With Gaza, Journalists Fail Again
 
By Chris Hedges

The assault on Gaza exposed not only Israel?s callous disregard for 
international law but the gutlessness of the American press. There were 
no major newspapers, television networks or radio stations that 
challenged Israel?s fabricated version of events that led to the Gaza 
attack or the daily lies Israel used to justify the unjustifiable. 
Nearly all reporters were, as during the buildup to the Iraq war, 
pliant stenographers and echo chambers. If we as journalists have a 
product to sell, it is credibility. Take that credibility away and we 
become little more than propagandists and advertisers. By refusing to 
expose lies we destroy, in the end, ourselves.  

All governments lie in wartime. Israel is no exception. Israel waged an 
effective war of black propaganda. It lied craftily with its glib, well-
rehearsed government spokespeople, its ban on all foreign press in Gaza 
and its confiscation of cell phones and cameras from its own soldiers 
lest the reality of the attack inadvertently seep out. It was the 
Arabic network al-Jazeera, along with a handful of local reporters in 
Gaza, which upheld the honor of our trade, that of giving a voice to 
those who without our presence would have no voice, that of countering 
the amplified lies of the powerful with the faint cries and pain of the 
oppressed. But these examples of journalistic integrity were too few 
and barely heard by us. 

We retreated, as usual, into the moral void of American journalism, the 
void of balance and objectivity. The ridiculous notion of being 
unbiased, outside of the flow of human existence, impervious to grief 
or pain or anger or injustice, allows reporters to coolly give truth 
and lies equal space and airtime. Balance and objectivity are the 
antidote to facing unpleasant truths, a way of avoidance, a way to 
placate the powerful. We record the fury of a Palestinian who has lost 
his child in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza but make sure to mention 
Israel?s ?security needs,? include statements by Israeli officials who 
insist there was firing from the home or the mosque or the school and 
of course note Israel?s right to defend itself. We do this throughout 
the Middle East. We record the human toll in Iraq, caused by our 
occupation, but remind everyone that ?Saddam killed his own people.? We 
write about the deaths of families in Afghanistan during an airstrike 
but never forget to mention that the Taliban ?oppresses women.? Their 
crimes cancel out our crimes. It becomes a moral void. And above all we 
never forget to mention the ?war on terror.? We ask how and who but 
never, never do we ask why. As long as we speak in the cold, dead 
language of those in power, the language that says a lie is as valid as 
a fact, the language where one version of history is as good as 
another, we are part of the problem, not the solution. 

  ?Bombs and rockets are flying between Israel and Palestinians in 
Gaza, and once again, The Times is caught in a familiar crossfire, 
accused from all sides of unfair and inaccurate coverage,? New York 
Times public editor Clark Hoyt breezily began in writing his assessment 
of the paper?s coverage, going on to conclude ?though the most 
vociferous supporters of Israel and the Palestinians do not agree, I 
think The Times, largely barred from the battlefield and reporting amid 
the chaos of war, has tried its best to do a fair, balanced and 
complete job?and has largely succeeded.?

The cliché that Israel had a right to defend itself from Hamas rocket 
attacks?that bombs and rockets were ?flying between Israel and 
Palestinians in Gaza??was accepted in the press as an undisputed truth. 
It became the starting point for every hollow discussion of the Israeli 
attack. It left pundits and columnists chattering about 
?proportionality,? not legality. Israel was in open violation of 
international law, specifically Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva 
Convention, which calls on an occupying power to respect the safety of 
occupied civilians. But you would not know this from the press reports. 
The use of attack aircraft and naval ships, part of the world?s fourth-
largest military power, to level densely packed slums of people who 
were hungry, without power and often water, people surrounded on all 
sides by the Israeli army, was fatuously described as a war. The news 
coverage held up the absurd notion that a few Hamas fighters with light 
weapons and no organization were a counterforce to F-16 fighter jets, 
tank battalions, thousands of Israeli soldiers, armored personnel 
carriers, naval ships and Apache attack helicopters. It fit the Israeli 
narrative. It may have been balanced and objective. But it was not 
true.

The Hamas rockets are crude, often made from old pipes, and largely 
ineffectual. The first homemade Qassam rocket was fired across the 
Israeli border in October 2001. It was not until June 2004 that Israel 
suffered its first fatality. There are 24 Israelis who have been killed 
by Hamas rocket fire, compared with 5,000 Palestinian dead, more than 
half of them in Gaza, at least a third of them children. This does not 
absolve Hamas from firing rockets at civilian areas, which is a war 
crime, but it does raise questions about the story line swallowed 
without reflection by the press. I covered the Kosovo Albanians? 
desperate attempts to resist the Serbs, which resulted in a handful of 
Serb casualties, but no one ever described the lopsided Serbian 
butchery in Kosovo as a war. It was called genocide, and it led to NATO 
intervention to halt it.

It was Israel, not Hamas, which violated the truce established last 
June. This was never made clear in any of the press reports. Hamas 
agreed to halt rocket fire into Gaza in exchange for an Israeli promise 
to ease the draconian siege that made the shipment of vital material 
and food into Gaza nearly impossible. And once the agreement was 
reached, the Hamas rocket fire ended. Israel, however, never upheld its 
end of the agreement. It increased the severity of the siege. U.N. 
agencies complained. International relief organizations condemned the 
Israeli blockade. And there were even rumblings inside Israel. Shmuel 
Zakai, an Israeli brigadier general who resigned as commander of the 
Israel Defense Forces? Gaza Division and was forcibly discharged from 
the military amid allegations that he leaked information to the media, 
told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on Dec. 22 that the Israeli 
government had made a ?central error? during the tahdiyeh, the six-
month period of relative truce, by failing ?to take advantage of the 
calm to improve, rather than markedly worsen, the economic plight of 
the Palestinians of the Strip. ? [W]hen you create a tahdiyeh, and the 
economic pressure on the Strip continues,? Zakai said, ?it is obvious 
that Hamas will try to reach an improved tahdiyeh, and that their way 
to achieve this is resumed Qassam fire. ? You cannot just land blows, 
leave the Palestinians in Gaza in the economic distress they?re in, and 
expect that Hamas will just sit around and do nothing.? 

