Today’s New York Times includes a remarkable article, in which the paper admits that Israel’s military duped it (and the rest of the mainstream U.S. media) yesterday. The Times report, although revealing, falls short in two areas: It nowhere explains that the Times has been tricked many times before, and it misses the much larger story: why Israel may be afraid to invade Gaza on the ground.
Israel’s English-language military mouthpiece, Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, told U.S. and other international reporters just after midnight Friday that Israel’s ground forces had started “attacking in the Gaza Strip.” The organizations immediately published bulletins reporting his statement. Hours later, the invasion claim was withdrawn. Israeli news outlets, who the military did not try to mislead, said the fake news was an effort to trick Hamas fighters into hiding in their underground bunkers, where Israeli warplanes could supposedly strike them.
Today’s Times article, by former Jerusalem bureau chief David Halbfinger, has a tone of injured betrayal. But Israel’s military has long suckered the Times and other foreign media outlets. Here’s just one example, a 2015 Times report that Israel had killed 6 Palestinians just inside the Israel/Gaza border. Reporter Jodi Rudoren justified the killings by taking stenography from Israel’s then-spokesman, Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, who alleged that “there were more than 1000 [Palestinian] men ‘attempting multiple times and at multiple locations to storm the border fence throughout the day,’ hurling projectiles including a grenade.”
Rudoren made no effort to verify Lerner’s assertion. Luckily, a veteran, genuine journalist named Joel Greenberg covered the same story in the Financial Times. Here’s what Greenberg said:
Officials in Gaza said six Palestinians were killed and dozens wounded. Witnesses said the shots were fired by snipers at Israeli guard posts along the fence. . . The [Israeli military] spokesman could not explain why troops had not instead used non-lethal crowd control weapons, such as tear gas and rubber bullets, routinely used by Israeli forces against violent protests in the West Bank.
Meanwhile, Times and other mainstream reporters have completely missed the larger story: Israel may not invade Gaza on the ground because it no longer can. Hard-headed military experts have said that the Hamas resistance movement has prepared strong defenses inside Gaza that have raised the costs of an invasion above an acceptable level to Israel.
Back in 2018, a retired Israel colonel named Shimon Arad wrote, a bit ruefully, that Hamas has built an effective tunnel system inside Gaza that could thwart an Israeli invasion. He explained:
. . . Israeli would now have to maneuver into the densely populated Palestinian cities and refugee camps, saturated with tunnels under houses and fighting positions, in order to destroy Hamas’s military capabilities. This is designed to make an Israeli maneuver costly, thereby deterring the operation entirely or cutting it short because of pressure from the Israeli public and regional and international actors to stop the fighting.
In other words, Israel may continue its indiscriminate air war against Gaza, killing scores of civilians, including children, because it won’t jeopardize the safety of its own soldiers.
Time for the US media to admit they have been supporting and protecting a rogue nation that has a record of lying, doctoring tapes, and commits war crimes. Their shameless bias for Israel, the walking on egg shells when reporting its human rights abuses, war crimes, and the killing of children, have done too much of damage. They have successfully been able to portray the Palestinians as the aggressors, when facts are totally contradictory. Every time Israel decides to bomb Gaza to rubble, the justifications come fast, and NO ONE challenges the lies Israel’s spokespeople keep uttering, and blaming the victims.
NO JOURNALIST HAS EVER ASKED A US PRESIDENT WHY ONLY ISRAEL SEEMS TO HAVE THE RIGHT TO DEFEND ITSELF. WHAT ABOUT OCCUPIED UNARMED CIVILIANS? THEY NEED MORE PROTECTION AND SOMEONE SHOULD DEFEND THEM TOO.
The New York Times has molly coddled its zionist journalist like Brett Stephens and Bari Weiss, who lied for Israel, and always made the long suffering Palestinians bad the bad guys. NOW they realize they have been duped, yeah right.
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Another confession by a major newspaper:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/guardian-backing-balfour-declaration-among-papers-worst-errors-of-judgment/
“The Guardian: Backing Balfour Declaration among our ‘worst errors of judgment’”
‘In list of all-time ‘mistakes,’ UK daily says modern-day Israel ‘isn’t country it foresaw or would have wanted’; Jewish leadership blasts ‘breathtakingly ill-considered’ position”
By TOI STAFF 8 May 2021, The Times of Israel.
“Over a hundred years after backing the UK government’s Balfour Declaration, The Guardian newspaper said it regrets its enthusiastic support for the famous statement recognizing a national home for Jews in historic Palestine.
“In an editorial published Friday to mark its bicentennial, the Guardian listed the ‘worst errors of judgment’ the British daily has made since its founding in 1821.
“These ‘mistakes’ included supporting the 1917 declaration issued by then foreign secretary Arthur Balfour, a document seen as a key milestone in the State Israel’s establishment and which the Guardian described as having “changed the world.”
“’The Guardian of 1917 supported, celebrated and could even be said to have helped facilitate the Balfour declaration,’ the left-leaning newspaper wrote.
“Referring to its then editor, CP Scott, the paper said his support of Zionism ‘blinded him to Palestinian rights.’
“’In 1917 he wrote [an editorial] on the day the Balfour declaration was announced, in which he dismissed any other claim to the Holy Land, saying: ‘The existing Arab population of Palestine is small and at a low stage of civilization.’ Whatever else can be said, Israel today is not the country the Guardian foresaw or would have wanted,” the column stated.” (cont’d)
I might have thought that the NYT might have been quietly proud of playing its part, even unwittingly, in what is now being sold as a brilliant anti-terrorist deception ploy – but no, they think this ‘unacceptable’, I see, because the Palestinians might think them complicit and take it out on journalists in Gaza. There’s a lot that some people will ‘accept’ before their moral red line is reached.
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“The editorial, which included a copy of Scott’s editor from November 9, 1917, carried the byline of Randeep Ramesh, its chief editorial writer.
“The Board of Deputies of British Jews denounced the column.
“’That the Guardian lists its support for a Jewish national homeland in 1917 among its ‘worst errors of judgment’ in its 200-year history is breathtakingly ill-considered,’ Marie van der Zyl, the group’s president, said in a statement.
“She added: ‘In its eagerness to disassociate itself in any way from its early support for Zionism, the Guardian chooses not to focus on the simple fact that had such a national homeland existed even a decade earlier than 1948, many millions of Jews – our close relatives – murdered in the Holocaust might still be alive.’
“Van der Zyl said that ‘alongside a safe and secure Jewish state,’ the Board of Deputies also backs the establishment of a Palestinian state, ‘something the Balfour declaration does not negate.’ The Balfour Declaration says in regards to supporting a Jewish national home that ‘nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.’
“Van der Zyl also accused the Guardian of seeming ‘to do everything it can to undermine the legitimacy of the world’s only Jewish state.’
“Among other things the newspaper said it got wrong over its 200-year history were being ‘a proudly imperialist paper,’ its support of the Confederacy in the US Civil War and its ‘at times racist’ editorials.”