The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Sunday, June 16, 2024

Editorial Notebook: A few days ago the Israeli army released a few of the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza, and massacred a few hundred more Palestinians, mostly civilians, along the way. The press’ reflection of the two facts tells a story of its own. The Jerusalem Post, Israel’s Fox News, bannered the rescue with a bit of an insulting headline that qualifies “dozens of Palestinians killed” with “but numbers are disputed.” The picture is of a reunion between hostage and family. By whom? Haaretz, the left-wing Israeli daily (where you’ll find a much more vigorous debate about Palestinian-Israeli conflicts than anywhere in the American press, and brutal criticism of Israeli policy or the Israeli military without fear of being termed anti-Semitic) follows the same approach, bannering the rescue and the death of Israeli soldiers but citing the reported number of Palestinians killed (210) without qualifier, other than “Hamas’s health ministry,” itself now a dog whistle among those in Israel and the West who think anything reported by Hamas is subhuman (as if anything reported by the Israeli government or, worse, the genocidal Israeli military, were better). Arab News, the Saudi mouthpiece, reverses the order. It banners with “Israel Kills 210 in Gaza” and subheads “4 hostages rescued,” noting the killing of a few Israeli soldiers. The front-page picture is of a man carrying a bloodied victim, child or adult, it’s difficult to tell, though if you’re betting the macabre odds, it’s probably a child. The Miami Herald ignores both events, as does the Vegas paper: Americans have tired of the war.  So has China: the Morning Post in Hong Kong is entirely China-centered, though Algeria’s Al Watan, a sort of Daily Mail of the Arab world, headlines “Massacre in Nuseira,” ignoring the hostage rescue and showing dead bodies, as that paper likes to do (there’s an odd facility with images of death in the Arab world). It looks like only the Toronto Star hits the right note, combining both elements in one headline: “Hundreds killed in hostage rescue.” So it’s always been with Israel: killing a few hundred Palestinians or Arabs in exchange for the life of a few Israelis is not only acceptable, it is desired. It is the message Israel likes to send to Palestinians and Arabs: your lives don’t matter. They’re not even lives. They’re numbers, and even those are doubtful. The Israeli’s bottom-line message to Palestinians: You don’t exist. You have no right to exist.

—P.T.

 

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The casualties were rising in 2007. Three hundred people were killed in the Gaza Strip, dozens of them children. However, during the George W. Bush administration and definitely after, the myth of fighting the world Jihad in Gaza had started to lose credibility. So a new mythology was proposed in 2007: the Strip was a terrorist base determined to destroy Israel. The only way the Palestinians could be ‘de-terrorized’, so to speak, was eliciting from them a consent to live in a Strip encircled by barbed wire and walls. Supply, as well as movement, in and out of the Strip depended on the political choice made by the Gazans. Should they persist in supporting Hamas, they would be effectively strangled and starved until they changed their ideological inclination. Should they succumb to the kind of politics Israel wished them to adopt, they would suffer the same fate as those on the West Bank: life without basic civil and human rights. They could either be inmates in the open prison of the West Bank or incarcerated in the maximum security one of the Gaza Strip. If they resisted they were likely to be imprisoned without trial, or killed. This was Israel’s message in 2007 and the people of the Gaza Strip were given a year, 2008, to make up their minds.

—From Ilan Papé’s The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories (2019)

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