A short lesson in defamation: UK newspaper links Gaza operation to Sabra and Shatila massacre
In the latest non-story about Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza last year, Britain’s Independent newspaper splashes an “exclusive” revelation across its front page today from an unnamed “high-ranking” Israeli commander saying that Israel “rewrote the rules of war for Gaza” by putting Palestinian civilians at risk to minimise the risk to Israeli soldiers.
The article is a garbled, evidence-free piece of anti-Israeli opportunism which appears designed to keep the UN’s Goldstone Report on Gaza high in the public consciousness. But the purpose behind the apparent absurdity of making a front page article out of such a flimsy pseudo-exclusive is revealed in an editorial accompanying the report which rehashes one of the most enduring calumnies in the arsenal of Israel’s detractors.
In urging Israel to conduct a full inquiry into Gaza, the paper says it should draw from the example of a previous Israeli investigation in the 1980s:
“The Kahan Commission, which examined the massacre of Palestinian refugees after the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, provides a respectable model. A new Kahan Commission is needed to look into every action of the Israeli military’s behaviour in Gaza, from the testimony of soldiers on the killing of civilians, to the revelations that troops were cheered into battle by extremist rabbis.”
The Sabra and Shatila massacre, it will be recalled, involved the deliberate slaughter of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in Lebanese refugee camps in September 1982 by an Arab-Christian Phalangist militia group. The Kahan Commission found that Israel bore a degree of indirect responsibility for failing to stop the militia group — which was allied to Israel — from perpetrating the massacre. Direct responsibility for the massacre, of course, belonged to the Arab group that actually conducted it.
However, it has long been a staple of anti-Israeli demonisation to attach full and direct blame for what took place to the Israeli military giving the impression that it was Israel that either did the killing or coordinated it.
This is precisely the game that the Independent is playing. As its editorial team knows all too well, only the smallest minority of readers will know the full details of what took place at Shabra and Shatila. The rest of the readership is left with the clear impression that Israel conducted a terrible massacre in 1982 just as it conducted a terrible massacre during Operation Cast Lead last year.
The techniques of anti-Israeli propaganda are varied. The Independent in recent years has carried the whole gamut from columnists such as Johann Hari who wrote on Israel’s 60th anniversary celebration of his abiding sense of Israel and “the smell of shit” to Yasmin Alibhai-Brown who in January 2009 stated that civilians in Gaza were “slaughtered like animals in an abattoir”.
Against that sort of background, today’s offering might seem tame. But that would be to miss the point. The effectiveness of propaganda is inversely proportional to its blatancy. The obscene rantings of Hari and Alibhai-Brown are that much less effective precisely because only the most fanatical of readers can be taken in by them.
It is the drip-drip infusion of the more subtle distortions that really does the damage as week after week and year after a year a portrait of a monster is carefully but quietly drawn.
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As ever, I refer readers to my recent book, A State Beyond the Pale, to get a more rounded discussion of the themes discussed in this article. To do so, click here:
To read the articles referred to from the Independent, click here for the editorial:
and here for the front page article:
Tags: Israel
February 3rd, 2010 at 1:10 pm
My letter is in The Independent today:
“Lord Phillips (Opinion, 1 February) believes that non-Jewish critics of Israel are silent for fear of being labelled antisemitic. Whenever I hear such a comment, I ask the person who makes it to give me an example of when a critic of Israel has been incorrectly labelled as antisemitic (using the EUMC Definition of Antisemitism ). They never can give an example. Those who use this allegation are attempting to suppress the right of Jews who are on the receiving end of racism to speak out.
Lord Phillips’ assertion that Israel is in “cavalier breach of international Law, the UN Charter, its Conventions and Resolutions” is wrong. Surprisingly – especially for a lawyer – he does not state precisely what law it is that Israel has breached. Neither does he say what the purpose of the checkpoints is. It is to ensure there are no more suicide bombers of the kind that have killed hundreds of Israelis in recent years. Remember March 2002 when 22 were killed and 140 wounded at the Park Hotel in Netanya while celebrating Passover?
As for “criminally disproportionate” retribution? I’m surprised that a lawyer does not know that under the laws of war, “proportionality” does not mean “like for like”. In the Second World War, far more Germans were killed than British. It means using means which are not out of proportion to the aims.”
February 3rd, 2010 at 1:56 pm
Robin Shepherd is wrong. I believe that Israel should show the same assiduity for perserving civilian lives as Britain. After all, who can forget Britain’s valiant attempts to save civilians at Dresden and in Palestine, Kenya, Malaysia, Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan?
February 3rd, 2010 at 2:07 pm
“Lord Phillips (Opinion, 1 February) believes that”
Given his views about the Jewish state, I find it most ironic that Lord Phillips was born on March 15, 1939, the day the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia.
February 3rd, 2010 at 2:26 pm
Reading over Phillips’s piece in the Independent, there are two points that strike me:
1) Despite his talk about the Holocaust which is merely a throat-clearing exercise, Phillips has an obvious desire to portray Israelis as Nazis. Just look at his language in these examples:
i) “Following the Gaza blitz”
ii) “Gaza, then, is a ghetto of 1.5 million abandoned people”
iii) “As for token Palestinian resistance, I sense they at least agree with the Jews in the lesson hard learnt by the latter, never to acquiesce in one’s own oppression, whatever the odds.”
2) The second point concerns Phillips’s support for Hamas and its attacks on Israeli civilians:
“As for token Palestinian resistance, I sense they at least agree with the Jews in the lesson hard learnt by the latter, never to acquiesce in one’s own oppression, whatever the odds. So Israel least of all should be surprised at the defiant trickle of Hamas rockets, against which their criminally disproportionate retribution in Gaza looked like nothing so much as the abused becoming the abuser.”
