Pick the Reality You Wish For

The Guardian, this morning:

Nato pact to send 5,000 troops for Afghan polls The agreement in Strasbourg to beef up security ahead of elections is being hailed as proof of a new era of co-operation between the United States and Europe.
Nato members are to send 5,000 more troops to Afghanistan to boost security ahead of critical elections, as the country's troubled president was yesterday forced into retreat over a controversial law effectively legalising rape within marriage. The outcome of yesterday's critical summit in Strasbourg will be a relief to Barack Obama, allowing the US president to argue that his offer of a new partnership with Europe has reaped tangible results and ensured the burden of fighting the war on terror is more broadly shared. Yesterday he welcomed the deal as a "strong down payment" on securing Afghanistan's future.

Deep down in the 17th paragraph of the article there is a toned-down admission that many of the promised troops will be sent to Afghanistan only for six months, and then even this:

Obama is committing an extra 21,000 troops, and possibly another 10,000 later in the year. He knows that he will come under sharp domestic pressure to revert to hard power if the mix of charm and intellectual persuasion he has displayed does not lead to tangible European response.

But it's a boring, poorly written article, and one can assume most readers won't get that far down. It does mean, however, that the editors know for a fact that their rendering of the event is not, perhaps, the only possible way of seeing it.

Contrast the depiction of the UK's top Lefty newspaper, then, with that of the New York Times, the top American newspaper and rather lefty itself:

STRASBOURG, France — With protesters raging outside, NATO leaders on Saturday gave a tepid troop commitment to President Obama’s escalating campaign in Afghanistan, mostly committing soldiers only to a temporary security duty...

The Afghan war, too, remained a dividing line for alliance leaders. Despite a glowing reception and widespread praise for Mr. Obama’s style and aims, his calls for a more lasting European troop increase for Afghanistan were politely brushed aside, as they had been in negotiations leading up to the meeting.

As expected, European allies agreed to provide up to 5,000 new troops for Afghanistan, the White House said Saturday. But 3,000 of them are to be deployed only temporarily to provide security for the August elections in Afghanistan.

A further 1,400 to 2,000 soldiers will be sent to form embedded training teams for the Afghan Army and the police.

Mr. Obama is raising the number of American troops this year to about 68,000 from the current 38,000, which will significantly Americanize the war. The new strategy, which the Europeans have pressed for, is aimed at creating larger and better-trained Afghan security forces that can defend the country and allow the West to leave.

The two newspapers are reporting on the same event, so far as I can tell: a big meeting in Strasbourg yesterday. True, there were violent demonstrations only at the NYT meeting, and overall satisfaction and resolute determination in the face of enemies only at the Guardian meeting, but I do think it unlikely that there were two separate events. Or am I wrong?

PS. The NYT article is topped by a picture of violent demonstrators, flying various communist flags. Someone really ought to suggest to those folks that they read Juan Cole's blog: today's fashionable Useful Idiots no longer serve the Kremlin nor read Mao's Little Read Book. Today they cover up for different hateful regimes. Really folks! You're way behind the times!

Naa, No Antisemitism There...

Antisemtism is notoriously hard to define, and even the better attempts to do so are not accepted by all. I'm not going to try and unravel the issue here, tho two quick comments are called for. First, the reason it's important is that antisemitism contributed immensely to Nazism and the worst war in human history, so even people who intensely dislike Jews feel the need not to be identified as antisemites (Unless they're Arabs; the rules are different for Arabs). My second comment is that since the 1940s the Zionist enterprise has been supported by a majority of Jews the world over, and has created the most significant change in Jewish life since Hadrian's genocide in the second century CE. This means that whether you lke it or not, any consistent anti-Israeli position (not to be confused with empiric criticism of specific Israeli actions) is probably antisemitic, for being against what the Jews as a nation are doing. Yes, even if the antisemites are Jewish themselves, that's obvious.

Antony Lerman, I'm beginning to think, is one of the Guardian's House Jews. Today he explains why that cartoon in the Washington Post isn't antisemitism. First:

But this cartoon is devoid of standard antisemitic caricatures. Moreover, antisemites in the 1930s were hardly likely to compare Jews with jackbooted Germans.

