Comment on the Faking of Photos by Hamas
Jul. 24th, 2014 10:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akirluFerret Steinmetz has a post here about the current mess in Gaza and in particular about the possibility that Hamas faked photos of injured Palestinian civilians. For some reason Ferret's LJ is marking my comment as spam, and it's not showing up there, so I thought I'd post it here just for the record, if only because nobody really likes to see their words go straight down the oubliette after they spent the time to write them:
My suspicion is that if the photo ops were faked it's because Hamas feels (quite correctly, imo) that the Palestinians have been losing the PR/propaganda war for a long time now, and are trying to step up their game for winning sympathy. Why fake injury photos in particular? Injured live people are just more emotionally compelling than dead people. Quick, what's the single most iconic photo of the horrors of the Vietnam war era? For me it's certainly the one of Kim Phuc fleeing naked down a road with other children after having just been napalmed. It's one of those pictures you never forget. More so than any of the photos of the dead, sad and awful as they were. It's just better for eliciting your (horrified) sympathy.
Because yeah, Israel has been winning the PR campaign to arrogating the entire moral high ground for decades now. I remember having a discussion with one (intelligent, reasonable, tolerably informed) friend a few years back, after a Palestinian suicide bomber had blown her(?)self up on a bus and killed, among others, Israeli children and my friend was going off about how he could completely sympathize with wiping out the Palestinians who were a uniformly murderous people. I asked him why he never got this worked up when Israelis killed Palestinian children. He told me with perfect sincerity that this never happens. Even after I found him numerous examples he flatly refused to believe it. I wish his were an isolated case, but it's not.
While it is certainly not free from a point of view, I do think that the historical perspective offered by the the Jews for Justice in the Middle East history of the Israel/Palestine conflict is nonetheless not of the demonizing ilk you mention above. And a good resource if you want to pick up a bit more background that is at least free from the typical pro-Israel propaganda without claiming innocence and purity for Palestine.
And yeah, there is a lot of open, genuine antisemitism among supporters of the Palestinians, but not all, or maybe even most, criticism of Israel is antisemitic in nature. There are a lot of very legitimate grievances on the Palestinian side, going back to the days of the British protectorate and beyond. I think it's fair to say that Israel's right to exist as conceived is predicated on the idea that Palestine has no such right. Though that isn't always explicit in public statements it's borne out again and again in policy and internal statements. That's a pretty fundamental injustice and it's not antisemitic to think so.
My suspicion is that if the photo ops were faked it's because Hamas feels (quite correctly, imo) that the Palestinians have been losing the PR/propaganda war for a long time now, and are trying to step up their game for winning sympathy. Why fake injury photos in particular? Injured live people are just more emotionally compelling than dead people. Quick, what's the single most iconic photo of the horrors of the Vietnam war era? For me it's certainly the one of Kim Phuc fleeing naked down a road with other children after having just been napalmed. It's one of those pictures you never forget. More so than any of the photos of the dead, sad and awful as they were. It's just better for eliciting your (horrified) sympathy.
Because yeah, Israel has been winning the PR campaign to arrogating the entire moral high ground for decades now. I remember having a discussion with one (intelligent, reasonable, tolerably informed) friend a few years back, after a Palestinian suicide bomber had blown her(?)self up on a bus and killed, among others, Israeli children and my friend was going off about how he could completely sympathize with wiping out the Palestinians who were a uniformly murderous people. I asked him why he never got this worked up when Israelis killed Palestinian children. He told me with perfect sincerity that this never happens. Even after I found him numerous examples he flatly refused to believe it. I wish his were an isolated case, but it's not.
While it is certainly not free from a point of view, I do think that the historical perspective offered by the the Jews for Justice in the Middle East history of the Israel/Palestine conflict is nonetheless not of the demonizing ilk you mention above. And a good resource if you want to pick up a bit more background that is at least free from the typical pro-Israel propaganda without claiming innocence and purity for Palestine.
And yeah, there is a lot of open, genuine antisemitism among supporters of the Palestinians, but not all, or maybe even most, criticism of Israel is antisemitic in nature. There are a lot of very legitimate grievances on the Palestinian side, going back to the days of the British protectorate and beyond. I think it's fair to say that Israel's right to exist as conceived is predicated on the idea that Palestine has no such right. Though that isn't always explicit in public statements it's borne out again and again in policy and internal statements. That's a pretty fundamental injustice and it's not antisemitic to think so.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2014-07-24 06:39 pm (UTC)I don't think so, not if by "as conceived" you mean "as conceived by the UN and international community that allowed it to be established." Israel was the result of a partition plan of the Palestinian territory. (Actually the second partition: the first one, circa 1920, produced Jordan.) The rump Palestine, the area west of the Jordan River, was divided in 1947 into proposed Jewish and Arab states. The main body of the Jewish community, including the agencies headed by Ben Gurion et al that became the Israeli government, accepted the partition. Some Jewish settlers objected but they were the minority. The Arabs, however, didn't accept it at all, and instead of establishing the Palestinian state in it, which they could easily have done and which would have been geographically larger than any Palestinian state under discussion today, Jordan and Egypt occupied its various parts for 20 years until the 6-Day War.
Meanwhile, the day the partition plan went into effect, Jordan and Egypt tried to invade Israel and wipe it out entirely. The Israelis won, captured enough land to flesh out their partition a bit more, including the western suburbs of Jerusalem, and the resulting armistice line is what's now called the Green Line. The 6-Day War is what happened the second time Jordan and Egypt (and Syria) used the occupied territories to launch an attempted wipe-out of Israel.
There are some right-wing Jewish maximalists who want all the territory described in the Bible as Jewish lands, and if it's their conception that you mean, you're right; but they don't get much support. Sharon even pulled out of Gaza. I decry the Israeli Jews who consider the Palestinian Arabs uniformly evil, but considering that many of the Palestinians, including specifically Hamas, have felt that way about the Jews for a lot longer, I don't expect much sense on that subject from either side.