Do you have any imagination? Then imagine you’re an Israeli. Please concentrate hard.
Every day rockets are fired in your general direction by fanatics seeking to murder you, your family and everyone else in your country.
The rockets used not to have the range to kill you, but now they do. Any day your house may collapse on you and your children, and you go to bed at night not knowing if you’ll see the sun rise in the morning.
Your house feels like a death trap, yet venturing outside makes you no safer: a rocket can get you in a supermarket or a café just as easily.
It isn’t just rockets either. When your children climb on the school bus in the morning, every morning, you pray they won’t be blown apart by a bomb.
When you yourself get on any public transport, you watch every fellow passenger carrying a package. Is it groceries or dynamite? By the time you get to your destination, your forehead feels damp.
You try not to venture out after dark for fear of being kidnapped and tortured to death. You’re wary of the family next door: their religion is different from yours, which to them means they’ll go to heaven if they kill you.
And so on every day, 365 of them in every year, 366 in a leap one.
Have you imagined it? I can’t.
However, I know I’d do everything in my power to defend myself. Above all, I’d put pressure on my government to protect me.
Occasionally, Israel’s government can only protect its citizens by striking out – to make sure the enemy’s rocket launchers, command structures, communications and logistic support are destroyed.
The government has the wherewithal to do it. Moreover, its army is strong enough to wipe the threat out once and for all.
But, unlike her enemies, Israel is a civilised country. And civilised countries can’t act the way, say, Russia is acting towards the Ukraine. Civilised countries need to check their actions against the opinions of other civilised countries.
Israel badly needs the West’s help, and not just because the West supplies much of her armaments. The country needs not just physical but also moral support, and it has every right to expect it.
The Israelis know that theirs is the preface to our Judaeo-Christian civilisation. Therefore we have the common cause of protecting this civilisation against its enemies, of whom Islam, in particular the Hamas rocket wielders, is at present the deadliest.
The Israelis know that Western countries are democracies, like Israel herself. That means they can’t go all out to support Israel without rallying public opinion first.
Just like in Israel, public support can only be secured by persuasive appeals in the press. So Israelis peruse Western papers, hoping to find signs of friendship.
Instead they find barely concealed sympathy for those who hate Israel and the West in equal measure.
They see in horror that, out of 196 states in the world, theirs is the only one whose legitimacy is ever questioned. And when they strike out in desperation, trying to protect themselves against wild-eyed murderers, the sympathy for their enemies isn’t even barely concealed.
The world’s papers hardly mention why the Israelis have hit Hamas. Instead they regale their readers with lurid stories about Palestinian casualties, especially women and children, who are always good copy.
Somewhere towards the end of the horror stories the papers make the feeble gesture of mentioning the rocket attacks. But they immediately cancel it out by lamenting that, while Hamas rockets don’t inflict numerous casualties, Israeli counterstrikes do.
Any half-decent or half-honest analyst knows why. Israel abhors the tragedy of her citizens being killed. Hamas casualties, especially civilian ones, are grist to the mill of propaganda war.
That’s why Israel has some of the most advanced civil defences in the world, while Hamas has none. Moreover, they deliberately place their rocket sites, ammunition dumps and command centres near, or even within, schools, residential quarters, hospitals and other sexy targets.
Unlike Hamas, Israel eschews indiscriminate attacks. She delivers pinpoint hits on military, or rather militant, targets and it’s not Israel’s fault that Hamas do everything they can to increase the collateral damage for propaganda purposes.
Unlike Hamas, Israel issues advance warnings to the residents of target areas, imploring them to evacuate. Under pressure from Hamas such warnings are typically ignored – with inevitable results.
What I find particularly emetic is that our media still claim that their coverage of the conflict is balanced.
Any copywriter or journalist will tell you that most people don’t read most texts from beginning to end. That’s why both ads and articles are always frontloaded, with the gist of the message contained within the headline and lead paragraph.
That information is most of what the people will read and all of what they’ll retain. With that in mind, consider the lead article in today’s Daily Mail, our least anti-Israel paper.
The headline screams: “Gaza buries its dead after bloodiest day yet of Israel’s ongoing offensive as thousands flee homes in fear of ground invasion”.
Then a subsequent paragraph whispers: “The militant wing of Hamas, the Islamist political party which controls Gaza, has fired hundreds of rockets into Israel, striking the deepest inside the country ever.”
In between the two statements there are 904 (!) words, roughly the number in this article so far, each describing the plight of Palestinians. What do you suppose the average reader will take out?
The homepage of The Guardian, the trendy leftie paper imbued with the Pall Mall type of anti-Semitism, runs three items on the conflict: “Israeli troops in Gaza clash as residents told to evacuate,” “Disabled Gazans unable to escape” and “Israel vows to continue bombarding Gaza.”
From right to left and everywhere in between, Western media promote the perniciously false image of innocent Palestinians being savaged by nasty Israelis. Why?
The question is simple, but the answer isn’t. A whole ganglion of reasons come together to perpetrate this outrage of blatant anti-Israel propaganda.
One of them has to do with the sympathy for any Third World ‘liberation movement’, assiduously hammered into the minds of Westerners over the last several decades. This regardless of the nature of the presumed victims and their putative oppressors.
Hence millions of blacks murdered in, say, Rwanda and Burundi, attracted much less attention than the mildly undemocratic practices of the South African apartheid government, easily the most liberal in Africa.
The underlying assumption was purely racist: the Boers were white and therefore had to know better. The butchers of Rwanda and Burundi were themselves black, so they acted in character – they can’t help themselves, old boy, what?
The same racist criteria are being applied in this case: yes, the Israelis are indeed like us, as much as Jews can be, but that’s what we hold against them. Guardian readers don’t attack anybody, not with bombs at any rate, so how come Israelis do? It’s not cricket.
And Hamas? Well, wogs will be wogs, what do you expect? And since these particular wogs claim being oppressed by exactly the kind of people who are routinely blackballed at Pall Mall clubs, their cause is… well, not exactly just, but understandable.
One type of racism demands a sympathetic treatment of even the beastliest Third World groups. The other dictates a shameless anti-Semitic bias, however subtly conveyed.
If you were an Israeli, how would you feel now, between the Scylla of one racism and the Charybdis of another? Don’t answer that.