NIDRA POLLER: NOW LOOK WHAT THEY HAVE DONE
Nidra Poller
“Now look what they’ve done!” That sums up the reaction, in certain quarters, to the November 18th slaughter at Kehilat B’nei Torah. They who? Palestinians? Israeli Arabs? Terrorists? Mujahidin? Activists? Résistants? No. The Jews. Israel = the Jews, look at what they’ve done now. Will they never learn?
The massacre is condemned, that’s the first step. Then the condemnation makes a U-turn and aims at Israel. like one of those killer cars unleashed since… when? Since the Protective Border operation pushed back the all-out attack from Gaza, leaving Hamas with phony victory celebrations in the rubble and Israelis with a hollow feeling in the pit of the stomach. The cease fire in Gaza was directly followed by a new double-pronged phase of the ongoing assault on Jews in their State: random assassinations and a “diplomatic” campaign to create a fake Palestinian State that can be used as a real weapon.
But that isn’t enough. Because there is something so atrocious about attacking men in prayer with a meat cleaver, knives, and a gun, there is something so unbearably eloquent in the sight of thick red blood on prayer books and tallit, there is something so barbaric about smashing into a synagogue to butcher pious rabbis, that certain commentators feel a need to defend themselves from accusations of bias. The campaign to create a cardboard Palestinian State is buffered by a communications offensive. Media coverage? It’s faultless, they say, and we are tired of your complaints. The creation of a Palestinian State by European parliamentary fiat is the appropriate response to “lone wolf” attacks by hopeless Palestinians, they opine, in unison with lawmakers, leaders, and anointed specialists. Extremists on both sides are spinning this political & territorial conflict into a religious war, they warn, and that must be nipped in the bud.
Daniel Haïk, political commentator on i24 news in French, faces a Belgian correspondent. With a little help from anchorman Jean-Charles Banoun, Haïk politely suggests that there is something twisted about coverage of the latest attack. “Mais non mais non,” responds the Belgian correspondent. “We condemned it. We all condemned it.” Fifteen minutes of “yes, buts” did not suffice to squeeze out a single drop of self-criticism. They condemned it, that’s the ticket to paradise. And they “contextualize” it. That’s the part that makes us wince. Contextualizing means it’s the fault of the far-right Netanyahu government, the pursuit of colonization, the failure of peace talks, the intrusion of Jews in Arab Jerusalem and fanatic Jewish prayer mongers on l’esplanade des mosquées (French for Temple Mount).
Wouldn’t you rather write for Haaretz and be invited to lunch by your French colleagues than get kicked in the pants like a tramp begging for a crust of bread?
You’re choking on an overdose of factual errors, misinterpretations, grotesque analyses, lopsided round tables, cockeyed interviews, and indecent tongue lashing of anyone who even vaguely suggests that the Har Nof attack and others before it are not the fault of Israel… and they don’t even want you to make a squeak.
Are they right? Am I some kind of hypersensitive, partisan, paranoid, kvetching Jew? Am I so uncouth that I don’t know how journalism woks, how experts analyze, how European parliaments legislate (for Israel)? Shouldn’t I be ashamed of making a big stink just because CNN broke the news on the Har Nof massacre with “Deadly attack on Jerusalem mosque”? Don’t you know that news travels at the speed of light? And you’re claiming a simple mistake is evidence of bias?
“Le Secret des Sources” is a weekly program on state-owned highbrow France Culture radio. Journalists give a peek into the backroom, tell how they milk sources, navigate in government circles, circumnavigate obstacles, face dangers, and get the story. The story on Saturday November 22 was the Mideast conflict.
The lineup tells half the story: Charles Enderlin, France 2; Philippe Agret, Agence France Presse; Olivier Ravanello, I Télé; Gideon Kouts, Maariv and Kol Israel, and no one to challenge their self-satisfied hypocrisy. Except, briefly, Kouts who dared to make two remarks that perturbed the unanimity. I guess they hung up on him. He was never heard from again. Charles Enderlin, father of the Mohamed al Dura blood libel, dominated the chit chat.
