Published on Monday, January 12, 2009 by The Progressive
by Uri Avnery
http://www.progressive.org/mag/avnery011109.html
NEARLY SEVENTY YEARS ago, in the course of World War
II, a heinous crime was committed in the city of
extremists called "the Red Army" held the millions of
the town's inhabitants hostage and provoked retaliation
from the German Wehrmacht from inside the population
centers. The Germans had no alternative but to bomb and
shell the population and to impose a total blockade,
which caused the death of hundreds of thousands.
Some time before that, a similar crime was committed in
shield. The Germans were compelled to send their
Luftwaffe and reluctantly reduce the city to ruins.
They called it the Blitz.
This is the description that would now appear in the
history books - if the Germans had won the war.
Absurd? No more than the daily descriptions in our
media, which are being repeated ad nauseam: the Hamas
terrorists use the inhabitants of
and exploit the women and children as "human shields",
they leave us no alternative but to carry out massive
bombardments, in which, to our deep sorrow, thousands
of women, children and unarmed men are killed and injured.
IN THIS WAR, as in any modern war, propaganda plays a
major role. The disparity between the forces, between
the Israeli army - with its airplanes, gunships,
drones, warships, artillery and tanks - and the few
thousand lightly armed Hamas fighters, is one to a
thousand, perhaps one to a million. In the political
arena the gap between them is even wider. But in the
propaganda war, the gap is almost infinite.
Almost all the Western media initially repeated the
official Israeli propaganda line. They almost entirely
ignored the Palestinian side of the story, not to
mention the daily demonstrations of the Israeli peace
camp. The rationale of the Israeli government ("The
state must defend its citizens against the Qassam
rockets") has been accepted as the whole truth. The
view from the other side, that the Qassams are a
retaliation for the siege that starves the one and a
half million inhabitants of the
Only when the horrible scenes from
appear on Western TV screens, did world public opinion
gradually begin to change.
True, Western and Israeli TV channels showed only a
tiny fraction of the dreadful events that appear 24
hours every day on Aljazeera's Arabic channel, but one
picture of a dead baby in the arms of its terrified
father is more powerful than a thousand elegantly
constructed sentences from the Israeli army spokesman.
And that is what is decisive, in the end.
War - every war - is the realm of lies. Whether called
propaganda or psychological warfare, everybody accepts
that it is right to lie for one's country. Anyone who
speaks the truth runs the risk of being branded a traitor.
The trouble is that propaganda is most convincing for
the propagandist himself. And after you convince
yourself that a lie is the truth and falsification
reality, you can no longer make rational decisions.
An example of this process surrounds the most shocking
atrocity of this war so far: the shelling of the UN
Fakhura school in Jabaliya refugee camp.
Immediately after the incident became known throughout
the world, the army "revealed" that Hamas fighters had
been firing mortars from near the school entrance. As
proof they released an aerial photo which indeed showed
the school and the mortar. But within a short time the
official army liar had to admit that the photo was more
than a year old. In brief: a falsification.
Later the official liar claimed that "our soldiers were
shot at from inside the school". Barely a day passed
before the army had to admit to UN personnel that that
was a lie, too. Nobody had shot from inside the school,
no Hamas fighters were inside the school, which was
full of terrified refugees.
But the admission made hardly any difference anymore.
By that time, the Israeli public was completely
convinced that "they shot from inside the school", and
TV announcers stated this as a simple fact.
So it went with the other atrocities. Every baby
metamorphosed, in the act of dying, into a Hamas
terrorist. Every bombed mosque instantly became a Hamas
base, every apartment building an arms cache, every
school a terror command post, every civilian government
building a "symbol of Hamas rule". Thus the Israeli
army retained its purity as the "most moral army in the world".
THE TRUTH is that the atrocities are a direct result of
the war plan. This reflects the personality of Ehud
Barak - a man whose way of thinking and actions are
clear evidence of what is called "moral insanity", a sociopathic disorder.
The real aim (apart from gaining seats in the coming
elections) is to terminate the rule of Hamas in the
is an invader which has gained control of a foreign
country. The reality is, of course, entirely different.
The Hamas movement won the majority of the votes in the
eminently democratic elections that took place in the
West Bank, East Jerusalem and the
because the Palestinians had come to the conclusion
that Fatah's peaceful approach had gained precisely
nothing from
settlements, nor release of the prisoners, nor any
significant steps toward ending the occupation and
creating the Palestinian state. Hamas is deeply rooted
in the population - not only as a resistance movement
fighting the foreign occupier, like the Irgun and the
Stern Group in the past - but also as a political and
religious body that provides social, educational and medical services.
From the point of view of the population, the Hamas
fighters are not a foreign body, but the sons of every
family in the Strip and the other Palestinian regions.