Did you get that? Describing Jews as Nazis can't be antisemitic, since the Nazis would never have compared Jews to themselves. Profound, isn't it? And then:

The ADL and Wiesenthal seem to imply that under no circumstances can you ever suggest that Israeli Jews might act in a Nazi-like fashion. While I fervently hope that Israeli Jews never do act like that, it cannot be taken as an iron rule that they never will. What people or group or individual is eternally immune from such behaviour? So it would be absurd to demand that Israelis should forever be shielded from such an accusation.

In other words, there's nothing antisemitic in depicting Israeli actions as Nazi-like, since for all we know, perhaps someday some Israelis will do Nazi-like things; after all, we don't know what the future holds, do we. Of course, given that line of reasoning perhaps we ought to depict the editors of the Guardian in SS imagery, after all, humans having the potential for evil in them, we don't actually know for a fact that none of them ever in the future won't do something that bad.

Killing a Child

A young Arab woman appeared at the gate of a Border Police base and started shooting. The Border Police is a unit with an unusually high percentage of Arabic-speaking Israelis, and they tried to talk to her in her own language, but she kept on shooting. Eventually an officer arrived and killed her. After her death it turned out she was only 16 years old, something that wasn't clear while she was behind the gun.

According to a Hebrew-language report, it's not clear if she was motivated by nationalist considerations or was trying to clear herself of honor defamation, though why shooting soldiers would clear her name of going on a date I cannot say.

Sooner or later she'll appear in a statistic about Palestinian children killed by Israeli troops.

Right and Wrong Even Amongst the Shadows

Yesterday a Palestinian man armed himself with an ax and made his way to a Jewish settlement to murder civilians (there's no army base there). Once there he hacked a child to death, started on an even smaller child, was then stopped by a local, but managed to escape. Since the security forces know who he is, it's only a matter of time before he's caught.

There are additional parts of the story, that make for all sorts of shadows, though they're shadows that can work in both directions. Oddly, this blog doesn't seem to attract many pro-Palestinian readers, or even plain antisemites who couldn't give a damn about the Palestinians but love them for their enmity to Israel, but I encourage those who are here to register their comments about those shadows, that I may hold them up to light.

Until then, however, note the fundamental difference between Israel and the Palestinians. Remember the squall of hand-wringing we had recently about some Palestinian civilians who weren't shot? Not to mention the larger question of waging war in Gaza. Compare that to this: the coldblooded murder of children, and silence at best from the society of the perpetrator; in some future round of negotiations the murderer will be sprung from an Israeli jail as a freedom fighter whose return home is a necessary condition of normal relations.

The Irish Times, Too

Too many things going on these days for much blogging. Pessach is only one of them. Anyway, an Irish reader (Connor) sent me a link which tells that The Irish Times is as bad as the Guardian. Though why they care, one way or the other, is beyond me. They're at one end of Europe, we're beyond the edge of the opposite end, and they're the local newspaper of a small country, without pretensions to be a global brand. Why care about Israel, of all places?

Ah, I hear you asking, and why does CAMERA care about some Irish newspaper? Perhaps because they're from Boston....

The Guardian on Twitter

Although I'm not a huge fan of the Guardian, their April First hoax this year was inspired: From now on, the paper will be published only on Twitter. Moreover, they're re-doing their archive in Twitter format, too:

JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?

Concert for Peace: NEVER!

Following my comment about the unfortunate Palestinian response to some of their teenagers playing music to an audience of Israeli Holocaust survivors, Claudio sent me this depressing link.

It is really hard to write on this subject without getting angry. We all know the extent to which Israel can be evil and satanic. After all, we Palestinians have been on the receiving end of Israeli savagery for decades.

In fact, being thoroughly tormented and killed by the children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of the holocaust has always been and continues to be “the” Palestinians’ way of life.

However, for some Palestinians to allow themselves to be duped to sing and play music to their oppressors and child-killers is simply beyond the pale of human dignity.

It is at least as insulting and humiliating as some Jews were forced or duped to play music to SS, Gestapo and Wehrmacht soldiers during the Second World War. In both cases, the act was meant to humiliate the victims and rob them of the last visages of human dignity.

It goes on and on. Khalid Amayreh is a person whose primary motivating force is hatred.

I don't know enough about the Palestinians to say how typical he is. He talks similarly to the people in Jenin who got so angry the other day, so he may not be a lone voice in the wilderness.