Talk about kvetching! Where’s the justice for journalists who report with good faith on a grinding conflict that has worn international nerves to a fray? They swap persecution anecdotes. During the “Gaza offensive” Ravanello didn’t even look at his Facebook account. How about you, Charles? Yes, in fact, there were all kinds of threats after my report of the death of a Palestinian child, he replies. No one pronounces the name “al Dura,” Enderlin is urbane: it still comes up now and then, insults and whatnot, but it’s over for me. (My i24 news interview centered on the release of Al Dura: Log Range Ballistic Myth, aired on November 20th.)
Later in the program Enderlin threw a dart at i24 news, “a pro-Netanyahu radio network [it’s television] that forces journalists to call the occupied territories “disputed.” This is obviously bad journalism. As an example of good journalism, Enderlin’s colleagues explain that their media issue terminology guidelines. Ravanello gets hot under the collar about the terms “terrorist” and “résistant”: an act can be labeled “terrorist” but not an organization!!! Got it, fellows? Hamas = la résistance.
The overall impression was that journalists impartially covering the Mideast conflict are in mortal danger from disgruntled Jews. Gideon Levy, says Enderlin, needs bodyguards. Somehow they made this danger more eloquent than the hatchet massacre in a Jerusalem synagogue and the celebrations it earned in Muslim circles. The real gore was on their Facebook pages.
Inviting Charles Enderlin as an example of integrity is equivalent to reporting the Har Nof massacre as an attack on a mosque: it’s a dishonest mistake. If his colleagues had read my book, they would know that a French court, having viewed raw footage shot by his cameraman Talal Abu Rahmeh at Netzarim Junction on September 30, 2000, included staged scenes. Some of which were aired in France 2 newscasts. This obvious falsification justified, in the eyes of the court, Philippe Karsenty’s right to publicly express his opinion that the al Dura “death scene” is a hoax. If I’m not mistaken, none of these journalists attended court hearings on the controversy. They probably applauded Charles Enderlin’s book Un Enfant est mort [a child is dead] without reading it or my critical analysis of same.
This is just one example of an international media onslaught. Anchormen and women jump out of their skin when faced with a defender of Israel. Journalists and specialists spill out sewers of defeatism about contemporary Israeli society, wealth disparities, tent protests, inaudible Leftists peaceniks & intellectuals, far right government, inexcusable pursuit of colonization, refusal to negotiate with the eminently moderate Mahmoud Abbas. A guest on “Moi president,” a program hosted by the very Ravanello who hobnobbed with Enderlin on Secret des Sources, said Israel is reduced to a mixture of Tel Aviv hedonists and Jerusalem religious fanatics; the disillusioned army was defeated by Hizbullah in 2006. [Or was it Ravanello himself? I came in at the end of the program and can’t find it on the I télé site to confirm this detail.] At the end of the program all four of his guests and 67% of viewers vote yes for French recognition of a Palestinian State. The real debate will take place in the French Parliament on Friday, November 28th with the vote scheduled for December 2nd.
The esteemed philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, distinguished member of l’Académie Française, loyal supporter of JCall will not join the European version of JStreet in calling for recognition of a Palestinian State at this stage. [L’esprit de l’escalier, Radio Communauté Juive, 23 November http://radiorcj.info/diffusions/27585/] Finkielkraut is profoundly aware of the horrifying significance of the synagogue massacre. A symbolic threshold has been crossed: These men were not killed as colonists, not as Israelis, they were slaughtered because they are Jews. Finkielkraut recognizes that the “occupation” that supposedly justifies such crimes is the whole of Israel. He acknowledges incitement. Mahmoud Abbas threatens war if “al Aqsa is contaminated by Jews.” That being said, he goes on to pummel Binyamin Netanyahu and Nafthali Bennet. He’s disgusted by their “jubilation.” They pounced on the occasion to dig in their heels and refuse to negotiate with Mahmoud Abbas. And the rest follows like rocks thrown by shababs: colonization, Temple Mount fanatics, extreme right coalition, refusal to negotiate, to make concessions. Netanyahu’s policies are dangerous and ineffective. They’re going to lead to Diasporism!
