Most talking heads and foreign-policy pundits as well as the Obama administration are united on one proposition. They say that while Israel’s efforts to defend its people against Hamas rockets and terrorist attacks are justified, it cannot continue to do so if their counter-attacks continue to result in terrible pictures of civilian casualties in Gaza. But letting such pictures dictate policy or to excuse media bias against Israel does nothing to promote peace or alleviate the suffering of the Palestinians.
National Journal’s influential Ron Fournier spoke for many today when he wrote that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s arguments in favor of his country’s positions were both “accurate and archaic.” He believes they are accurate in the sense that any country has the right to stop people from shooting rockets at their cities or digging tunnels whose purpose is to allow terrorists to commit atrocities against their citizens. But Fournier believes the prime minister’s position—one that is backed by the overwhelming majority of the Israeli people—is untenable. That’s because he believes the pro-Israel consensus in the West that once would have sanctioned a campaign against Gaza is rapidly disappearing because a new generation of leaders and journalists has arisen that has no patience with Israel and sympathizes with the Palestinians. Since this generation thinks Israel is oppressing the Palestinians regardless of recent events in Gaza and denying them independence, they are no longer willing to support the Jewish state’s efforts.
The pictures of suffering Palestinians and the lopsided casualty figures dovetail with Fournier’s analysis. His point, shared by many others speaking out on the issue, is that the terrible images of Palestinian casualties are feeding a narrative in which Israel is increasingly viewed as the bad guy in the conflict regardless of the justifications put forward by Israelis and their supporters.
Fournier’s conclusion that the solution is for Israel to be more accommodating to the Palestinians shows a disregard for logic that isn’t normally to be found in his cogent analyses of domestic political issues. His attempt to use the distorted coverage of the conflict—of which his facile conclusions about peace are a part—as evidence of a festering problem that Israelis are not addressing fails to take into account the fact that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy on the part of media figures and an administration that doesn’t grasp the realities of the situation. Just as important, his claim that a new hostility to Israel in the American media is something new and therefore a herald of a decline in general U.S. support for the Jewish state is simply unfounded.
Let’s address the basic assumption of Fournier’s analysis, which also seems to be the foundation of the administration’s policy: the Middle East conflict is complicated but the real reason for the failure to attain peace is the decision of Israel’s government to not fully embrace a two-state solution or to make it possible for the Palestinians to achieve independence. This is simply not true. Israel’s offers of an independent state in almost all of the West Bank, Gaza, and a share of Jerusalem in 2000, 2001, and 2008 may be ancient history in our 24/7 news cycle. But their rejection by the Palestinians and the continued refusal of even the “moderate” Palestinian Authority to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn gives the lie to this off-repeated fallacy about Israel’s guilt.
Fournier’s belief that the outrageous anti-Israel bias on the part of U.S. journalists covering the current conflict for MSNBC and CNN is a new development also demonstrates that he hasn’t been paying much attention to the coverage of Israel over the last 40 years. The assumption that most Western journalists were inherently sympathetic to the efforts of the small Jewish state to resist efforts by the Arab and Muslim world to destroy it went out the window in the 1980s during the First Lebanon War and was buried during the first two intifadas. That journalists are now willing to publicly label Israelis as “scum” is a function of the way social media has changed the way the news business works. But these sentiments have been on display in much of the mainstream media—especially important outlets like NBC News or the New York Times—for decades. Nevertheless polls have consistently shown that the vast majority of Americans still sympathize with Israel and rightly view groups like Hamas as terrorists that must be defeated. This illustrates the disconnect between much of the liberal mainstream media and the American people, not the end of the bipartisan pro-Israel consensus.
The problem is the willingness of much of the international media to buy into Palestinian propaganda while ignoring the plain facts about the culpability of Hamas for the fomenting of the current conflict and the casualties that have resulted from its launching of the latest round of fighting. A media that isn’t willing to place the video of Palestinian suffering in a context of Hamas decisions to build shelters in the form of a vast tunnel network for their fighters and rocket arsenal while staking out civilians as human shields to be killed when Israel responds to rocket and tunnel attacks is one that can’t then turn around and advise Netanyahu that his country’s public-relations problems are its own fault. To the contrary, the willingness of much of the international media to whitewash Hamas and vilify Israel has only convinced Israelis that this is not the moment to hazard their lives on promises from the Palestinians or the Obama administration.
Asymmetrical warfare between a nation state and a terror movement that operates for all intents and purposes as an independent state in Gaza does generate problems for Israel. But if the goal is peace, then the only answer for Israel and the United States is to crush Hamas, not allow the pictures of the suffering that the terror group has orchestrated to force–as Kerry’s proposals have indicated–the West to grant them concessions. If both the administration and journalists like Fournier don’t understand this, the fault lies with them, not Netanyahu.