I'm of the persuasion that Israel should always be on the lookout for whatever policy might lead to peace with our neighbors, and should be willing to pay a reasonable price to encourage it to happen; I'm also of the persuasion that no matter what we do, the ultimate decision is of our enemies. They're the ones who need to decide to live alongside us in peace; a large majority of Israelis has long since wished to live alongside them in peace. Items like this demonstrate that some Arabs, in this case, Palestinians, are so consumed with hatred they'll pay whatever price needed to have it gratified - and since that won't happen, they prefer war.

Since Mr. Amayreh is so involved in Holocaust-Zionism comparisons, malicious nonsense as they are, here's another one for him to ponder.

While the Jewish grievances against Germany were vastly and incomparably greater than any Palestinian grievance could ever be, by 1952, that's less than a decade after the Shoah, Israeli society was at extreme loggerheads with itself about a proposal to accept indemnities from Germany. Ben Gurion the pragmatist sought German funds to help build Israel, recognizing that they would contribute to Germany's international rehabilitation; a large, vocal, and for a moment even violent opposition stated that Jews should never accept anything from Germany; better to slog on with food rationing and hundreds of thousands of refugees in tents, and never give the Germans the dignity of accepting anything from them. We'll put the past behind us and move on, but we'll not forgive.

Ben Gurion won the day, though it was close. By 1965 there were full diplomatic relations between Israel and Germany, two years before the Six Day War; the first German ambassador was a one-armed veteran officer of the Wehrmacht. By the late 70s, (West) Germany was Israel's closest ally in Europe. The two national memories are complicated till this day, and will remain so for the next century or two, but they don't interfere with each side's ability to get on with promoting its interests in a reasonably civil way.

A World of Kvetchers

The top item on Haaretz' website this morning is a poll that tells of 54% dissatisfaction with Netanyahu's government. The government was sworn in towards midnight yesterday, and Haaretz goes to press at, I dunno, probably 3:30 am, so either the folks were polled at 1:30 am, or - more likely - they were polled during the final hours of the previous government. I recognize that the stone-age tradition of allowing a government 100 days of grace is hopelessly anachronistic, but perhaps we might wait ten days? Ten hours? A hundred minutes?

It's not only Israel. Over at the Guardian Jonathan Freedman, a (comparatively) sane voice, bemoans that Obama, coming to a meeting in London today, hasn't yet saved the world; matter of fact, he isn't even JFK! As I never tire of mentioning in these cases, JFK was a mediocre president at best and it's not clear why Obamaites think he's a model they ought to be striving for. On a more serious note, the thought that any American president could successfully figure out the job in less than a year, even without global recession, is childish. Two years would be more plausible. For those who lack enough fingers to count with, Obama also is still in his first hundred days.

Sheesh.

Netanyahu's New Government

One advantage in being a centrist is that you don't need to be against a new government merely because you didn't vote for it. On the contrary. Being a centrist means you hope a new government will do such a fine job you'll have no compunctions about voting for it next time. (Alas, this doesn't always happen).

So, although I didn't vote for Netanyahu nor any of the parties that make up his rather improbable coalition, and I'm not convinced his government will successfully run this country for the coming four years, I hope it will. And if it does, I'll vote for him next time.

In the meantime, here's a statement that's making its rounds in cyberspace regarding one of the key figures in the new government; for those of you who are hebraically challenged, the pun is that the Hebrew word for cabinet minister is Sar, which rather rhymes with Czar.
Update: AP has an article about Netanyahu's new government which also sorts of takes a centrist line: maybe this time he'll be alright.

Arab Leaders, International Law, and Genocide

Sudan's leader Omar al-Bashir, recently indicted by the ICC for his role in the genocide in Darfur has been greeted with open arms at the meeting of Arab leaders in Doha yesterday. (Yes, that would be the Doha that gives its name to the present round of international trade talks. Heh). The fact that the man is one of the top criminal around doesn't seem to perturb his Arab brothers. Keep this in mind the next time they or their mouthpieces rant on and on about how horrendous Israel is, where even if you take their version of events Israel hasn't done anything remotely similar to the genocide in Sudan (nor to the previous one, in southern Sudan, with 2,000,000 dead).

Discussing Israel's Actions - 2

The people who know Israel is wrong, no matter what the facts might be, will be unmoved by this New York Times item, which tells that the IDF military police has shut down the investigation into the allegations of the Oranim soldiers for lack of facts. And note: not for lack of evidence, which could imply the events happened but can't be documented well enough to indict anyone. Lack of facts mean it didn't happen.

