The Private Thoughts of a BBC Fellow

I don't pretend to understand all the minutiae of Twitter, this post notwithstanding. A few minutes ago I stumbled upn an oddity I hadn't been aware of. A British journalist named Hugh Naylor tweeted something about Oxfam, and I responded. When you respond to a tweet and others have responded before you, you see the entire conversation; in this case, part of what had gone on there before my arrival was that a second British journalist, Roland Hughs, had been chatting with Naylor about how dangerous it is in Gaza. Hughs signed off with a comment about how he, unlike Naylor, wasn't in an area where Israeli warships are firing at random in Naylor's direction.

I responded sharply (There aren't Israeli warships firing randomly in anyone's direction, anywhere. Get a hold of yourself). Then, when I came to retweet Hugh's tweet so people could see the lazy comments of a BBC reporter, Twitter blocked me. It seems Hugh's Twitter account is protected, perhaps to give him the ability to chat without being listened in on. Except that I hadn't been listening in; as a matter of fact, until half an hour ago I didn't know Roland Hugh even exists.

But now that I know, I find it instructive that a BBC World News journalist, when he's got his guard down and is chatting with a friend, describes IDF actions in language not much different than Hamas does. Or, in the ranking I posited here, he's a category two antagonist.

Update: a number of readers have sent me screenshots of Roland's tweet. Here, for example.

The Pernicious BBC

This evening, November 17th 2012, the top story on the BBC's news website is about the conflict between Israel and Hamas. The story itself is annodyne. The noteworthy thing is the series of six images which adorn the top section of the webpage. Since it will probably be taken down later this evening or tomorrow at the latest, I've recorded it.

Picture number one: an Iron Dome rocket streaking into the skies:

The second picture is of the reason Iron Dome is in action: Missiles being shot from the middle of a residential area in Gaza.

The next photo is of a large explosion in the middle of the city of Gaza.

The next picture is of a damaged building, it could be on either side:

Next comes a picture of massing IDF tanks. Threatening.

So far, so good. Each of these images was probably taken yesterday or today. I'm not confident all the readers of the BBS website will be able to identify each of the pictures, and I haven't seen any mention on the website of how even the BBC is documenting the Hamas war crime of shooting from residential areas, but at least they're putting the images out there and we can use them. The final picture, however, wasn't taken today, and isn't part of the story, since at the moemnt there is no physical contact between the IDF and the population of Gaza. So it was inserted not to show us the news - since it's not news - but for some other reason completely. On the immediate level, it serves to balance the picture of the IDF tanks; on a more fundamental level, it offers an image to frame the entire conflict.

(Goliath, as history would have it, came from the vicinity of Gaza. And he's entered Western culture through a book written by Jews).

BBC Tells about Jerusalem as it Isn't

CAMERA has prepared a 15-minute film about a longer BBC film which told about Jerusalem as it isn't, and then refused to correct itself.

The idea that the BBC would air an inaccurate report about Israel is not surprising: one expects no better from the BBC, and is pleasantly surprised when they depart from their biased line. (I wrote about such a case here)

The really ironic part about the false BBC report is that while it attempts to show Palestinian suffering under rapacious Israeli rulers, the reality is that growing numbers of Palestinians in East Jerusalem are acquiring Israeli citizenship as insurance against the day when Israel might leave and they'll be stranded in Palestine. Don't expect the BBC to report on this, however. It wouldn't fit the meta-narrative.

Update: The BBC won't tell the story, but Ynet (English) coincidentally has it today.

Yehuda Avner, The Prime Ministers

If Yehuda Avner's new book The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership isn't yet on your reading list, put it there. If you don't have the time for a 700-page book, even if it's highly readable, stop reading this blog for the duration.

Avner, born in Manchester, came to Jerusalem in 1947 as a 19-year-old and almost immediately was drawn into Israel's War of Independence. His description of the events of 1947-48 is immediate and moving. Shortly thereafter, however, he stops telling about himself, and instead tells about the four Israeli prime ministers he served - Levi Eshkol and Golda Meir as a speech-writer and media aide; Ytzchak Rabin both in Washington (where Rabin was ambassador) and in Jerusalem, during Rabin's first premiership, and most important of all, as a close aide to Menachem Begin. While the book tells about four prime ministers, it is really about Begin, who fascinated Avner from the moment he arrived in Mandatory Palestine, if not earlier.

It's not a history book in the meaning of an attempt to tell a full tale of an event or series of events. Since Begin is the main protagonist and Begin was always a controversial man, the book is a bit odd in not telling us much about those controversies. It tells us Begin's version of the Altalena incident, when in June 1948 Ben Gurion ordered the brand new IDF to shell an Irgun weapons ship by that name on theTel Aviv beach. (I blogged about this event once from a very strange perspective, here). It never mentions Begin's attack on the Knesset of 1952, during the fraught controversy of restitution payments from Germany. It glosses over the anger against Begin during the (1st) Lebanon War of 1982. For that matter,it glosses over the anger against Golda Meir after the Yom Kippur War, and doesn't much explain why Labor and Rabin lost the elections in 1977.