What is going on? What explains the sudden intensification of criticism of Israel and the urgent need to fabricate a Palestinian State? An unremitting offensive that began with the kidnap and murder of three yeshiva bochers and has been carried through several stages including rocket attacks, tunnel infiltrations, pro-Hamas stampedes in Western countries, assassinations by car ramming, slaughters with knives and hatches, culminates in and a campaign for recognition of a Palestinian State. Opinion assaults against Israel rise in rhythm with physical attacks from Hamas, applauded by the Palestinian Authority and global Islamist forces.
This is what I call the lethal narrative strategy. Physical violence aimed at harming and demoralizing Israelis—making them suffer at home and look bad abroad—culminates in political and rhetorical offensives to destabilize the State, with the ultimate aim of toppling it. We witness a perverse logic in media and government circles that replaces the sense of horror when praying Jews are hacked apart with outrage at the State that allows itself to be persecuted. The obvious comparison between the Har Nof blood bath and DAESH decapitation orgies is stubbornly denied. The fanatics are not the demons that wield butcher knives but Jews who think there is room for them to pray on the Temple Mount. The source of conflict, the element that blocks any and all negotiated solutions is not the forked PLO tongue it is the refusal of a “far right” Israeli government to make the necessary concessions and create the Palestinian State. And, finally, the origin of a wave of aggression that has continued from June to date is, retroactively, the failure of a 9-month stint of peace processing driven by US Secretary of State John Kerry.
All of these causes can be more or less examined. Except for one: the failed peace process. It is the First Cause. What issues were discussed last summer? What were the stumbling blocks? In what way did those negotiations resemble previous efforts? These and all other verifiable details are locked in an unbreakable safe. The First Cause cannot be examined. And Israel is guilty.
What explains the failures of previous rounds of peace talks? In September 2000, after walking out on the Camp David negotiations, Yasser Arafat organized “spontaneous” demonstrations that blossomed into the “al Aqsa Intifada.” Last week Israeli forces intercepted a shipment from China labelled “Christmas decorations. It contained 5,200 knives, 1,000 swords, 18,000 firecrackers, 4,300 taser-flashlight devices, 5,000 electric shock devices destined, obviously, for “spontaneous” demonstrators. [http://www.timesofisrael.com/police-bust-massive-shipment-of-firecrackers-knives-bound-for-jerusalem/]
This explains the ebb and flow of shabab operations in “Arab” Jerusalem. The same forces that purchase street weapons from China decide when and where to spontaneously uprise. Punitive measure against perpetrators and their families—house demolitions, withdrawal of residence permits and welfare payments, transfer out of Israel—might not be effective if the lone wolves were really alone. They aren’t. Their paymasters and dispatchers will have to factor the new measures into their calculations.
But we still need to understand why the “international community” feels the urgent need for a Palestinian State. The conflict, they say, has gone on for too long. Nothing has worked so far. Now it is getting more violent and, worse, it is turning religious. If DAESH is not Islamic and the Palestinian ambitions are strictly political and territorial, who are the religious troublemakers?
The Jews.
If an outside observer–the EU, the UN, or your corner journalist—presumes to impose a solution to a conflict that stubbornly persists, he should be expected to think the issue through in all its dimensions. Otherwise, it is quite unrealistic to imagine that the outsider knows better than the concerned parties. When it comes to thinking through the “Israel-Palestine” conflict, one element is locked tight and unavailable for analysis: the two-state solution. It is the touchstone, the holy grail, the silver bullet.
Why is The Solution not forthcoming?
It’s the fault of the Jews. That’s why they are attacked with rockets, tunnels, cars, cleavers, and parliamentary resolutions. Like misers, they withhold The Solution. The good folks looking on from their high places are not without pity. They condemn the bloodshed. And impose the remedy. The State of Palestine…
…that will punish the Jews for refusing to submit.
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