https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/12/07/why-the-media-keep-underestimating-israel/
As a boy in Wilhelmine Germany during the First World War, future historian Sebastian Haffner devoured daily army bulletins. At just seven years old, he was already a ‘fanatical jingoist and armchair warrior’, meticulously tallying troop strengths. He was confident that the Kaiser’s army would soon triumph.
The bulletins, however, were rose-tinted, designed to bolster morale rather than inform. As the front deteriorated, they increasingly resembled a fantasy league, with regiments holding favourable positions only on paper. When defeat finally came, it shocked the nation. Haffner likened the feeling to ‘someone who year after year has deposited large sums of money in his bank’ only to discover ‘a gigantic overdraft instead of a fortune’.
Today, this experience is all too familiar. Like Germans deceived by rosy war bulletins, educated people are often blindsided by major events, misled by wishful thinking disguised as analysis. From Brexit to the rise and resurgence of Donald Trump, big events are routinely confounding mainstream predictions. Errors are inevitable when discussing the future, but something is amiss when they consistently tilt in the same direction.
Brexit was dismissed as unlikely to happen because few in the media class wanted it to happen. Similarly, before the recent US presidential election, MP turned commentator Rory Stewart proclaimed that Kamala Harris would ‘win comfortably’. Americans, Stewart supposed, surely wouldn’t vote for Trump again. Yet they did – across demographics and states, in greater numbers than before.
It should raise eyebrows that predictive errors so often reflect the broadly liberal worldview of those making them. This worldview esteems international law over sovereign parliaments and has a narrow view of democracy. When voters defy this orthodoxy, their choices are dismissed as mere ‘populism’. However comforting these assumptions may be, they collapse time and again under the weight of reality.
Most recently, Israel has confounded expectations in its war against Hamas. The IDF has ground Hamas into the rubble of Gaza, killing most of its leaders. It has wreaked sufficient devastation on Hezbollah to produce a ceasefire agreement, albeit a shaky one. Commentators warned solemnly of ‘escalation ladders’ and a ‘wider regional war’, predicting that Iran would not stand idly by as its proxies were degraded. Yet apart from a few token missile strikes, that is precisely what has happened.