Perhaps more irritating, if you're looking for anything remotely like a comprehensive history of segments of Israel's tale, Avner never addresses the complexities of Israel's positions. He's an old-school Zionist, who knows the Jews needed a state, knows they still need it, and knows lots of people disagree. Hes not out to convince them of anything.

It's a magnificent book if you're interested in coming closer to an understanding of how those four leaders understood the world they were in. How they saw themselves, how they related to interlocutors and adversaries. How Eshkol and Golda instinctively slipped into Yiddish. Begin, too. Rabin, not, being a sabra, yet he shared many of the same basic ideas, about how the Jews must have a state and that this wasn't yet a resolved issue. (Arguably, it still isn't, and I expect present-day Israeli prime ministers share the same set of sentiments, even though the general discourse seems to have moved on, and an Israeli politician using such language abroad will most likely be accused of distracting attention from the plight of the Palestinians).

There's a memorable scene in which Eshkol discusses economic policy with a doorman. Not possible today. Golda talks about the Jewish connection to Jerusalem. Not likely today. The chapter on Rabin and the Entebbe operation is riveting.

And Begin. Lecturing to Jimmy Carter, then Sadat, then Reagan, and brushing off Lord Carrington, a British Foreign Secretary of the time. Energizing Jewish leaders, who in those days played a role they seem no longer to play. Engaging ordinary Israelis. Above all, being profoundly Jewish, though not strictly orthodox. Begin's Jewishness shine throughout the book.

Then there are the negotiations, mostly with American leaders, from 1967 onwards. Avner supplies the details of what meetings between leaders look like, who says what, what the body language conveys, what is scripted in advance and what really isn't. It's fascinating.

Also, troubling. Ever since the Six Day War, we learn, American leaders (not to mention all the others) are fixated on this version or that of having Israel hand over the territories it acquired in that war in return for peace. There is never (as told in this book) any discussion of what will keep the peace going once the agreement has been reached. There's this puzzle, and it can be resolved by moving these pieces in these ways... and what happens afterward? Well, there will be peace,of course, and nothing will threaten it ever, so no-one needs to think much about it; it will be gloriously boring. No-one in the book ever brings up the possibility that the conflict can't be resolved by Israel giving back those territories because the conflict was always about much more than them. It's not mentioned, not considered, not part of the discourse. To which one might add that in 1992 the author visited with the retired Margart Thatcher, who admitted that when she met Begin in 1980 (?) she had never given much thought to the Holocaust, and thus didn't know how important it was to Begin and most Jews.

Not only is there abysmal ignorance about those strange Arabs; there's not much thought given to the Jews, either. Merely a mathematical solution for a conflict. Frightening.

What they Tell About Hamas

Haaretz, today, leads with what most interests Israelis:

Hamas will never recognize Israel, Gaza leader Ismail Haniyeh said Tuesday at a rally to mark the 23rd anniversary of the militant group's founding.

"We say it with confidence as we said it five years ago when we formed our government, and we say it today: We will never recognize Israel," Haniyeh told a crowd in Gaza City numbering tens of thousands.

Given that no non-expert in the world knows anything about which party won which election in Azerbaijan, Bolivia or Croatia, and the only reason they do know anything about Hamas is because of its relationship to Israel, this is arguably the part of the story that ought to interest non-Israeli media outlets, too.

But no.

The Washington Post simply downloaded the story filed by AP, about the size of the Hamas rally and how popular the party may be. At the very end of the item we learn that Hamas gave out a press release:

In a message distributed to media Tuesday morning, Hamas said it remains committed to destroying Israel, bringing back Palestinian refugees and seizing control of Jerusalem's holy sites.
"Anyone who gives up these rights is a traitor," it said - an apparent dig at Hamas' rival, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who favors a peace agreement with Israel.

According to Haaretz this was the message of the main speech at the rally, given by the Hamas Prime Minsiter Ismail Haniyeh, not some press release. So which was it? It's a significant difference, one might think.

According to the BBC, Haniyeh said it at the rally. However, the BBC also tucks this in at the end of the item, after carefully insinuating that Hamas merely doesn't like the Israeli occupation of the West Bank

"Today, on the anniversary of its establishment, Hamas stresses that it is committed to the principle of reconciliation," Mr Haniya told throngs of supporters who filled the streets of Gaza City, waving green banners.
"Reconciliation is a must so that the Palestinian people recover their unity in confronting the occupation," he said.

Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip during the 1967 Middle East war. It withdrew its troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005, but heightened its blockade on the territory after Hamas came to power in 2007.

No mention of the well known fact that in Arabic, the occupation can easily mean any Jewish sovereignty anywhere in what the Palestinians regard as their land in its entirety. If this isn't such a case, how does the BBC know? And if they know, don't we deserve to know how they know? 

