How Hamas and its useful idiots have poisoned the narrative about this war.
by Brendan O'Neill
Hamas will be on the back foot in this face-off, having had its ranks devastated by the IDF. But it has something in its favour: the anti-Israel hysteria of the West’s influencers. Over the past week, our elites’ crusade of criminalisation against the Jewish State has reached dizzying new heights. Israel has been found guilty in the kangaroo court of the West’s puffed-up moralists of every war crime imaginable. It has been judged the most savage nation in existence. Such shrill damnation of the Jewish State has one effect and one effect only: to inspire Hamas to continue its ruinous war in Gaza.
‘It’s definitely genocide’, the cry went up last week, following the publication of an exposé by the Guardian and others claiming that 83 per cent of the dead in Gaza are civilians. The figures come from the IDF’s own ‘intelligence database’, we were told. They show that ‘five out of six Palestinians killed by Israeli forces’ have been civilians. This is ‘an extreme rate of slaughter rarely matched in recent decades of warfare’, said the Guardian. You have to look to Srebrenica or Rwanda, it said, to see similar levels of wanton destruction of human life.
The truth – as we have come to expect on everything Israel-related – is far more complicated. What the IDF database actually says is that 8,900 – around one in six – of the dead in Gaza are ‘named fighters’ from ‘Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad’. There will be many other dead, it says, who are either fighters who could not be identified or fighters from other Islamist groups. Indeed, the purple-prose ‘exposé’ of the IDF’s supposed genocidal ruthlessness undercut its own claims by acknowledging that the number of fighters killed is ‘likely higher’ than 8,900 since the IDF’s database ‘does not include… operatives who were killed but could not be identified by name [or] Gazans who took part in fighting but were not officially members of Hamas or PIJ’.
Right. So it’s not true that only one in six of the dead are militants. That was a reckless and sinister misrepresentation of the facts. It’s even feasible that the number of fighters who could not be identified is higher than the number who could be: war, after all, is a messy business where establishing facts is hard. And yet the post-truth insistence that 83 per cent of the dead are civilians spread like a fire in influencer circles. ‘Barbarians’, they cried. ‘Demons’, even. The small print, the truth, was incinerated in the rush to damn Israel as genocidal.
It seems the butchery of truth is a small price to pay for that most jealously coveted goal of the West’s cultural establishment: to find Israel guilty of genocide. It’s not only numbers they’ll twist – it’s language, too. Recall when the Irish government said the International Court of Justice should broaden its definition of genocide in order that Israel might be put in the dock for its ‘collective punishment’ of Gaza. Can’t find Israel guilty of genocide? No problem, just change the meaning of genocide. Classic Orwellianism. One human-rights expert reminds us dimwits that genocide is ‘a crime that can be committed without a single person dying’. So whether Israel had killed 60,000 people or none, it could still be deemed a genocidal state. This is a species of madness.
