospital, it too will be a distant memory.

There is dramatic footage captured in September 2000 at the Netzarim junction in the Gaza Strip — where I saw a nineteen-year-old boy shot and killed by an Israeli sniper — by France 2 TV, of a father trying to shield his traumatized 12-year-old son, Muhammad al-Durrah, from Israeli gunfire that ultimately killed him. 

The killing of the boy resulted in the typical propaganda campaign by Israel. Israeli officials spent years lying about the killing, first blaming the Palestinians for the shooting, later suggesting that the scene was faked, and finally insisting the boy was still alive.

When an Israeli soldier, in 2003, murdered the 23-year-old student and American activist Rachel Corrie, by crushing her to death with a bulldozer as she tried to prevent the illegal demolition of a Palestinian doctor’s home, the Israeli army said it was an accident for which Corrie was responsible.

The Israeli military has killed “at least” 20 journalists since 2001, with no accountability, according to a 2023 report by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.  “Immediately after a journalist is killed by security forces, Israeli officials often push out a counter narrative to media reporting,” the CPJ concluded. This includes blaming the deaths on “indiscriminate fire” by Palestinians or attempts to discredit those killed as “terrorists.”

Israel blocks the work of independent human rights organizations into atrocities and war crimes it commits in Gaza and the West Bank. It refuses to cooperate with the International Criminal Court into possible war crimes in the Occupied Territories. It does not cooperate with the U.N. Human Rights Council and prohibits the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, from entering the country. Israel revoked the work permit for Omar Shakir, the Director of Human Rights Watch (Israel and Palestine), in 2018 and expelled him. In May 2018, Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy published a report calling on the European Union and European states to halt their direct and indirect financial support and funding to Palestinian and international human rights organizations that “have ties to terror and promote boycotts against Israel.”

After the bombing of the hospital, Israel first released a video that purported to show Palestinian Islamic Jihad rockets which struck the hospital. The Israelis hastily removed the video when journalists noticed that time stamps showed the images were taken 40 minutes after the strike on the hospital. 

Israeli propagandists — aware that Palestinian rockets have little explosive power — then claimed that Hamas stored munitions under the hospital. This caused the massive explosion, they said. But if this was true, it would mean there would be a secondary explosion. There was none. And now Israel has released what they say is a recording of two Hamas militants discussing the missile strike on the hospital. The militants ask each other, in a self-incriminating conversation that is too ridiculous to believe, if Hamas or PIJ carried out the strike. Please. How was Israel completely in the dark about an incursion by thousands of armed Palestinian militants from Gaza into Israel on Oct. 7 and able to capture this incriminating conversation by two supposed militants?  

“Israel has a whole unit of ‘mistaravim’, Israeli Jewish undercover agents trained to pose as Palestinians and secretly operate among Palestinians,” the reporter Jonathan Cook writes. “Israel produced a highly popular TV series about such people in Gaza called Fauda. You have to be beyond credulous to think that Israel couldn’t, and wouldn’t, rig up a call like this to fool us, just as it regularly fools Palestinians in Gaza.”

Israel has also long targeted medical facilities, ambulances and medics, as Middle East scholar Norman Finkelstein points out. It bombed a Palestinian children’s hospital during the 1982 war in Lebanon, killing 60 people. It also carried out missile strikes on clearly marked Lebanese ambulances during the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon. It damaged or destroyed 29 ambulances and almost half of Gaza’s health facilities, including 15 hospitals, during the 2008-2009 assault on Gaza known as Operation Cast Lead. It routinely prohibited wounded Palestinians from being picked up by ambulances during this operation, often leaving them to die. During Operation Protective Edge, the 51-day assault on Gaza in 2014, Israel destroyed or damaged 17 hospitals and 56 primary healthcare centers and damaged or destroyed 45 ambulances. 

You can see my interview, released today, with Professor Finkelstein about Gaza and Israel here.

Amnesty International, which investigated the Israeli attacks on three of these hospitals in 2014, dismissed the “evidence” for the attacks offered by Israel as false. “The image tweeted by the Israeli military does not match satellite images of the al-Wafa hospital and appears to depict a different location,” the report read.

Expose Israeli lies and you are attacked by Israel and its supporters as an anti-Semite and apologist for terrorists. You are banished from mainstream media. You are denied forums to speak about the issue and, as has happened to me, disinvited from university events.

It is an old game, one I have played as a reporter many, many times. I bear the scars of the lies spewed out by Israel and its lobby. Meanwhile, Israel continues its butchery, endorsed and even lauded by Western political leaders, including Joe Biden, who accompany the torrent of lies from Israel like a Wagnerian chorus.