By Noah Rothman
Tuesday, May 28, 2024
The impulsive reaction of Israel’s reflexive critics to
an Israeli air strike inside Rafah over the weekend illustrates the folly in
lending too much credence to the news that emerges from the imperfect
information environment of the battlefield.
Over the weekend, local officials inside Hamas-controlled
Gaza described a “horrifying” scene in which an Israeli strike on a refugee
encampment near Rafah killed dozens of civilians. Israeli-government officials
describe the incident as “tragic” and a “mistake” owing to the fog of war,
though Jerusalem continues to investigate the event.
The strike was initially said to have targeted “displaced
Palestinians at a tent camp in Rafah,” which may constitute a “violation of
President Biden’s ‘red line,’” Axios journalist Barak Ravid reported. Still, the Biden administration reserved
judgment. The White House’s failure to lunge for the least charitable
explanation for Israel’s conduct was quickly deemed a betrayal of his own
policy preferences.
“Will anything that Israel does cross that line? Or is
this a line that is infinitely movable,” asked
Human Rights Watch’s Kenneth Roth. Biden dithered, the Economist’s
Gregg Carlstrom snarked, gathering “the best and brightest minds to debate
whether or not this was an acceptable number of displaced children burned alive
in their tent camp.” New York Times reporter Peter Baker relayed a conspiracy theory he hears peddled by “White
House officials” who allege that the Israeli government’s recklessness was
designed to “sabotage the president’s reelection campaign.”
In the intervening hours, however, a simplistic story
centered on Israeli perfidy and malevolence became hopelessly complicated by
the facts of the matter.
A spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces maintains that
the strike, in which at least 45 are believed to have been killed, involved the
deployment of the “smallest munition our jets can use” and suggested that
secondary explosions were responsible for the excessive collateral damage. The
IDF subsequently produced audio
of an intercepted phone conversation between two Gazans who substantiated
the Israeli claim. “All of the ammunition started exploding,” one observed.
When asked if the ammunition was “ours,” the speaker emphatically confirmed
that it was. “Yes, this is an ammunition warehouse,” he continued. Both
subjects concur that the “Jewish bombing wasn’t strong” and there were “a lot
of secondary explosions.”
Israel’s critics are unlikely to take the IDF’s word or
the evidence in support of it at face value. But that circumspection seems
never to apply to the claims retailed by Gaza-based Palestinians. In the hours
since that controversial Rafah strike, the IDF has maintained its tempo of
operations in Rafah. On Tuesday, another 21 Gazans were killed and many more
wounded in what local authorities claim was an Israeli artillery strike on a
civilian tent encampment. But the IDF maintains that it executed no strikes
anywhere near a humanitarian corridor where displaced Rafah residents are
taking shelter — a detail even the Washington Post later confirmed. “Witnesses said the strikes occurred just south
of the humanitarian zone,” it reported tersely.
No one in a position of authority disputes that the fire
in the Rafah camp was anything other than a tragedy of the sort that is
lamentably common in warfare. Israel’s critics routinely cast their own
credibility in doubt, however, by racing to attribute Israel’s actions to the
malice fueling its eliminationist campaign in the Gaza Strip. That tidy
narrative rarely survives closer inspection, but its advocates seem never to
reexamine their priors.
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