The Guardian simply doesn't report on the event. Nothing. Tens of thousands of Gazans demonstrating in the middle of town, speeches, a major spectacle - not newsworthy.

Sadly, the New York Times comes off worst in this little experiment. Not only is there no mention of the event, when I wrote "Hamas" into their search engine the most recent item I was offered was about a fairy tale. About two weeks ago Ismail Haniyeh apparently told some foreign reporters that if there's ever a referendum about a peace deal with Israel among all the Palestinians world-wide, and the result isn't to the liking of Hamas, Hamas will accept the verdict. Of course, there's no reason to expect millions of Palestinians with limited civil rights scattered over various Arab states to vote for an agreement that will leave them there with no Right of Return, so one might expect a reasonable reporter to spell out that Haniyeh isn't risking much with his statement; but in the meantime he's just said what he really thinks, in Arabic, before a large rally, and the NYT doesn't find it newsworthy.

Spin, Wikileaks, Propaganda

Omri Ceren has been doing a spot of googling. His point of departure is the section of the new Wikileaks revelations that the Saudis and other Arab regimes have all along been beseeching the Americans to bomb Iran's nuclear capacity. Taking that documented fact, he then goes back to see what the various pundits have been saying about the matter all along. Predictably, they were reporting on an alternate universe, one in which the Saudis and others care deeply about the Palestinians, and not so much abut the Iranians.

Andrew Sullivan, in a sign of the changing times, never misses a beat: oops! The Saudis et al have been as strident as the Israelis in their calls for an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities? Well, remember, they're only Sunni Arab autocrats -  the implication, you understand, being that they're not really to be taken seriously if you're a moral person. Of course, the case can be made that Abu Mazen, Salam Fayyad, and all of the Hamas leadership are also Sunni Arab autocrats, but I rather think Andrew wouldn't use the term in their case.

Look, we all have our agendas; some of us even admit them openly (me, I'm a Zionist, and also mostly pro-American; Julian Assange of Wikileaks is anti-American and thinks he's God). Some of us try to write mostly about things we know about. Others: less so (Andrew knows none of the languages, and has no access to decision makers or any relevant players; he lives off website links). And then there are the professional propagandists, the people who have to know they're carefully tailoring their descriptions of reality so as to create a public opinion that will agree with their agenda. The BBC, for example: Robin Shepherd documents - once again, and again, and again - that their editorial decisions cannot possibly be portrayed as an honest attempt to inform the public, and can only be understood as conscious propaganda.

Or is it conscious? Read IsraelNurse's excellent analysis of the Guardian's Harriet Sherwood's first six months in Israel. Just look at the list of places she has reported from, almost all of them Palestinian (she's the correspondent to Israel but she never reports from Israel). On the one hand, she can't possibly be doing the traveling she's doing while telling herself she's reporting on Israel; there's no way she can be as biased as she is without knowing that's what she is. Yet is this truly so? It's a question I've been pondering for decades, and have never quite convinced myself either way: when antisemites frame reality to reinforce their animosities, do they do so in bad faith (i.e do they know they're lying or framing in a deceitful manner), or are they so carried away by their detestations that they lose track, and really begin to believe in their own sincerity? This is not an easy question to answer.

Lighten Up, Folks

Robin Shepherd demonstrates that the BBC isn't just biased against Israel: they've got to actually work at it.

Yet, truth be told, perhaps it not a good idea to spend as much time as this blog does being all serious about stuff. Especially at Sukkot, the only Jewish holiday where we're explicitly told to be happy. So for starters, Jeffrey Goldberg insists Fidel - for all his blemishes - is actually pro-Israel.

Judeosphere likes the political cartoons of Shlomo Cohen, as anyone ought. Personally, I think this one is simple genius:

If you're a Facebook user (most people are, I'm not) you'll probably need to see this film

If you're a Twitter user (I'm guilty), this film

And if you user You-Tube (me? never), this film

Protest the Zionist BBC Conspiracy!

Poor folks at the BBC. They invest so much time and effort in slanting the news against Israel, that when every now and then the facts are so stark that they can't, furious protests are launched against them for being pro-Israel. They recently had a program on the Mavi Marmara (Goldblog linked to it here) that wasn't condemnatory of Israel, and now the juice is flowing. I found this complaint particularly delicious:

Blackwell also suggested that the time of the screening was unfair. “Scheduling the broadcast during the evening in the first week of Ramadan, when many Muslim viewers were unlikely to be watching because they would be breaking their fast, [was unfair],” she said.

An astonishing lack of Muslim sensitivities, don't you agree?