The item does however raise a number of perplexing questions:

The academy’s director, Dany Zamir, told Army Radio on Monday that he accepted the advocate general’s report. Still, he added, “If soldiers will now feel that they cannot talk because of the outcome of this specific story, then this is very bad for us as a society and army.”

Anyone have any idea what he's talking about? Or this:

On the other hand, he stated, it was not his intention to attract news media attention by making the contents of the soldiers’ discussion public. He added that the news media’s focus on the story “truly complicated everything.”

First he leaked the discussion to the press, then he didn't mean it to be public. And of course, inevitably:

A group of nine Israeli human rights organizations issued a statement saying that the army’s speedy closing of its internal investigation underlined the need for an independent investigation into possible Israeli war crimes in Gaza.

Translation: since the investigation didn't give us the results we were praying for, we need to try again with an independent team who won't be swayed by such things as empirical evidence or lack there-of. You easily see the dynamic here: These folks are Israelis, so they must be reliable where the other Israelis, the ones with the training and access, are obviously not. That's the line our enemies will take, at which point these particular Israelis will cite the international opinion as proof of Israel's need to do it better, by handing its sovereign obligation to investigate to entities who have no obligations to anyone except their agendas. By the end of the day the discussion will have been transferred from crimes that didn't happen to Israel's intransigence in not allowing outsiders to say they did.

Discussing Israel's Actions - 1

A rabbi from Sderot traveled to the US to tell people about life under fire. Not everyone was interested:

When I welcomed the custom of a question and answer period following my presentation, the very right of free speech that I welcomed to the audience of now over 100 people was thrown in my face and denied to me. First, an audience member verbally attacked me, expressed his support for the firing of rockets into Israel, and ended his anti-Semitic rhetoric filled rant with a question irrelevant to anything in my presentation. I then pointed out to the audience the same fact I want to point out in this article, that this person was not simply criticizing Israel but was clearly expressing his support for a terrorist organization.

Yet before I could finish answering the question, I was interrupted and silenced by the overwhelming Hamas supporters. Next, another audience member stood up and screamed out, calling me a “dirty whore” in Arabic and proceeding to grab his crotch and scream “Here’s your Qassam!” in Arabic.

The critics of Israel used to assure us they were friends worried about some of our actions; then they dropped the friends part but insisted their valid unease at our actions need be heard; there is a growing group out there who don't care in the slightest what our actions are; their problem is our existence.

Which of course isn't new at all.

Concert for Peace, Or Not

Last week the NYT carried this nice fluffy story about a youth orchestra from Jenin that preformed for a public of Holocaust survivors in Holon, Israel. It was the idea of the orchestra's Israeli Arab director, Wafaa Younis, (no idea if she's fluffy) and funded by Shari Arison, Israel's wealthiest woman, who no doubt is fluffy headed (but means well). I briefly toyed with the idea of linking to the story, but seem not to have. It was too fluffy for me, and didn't seem to have much significance beyond the good-feeling markup.

Apparently I was wrong. Some influential group in Jenin has fired Ms. Younis, forbidden her to enter town, and put an end to her harmful escapades.

Adnan al-Hindi, the leader of the camp’s Popular Committee, a grass-roots group representing the Palestine Liberation Organization, said the young musicians had been exploited by the orchestra director, Wafaa Younis, for the purpose of “normalizing” ties with Israel. He said by telephone that the children had been “deceived” and dragged unwittingly into a political situation that “served enemy interests” and aimed to “destroy the Palestinian national spirit in the camp.”

“It was a shock and a surprise to the children and their relatives,” he said, adding that Ms. Younis had told the young musicians’ families only that the trip to Holon was an opportunity for artistic self-expression.

Ms. Younis, from central Israel, has been traveling to Jenin every week for several years to teach music in the camp. Mr. Hindi said that the house she rented as a studio had been sealed, and that she was barred by the Popular Committee from all activity in the camp.

Depressing, isn't it. And note that al-Hindi is Fatah, not Hamas.

A Warm Community in the Cold

This post has nothing to do with my usual themes, simply with the human condition.

Via Powerline I reached a dramatic slideshow at Boston.com about the floods in North Dakota. Or, more accurately, about the communities in and around Fargo, as they face the icy rising waters. It's a dramatic series of pictures, and it tells an impressive tale of an entire community facing adversity with determination, lots of hard work, and also, it's important to add, formidable logistic abilities. Everybody seems to be working hard, the pictures show no panic, but the efforts seems to be achieving things, complicated as this must be. Someone must be directing the effort, allocating volunteers, organizing empty sandbags, mounds of sand, heavy equipment, and so on and on.

