Some Journalists Have Courage

As a former physician who served in the IAF during the War of Attrition (1969 to 1970), who was born in the United States and now lives in Canada, reading the American and Canadian press can be very discouraging if not terrifying when it comes to characterizing Israel’s war with Hamas. When I left Israel in 1973, to do extra post-graduate training in Canada, I was soon confronted with the experience of watching on television the frightful reporting of the October 1973 Yom Kippur War, which lasted for two weeks and five days ending in a ceasefire on October 22, 1973, which was temporarily violated but reinstated on October 25th.

For the first week of the war, I was glued to the television and, since this was prior to the internet, to the news as reported wherever possible. I knew that planes from my home base in central Israel would be involved in the war and as I had left Israel only a few months before and had done a four-week miluim (reserve duty) just prior to my leaving for Canada I was sure that some of my former friends from the base which included many Phantom F4 and Skyhawk pilots were involved in the air/anti-aircraft war, in which many Israeli aircraft succumbed. It was only later, after the war, that I learned that some of my classmates from my flight surgeon course (the first of its kind in Israel at the time) were killed when their helicopter landed on a mine in, as I recall, the Golan Heights on the border with Syria.

At the time, the press and TV media in the United States and Canada was supportive of Israel. There was a problem with the United States being hesitant about supplying Israel with necessary arms replacements, and then-president Nixon had to be convinced by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that the situation for Israel was dire and it was mandatory for the resupply of arms to avoid what could become a serious escalation of the war. Also, it was obvious that the Soviets continued to resupply their Arab patrons with the weapons that they were losing, something that the United States was very concerned about.

Some European countries balked at allowing the United States to use their bases for aircraft to refuel and regroup on the way to Israel or only did so in a roundabout way to avoid negative political responses. At the end of the war, when the combined Arab armies were defeated, the aftermath was quite traumatic. Blame was everywhere, but eventually, the Egypt-Israel peace treaty came into being, and Anwar Sadat was assassinated, Golda was forced to leave politics and Chief of Staff David Elazar (Dado) was forced to resign.

The story of Gaza is very convoluted, being under Egyptian rule from 1948 to 1967 when it was taken over by Israel during the 1967 war. From 1967 until 1993 Israel was in control and more than twenty Jewish settlements were established in Gaza. Following the Oslo Accords, it looked like there might be a peaceful outcome to the Arab/Palestinian/Israeli relationship, with the control of Gaza given to the Palestinian Authority (PA) under its leader Yasser Arafat.

After the withdrawal of Israel’s military and Jewish settlers from Gaza in 2005 under the direction of then Prime Minister and famous General Ariel Sharon, Hamas violently seized control of Gaza from their rival Fatah-led PA. Since then, the friction between Hamas and Israel has led to several missile-based attacks on Israel, mostly on the border communities such as Sderot.

Israelis were horrified as the details emerged of the October 7th, 2023, attack on the border kibbutzim and moshavim and Nova music festival in which 1200 Israelis were murdered, and 250 hostages were taken. In what has been the longest war in Israel’s history, Gaza has been invaded, hundreds of Israeli soldiers have died and there has been huge damage to Gaza, with many lives lost as Hamas has used a strategy of putting civilians in military vital targets, assuring a high civilian casualty rate. The leadership of Hamas has many times admitted to this strategy, even as they have been gradually decimated.

Some time after the Hamas war started, Israel successfully eliminated the real threat of Hezbollah from Lebanon, successfully killing their leader Nasrallah and most recently with the aid of the United States significantly harmed Iran’s military and, most importantly, nuclear capabilities.

One might have thought that much of the free world would have welcomed Israel for destroying what have been labeled by most EU and democratic nations as terrorist organizations or nations. Soon after the October 7th attack, even before Israel began their military incursion in Gaza, anti-Israel and blatant anti-Semitic protests and communications became rampant. Many universities were the center of protests with encampments at Columbia, NYU and University of Toronto, to name a few. As the war progressed and despite major attacks on Israel from Iran and the Houthis (another ally of Iran), the media began to become more fixated on the death toll in Gaza and the charge of genocide by Israel of Gazans, either by the military or most recently by starvation. The media routinely shows pictures to support the charge of starvation, and even when it is shown that the evidence is spurious, that doesn’t change the narrative by EU and North American and British leaders.

In the face of unrelenting media coverage (written and broadcast), it is unusual to read countervailing narratives that question the current accusatory pieces about Israel’s horrendous and inhumane actions, often hardly acknowledging who started the war and what the well-expressed goal was from the warring parties, the eventual destruction of Israel and elimination of the Jewish population.

It with this background that I was surprised and pleased and even partially relieved that in a short period there were highly regarded journalists, two in Canada and one in the United States, who wrote very strong counter-narratives to the charges of genocide and purposeful starvation.

