The war in Gaza may be over, but the repercussions for the state of Israel have just begun. Reporters from the Western world, including the United States, will flood into the occupied territory. They will witness and report conditions so horrific and war crimes so egregious that the reputation of the Jewish state may never recover.
Missing: Israel’s Humanity
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The TMI Show" talk show. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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I have trouble … incorporating your assertions with the reality of what I’ve seen the U.S. media become.
I suspect we will see a few minutes of “shock and awe” over the devastation. Then we will have some very, um, assertive Israeli military/PR spokespersons insert themselves into the discourse, aggressively talking over any reporting and redefining the terms of the narrative in a manner that paints Israel as Victim.
Following that, David Muir’s biceps will visit a Potemkin Village showing happy Gazans who will comment on camera how well they are treated. The U.S. media’s coverage will dwindle to nothing relatively quickly. The other nations’ coverage? Who cares? What the U.S. media advances as “fact” is what the U.S. population absorbs as “reality.”
The New York Times? I’m already expecting the sort of articles they excel at: the nut graf buried down around paragraph 16, which permits them to simultaneously bury the story while sanctimoniously claiming to have reported on it. Maybe the New Yorker will have an article or two. The AP might manage some real reporting as well. But in the current “marketplace” of “ideas”? As the warden says in “Shawshank Redemption,” it’ll vanish “like a fart in the wind.”
Also expect very meager reportage on the aftermath. Follow the money? Oh, not this time. There’ll be a little article here, a little there, but just as surely as the ceasefire came once Gaza had nothing left to bomb, no one’s going to cover the extinction of Gaza’s Palestinian population. Nor will anyone really make (or be permitted to make) much of an effort to document what will certainly be a puppet government installed by the West with zero input from those few Gazans who’ve survived this long.
There’s no guarantee the ceasefire will hold. I assume this is a pause to focus on Iran, then right back to war.
Israel’s “humanity” vanished somewhere around the time (the 1920’s and 30’s) when the Brits started evicting Palestinians and giving their land to European Zionists, equipping the Euro-Zionists to “defend themselves” against Palestinians, and turning a blind eye to the Euro-Zionists’ assaults on their Palestinian neighbors as they gradually carved out more and more of Palestine for themselves.
This conflict has been going on so long that most of the people “who started it” are long dead. The people fighting today are avenging people who were avenging people who were avenging people … who are long dead. If we’re going to end this cycle of revenge, we’re going to have to envision and build a world where the people who are living today can achieve peace, security, and freedom. We have to focus on the future. The past is rabbit hole that we shouldn’t explore except in figuring out how to get as far away from it as possible.