Moving, and highly impressive.

An Ethos of Success

As some of you know, after decades of doing one sort of thing, a year or two ago I set off to do something quite different, and am acting like a hi-tech entrepreneur as if I was 20 years younger. Yet old habits refuse to die, and at times I revert to them: When in need of understanding a new situation, read a book or three.

So I just read Guy Kawasaki's The Art of the Start. Lots of fun, and I warmly recommend it, even if you're not starting anything but appreciate a wry and self deprecating take on how the world works. Actually, while this blog deals mostly with my old persona, not with the entrepreneur me, I'm blogging about it because on a level Kawasaki probably didn't have in mind, his manual for getting up and running is also a commentary on a specific but very important way of life, and it addresses some of the themes of this blog.

The world of innovators is about people adding value to the world, he tells between pages 3-215 (that's the whole book). It's also a world where getting bruised is merely a way of figuring out how to do your thing better. While he has an entire chapter on "Being a Mensch", he isn't into feeling sorry for oneself. The whole victim thing, surely one of the most powerful emotions around and perhaps the single most potent one in international politics, is summed up on page 117:

Your goal shouldn't be to 'retain control' and 'avoid getting ousted'. Your goal should be to build a great organization. There may come a time when you should be ousted. Deal with it. Would you rather have an inferior organization that failed, but that you were in control of until the better end?

Deal with it. Make the best of what you have, and pick up and move on when necessary. The world would be a better place if everyone lived that way; it's no coincidence the folks who do often seem to control the world, or at least their segments of it. It's not a conspiracy, a cabal, nor even the machinations of the hegemonic power brokers. It's a way of life that optimizes the possible rather than bemoaning the world's imperfections and injustices. Simple, isn't it?

At the Center of the Storm

Martin Ivens of the London Times has a somewhat rambling article written in Tel Aviv about the upcoming G20 meeting in London. His subject: the G20 is a talkshop. Obama's real legacy will be forged in the Middle East.

The underlying themes: Reality is stronger than politicians' ability to spin it, even hugely talented politicians. Even the President of the United States is rather limited in his ability to forge reality. And finally, the Jews are at the center of it. Again, I might note: they've been there or nearby for most of the past 2,000 years, give or take five centuries.

It would be nice to be comfortable and irrelevant, in a New Zealandish sort of way. Sigh.

Cool Rationalism vs. Atavistic Fanatics

Last week Uri Dromi published another column at the Guardian's CiF. Dromi is one of the Guardian's fig leaves, enabling them to say they can't be antisemites because look at the range of their authors.

The reason I'm linking is because there's an interesting dynamic there. Dromi is looking for facts, trying to sift evidence and evaluate it. The kind of thing an educated enlightened person should do. Many of the responders haven't the slightest interest in facts; for them, the story is crystal clear and shouldn't be muddied:

These days, I find it hard to find the will to comment on blogs that seeks to deny or minimise violence against the Palestinians in the hands of Israel state. I cry for our collective failure to defend the Palestinians. We know what needs to be done- boycott Israel until the state of Israel violence oppression against the Palestinians comes to an end. Thank you the Guardian and other media outlets and their brave journalists do informing us the truth of this not secret inhumanity.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/23/israel-gaza-war-crimes-guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2009/mar/23/israel-gaza-drones

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2009/mar/23/israel-gaza-medical-workers

Or this one:

This is all just nonsense anyway. The fact is that no matter what either side do. Palestinians have the moral authority because they have a moral right to resist occupation and being forced to live in the largest open air prison in the world.

One of the many reasons enlightened people the world over need to confront antisemitism is this: the antisemites are a throwback to the darker moments of history, and they dismantle the tools crafted over centuries by which society climbed up out of barbarity.

NYT Corrective

Somewhat to my surprise, I admit, the New York Times continues to follow the story of the IDF behavior in Gaza; this time they've got a story that mostly tells it as it is. So unlike some media outlets, at least the NYT is being professional.

(Silke in comments to the previous post fumes over the editorial choice to caption the story with a picture showing devastation in Gaza, but I can live with that. There really was lots of devastation; I'm willing to own it, war being what it always is, and the Palestinians insisting on war over peace. The slander was in depicting the IDF as a raging brutal horde, which of course it never remotely was.)