In the Toronto Star, the columnist Rosie Dimanno writes, “Hamas has been accused by civilians to have seized food aid for itself before airdrops began last week and ambushed the few humanitarian convoys that had been permitted to enter the enclave since Israel imposed a near-total blockade in March. Its fighters are not starving and fainting from hunger. There’s no indication the internationally designated terrorist group has shared any of its seized provisions with the populace, any more than they allowed the citizenry to take shelter in their tunnel network during Israeli bombardments. Hamas starves as a tactical weapon — precisely what they’ve accused Israel of doing to Palestinians.” At the end of the article, she powerfully states, “Defiant, despotic Hamas. Which no more wants a two-state solution to the pernicious conflict in the Middle East than it wants a one-way ticket to exile.”

Another columnist, Marcus Gee from the Globe and Mail, wrote, “Canada’s decision to recognize Palestinian statehood is a grave mistake, for several reasons. First, it rewards terrorism. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is wrong about many things, but he is right about that. Palestinian advocates have argued for years that the major Western powers should grant recognition to a sovereign Palestine, as many other countries already have. The Western powers have always balked, arguing that formal recognition should come only after a final peace settlement. Now France, Britain and Canada have agreed. They are the first members of the G7 club of rich, democratic nations to take this momentous step.

Hamas can now argue that its Oct. 7 attack on Israel won Palestinians the prize that has eluded them for so long. It drew the Israelis into a devastating counterattack that blackened their reputation. Gaza may be in ruins, its people in misery, but some of Israel’s most powerful friends have turned against the Jewish state. Murder works. Yahya Sinwar, the Oct. 7 mastermind later killed in Gaza, would be pleased.” He continues, “So, Canada’s decision rewards terrorism, reduces the chances of a negotiated settlement and recognizes a state that does not exist.”

Lastly was a powerful opinion piece by Bret Stephens of the New York Times and previously of the Jerusalem Post and War Street Journal, responded to a very damning piece about the reality of genocide occurring in Israel at the hands of Israel, He says, “It may seem harsh to say, but there is a glaring dissonance to the charge that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. To wit: If the Israeli government’s intentions and actions are truly genocidal — if it is so malevolent that it is committed to the annihilation of Gazans — why hasn’t it been more methodical and vastly more deadly? Why not, say, hundreds of thousands of deaths, as opposed to the nearly 60,000 that Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between combatant and civilian deaths, has cited so far in nearly two years of war?” He continues, “The answer, of course, is that Israel is manifestly not committing genocide, a legally specific and morally freighted term that is defined by the United Nations convention on genocide as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” He finishes his powerful piece that received many critical letters to the editor with the following paragraphs: “First, while some pundits and scholars may sincerely believe the genocide charge, it is also used by anti-Zionists and antisemites to equate modern Israel with Nazi Germany. The effect is to license a new wave of Jew hatred, stirring enmity not only for the Israeli government but also for any Jew who supports Israel as a genocide supporter. It’s a tactic Israel haters have pursued for years with inflated or bogus charges of Israeli massacres or war crimes that, on close inspection, weren’t. The genocide charge is more of the same but with deadlier effects.

“Second, if genocide — a word that was coined only in the 1940s — is to retain its status as a uniquely horrific crime, then the term can’t be promiscuously applied to any military situation we don’t like. Wars are awful enough. But the abuse of the term “genocide” runs the risk of ultimately blinding us to real ones when they unfold.”

It is difficult to be a Jew and a Zionist even in Toronto, Canada, these days. It is perhaps not as bad as some other countries such as the UK and France perhaps- many Canadians proudly wear their Jewish identity on chains or on their heads but there is a necessary police presence at synagogues and Jewish places of business and restaurants have been attacked and protests occur on a regular basis near some predominantly Jewish customer shopping plazas.

I laud the three columnists. They show great courage and leadership to make bold statements in the face of what seems to be a solid wall accusing Israel of heinous crimes against humanity, often without criticizing Hamas, the perpetrator of the war. It seems that even many of the Arab and Middle East countries are not in conflict with these three columnists when they declared following a major meeting which included members of the EU, “ “In the context of ending the war in Gaza, Hamas must end its rule in Gaza and hand over its weapons to the Palestinian Authority, with international engagement and support, in line with the objective of a sovereign and independent Palestinian State,” said the declaration.

“We condemn the attacks committed by Hamas against civilians on the 7th of October,” the declaration added. It marks a first condemnation by virtually all Arab nations of the attack.

How history will look back on this war and these outspoken columnists remains to be seen. Hindsight is very creative, but in the present, I am happy that I was able to read such newsworthy narratives at a time when the world of Jews and Israel seems very bleak.