A Sad Book and a Funny One

The Economist is ultimately a British publication, much as they do aspire to be worldly and all that. It shows in their fundamental skepticism in matters of Israel, and sometimes it shows up in the way they offer book reviews for items which have yet to be published in America (and thus can't be delivered yet by Amazon.com, which means they effectively don't exist). Here are two reviews of two very different books which one might have taken to the beach for some light summer reading, if only someone else had had their act together.

First, the sad book, John Calvert's Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism (Columbia/Hurst), reviewed by The Economist here. Sad, but probably important.

Then there's this one, by John Gross: The Oxford Book of Parodies. Going by the few snippets offered by The Economist here, this one's probably a delightful book.

Perhaps Not Easing the Blockade of Gaza

Israel decided yesterday to ease the blockade of Gaza. Or not. It depends which media outlets you imbibe.

Haaretz tells that the easing is dramatic, and adds gloatingly that the Turks did it.

The New York Times says Israel bowed to pressure following the Mavi Marmara incident, and the American administration is pleased.

The Washington Post reports that Israel is switching from a short list of permitted items to a list of forbidden ones, and speculates that this may be a good thing - the administration thinks so - or may not. We'll have to see, is the tone.

The London Times starts with Tony Blair, and continues with him: their evaluation of the decision is whatever he says, i.e. it's dramatic, it could of course have been even better but it's still good, and of course the Israelis must implement it as decided.

The BBC has a long report, mostly devoid of snark: they tell what changes Israel is making, cite American approval, underline that Tony Blair was instrumental in the decision, and end with a quote from unidentified Palestinians who say the whole thing is a sham. Ah, and they mistakenly tell that the blockade began in 2005 (which is when Israel left Gaza), when in reality it began only in 2006, after Hamas won the Palestinian elections.

The Guardian is greatly impressed by how the pressure on Israel worked, after its "deadly interception" of the flotilla. They explain what Israel proposes to do, but also explain that it's not clear what this really means, and then give space for various critics of Israel to explain why it's either not significant or not really going to happen. Unnamed "aid agencies", a top Hamas fellow, an Israeli radical NGO, those sort of people. Still, they add, the White House is pleased. Of course, the main reason must have been to foil the arrival of additional ships.

UNRWA says nothing less than Israel fully throwing open its border is acceptable, so this move isn't.

Juan Cole, whom I rarely read these days, starts with an article from the LA Times about how the Israeli decision is only marginally significant, and may well not really change anything. Cole then goes on to poke fun at Israel's security agencies, who don't understand the Arab world and are ridiculous.

Richard Silverstein manages not to notice the matter at all, so I don't have to link to him and you don't need to check - which is good, because he's inordinately sensitive to his page hits. Mondoweiss also hasn't noticed: odd, that. Those folks never miss a report about how ghastly Israel is, but this one seems to have escaped their attention. At least Andrew Sullivan noticed. He agrees with other bloggers that it's a scandal that Israel may wriggle out of an international investigation of the flotilla incident in return for easing the blockade, but admits the easing itself is a good thing.

The IDF announced it is expanding supplies into Gaza by 30% immediately, with more to come.

Meanwhile, watch the market: prices in Gaza are tumbling since yesterday. Not because shortages will now disappear, but because goods brought in from Israel are of higher quality than those smuggled in through the Rafah tunnels, and are also cheaper.

We're not talking about learned scholars disagreeing about an event from, say, 500 years ago. This all happened last night.

Deceased Tunnelers

Four Palestinians died yesterday in a tunnel under the Egyptian-Gaza border.

Hamas says the Egyptians did it on purpose, and their spokesmen are livid. The Guardian doesn't say anything: no story here, move on. The BBC says the men died but can't figure out how. On the other hand, the item does note that Israel killed a Palestinian yesterday.

No to the Two State Solution

American Vice President Joe Biden is in town today, mostly to make sure Netanyahu doesn't order a pre-emptive attack on Iran anytime soon, but along the way also to pretend things are moving forward on the Israel-Palestine negotiation track:

"I think we are at a moment of real opportunity, and I think that the interests of the Israeli and Palestinian people, if everybody stops and takes a deep breath, are actually more in line than they are opposites," he added.

Why do respectable people make such silly statements? I can't answer that. I mean, the man is the number 2 person in the American administration; there's a reasonable chance he's being recorded, and someone might even be watching; who knows, if you stretch your imagination a wee bit it's even (just) imaginable that someone will still remember long enough to know how unrealistic he was being.

Ehud Yaari recently published an important article in Foreign Affairs, and a quick summary of it in The Forward. Sadly, the full article is not accessible, and neither of those two links lead to the parts that - to my mind - are most important, namely, the description of how the Palestinians are not interested in a two state resolution to the conflict. Yaari is one of our top experts on the Arab world and the Palestinians in particular; he has spent his entire professional career of over 40 years listening to things Arabs say (in Arabic, of course). His analysis is obvious to those of us who stake our lives on knowing what's going on around us, but needs to be said from the perspective of someone who really listens, directly. So I've cut and pasted a snippet, in the hope the Foreign Affairs people won't sue me for copyright infringement. Its a long and interesting article, and I've only cited three paragraphs.