February 3rd, 2010 at 3:24 pm
Jonathan Hoffman is far too modest and retiring. I suppose I shall have to blow his trumpet for him. His full reply to Phillips, a most excellent piece, appears in the Jewish Chronicle:
Open Letter to Lord Phillips of Sudbury
http://tinyurl.com/yhfxoea
February 3rd, 2010 at 5:44 pm
I haven’t bought the Independent since 12th September 2001. On that day, Robert Fisk attached blame for the Al-Qaida atrocities onto America, Israel and the West. It’s the first and only time I’ve bought a newspaper and within two minutes stuck it into the nearest rubbish bin.
February 3rd, 2010 at 11:04 pm
Quite right Robin. Having read the leader article it is quite clear that The Independent is deliberately planting the false impression that Israel carried out the massacre at Sabra and Shattila.
This is journalism at its most corrupt and cynical.
February 4th, 2010 at 8:45 am
Robin you are absolutely right. The perpetrators of the criminal act at Sabra and Shatilla have gone virtually unscathed over time as Israel remains, in most people’s minds, as the party responsible for it . Who does, these days recall Elie Hobeika, the former head of intelligence for the Lebanese Christian Maronite Forces (Phalange), as the man the Kahan Commission actually blamed for directly ordering the slaughter as revenge for Bashir Gemayel’s assassination?. And not only Kahan but also General Laachad, commander of the Christian Southern Lebanese army, who in an interview said:
“In September 1982, immediately after the massacre, when I was military governor in Beirut, Hobeika’s men came to me straight from the camps, the victims’ blood all over their clothes. They told me everything - a minute-by-minute account. I know 100 percent that neither Sharon nor anyone from the IDF was involved. But legally Sharon bears responsibility because he knew that Hobeika was a bad person, and he shouldn’t have let him in.”
By superimposing an airbrushed history to justify its view of Israel in the present, the writers at the Independent perpetuate a false account of history. Over time it will be hard to agree on any factual account on anything unless we combat this false history. I propose that the ” New” Historians after Revisionism should be called “Correctionist” Historians!!
February 4th, 2010 at 11:02 am
Unfortunately, I believe that it is not only “the most fanatical readers” who are likely to be taken in by the anti-Israeli writings of Ms Alibhai-Brown and Mr Hari. They both cause and perpetuate what on the surface may appear, to the uninformed, reasonable (and reasoned)criticism of the Jewish State, therefore resulting in considerable damage.
Once again I’m surprised to find myself admiring Sivio Berlusconi for his words of support to Israel during its recent address to the Knesset.
Israel ought indeed to be part of the European Union, and NATO - I believe. With it we stand, without it we fall.
February 4th, 2010 at 3:00 pm
The solution to blaming Israel is really quite simple for Israelis: own up to it. Tell the world, point blank, that if Arabs want to fight Israel they should expect ever greater massacres in the future. And maybe, just maybe, the Israeli government can use this threat as a weapon of deterrent.And use it, too.
Very simple: No attacks, no massacres. Attacks=massacres. Period.
February 5th, 2010 at 11:08 am
Response to Wolf Terner … It isn’t going to happen. Israel isn’t like that. Thank god.
February 5th, 2010 at 2:08 pm
OT: Jonathan Karmi above posted a great review of “Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle” at Amazon.co.uk. (see link below) just a few days ago. If you read the comments below that review (click on link “Comments”), you will see that he has also put up a most excellent defence of Israel in response to a long series of really quite vicious attacks by an anti-Zionist customer.
Start-Up Nation at Amazon.co.uk
http://tinyurl.com/yc8btzq
February 5th, 2010 at 4:12 pm
Thanks Joshua. Mounting that defence was a pain as I’m not blessed with great patience, so I did descend into a bit of rudeness at one point. The enigmatically named S. Wood seems well versed in the party line of Scottish Palestinian Solidarity. I salute his indefatigability, but he can’t see the wood for the trees.
Great quotes from Antony Julius under Robin’s FT article. Many thanks for that. And Robin - thanks for the Just Journalism pointer. Looks a really good site.
February 5th, 2010 at 5:09 pm
Response to J. Karmi: More’s the pity.
Take a history lesson. Had the french bloodied Hitler’s nose after his move to reoccupy the Rhineland there would have ended
germanany’s craving for another war. Had Churchill and Roosevelt taken on the Russians in eastern europe after WW11 there would have been no cold war, Cuban crisis, Berlin Wall, Middle eastern wars between proxy fighters Egypt and Israel. Had America decimated the chinese during the Korean war there would have been no Vietnam war, no Cambodian holocaust…. And no, the russians would never have gone to bat for the chinese.
Turning the other cheek is not a Jewish concept, no matter how often Christian nations expect Jews to do just that!
February 6th, 2010 at 2:14 am
In the past I bought a few issues of Independent. Nowadays I just go into the central foreign newspaper shop and look into it - for free! The letter-writers more often than not are clearly psychotic primitive readers who go pitbull-mode foaming at the mouth whenever it comes to the magic words “Tony Blair”, (in the past) “George W. Bush”, “Israel”. It’s really-really amusing. I well remember the odious disgusting cartoon in the paper about Sharon depicting him as an ogre chewing off the head of a baby - 6 or 7 years ago - I just by chance bought that particular issue too. It was later awarded by the British Cartoon Association - to its shame. As I understand the Independent paper was created in 1986 by an Irishman. I also know that the “Independent” DID plagiarize/stole from an official Labour party material on the positive aspects of EU integration - all in the spirit of genuine “Independence” LOL. Clearly such an overall ridiculous,discredited and pathetic, what’s more paranoia-mongering “newspaper” (Tony Blair: viewspaper) have no past - but, hopefully, no future either.