Last week in Yemen, at least 43 people were tragically killed in an airstrike. Reports said 29 of the dead were children on a bus returning from a picnic.
The attack, in a northwest province of Yemen, was carried out by a Saudi-led coalition fighting Iranian-backed Houthi rebels.
Of course, Israel had nothing to do with the attack, but it was only a matter of time before some critic would use this incident to smear Israel. The Guardian‘s Owen Jones sniffed this disapproval:
Consider another horror unfolding with direct western involvement. On Wednesday night a pregnant woman and her 18-month-old daughter were killed in Gaza by an Israeli airstrike. It is being framed as a conflict between Hamas and Israel, as though an equivalence can be drawn between an open-air prison camp and a regional military superpower. Every death – Palestinian or Israeli – is a tragedy, every attack on a civilian by either Hamas or Israel indefensible. Yet, the human rights NGO B’Tselem reports, 9,456 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli security forces – with western complicity – in the past 18 years, compared with 1,237 Israeli security force personnel and civilians killed by Palestinians. Of the Palestinian fatalities, 2,025 were children. Other estimates put the Palestinian death toll over the same period at up to 9,730. It is perverse to suggest this “conflict” is anything other than overwhelmingly one-sided. And yet as the slaughter continues, British arms sales to Israel are at a record high.
Both Saudi Arabia and Israel think they can get away with killing innocents, including children, for a very simple reason: they absolutely can.
Join the fight for Israel’s fair coverage in the news
I don’t know enough about the Yemeni incident to comment on Jones’ criticism of the Saudis. But as for Israel, I have five thoughts:
1. Using casualties as some kind of moral barometer is perverse. Jones simply strips the numbers of all context to sling his mud.
If the number of dead Israelis isn’t equal to (or greater than) the number of dead Palestinians, it’s not for lack of Palestinian effort. We don’t apologize for surviving years of suicide bombings, drive-by shootings, stabbings, rock throwings, firebombings and now incendiary kites and balloons. If Hamas was capable of producing more precise rockets or outgunning Iron Dome, it would.
3. If Gaza is indeed “open-air prison camp,” it’s not because Israel is throwing its weight as a “regional military superpower.” It’s because Hamas is trying smuggle weapons into Gaza by sea and by land. When the Gaza terror threat ends, so will the blockade. For now, Hamas is remarkably persistent.
But Israel is too.
Deal with it.
4. As for the regrettable death of children, Israel goes to great lengths to minimize collateral damage — by dropping leaflets and making phone calls to warn civilians away, knocking on the roof, and even aborting attacks at the last moment.
Unfortunately for Palestinian kids, Hamas and the PA are a bigger threat to their well-being than Israel.
With TV shows and summer camps teaching kids jihad, Hamas poisons the minds of a generation of Palestinians, ensuring enmity. Social media incitement further inflames young Palestinians while monuments, schools, and scout groups honor the murderers of Israeli men, women and children.
By placing weapon caches, tunnel entrances, rocket launchers and command and control centers in, under and around apartment complexes, schools, hospitals, mosques and even a hotel full of fellow journalists, Hamas itself endangers Gaza’s civilians, young and old.
After terror attacks, Palestinians distribute candy to their children and pay stipends worth thousands of dollars to the people who murder our children.
As Nelson Mandela once said:
There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.
5. Despite Jones’ condemnation, he offers no meaningful alternative to the Gaza blockade. I’m open to ideas that would give Palestinians dignity and let me sleep peacefully at night, but I didn’t see any here. In a 558-word column, the overly conspicuous piety known virtue signalling is a lot easier than conflict resolution.
Featured image: uses elements of: CC BY-SA Martin Fisch with additions by HonestReporting; Jones via Wikimedia Commons;