A small sovereign state within the pre-1967 boundaries has never
been the fundamental goal of Palestinian nationalism; instead, Palestinian
national consciousness has historically focused on avenging the
loss of Arab lands. As the prominent Palestinian academic Ahmad
Khalidi has argued, “Today, the Palestinian state is largely a punitive
construct devised by the Palestinians’ worst historical enemies.” Furthermore,
he contends, “The intention behind the state today is to
limit and constrain Palestinian aspirations territorially, to force them
to give up their moral rights.” Indeed, in a private conversation in
2001, then pa President Yasir Arafat told me that he believed statehood
could potentially become a “sovereign cage.”

Many Palestinians now feel that by denying Israel an “end of conflict, end of claims” deal, they are increasing their chances of gaining
a state for which they are not required to make political concessions.
Within a few years, the scant support for the two-state formula that currently exists will likely erode, and new concepts will begin to
compete as alternatives. In other words, the Palestinian community
will accelerate its collapse into Israel’s unwilling arms, in effect accomplishing
by stealth the sort of Arab demographic dominance that
Israeli leaders have for decades sought to avoid by occupying, rather
than annexing, the Palestinian territories. Such an annexation in reverse
would leave Israel no choice but to coexist alongside an Arab
majority within the whole of Palestine as it existed under the British
Mandate.

Khalidi has illustrated what many Israelis and Americans refuse to
see: the Palestinian general public instinctively distinguishes between
“independence” (the end of occupation) and “sovereignty” (statehood).
Most Palestinians wish to get rid of Israeli control but do not
necessarily strive to see the land divided. More and more Palestinians
are therefore considering options other than statehood. One option
proposed by Abdel Mohsin al-Qattan, former chair of the Palestinian
National Council, would be to maintain the territorial integrity
of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea and
govern it through a weak joint central government and two strong autonomous
governments—without necessarily demarcating geographic
borders between them. Another popular solution among
Palestinian leaders is a unitary state, which, for purely demographic
reasons, would eventually be controlled by an Arab majority.

Update: Soccerdad points me to what seems to be the Yaari article in its entirety here.

The Egyptians? Why?

Yesterday there was a bloody clash on the Egyptian-Gaza border. An Egyptian policeman was killed, and there were a number of injured people on both sides- it's not clear how many. These are straightforward facts, as far as they are.

How should they be explained? What's going on? That's harder to know, first, because much of the data isn't accessible. So far as I can tell, no one - that means, NO ONE - has any access to the decision making process of the relevant Egyptians and Palestinians, nor can they even say who made any decision. A man was killed when both sides were using real firearms, and no-one has anything whatsoever to say about who gave which orders, what they thought they were doing, how they understood their situation, or any other part of the story. These things are of course crucial, and no explanation can even begin to approach accuracy without them, but hey, we've not got them, it would be too much of a bother to try, and anyway we've all got pre-existing templates with which to explain such matters so why worry?

Mondoweiss simply disregards the matter. They're interested in Gaza only in two scenarios: when Israel can be blamed, or even better, when Israel can be blamed but they're saving the situation. This case fits neither template, so it didn't happen. Better to blame Israel for that Jordanian-al-Quaida chap who killed seven CIA men. And yes, I understand that Mondoweiss, being a mere blog, doesn't need to cover everything - I certainly don't, either. Yet they're a blog with a large number of contributors, and their editorial choices are instructive.

The BBC doesn't offer any explanation, though its report does contain this odd sentence:

Egypt and Israel impose a strict blockade on the Gaza Strip, which Israel says is aimed at weakening Hamas.

People are being shot as the Egyptians impose a blockade, and the only context offered is why Israel does it.

The Guardian does the same slight-of-hand:

Ehab Ghussein, a Hamas spokesman, said frustration about Egypt's new underground wall was fuelling the protests. "There was anger, and that's because of what happened, especially about the wall and [Egypt preventing entry of] the people who are coming to stand with us," he said. Israel's strict blockade of Gaza, which has been in place for more than two years, prevents all exports and limits imports to a few humanitarian items. Egypt has also kept its one border crossing with Gaza, at Rafah, largely closed.

So it's Israel's blockade, with the Egyptians merely tagging along. Why? The Guardian explains:

Under pressure from the US and Israel, Egypt has started building a vast steel wall along its side of the Gaza border to prevent smuggling. Hundreds of smuggling tunnels dug by Palestinians reach into northern Egypt and supply Gaza with a wide range of products from food and clothing to animals and cars. Israel and the US have said they are concerned about weapons smuggling.

They Egyptians are puppets of the Israelis and Americans. Why a nation of 80 million debases itself in such a manner is unexplained, though there's the implication that the puppeteers have awesome powers; at least with the Americans this has a rational grounding. The Israelis, however? Do they control the world? And if so, haven't we seen that theme somewhere before?

