SHOCK AND AWE IN GAZA BY JONATHAN COOK CALIFORNIA’S WATER CRISIS BY JOSHUA FRANK HONDURAS: FIVE YEARS SINCE THE COUP BY NICK ALEXANDROV FINANCE CAPITAL AND INQUALITY BY ISMAEL HOSSEIN-ZADEH BEYOND THE GRID WITH JIM JARMUSCH BY KIM NICOLINI 2014 , 7 NUMBER 21 TELLS THE FACTS AND NAMES THE NAMES VOLUME AND NAMES THE VOLUME THE FACTS TELLS the corporation’s diplomatic correspondent, Jonathan Marcus, Shock and Awe in Gaza promised in an online article to explain “What weapons are How the Media and Human Rights being used in the Israel-Gaza confict”. Groups Cover for Israeli War Crimes At length he enumerated the kinds of rockets in Hamas’ hands and their range. But what of Israel’s massive ofen- By Jonathan Cook sive arsenal? Tis was the extent of his disclosure: “Te full panoply of Israeli air power has been used in a steadily es- calating series of attacks against rocket launch sites, weapons On July 8, as Israel officially launched its most recent stores, and the command elements of Hamas and other attack on Gaza, the BBC published an online report noting groups.” Note there was no mention, despite documentation, that some of the graphic images trending on social media of strikes on civilians. were not in fact the result of the latest air and sea strikes bat- He then quickly switched to Israel’s “defensive” weapons. tering the Palestinians’ besieged coastal enclave. Its analy- “As important in determining Israel’s strategic outlook as its sis “found that some [images] date as far back as 2009 and ofensive operations is the reliance that it places on missile others are from conficts in Syria and Iraq.” defence—the Iron Dome system—to defend its civilian popu- Te implication, amplifed by pro-Israeli websites, was lation.” Te rest of the article continued in the same vein. that social media activists were trying to deceive the watch- Marcus could hardly have done a better job of promot- ing world into believing that Gaza was sufering a greater on- ing the idea of the Palestinians as aggressors and Israelis as slaught than was really the case. Tis was more “Pallywood”, the victims had he been paid to do so by Israel’s ministry of as Israel’s supporters like to deride the increasing visual hasbara (propaganda). Te article concealed the fact that by documentation of Israeli war crimes in an age of smartphone the time of its publication, on July 10, dozens of Palestinians, cameras. including many children, had been killed by Israel’s “defen- Probably unthinkingly, the Hufngton Post echoed these sive” operation. sentiments, arguing that the BBC report suggested “images Meanwhile, Hamas’ fearsome arsenal had by this time shared across social media purportedly showing death and killed precisely no Israelis—and barely any had been harmed, destruction caused by Israel in Gaza were fake.” But in truth, excepting the reports of numerous Israeli victims of “anxiety”, the images covered in the report were not “fake” in any many of them presumably provoked by reports like Marcus’. meaningful sense of the word. (During these operations no one has the time or resources to Te misattributed explosions and crushed bodies showed record the vast number of Palestinians in Gaza sufering from the real sufering of Palestinians in Gaza during earlier Israeli anxiety.) attacks—Operations Cast Lead of winter 2008-09 and Pillar As the explosions and disfgured bodies from Gaza blurred of Defence four years later—or of victims caught in recent into an almost indistinguishable collage of sufering for social fghting in Syria and Iraq. media activists, I too watched the coverage and analysis of the Nor were the solidarity activists who shared these images past weeks’ events with a weary sense of deja vu. resorting to them because there was a dearth of horrifying When Hamas was not being presented as the aggressor, visual evidence from Israel’s latest bombardment of Gaza. forcing Israel to “respond” and “retaliate”, it was apparently It was simply that Gaza’s “shock and awe” destruction by a military leviathan. With its lightly armed cadres and the an almost invisible Israeli aerial presence, and the efects on of-the-back-of-a-truck rockets, Hamas “exchanged fre” and Palestinian bodies of missile blasts and collapsing homes, “traded blows” with one of the most powerful armies in the looked much as it did in 2008 and 2012. Te names of the world. A headline on yet another “balanced” BBC story de- operations may change—Israel dubbed this latest one clared: “Israel under renewed Hamas attack”. “Protective Edge” in English, avoiding a literal translation of Te dissembling, as ever, reached its apeothosis in the U.S. the more menacing Hebrew title “Solid Clif”—but the toll media. Te New York Times, for example, ofered headlines on civilian lives