Foreign Policy magazine is a leading publication for serious discussion of global affairs and American foreign policy. Though its circulation figures are much lower than the most widely-read media heavyweights, it’s read by countless policy-makers, lobbyists and those seeking to understand the world.
That’s why an essay by Somdeep Sen, titled “Why Israel Hates Gaza,” published in the magazine on December 26, must be addressed.
Before going further, it’s important to note a basic fact about Sen’s remarkably one-sided rant: It doesn’t so much dismiss Israeli concerns as totally omit them altogether.
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Litany of Omissions
For an essay seeking to establish why Israel allegedly “hates Gaza,” it’s instructive to note what readers are not told:
Early on, the article refers to “the Israeli 11-day military campaign in Gaza in May” and focuses on the damage done by Israeli airstrikes.
In fact, the conflict arose because Hamas fired rockets at Israel’s capital, Jerusalem, in the full knowledge that doing so would force Israel to react.
Moreover, in 2006, Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was kidnapped by Hamas terrorists during a cross-border raid into Israeli territory in which the border patrol Shalit was part of came under attack. Three of his crewmates were killed and when Shalit surrendered, he was kidnapped into Gaza and kept there, without access to humanitarian staff and in contravention of international humanitarian law (IHL), for over 5 years. His family was unable to speak to him, again in breach of IHL.
Shalit returned home only in 2011 after Israel agreed to an exchange in which over 1,000 Palestinian security prisoners, many with blood on their hands, were released. Despite assurances that they would not go back to their murderous ways, a number of them did exactly that, and helped orchestrate further attacks against Israel.
It’s worth noting, too, that the same year that Shalit was kidnapped, a British journalist, the BBC’s Alan Johnson was also taken captive. Although he was released 44 days later, his treatment has served as a warning to all foreign journalists in Gaza: Don’t question the narrative Hamas and other Islamist groups want heard.
Numerous UN officials and journalists reporting from Gaza who confirmed “Israeli claims” about Hamas war crimes (more on that later) have been declared either persona non-grata or had their footage deleted.
Another stunning omission is any reference to the tens of thousands of rockets fired at Israel by Gaza-based terrorists. Many of these rockets are constructed, stored, and launched from behind the cover of densely-packed civilian areas — a war crime by any definition. And in firing these munitions at Israeli population centers in the hopes of killing Israeli civilians, another war crime is committed.
Moreover, with Hamas and Islamic Jihad regularly breaching international law, Israel is forced to fight back without being able to win decisively, and the terrorists are able to continue their reign in Gaza. The street executions and arbitrary imprisonments are crucial to understanding why many Israelis regard Gaza as a place far more extreme than the West Bank. While Ramallah may be the stronghold of Fatah, Gaza is on another level entirely.
At one point in the essay, Sen speaks of how “key figures at the helm of armed factions like Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas grew up in destitute conditions in Gaza’s refugee camps.” There is far more to it than that: Hamas has built a rampant kleptocracy, in which millions upon millions of dollars earmarked for humanitarian aid have been channeled to its members’ bank accounts, thereby perpetuating poverty.
Yet all this is totally omitted from the article.
Blatant Misrepresentation of Reality
Time and again, Sen’s essay excuses Palestinian terrorism. For example, he depicts Gaza as having “no access to formal politics under Egyptian rule”, so “military tactics were the only available means of political engagement in Gaza.”
While he cites multiple political leaders who, like the Israeli public, have become tired of the endless waves of terror emanating from the territory, and speak openly of it as a fortress of terror, Sen dishonestly characterizes these descriptions of Israel needing to confront the terrorists in Gaza as somehow being “vocal about their contempt for the place.” If Sen can’t tell the difference between malicious actions and the desire to eradicate terror attacks, all the while removing agency from people inhabiting an entire region, then at least the Foreign Policy editorial staff should have drawn attention to this barefaced lie when editing the piece.
The attempts to smear Israel take readers back to the days preceding the state’s founding, with Israeli leaders portrayed as having deliberately destroyed Arab villages and overseen an attempt to remove any evidence of an Arab presence in the land. Naturally, nowhere in this essay is there any room for the multiple peace offers accepted by Israel, not least the UN partition plan that was approved in 1947 and would have offered two peoples the opportunity to live side-by-side in their respective sovereign states.
The fact that Jewish leaders accepted this plan, despite the majority of the designated land being located in the arid Negev desert, and despite the fact that it would have likely forced the vast majority of Jews to live in a small and vulnerable strip of territory along the coast, pinned between three different Arab-dominated regions, is totally ignored.
Instead, readers are fed patent falsehoods about “the memory of Israel’s violent birth and the manner in which it sought to erase the existence of Palestine and Palestinians,” and glibly informed that, “as a consequence, Gaza today is at the core of militant commitment to the Palestinian national movement,” as if one follows simply from the other.
It’s noteworthy that the writer is an associate professor at a Danish university. The descent of academia into interest-driven “research” and identity politics has been well documented. Yet the media remain accountable to the public and need to do better. It is important that the media continue to present a range of opinions. But not at the cost of undermining the truth through a litany of unsubstantiated claims and decontextualized smears.
Ultimately, if Israel truly “hated Gaza”, it wouldn’t have invested in defensive measures such as Iron Dome, which saves Israeli lives and thereby drastically reduces the need for Israel to strike back at rocket-firing terrorists. Without Iron Dome, a solely defensive weapon which, while largely funded by the United States was the brainchild of Israeli engineers, the damage inflicted upon Gaza would have been far greater. More than it protects Israeli civilians, the Iron Dome actually protects Gazans.
Finally, returning to Sen’s starting point, it’s important to note that there is room to debate how the UK government’s move to proscribe all of Hamas as a terrorist organisation will affect the populace of Gaza as a whole. It is legitimate to open a discussion about ensuring human rights and how to meet people’s needs. About this, there is no doubt.
But when the argument fails to note the reality that Gaza is ruled by an organization bent on Israel’s destruction, and it routinely acts on that ideology, then the resulting conversation is fundamentally warped and actually distances the chances of reaching a more equitable situation for people on all sides.
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