The New York Times offers no explanation at all. There's this context:

The demonstration, organized by Hamas, protested Egypt’s refusal to allow international aid and solidarity missions into Gaza as well as Egypt’s construction of an underground barrier to obstruct smuggler tunnels. Those tunnels supply both goods and arms to Hamas and Gaza.

But no explanation why Egypt might be doing what it does.

Then there's Haaretz. Like everyone else, Zvi Barel has no specific information, he can only tell about the larger picture. Still, in spite of being on the left side of Haaretz, as I've documented in the past, he's first and foremost an expert.

Egypt's stance does not arise from its desire to help the Israeli siege on Gaza or to respond to the United States' demand to prevent smuggling. It is intended to show both Hamas and Syria that just as it has the power to open the border crossings at will and relieve the siege, so it can twist Hamas' arm.

And also this:

Egypt is interested in Palestinian reconciliation and wishes to set up a Palestinian unity government. Egypt has assured Hamas and Mahmoud Abbas of its support if such a government is formed, mainly because it does not want to be responsible for the Gaza Strip. But Cairo is fed up with Hamas' foot-dragging and Tehran's meddling. In this Egypt is assisted by Saudi Arabia, which gave Hamas politburo chief Khaled Meshal an ultimatum to decide whether he is running an Arab organization or is under the "patronage of a foreign power," i.e. Iran.

Read the whole thing, as Glenn says. You begin to see why Israelis' understanding of the world is dramatically different from that of everyone else.

Flare-Up of Violence

On Thursday Palestinian gunmen killed Meir Avishai Hai, 40, father of seven, in the northern West Bank. On Saturday IDF forces killed the three killers. What you make of this story depends upon who you are and what positions you held prior to the events, obviously. Yet it also works the other way: the kind of information you routinely take in impacts how you understand the story.

First, the NYT. Ethan Bronner, whom the Mondoweiss crowd has long since written off as hopelessly pro-Israel, puts all of what he sees as the essential elements in his first short paragraph, then gives two conflicting interpretations in the next two paragraphs, and then gives details about the events.

The Israeli military killed six Palestinians on Saturday, three in the West Bank whom it accused of killing a Jewish settler and three in Gaza who it said were crawling along the border wall planning an attack. It was the deadliest day in the conflict in nearly a year.
Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister, called it “a sad day for Palestinians and their National Authority” and condemned the West Bank operation as an “assassination” and “an attempt to target the state of security and stability that the Palestinian Authority has been able to achieve.”
Maj. Peter Lerner, spokesman for Israel’s Central Command, which controls the West Bank, said that its forces had spent the past two days looking for the killers of the settler, Rabbi Meir Hai, a 45-year-old teacher and father of seven, who was shot dead on Thursday as he drove near his home in the settlement of Shavei Shomron.

The BBC's headline tells of Six Palestinians killed in West Bank, Gaza attacks. Who attacked? The headline doesn't say, and the short item wanders around the hill doing its best not to be clear about anything:

Israeli troops have killed six Palestinians - three in the Gaza Strip and three in the West Bank.

The Israeli military said three Palestinians suspected of trying to infiltrate from Gaza were killed in an air strike near the Erez crossing.

It is the largest number of deaths in a day since the Gaza conflict a year ago.

Separately, Israeli forces said they had killed three men - who were suspected of killing a Jewish settler - in the West Bank city of Nablus.

Palestinian sources in Nablus say two of those killed were militants from the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the militant faction of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah party.

The faction was one of two groups which said they had killed the settler, a father of seven, two days ago - the first fatal shooting of an Israeli by militants in the occupied West Bank for eight months.

The item was later folded into a longer item in which the theme was how angry the Palestinians are at the Israelis. Palestinian leaders condemn Israeli raid in West Bank:

"This [Israeli] operation represents a dangerous escalation," Mr Fayyad said. He said the raid in Nablus "can only be seen in the context of targeting the security and stability that the Palestinian Authority has been able to bring about".

That would be Salam Fayad, the most moderate leader the Palestinians have ever had, not some firebrand Hamasnik - not that you'd ever know it from the BBC.

So far as I saw, the BBC never manages to mention the dead Israeli without reminding that he was a settler. As regular readers of this blog will recognize, human rights are a slippery thing, to be applied differently according to ethnicity and identity. A dead Palestinian may or may not have murdered a Jew, but the dead Jew most certainly was a settler, with the unspoken implication that his human rights are thereby diminished.

Then again, why complain about the BBC when we've got our very own B'telem? None of their people were on the scene, but they're already calling for the IDF to investigate itself on the accusation that its troops wrongfully executed innocent Palestinians:

An investigation into an overnight Israel Defense Forces operation in the West Bank city of Nablus early Saturday suggests that Israeli soldiers may have executed two of the three Palestinian militants who were killed, the left wing rights group B'Tselem said Saturday.

