Foggy Weather in Gaza

When facts are in short supply, narratives fill the gap

Gaza City: The ugly reality of war

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They did it on purpose.

That was the charge hurled by celebrity chef José Andrés after a Gaza aid convoy belonging to his charity, World Central Kitchen, was attacked by the IDF, killing seven people. How he knows that the convoy was deliberately targeted, Andrés didn’t say. And of course he didn’t have to say, because he wasn’t asked to submit evidence in support of his claim. Why bother? Everybody on the “anti-Zionist” Left knows that Israel is committing war crimes and genocide in Gaza. The narrative of settler-colonialist oppression and Zionist evil crowds out all other possibilities.

The fog of war has proved convenient for those who want Israel to lose the war against Hamas. They claim, for instance, that famine conditions prevail in Gaza. This is almost certainly untrue—but the fog of war makes it difficult to prove that it’s untrue, though there are grounds for skepticism. No doubt the food situation in Gaza is dire. But if an actual famine were in progress, we’d surely be regaled with the horrifying, sadly familiar, visuals. That would be a huge propaganda coup for the enemies of Israel. So far, however, such visuals have not been forthcoming.

The same applies to the oft-repeated charge that Israel has subjected Gaza to “indiscriminate bombardment.” There are many reasons to think that the IDF is doing no such thing, but little hard proof one way or the other. And the situation is obscured even more by the unreliability of witness reports from NGOs, the UN, and the media, most of which either openly or covertly side with Hamas—the Red Cross being one notorious example of this corrupt partiality.

Then there’s the claim that since the Gaza War began, nearly two hundred aid workers have been killed—a number, we’re told, unprecedented in world history. But down in the fine print are a couple of caveats: first, that the number includes aid worker fatalities in the West Bank; second, that not all the deaths have been war related. And though it’s implied that these aid workers were killed by the IDF, no details are provided. Further investigation might reveal, for instance, that many of those aid workers were collaborating with Hamas, or even belonged to that genocidal death cult. There’s enough evidence of the misbehavior of organizations like the Red Cross and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) to make this plausible.

Here on Substack, I’m regularly taken to task by people who find it outrageous that I treat the “anti-Zionist” narrative on the Gaza War with skepticism. One critic berated me for declining to go along with the majority:

How many Hamas combatants have been killed? How many remain? It’s wild how none of the murder-them-all types seem to GAF about any of those details, yet find time to call others “fools” for simply not supporting what looks to the world like a genocide attempt.

I trust that the bias, amounting to malice, of this retort is evident. For one thing, the IDF had given its estimate of the number of Hamas terrorist-rapists killed thus far: 12,000 as of mid-February. (Hamas has admitted to 6,000 of its goons killed.) For another, nobody really knows how many total Palestinian casualties, killed and wounded, have occurred since the beginning of the war. The number 30,000 killed has indeed been bandied about, but since it comes from the Hamas-dominated Gaza Health Ministry, this estimate can hardly be considered reliable. In any case, a total of 30,000 casualties, terrorist and civilian, out of a population of over two million, hardly supports a charge of genocide.

The genocide charge is also mendacious because it lets Hamas off the hook. The narrative goes like this: Some 30,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, it was the Jews who killed them, and that is genocide. But this narrative sidesteps an inconvenient truth: It’s very much in the interest of Hamas to get as many Palestinian civilians as possible killed. There’s nothing speculative in this: The leaders of Hamas themselves have openly, even proudly, proclaimed their desire to produce as many “martyrs” as possible. And produce them Hamas does, by using civilians as human shields and civilian infrastructure—hospitals, schools, mosques—as fighting positions, supply dumps, etc. So if there’s genocide going on, the opposing sides must be working together to make it happen—a dubious notion, to put it no more pointedly.

Finally, the idea that a war can be fought without involving civilians is one of those false doctrines of the Left that it uses against its ideological foes. But history shows that it’s bogus. Modern warfare has always taken a large toll among the civilian populations of the belligerents. Americans have a hard time taking this in, since a fortunate combination of circumstances shielded the homeland from the direct effects of the world wars. But the men whom America sent to fight in Europe and the Pacific saw what modern war was like. And anyone who studies the history of modern war cannot deceive himself that a clean, “just” war is possible. This is as true of Gaza as it was of France, Germany, Okinawa, Korea, Vietnam, et al.

Israel claims, and such evidence as we have confirms, that it’s doing what it can to minimize civilian casualties and collateral damage in Gaza—everything, that is, consistent with the effective prosecution of its campaign to crush Hamas. If the “anti-Zionists” were really concerned about the welfare of the Palestinians of Gaza, they’d support the Israeli objective. For this war, and the miseries that it inflicts on the innocent, was started by Hamas. And it will end when Hamas does, not a moment sooner.