They do not "hide behind the population", the
population views them as their only defenders.
Therefore, the whole operation is based on erroneous
assumptions. Turning life into living hell does not
cause the population to rise up against Hamas, but on
the contrary, it unites behind Hamas and reinforces its
determination not to surrender. The population of
Leningrad did not rise up against Stalin, any more than
the Londoners rose up against Churchill.
He who gives the order for such a war with such methods
in a densely populated area knows that it will cause
dreadful slaughter of civilians. Apparently that did
not touch him. Or he believed that "they will change
their ways" and "it will sear their consciousness", so
that in future they will not dare to resist
A top priority for the planners was the need to
minimize casualties among the soldiers, knowing that
the mood of a large part of the pro-war public would
change if reports of such casualties came in. That is
what happened in
This consideration played an especially important role
because the entire war is a part of the election
campaign. Ehud Barak, who gained in the polls in the
first days of the war, knew that his ratings would
collapse if pictures of dead soldiers filled the TV screens.
Therefore, a new doctrine was applied: to avoid losses
among our soldiers by the total destruction of
everything in their path. The planners were not only
ready to kill 80 Palestinians to save one Israeli
soldier, as has happened, but also 800. The avoidance
of casualties on our side is the overriding
commandment, which is causing record numbers of
civilian casualties on the other side.
That means the conscious choice of an especially cruel
kind of warfare - and that has been its Achilles heel.
A person without imagination, like Barak (his election
slogan: "Not a Nice Guy, but a Leader") cannot imagine
how decent people around the world react to actions
like the killing of whole extended families, the
destruction of houses over the heads of their
inhabitants, the rows of boys and girls in white
shrouds ready for burial, the reports about people
bleeding to death over days because ambulances are not
allowed to reach them, the killing of doctors and
medics on their way to save lives, the killing of UN
drivers bringing in food. The pictures of the
hospitals, with the dead, the dying and the injured
lying together on the floor for lack of space, have
shocked the world. No argument has any force next to an
image of a wounded little girl lying on the floor,
twisting with pain and crying out: "Mama! Mama!"
The planners thought that they could stop the world
from seeing these images by forcibly preventing press
coverage. The Israeli journalists, to their shame,
agreed to be satisfied with the reports and photos
provided by the Army Spokesman, as if they were
authentic news, while they themselves remained miles
away from the events. Foreign journalists were not
allowed in either, until they protested and were taken
for quick tours in selected and supervised groups. But
in a modern war, such a sterile manufactured view
cannot completely exclude all others - the cameras are
inside the strip, in the middle of the hell, and cannot
be controlled. Aljazeera broadcasts the pictures around
the clock and reaches every home.
THE
battles of the war.
Hundreds of millions of Arabs from
more than a billion Muslims from
see the pictures and are horrified. This has a strong
impact on the war. Many of the viewers see the rulers
of
collaborators with
atrocities against their Palestinian brothers.
The security services of the Arab regimes are
registering a dangerous ferment among the peoples.
Hosny Mubarak, the most exposed Arab leader because of
his closing of the Rafah crossing in the face of
terrified refugees, started to pressure the
decision-makers in
blocked all calls for a cease-fire. These began to
understand the menace to vital American interests in
the Arab world and suddenly changed their attitude -
causing consternation among the complacent Israeli diplomats.
People with moral insanity cannot really understand the
motives of normal people and must guess their
reactions. "How many divisions has the Pope?" Stalin
sneered. "How many divisions have people of
conscience?" Ehud Barak may well be asking.
As it turns out, they do have some. Not numerous. Not
very quick to react. Not very strong and organized. But
at a certain moment, when the atrocities overflow and
masses of protesters come together, that can decide a war.
THE FAILURE to grasp the nature of Hamas has caused a
failure to grasp the predictable results. Not only is
Israel unable to win the war, Hamas cannot lose it.
Even if the Israeli army were to succeed in killing
every Hamas fighter to the last man, even then Hamas
would win. The Hamas fighters would be seen as the
paragons of the Arab nation, the heroes of the
Palestinian people, models for emulation by every
youngster in the Arab world. The
into the hands of Hamas like a ripe fruit, Fatah would
drown in a sea of contempt, the Arab regimes would be
threatened with collapse.
If the war ends with Hamas still standing, bloodied but
unvanquished, in face of the mighty Israeli military
machine, it will look like a fantastic victory, a
victory of mind over matter.
What will be seared into the consciousness of the world
will be the image of
ready at any moment to commit war crimes and not
prepared to abide by any moral restraints. This will
have severe consequences for our long-term future, our
standing in the world, our chance of achieving peace and quiet.
In the end, this war is a crime against ourselves too,
a crime against the State of
(c) 2009 The Progressive
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