In the operation, the IDF killed three Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades operatives, whom officials said were responsible for a shooting attack on Thursday which killed 40-year-old father of seven Meir Hai of the settlement of Shavei Shomron. The troops surrounded the homes of the three and called for them to exit, and killed them when they refused to surrender.

Haaretz gives B'tselem space, but also quotes an IDF officer:

Meanwhile Saturday, a senior IDF officer rejected claims that the militants had been executed, telling Channel 10 news that "the soldiers called on the terrorist to surrender and turn himself in. He refused and hid in his room and sent his wife out toward us. In cases where there is a threat to our troops and a wanted militant refuses to surrender, IDF forces are permitted to open fire in order to neutralize the threat. I am pleased that none of our fighters were hurt, but the risk factor was very high in this operation."
Another senior IDF official told Israel Radio that the three militants had not fired at Israeli troops and that two of them were unarmed, but that the Israeli soldiers knew that the terror squad that carried out Thursday's attack, to which the three belonged, were highly skilled and had access to firearms and therefore posed a threat. He stressed that the operation was carried out in accordance with IDF regulations, and that the soldiers first fired protest dispersal ammunition, then fired at the walls, and only later fired at the militants.

Earlier, Friday's edition of Haaretz had some discussions that are totally absent in the non-Israeli media: what is the significance of Thursday's attacks? It turns out there were two roadblocks in the immediate vicinity of the site of the attack that were both recently removed. Depending upon your political views, this removal was either crucial, and encouraged the attackers, or totally irrelevant and had no connection to anything. None of the folks voicing opinions can know if they're right, of course, but the question is worth posing, which is why the foreign media doesn't. This little nugget, however, seems very important to me:

Over the past year, the number of terror attacks in the West Bank has dramatically decreased thanks mainly to the Shin Bet security service and IDF. However, IDF officials say attempts to carry out terror attacks continue, especially those perpetrated by local individuals working alone.

Anyone watching knows that matters on the West Bank have been getting dramatically better this year, yet cells of local Palestinians are trying incessantly to attack Israelis; we don't hear much about them because they're being thwarted. Kind of important, isn't it?

Finally, in Hebrew only, Ron Ben-Yishai, tries to figure out what's significant and what not. The dismantling of those two roadblocks: Ben-Yishai admits it didn't help, but expects the attackers could have attacked anyway by shooting from the roadside. At least one of the three attackers signed the agreement with the PA and Israeli authorities whereby he renounced terror and was let off Israel's list of target. Yes, but so did 400 others Palestinian terrorists, and most have indeed honored their signature. The IDF acted on its own yesterday, without coordinating with the PA's police forces except to notify them at the last moment so they should still uninvolved: yes, says Ben-Yishai, that wasn't really nice, but then maybe it's better that they obviously weren't involved so that the Palestinian populace not think their own police is cooperating in killing terrorists.

And so on.The difference between the reports in Haaretz and Y-net, on the one hand, and the non-Israeli media on the other, is that the Israelis are trying to understand the complexity of the situation. Not surprising, given that it's their fate. The outsiders offer a superficial story, more or less biased, but in any case offering only bits of the story. The dramatic bit, yes, but not the bits that explain what's going on.

Waging War With Care

Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal, the newly appointed commander of American forces in Afghanistan, has told senators his forces will have to be more careful so as to reduce the numbers of civilians being killed in American actions.

As I've said in the past, I'm mostly a supporter of the American war against the Islamists; however, I'm weary of the double standard whereby Israel is required to maintain a level of care towards non-combatants that no-one else would even dream of aiming at, and is routinely damned for not being successful enough, where others are either not noticed at all, or eventualy mildly tutt-tutted at.

In which context, it was interesting to watch this BBC interview from last January, during the Gaza operation. It's with Richard Kemp, a retired British army Colonel who commanded troops in Afghanistan a few years ago. Kemp notes that Israel is more careful than any army in the history of warfare; however, when he offers the BBC lady to elaborate, she declines to listen and instead explains how bad the Israelis are being.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WssrKJ3Iqcw
(For some reason I wasn't able to embed the interview. Anyway, thanx for the tip, Vic).

Maybe, Perhaps, Possibly

The BBC reports on the arrest of four antisemitic Muslims in New York, who felt the best way to express their anger at American actions in Afghanistan would be to murder Jews in the Bronx.

Note the formulations and parenthesis:

Arrests in New York 'attack plot'

So maybe it was an attack plot and maybe it wasn't.

The men were seized after allegedly planting what they thought were bombs
near two synagogues in the Bronx area.

It is not the BBC's task to tell us what happened and thereby prejudice our ability to serve on a jury, so it leaves us to make up pur own minds about whether the men actually planted anything near synagogues or perhaps not and it's simply an FBI plot.

Presumption of innocence running wild. The word antisemites, meanwhile, isn't printed anywhere, though the official in the video does use it.

