The Media Directive Is Clear: Israel Can Do Only Wrong

By Jeffrey Blehar

Monday, June 10, 2024

 

This weekend something quite surprising and wonderful happened, for a change: In a brilliantly daring and well-coordinated rescue, commandos from Israel’s counterterrorism unit, Yamam, raided two buildings in Gaza on Saturday morning and retrieved four hostages taken on October 7 — alive and well. In an eerie echo of the heroics displayed by the Israelis at Entebbe in 1976, they suffered only one casualty, that of Arnon Zmora, who died of wounds sustained while leading his extraction team on their successful mission.

 

Most media attention has focused on the return of young Noa Argamani, whose abduction — livestreamed by cheering GoPro-wearing jihadis — was one of the most traumatic videos from that day; the images of her reunited with her family were thus among the most moving from this weekend. But for those familiar with Hamas’s brutal hostage calculus, the rescue of the three men — Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov, and Shlomi Ziv — unharmed is in many ways even more miraculous. (Kozlov popped the collar on his polo shirt as he stepped off the rescue transport, which is exactly what I’d be doing if I’d spent the last eight months expecting to be shot in the head execution-style yet walked away unscathed.)

 

You might have thought that all this was cause for celebration. You are of course a benighted fool to think that, and likely a moral monster as well. For it seems our betters in the media, as well as the keening mobs online, are here to tell us that the rescue of these hostages was in fact a tragedy if not an outright war crime. Hamas immediately claimed over 200 civilians dead — as spurious and invented as all “official” Hamas death tolls, but the peg upon which they correctly expected Western media to hang their coverage. Then, like clockwork, the story became not about the miraculous rescue but the supposedly horrifying human cost of it.

 

The Daily Beast’s Wahajat Ali lamented, “Is killing more than 200 Palestinian civilians worth 4 Israeli hostages? A question worth asking on the record.” (Not asked on the record: What were those 4 hostages doing in Gaza?) Others lamented the death of Palestine Chronicle journalist Abdallah Aljamal — killed senselessly while reading his Koran at home during the raid, merely because he was holding three Israeli men captive there. The Washington Post led the way in the media, with the headline “More than 200 Palestinians Killed in Israeli Hostage Raid in Gaza” and a subheading describing it as a “brazen” attack that “unleashed relentless bombardment” in the Nuseirat refugee camp — the story as told from Hamas’s point of view. That freakishly inverted moral framing was everywhere. A pair of CNN headlines told you everything about whom they believed and whose side they were on: (1) “Yesterday marked Gaza’s deadliest day in 6 months, Palestinian health ministry says,” (2) “Israel alleges journalist held hostages in Gaza, without providing evidence.” (They have since provided reams of it.)

 

Now realize: It has long been known by all — including pro-Palestinian activists — that the death numbers from Gaza’s “Health Ministry” (a name meant to make you think of a disinterested Western-style civil-service bureau rather than, in reality, a Hamas-operated organ with PR rather than public-health priorities) are pure invention. They are meant to serve propaganda purposes, nothing else. The media all know this; even the Associated Press — with its long and scandalous history of collaboration with Hamas in order to secure local access — noted last week that the Hamas-supplied numbers are entirely bogus, meant to drive narratives in the moment and become “known fact” to true believers regardless of their quiet later debunking. Many in the media do not care, however. Because this isn’t about the bourgeois concept of “truth,” as they see it, it’s about the capital-T Truth: Israel is a villainous and unjust state run by a conservative hate-figure oppressing the indigent (and indigenous) Other. That explains why an otherwise joyous event — the rescue of four innocents in a brilliantly executed and extraordinarily daring mission — is being spun as a blood-sodden tragedy, maybe even yet another black mark for the State of Israel. Because the Israelis can’t be allowed to win, certainly not morally.

 

Underlying these rhetorical strategies and double standards, the calculated acts of historical amnesia, and the like is this tribal puerility — a pre-rational, childlike default to team-sport rooting interests so nakedly obvious as to make clear that those who defend Hamas employ only one standard: Hamas should win and Israel should lose, so Israel is always wrong and Hamas is always either the victim or the noble freedom-fighter. Did an Israeli hostage die? It’s the evil settler-colonialist occupiers’ faults for forcing terrorists to abduct them and civilians to willingly hide them among themselves. Were they rescued alive? Then what about all those Hamas fighters and the civilians among whom they intentionally embedded their high-value targets? This is actually an extremely simple program to mentally execute and apply (“two legs bad, four legs good”), which has added virtues given the limited intellectual capacities of many who adhere to it.

 

Why must Israel not seek to rescue hostages seized in a brutally terroristic surprise act of war? Because it’s not fair, is essentially the answer we receive; the implied predicate is “because we want them to win and you to lose.” Abducting, raping, and murdering hostages in a shock razzia is the only strategy these militarily weak, sympathetic terrorists can possibly use against Israel, we are told, so it is per se morally valid as “resistance.” (“What did you think decolonization looked like?” went the repulsive cheer at the time.) It’s an argument that assumes the essential validity of Hamas’s struggle to destroy the Jewish state. By this logic — found pouring mindlessly out of the mouths of thousands of college-aged kids who don’t bother to think it through or don’t want to admit their position is pre-rational — apparently the Israelis should simply either bid farewell to their abducted citizens (“Too bad, Hamas stashed them among a bunch of grandmas and journalists and lyric poets, you can’t have them now!”) or give Hamas whatever it demands. Israel can’t fight back as is done typically in war throughout the long centuries of human history because Hamas figured out One Weird Trick and hid among “innocent civilians.” (Hamas, of course, explicitly does not believe in the concept of innocent civilians; not only is this of no matter, it is regarded by Hamas’s admirers as an exceedingly clever bit of brutal cynicism, a real-world echo of Alinsky’s famous advice to radicals: “Make the enemy live up to his own book of rules.”)

 

My colleague Charlie Cooke made a worthy observation over the weekend, as we pondered the media (and social-media) reaction to Israel’s rescue mission around NR’s virtual water-cooler. He noted that the spin you’re seeing, from avowed partisans all the way to the Washington Post, is how antisemitism operates in the modern era: Israel is held to standards that apply to no other people or nation, and propagandistically distorted narrative frames generally applied only to an enemy in wartime are imposed on it. The truth of this observation was made starkly clear this weekend in the way America was asked to regard the rescue of four Israeli hostages from terrorist savages bent on the destruction of their entire nation. Think of the new antisemitism as an interpretative filter, a heuristic that understands Israel as a permanent villain and the Palestinians as permanent victims, virtuous in their powerlessness to the point of lacking all moral agency or responsibility. With that filter applied, you can see clear as mud that in war, Israel shall always and only do wrong — even when they accomplish the truly righteous.