were inevitably the same. that stripped Israeli atrocities of their horrifc import while Te images, however misattributed, were a far more honest invariably removing Israel from the scene entirely. A missile record of Israel’s latest orgiastic bout of slaughter in Gaza strike on July 10 that wiped out a family of nine Palestinians than the media’s obfuscatory references to an ongoing “cycle watching the World Cup was titled “Missile at beachside Gaza of violence”. cafe fnds patrons poised for World Cup”, as if the missile itself took the decision to “fnd” them. Israel’s missing arsenal Similarly, when four children were hit by a missile on July Tere was a rich irony to the BBC, which has done so 16, as they played football on a beach in full view of inter- much to veil the realities of Israel’s ritual war-making, criti- national correspondents in a hotel nearby, the Times editors cising social media users. To take just one example of many, changed an already weak headline—“Four young boys killed 9 playing on a Gaza beach”—to the downright mendacious: dreds of arrests, on the pretext of searching for the youths. “Boys Drawn to Gaza Beach, and Into Center of Mideast Teir bodies were eventually found in a shallow grave near Strife”. No blast, no deaths or injuries and, of course, no Hebron, on June 30. Israeli responsibility in sight. All of it whitewashed with that (In turn, though largely ignored by the media, the incit- weasel word “strife”. ing cause of the abductions was most likely the execution And what was the seemingly innocuous word “drawn” by Israeli soldiers of two unarmed Palestinian youths taking supposed to convey? Did it not hint that the boys had gone part in a protest on May 15, Nakba Day, near Ramallah. Te somewhere forbidden; that, in short, it was their fault for moment of the boys’ deaths was caught on flm from various being in the wrong place, as though in Gaza there was a right angles, showing they had posed no threat to the soldiers sta- place to be under the rain of Israeli missiles? Or maybe the tioned nearby. Israel again suggested that the video evidence Times editors hoped we would infer that they had been lured —some of it provided by CNN – was faked.) there by a more sinister, local hand. Opportunistic as ever, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Interventions by U.S. media organisations were not re- Netanyahu, imposed a gag order on reporting a phone call stricted to word games. NBC’s experienced Gaza reporter made to the emergency services by one of the Israeli youths Ayman Mohyeldin, who has been the most even-handed of shortly afer the abduction. Gunshots can be heard. Te aban- the U.S. correspondents, was told by studio executives he doned car, found the next day, had eight bullet holes and the was being pulled from Gaza because of “security” concerns. teenagers’ blood on it. In short, Israeli ofcials knew from the Te decision happened the same day he landed possibly the outset that the three youngsters were dead. biggest scoop of his career: he had been playing ball with the Israel also quickly determined who they thought were the boys moments before they were slaughtered. He never got to suspects: two or three young men from Hebron, who went fle his horrifying exclusive. underground almost immediately aferwards. Tey were from Strangely, however, Gaza was safe enough for Richard a family loosely afliated with Hamas but also with a history Engel, NBC’s correspondent in Tel Aviv, who immediately of being, in the words of one Israeli analyst, “trouble-makers”. took Mohyeldin’s place in the tiny enclave. A storm of protest Tis tenuous link appears to have been the sole evidence for from viewers forced NBC to relent a few days later, allowing Netanyahu’s strident and of-repeated claim that Hamas had him back as inexplicably as they had required him to leave. ordered the abductions and that it alone would be held ac- Diana Magnay also felt the long arm of the executives at countable – frst in the West Bank, then in Gaza. CNN. During a live link located on a hill in Israel overlook- Mass raids across the West Bank, dubbed Operation ing the Gaza Strip on July 17, the CNN correspondent had Brother’s Keeper, rounded up hundreds of Hamas activists, talked to anchor Wolf Blitzer as a missile slammed into Gaza most of them with no ties to the movement’s military wing. behind her. As the explosion lit up the night sky, loud cheers Netanyahu had good reason to wish to exploit the teenagers’ could be heard just of-camera. A visibly discomfted Magnay deaths as a way to eradicate Hamas’ infrastructure—from was forced to explain as delicately as she could that crowds of charities to newspapers—in the West Bank and turn the Israelis came to watch and celebrate Gaza’s sufering.