Sources

The Pope is in our region for a while, visiting holy sites, praying, and apparently stepping on diverse political landmines. I'm not certain I have much to say about the matter, though if I decide I do, I'll inform you all, rest assured. Us bloggers, we don't keep our opinions to ourselves...

It is however a fine opportunity to poke fun at that most august of all media outlets worldwide, the BBC. They put up an item about the visit, and laid bare the idiocy journalists are willing to engage in.

Analysts say his words are likely to be heavily scrutinised during this week's trip.

Yes, well, analysts are a fine thing, aren't they? We're never told who they are, if they're reputable, knowledable, worthy of our attention, or even if they really exist. In this case, do you really belive the BBC chap took a cab all the way to the dusty book-case lined cubicle of an "analyst", to confer with her about whether people would pay attention to the utterances of some Catholic fellow who keeps on obstructing traffic? And how do you think the analyst (actually, the form used was plural, so there must have been a convacation of them) reached their learned conclusion whereby people would listen to the utterances of the Pope?

Then, there's this:

Pope Benedict, as a child growing up in Nazi Germany, joined the Hitler Youth, as was required of young Germans of the time, but he was not an enthusiastic member.

Now it just so happens there are methods of knowing such things, if young Ratzinger's lack of enthusiasim was pronounced enough at the time to have left a documentary trail and the BBC fellow had the tools to follow it. But that's unlikely on all counts. More likely, the BBC chap is spouting some hearsay he once came across, in which case he is - at best - no more trustworthy than some bloke writing on Twitter. More troubling is the question why he feels it important to foist his unfounded impressions on us in the form of news, unless perhaps he and his editors feel their task is to have us believe the correct version of reality as determined by them.

What's the BBC Policy?

A while ago I mentioned the clearly antisemitic short play penned by a British woman, Caryl Churchill, titled Seven Jewish Children, though there are no recognizable Jews in it at all. The play doesn't seem to be achieving earth shattering success, but perhaps it doesn't need to. The danger of antisemitism is that it permeates the Zeitgeist, not that one particular event or statement convinces lots of people - and I don't think there's any way to argue that isn't happening, since it clearly is.

The BBC has just decided not to air a radio version of the play. Not because its decision makers disagree with it - they actually think it's a brilliant piece - but because they recognize it's too one-sided for them to be able to balance with a second piece. After all, there's no one out there writing imaginary plays about celebratory tents set up for public commemoration of suicide murderers, say, or skits about women who bless their sons as they go off to die with Jewish teenagers or fathers who announce in the presence of their surviving sons that they hope they, too, will follow the example of their murderous brother. As the BBC chaps recognize, no Jew would write such a play.

I admit, not for the first time, that the BBC puzzles me. They have no compunctions in presenting the Israeli-Arab conflict in deeply slanted ways, but every now and then they balk at doing precisely that. What's their method?

Pathologies about Israel

The BBC has a story about an Israeli admiral who was sighted in a den of iniquity. Not admirable, indeed, but is it newsworthy? Personally, I doubt this needs to be in the Israeli press. But the BBC? I mean, if it were the British Deputy Undersecretary of Fisheries and Salt-Mining from the Tory party, I can see why it would get into the Sun. If it were the very top American General, it would perhaps get into the National Enquirer. But the BBC? Can you see them reporting on the sexual escapades of, say, the French Minister of Finance, assuming they know his name? The top admiral in the Russian Navy? What's going on?

Then we've got this one, also at the BBC today, on the traumatized children of Gaza. I asked the BBC's search engine of it could tell me about anyone traumatized in Israel, and it had to go all the way back to August 2001, where it quoted a British woman whose Israeli grandson was traumatized - says the grandmother, mind you, not the reporter - after both his parents and some of his siblings were shot, and I quote:

It is not yet known why they were attacked but Israeli radio were reporting they were the victims of a "terrorist cell".

So I asked for trauma in Somalia, and got a story from 2005 about Somali refugees in the UK who are having a hard time. Trauma in Sri Lanka (there's this real brutal war going on there, with lots of civilians in the middle): to be fair to the BBC, they did have a recent story on that. Trauma in Georgia? One item which just barely makes the grade.

An Antisemite at the Foreign Office

Top ranking British diplomat Rowan Laxton doesn't like Jews.

Middle East expert Rowan Laxton, 47, was watching TV reports of the Israeli attack on Gaza as he used an exercise bike in a gym.

Stunned staff and gym members allegedly heard him shout: 'F**king Israelis, f**king Jews'. It is alleged he also said Israeli soldiers should be 'wiped off the face of the earth'.

My italics.

Haaretz adds

The Daily Mail said that in response to a query on Monday, Laxton denied that his comments were anti-Semitic, but dodged answering whether they were anti-Israel.

He denied.

The Guardian and BBC websites haven't heard of the case, if you believe their search engines.