Media on IDF Brutality in Gaza

Alex Safian at CAMERA sums up what's now known about the allegations made by Danny Zamir's soldiers: the two worst allegations, about IDF snipers gunning down Palestinian women and children, simply never happened.

Two central incidents that came up in the testimony, which Danny Zamir, the head of the Rabin pre-military academy presented to Chief of Staff Gaby Ashkenazi, focus on one infantry brigade. The brigade’s commander today will present to Brigadier General Eyal Eisenberg, commander of the Gaza division, the findings of his personal investigation about the matter which he undertook in the last few days, and after approval, he will present his findings to the head of the Southern Command, Major General Yoav Gallant. Regarding the incident in which it was claimed that a sniper fired at a Palestinian woman and her two daughters, the brigade commander’s investigation cites the sniper: “I saw the woman and her daughters and I shot warning shots. The section commander came up to the roof and shouted at me, 'Why did you shoot at them?’ I explained that I did not shoot at them, but I fired warning shots.” Officers from the brigade surmise that fighters that stayed in the bottom floor of the Palestinian house thought that he hit them, and from here the rumor that a sniper killed a mother and her two daughters spread.

Regarding the second incident, in which it was claimed that soldiers went up to the roof to entertain themselves with firing and killed an elderly Palestinian woman, the brigade commander investigation found that there was no such incident.

I admit, this is not particularly surprising. It is not easy to figure out the facts of a simple killing in a civilian setting, as any police officer will tell you; peering backwards through the fog of war is even harder. Not impossible, mind you; the shelves with history books that do it are long and laden; but rushing to prove the bestiality of IDF troops is often a fool's errand, motivated more by the determination to convict Israel of immorality than by painstaking respect of facts.

As I wrote a few days ago, Israelis routinely and publicly examine their actions at war, as it should be; in this case, the full investigation tells the opposite story from the first one: The Palestinian family had been held in a house alongside the IDF troops, and now they were being directed out of harm's way. A woman with two children didn't follow the directions given her. A sniper indeed identified a woman and two children in a place they shouldn't have been in; he fired warning shots meant to frighten, not harm. His officer shouted at him for firing in the direction of civilians, since even the officer thought he was shooting at them. The sniper - the only person in this story who was looking through the sights and doing the shooting - reassured his commander he wasn't about to harm anyone. Other soldiers, within sound range but not eye contact, thought the sniper had killed civilians, and were so disturbed by the incident that it eventually reached Haaretz, triggering an investigation that unraveled the facts of the case and refuted the allegations.

Sounds like a moral army to me, and a moral citizenry too. Commendable, wouldn't you say? Conduct to be proud of.

But don't expect anyone to do any commending. The initial allegations were quoted - very literally - worldwide. Their refutation won't be. There are banal reasons for this, having to do with the profound unseriousness of the business of media and news as entertainment. Yet that is not a satisfactory explanation. The act of slandering Jews is one of the most fundamental in Western society, and has been for millennia, often with lethal results. When educated and respected stalwarts of their societies engage in the pastime, they bear full moral responsibility for their acts. They may or may not be antisemites (shorthand: the Guardian is, the NYT isn't), but their actions are.

How about Haaretz? Had they published the allegations in Hebrew alone, thus enabling the crucial internal discussion without translating it for the rest of the world to gloat over, would that have been better? Anshel Pfeffer, one of their columnists, agonizes over the issue. I tend to agree with him. The Israelis need to have their discussions; the observers will disseminate the incriminating parts no matter what, and won't disseminate the exoneration no matter what; Haaretz bears some responsibility for this dynamic, but not much.

The opprobrium belongs fully to those engaged in antisemitic acts.

And Still Counting in Gaza

I'm not certain why we have two items on this on two consecutive days, but perhaps Haaretz was simply being sloppy yesterday. Knowing them, it's certainly possible. Anyway, Y-net cites an official announcement from the IDF today.

The IDF said Thursday that an internal inquiry found that 1,166 people were killed in the three-week offensive that ended in January. It said 709 were Hamas militants, and just under 300 people, including 89 children aged 16 and 49 women, were civilians.
According to the military, it is unclear clear whether an additional 162 men who died were militants or civilians.

These numbers are rather different from the Palestinian ones that were quoted world-wide and are by now etched in stone and won't be dislodged.

It's possible they're both wrong; it's not possible they're both right. You might perhaps expect respectable media outlets to try to get to the bottom of the matter, and figure out what the truth is - but I can't say why you might expect that.