The Truth Behind the Israeli Propaganda
By Robert Fisk
June 05, 2010 "The Independent" -- I have,
of course, been outraged at armed men boarding ships in international
waters, killing passengers on board who attempt to resist and then
forcing their ship to the hijackers' home port. I am, of course,
talking about the Somali pirates who are preying on Western ships in
the Indian Ocean. How dare those terrorists dare to touch our unarmed
vessels on the high seas? And how right we are to have our warships
there to prevent such terrorist acts.
But whoops! At least the Israelis have not demanded ransom. They just
want to get journalists to win the propaganda war for them. Scarcely
had the week begun when Israel's warrior "commandos" stormed a Turkish
boat bringing aid to Gaza and shot nine of the passengers dead. Yet by
week's end, the protesters had become "armed peace activists", vicious
anti-Semites "professing pacifism, seething with hate, pounding away at
another human being with a metal pole". I liked the last bit. The fact
that the person being beaten was apparently shooting another human
being with a rifle didn't quite get into this weird version of reality.
Turkish family protests that their sons wanted to be martyrs –
something which most Turkish family members might say if their
relatives had been shot by the Israelis – had been transformed into
confirmation that they had been jihadis. "On that aid ship," a Sri
Lankan texted me this week, "I had my niece, nephew and his wife on
board. Unfortunately Ahmed (20-year-old nephew) got shot in the leg and
now treated (sic) under military custody. I will keep you posted." He
did indeed. Within hours, the press was at his family's home in
Australia, demanding to know if Ahmed was a jihadi – or even a
potential suicide bomber. Propaganda works, you see. We haven't seen a
frame of film from the protesters because the Israelis have stolen the
lot. No one has told us – if the Turkish ship was carrying such
ruthless men – how their terrible plots to help the "terrorists" of
Gaza were not uncovered in the long voyage from Turkey, even when it
called at other ports. But Professor Gil Troy of McGill University in
Montreal – in the rabid Canadian National Post, of course – was able to
spout all that gunk about "armed peace activists" on Thursday.
I wasn't personally at all surprised at the killings on the Turkish
ship. In Lebanon, I've seen this indisciplined rabble of an army – as
"elite" as the average rabble of Arab armies – shooting at civilians. I
saw them watching the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinians on the
morning of 18 September (the last day of the slaughter) by their
vicious Lebanese militia allies. I was present at the Qana massacre by
Israeli gunners in 1996 – "Arabushim" (the equivalent of the abusive
term "Ayrab" in English), one of the gunners called the 106 dead
civilians, more than half of them children, in the Israeli press. Then
the Israeli government of Nobel laureate Shimon Peres said there were
terrorists among the dead civilians – totally untrue, but who cares? –
and then came the second Qana massacre in 2006 and then the 2008-09
Gaza slaughter of 1,300 Palestinians, most of them children, and then...
Well, then came the Goldstone report, which found that Israeli troops
(as well as Hamas) committed war crimes in Gaza, but this was condemned
as anti-Semitic – poor old honourable Goldstone, himself a prominent
Jewish jurist from South Africa, slandered as "an evil man" by the
raving Al Dershowitz of Harvard – and was called "controversial" by the
brave Obama administration. "Controversial", by the way, basically
means "fuck you".
There's doubts about it, you see. It's dodgy
stuff.
But back to our chronology. Then we had the Mossad murder of a Hamas
official in Dubai with the Israelis using at least 19 forged passports
from Britain and other countries. And the pathetic response of our then
foreign secretary, David Miliband? He called it "an incident" – not the
murder of the guy in Dubai, mind you, just the forgery of UK passports,
a highly "controversial" matter – and then... Well, now we've had the
shooting down of nine passengers at sea by more Israeli heroes.
The amazing thing in all this is that so many Western journalists – and
I'm including the BBC's pusillanimous coverage of the Gaza aid ships –
are writing like Israeli journalists, while many Israeli journalists
are writing about the killings with the courage that Western
journalists should demonstrate. And about the Israeli army itself. Take
Amos Harel's devastating report in Haaretz which analyses the make-up
of the Israeli army's officer corps. In the past, many of them came
from the leftist kibbutzim tradition, from greater Tel Aviv or from the
coastal plain of Sharon. In 1990, only 2 per cent of army cadets were
religious Orthodox Jews. Today the figure is 30 per cent. Six of the
seven lieutenant-colonels in the Golani Brigade are religious. More
than 50 per cent of local commanders are "national" religious in some
infantry brigades.
There's nothing wrong with being religious. But – although Harel does
not make this point quite so strongly – many of the Orthodox are
supporters of the colonisation of the West Bank and thus oppose a
Palestinian state.
And the Orthodox colonists are the Israelis who most hate the
Palestinians, who want to erase the chances of a Palestinian state as
surely as some Hamas officials would like to erase Israel. Ironically,
it was senior officers of the "old" Israeli army who first encouraged
the "terrorist" Hamas to build mosques in Gaza – as a counterbalance to
the "terrorist" Yasser Arafat up in Beirut – and I was a witness to one
of their meetings. But it will stay the same old story before the world
wakes up. "I have never known an army as democratic as Israel's," the
hapless French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy said a few hours before
the slaughter.
Yes, the Israeli army is second to none, elite, humanitarian, heroic.
Just don't tell the Somali pirates.
©independent.co.uk
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