Israel, we know from papers such as Haaretz, started planning this 
assault last March. The Israeli army deliberately broke the truce when 
it carried out an attack on Nov. 4 that killed six Hamas fighters. It 
timed the attack, the heavy air and naval bombardment and the invasion 
of Gaza to coincide with the waning weeks of the Bush administration. 
Israel knew it would be given carte blanche by the White House. Hamas 
responded to the Nov. 4 provocation in the way Israel anticipated. It 
fired Qassam rockets and Grad missiles into Israel to retaliate. But 
even then Hamas offered to extend the truce if Israel would lift the 
blockade. Israel refused. Operation Cast Lead was unleashed. 

Henry Siegman, the director of the U.S./Middle East Project at the 
Council of Foreign Relations, noted correctly that Israel ?could have 
met its obligation to protect its citizens by agreeing to ease the 
blockade, but it didn?t even try. It cannot be said that Israel 
launched its assault to protect its citizens from rockets. It did so to 
protect its right to continue the strangulation of Gaza?s population.? 

There were a few flashes of integrity in the American press. The Wall 
Street Journal ran a thoughtful piece, ?How Israel Helped to Spawn 
Hamas,? on Jan. 24 that was unusual in view of the acceptance in U.S. 
press coverage that Hamas is nothing more than an Islamo-fascist 
organization that understands only violence. And some journalists from 
news organizations such as the BBC did a good job once they were 
finally permitted to enter Gaza. Jimmy Carter wrote an Op-Ed article in 
The Washington Post detailing his and the Carter Center?s efforts to 
prevent the conflict. This article was an important refutation of the 
Israeli argument, although it was ignored by the rest of the media. But 
these were isolated cases. The publishers, news executives and editors 
largely accepted without any real protest Israel?s ban on coverage and 
allowed Israeli officials to fill their news pages and airtime with 
fabrications and distortions. And this made the war crimes carried out 
by the Israeli army easier to commit and prolong.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who is acutely aware of Israel?s violations 
of international law, has already begun to reassure his commanders that 
they will be protected from war crimes prosecution. 

?The commanders and soldiers that were sent on the task in Gaza should 
know that they are safe from any tribunal and that the State of Israel 
will assist them in this issue and protect them as they protected us 
with their bodies during the military operation in Gaza,? he said. 

Israel?s brutal military tactics, despite the lack of coverage in the 
American press, have come under intense international scrutiny. Human 
rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, 
blame the high civilian death toll on indiscriminate firing and 
shelling, as well as the use of white phosphorus shells in civilian 
areas. Israel has admitted using white phosphorus in Gaza but insists 
the chemical, used for smoke screens and to mark spots to be shelled or 
bombed, was not used directly against civilians. 

Hamas is an unsavory organization. It has made life miserable for many 
in Gaza and carried out a series of death-squad-style executions of 
alleged opponents. But Hamas, elected to power in 2006, also brought 
effective civil control to Gaza. Gaza, ruled by warring factions, 
warlords, clans, kidnapping rings and criminal gangs, had descended 
into chaos under Mahmoud Abbas? corrupt Fatah-led government. Hamas, 
once it assumed power, halted suicide bombing attacks on Israel. It 
ended rocket fire into Israel for almost a year. It upheld its 
agreement with Israel. Hamas? willingness to negotiate with Israel, 
albeit through Egyptian intermediaries, led al-Qaida, which has been 
working to make inroads among the Palestinians, to condemn the Hamas 
leadership as collaborators. 

Israel and the United States carried out an abortive and desperate 
attempt to overthrow Hamas by arming and backing a Fatah putsch in June 
2007. They wanted to install the pliant Abbas in power. Hamas resisted, 
often with violent brutality, and expelled Abbas and the Fatah 
leadership from Gaza to the West Bank. Israel has now decided to do the 
dirty job itself. It will not work. Israel broke and discredited Yasser 
Arafat and Fatah in much the same manner. Abbas and Fatah have no 
authority or credibility left. Abbas is seen by most Palestinians as a 
pliant Israeli stooge. Israel is now destroying Hamas. Radical Islamic 
groups, such as al-Qaida, far more violent and irrational, stand poised 
to replace Hamas. And Israel will one day look wistfully at Hamas just 
as it does now at Fatah. But by then, with Israel surrounded by radical 
Islamic regimes in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and even Jordan, as well as 
fighting a homegrown al-Qaida movement among the Palestinians, it may 
be too late.

The Israeli government bears the responsibility for its crimes. But by 
giving credibility to the lies and false narratives Israel uses to 
justify wholesale slaughter we empower not only Israel?s willful self-
destruction but our own. The press, as happened during the buildup to 
the Iraq war, was again feckless and gutless. It bent to the will of 
the powerful. It abandoned its sacred contract with its readers, 
listeners and viewers to always tell the truth. It chattered about 
nothing. It obscured the facts. It did this while hundreds of women and 
children were torn to shreds by iron fragmentation bombs in a flagrant 
violation of international law. And as it failed it lauded itself for 
doing ?a fair, balanced and complete job.? 

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