Gaza Revisionism: “Time” and “Time” Again!

Once again Karl Vick of “Time” magazine looses his thin veneer of journalistic credibility with his story “The Gaza Problem” (December 3, 2012), which is replete with half-truths, misinformation, shoddy reporting, blatant bias and outright historical revisionism.

As one who spent over a year in the Gaza Strip during my compulsory IDF military service and many months there on reserve duty, in addition to being a student of Middle-East history, I find Vick’s complete lack of journalistic objectivity highly disturbing.

His opening statement claiming that “Gaza is mostly sand” is just incorrect.  The article goes downhill from there.  In fact the thousands of Israeli citizens who were unilaterally withdrawn from every millimeter of the Gaza strip by the Democratic government of Israel in order to “give peace a chance” left a veritable treasure of agricultural infrastructure for the Gazan population to utilise.  That infrastructure, coupled with extremely generous donations from the international community, should have allowed the Gazans to build a “brave new world,” a Singapore on the Mediterranean.  Instead, as we all know, they choose the path of the gun by electing the terrorist organization Hamas. Hamas promptly killed or expelled their Fatah rivals and imposed a sharia inspired campaign of terror on the local population and set about, with generous help from Iran, trying to realise the aim of their founding charter to kill Jews wherever they are and to violently conquer “all of Palestine.”

Vick, similarly to the BBC, never uses the “T” word (“Terrorist”) but consistently insists on referring to those who indiscriminately target civilians as “Militants.” This lends them a veneer of legitimacy.   In his statement, “according to Palestinian officials, more than 100 Palestinians have been killed,” he does not differentiate between terrorists who were killed whilst deliberately targeting Israel’s civilian population, Palestinian “collaborators” who were summarily barbarously executed, without trial, by their own people, or the few civilians who were killed collaterally, but not deliberately, by the IAF.  In fact, the Hamas regime was committing a double-war crime, both deliberately targeting Israeli civilians and using their own civilians as human shields!  Colonel Richard Kemp, CBE, who was Commander of British Forces in Afghanistan stated:

I don’t think there has ever been a time in the history of warfare when any army has made more efforts to reduce civilian casualties and deaths of innocent people than the IDF is doing today in Gaza. Hamas, the enemy they have been fighting, has been trained extensively by Iran and by Hezbollah, to fight among the people, to use the civilian population in Gaza as a human shield.”

Vick falsely claims that the national identity of the Palestinians was forged from the “trauma of loosing their land to Jewish armies in 1948.”  He neglects to mention that UN Resolution 181 passed on November 29 1947 called for the partition of Mandatory Palestine into two states: A Palestinian Jewish State living side by side with a Palestinian Arab State.  Had the Arabs accepted that resolution, as the Jews did, there would have been no conflict.

The tragedy of the Middle East is that the Arab countries summarily rejected the UN Partition plan and tried to finish Hitler’s job and drive all of the Jews into the sea and conquer the entire mandatory territory.  The “tragedy” (naqba) for them is that the Jews fought back and managed to create a State of their own, at the huge cost of 1% of the Jewish population.  Those are the inconvertible historical facts.  Similarly, in his reference to the Six Day War Vick fails to point out that it was a defensive war, and not a war of aggression.  Vick insists on referring to Israelis as “the Jews” and the IDF as “Jewish armies.”  This is further evidence of his anti-Semitic bias.

Finally Vick neglects to mention that whilst the both sides suffered civilian deaths during the recent conflict, there is a palpable difference:

• The Gazans publically rejoice at civilian casualties (such as the bomb on the Tel Aviv bus), whilst Israel grieves at civilian casualties.

• The Gazans deliberately attempt to murder civilians, whilst Israel surgically targets known terrorists and terror infrastructure.

• The Gazans educate their children to sanctify death, whilst the Israelis educate their children to sanctify life.

As Golda Meir observed:  “We will have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.”