Academics and media figures are trying to sift the truth from a barrage of facts and images emerging from the Israel/Palestine battlefront. “PR” is working hard for both sides.
As of press time, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had reiterated his determination to remove the threats of rockets and the tunnels while withdrawing some troops from Gaza. Hamas leaders continued sending rockets into Israel.
The death toll had reached more than 1,800 Palestinians, 64 Israeli soldiers and three Israeli civilians.
The totals supplied by Hamas and the United Nations are challenged by some sources.
Richard Kemp, retired U.K. Army colonel, cast doubt on the figures in an article for the Gatestone Institute, an international policy council. He says “All Palestinian civilian casualties in this conflict result ultimately from Gaza terrorists’ aggression against Israel, and Hamas’ use of human shields—the most important plank of Hamas’s war-fighting policy.”
“To suggest that military incompetence is the only explanation for civilian deaths other than deliberate mass murder reveals a breathtaking but unsurprising ignorance of the realities of combat,” he added.
Kemp says far more Hamas combatants are in the totals than are being supplied by Hamas and the U.N. “Analysis of casualty details released by Al Jazeera show most of those killed in Gaza have been young men of fighting age, not women, children or old people,” he says.
Satellite images and a full-page map of the destruction in Gaza ran in the Aug. 3 New York Times and elsewhere. Nearly 60,000 people have lost their homes and the number taking shelter in schools of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency is nearly five times as many as 2009, it said.
Debate over who is right and who is wrong raged on the CNN and Fox cable networks and to a lesser extent on the major networks. Floods of comments inundated social media.
While academics and media figures are wading into the battle, little has been heard from PR figures. The debate has polarized combatants who find little if anything good about the “other side.” Critics of either side are seen as “enemies.”
There is almost no middle ground.
Who Is Driving Whom Out of the MidEast?
A major issue is who is driving whom out of the MidEast?
Israel, quoting statements of Hamas and other factions and allies, says their aim is the “destruction of Israel.”
Those who support the creation of a Palestinian state say it is Israel that is driving out the Palestinians.
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Richard Falk, Princeton professor emeritus of international law, noted the Knesset recently elected Reuven Rivlin, whom he calls “an Israeli ardent one-stater,” to be the next president of the country, signaling an increasing readiness to incorporate into Israel what Israelis call Judea and Samaria and the rest of the world knows as the West Bank.
Writes Falk: “In other words, behind the iron and fire is a vision of how to complete the Zionist project without needing to offer the Palestinians anything more than minority rights. It is, perhaps, this triumphalist Zionist vision of the future that best explains why Israel launched this vicious attack on the long-beleaguered people of Gaza: to eliminate Hamas, the major obstruction to realizing that vision.”
Falk feels the only course Hamas has is to launch “primitive” rockets at Israel to draw attention to the siege under which the citizens of Gaza live.
“Prior to the heavy flow of rockets, Israel launched airstrikes on Gaza which appeared to be designed to induce retaliation that could then provide Tel Aviv with justification to launch a massive military operation…” he writes.
Falk and other law professors have signed a joint declaration calling for an "end to the collective punishment of the civilians of Gaza."
The 3,000 rockets that have been launched include 200 that have landed in Gaza, according to Israeli military leaders. Israeli spokesman Avichay Adraee tweeted in Arabic to more than 119,000 followers that the rockets are “weak” and a “failure” and that the threat is exaggerated by Hamas.
George Washington University media professor William Youmans wrote July 29 that Israel’s “alarmism” about the rockets is difficult to reconcile with official Israeli statements that minimize the rocket threat. The Iron Dome defense can stop some headed to populated areas and others fall in fields, say military leaders.
Fairness & Accuracy in Media (FAIR) said July 29 that the alleged threat of the tunnels that lead into Israel from Gaza is an example of “media hype.”
“The only thing missing from the nightmarish scenarios of terrorists emerging from the ground to kill innocents is any evidence that anything like this has ever happened,” wrote Peter Hart. Media such as NYT and CNN are leaving out such “inconvenient facts,” he added.
Dershowitz Charges “Racist” Media
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Retired Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, who has discussed the Israeli/Palestine conflict on numerous shows, charged on the July 24 Hugh Hewitt radio show that media are “racist” in their coverage of the conflict.
Media have ignored far greater casualties in “Muslim-on-Muslim” violence in the Arab world, he said in a report on The Daily Caller.
“Seven hundred people were killed in two days last week—but there wasn’t a word about it in the media,” he said. “But a few dozen Palestinians were killed and the body count was prominent. And I think this is racism—implicit racism on the part of the media. And that is, when an Arab and Muslim kills another Arab and Muslim, it is not news. But when an Israeli Jew in self defense kills and Arab Muslim, that becomes front page news.”
Jamie Weinstein, senior editor of The Daily Caller, which covered the remarks of Dershowitz, added that “during two days last week, more Syrians were killed than in the entire flare up between Israel and Hamas over the last two weeks. In total, more Arabs have died in the current Syrian civil war than in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict by nearly a factor of two.”
Dershowitz Debates CNN Editors
Dershowitz and CNN editors were quoted extensively in a debate July 28 on the network.
Dershowitz said Israel ended its occupation of Gaza in 2005 and that Israel must always have some military presence in the West Bank as a security border.
Israel, he said, offered in 2000-01 to end the occupation and to create a two-state solution. “Yasser Arafat said no. In 2007, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered to end the occupation, create a two-state solution. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas did not respond. You have to remember that Israel has since 1948 favored the two-state solution.”
Not agreeing were Marc Lamont Hill, CNN political commentator, and Peter Beinart, CNN political commentator who is also a columnist for Haaretz, Israeli news medium.
Beinart said the occupation did not end because Israel “controlled the electromagnetic space, the airspace, the naval space, the population registry. Every single measure of occupation, they satisfy all the conditions for occupation.”
He said Israel has the right to defend itself but has given “nothing” to Palestinians in the West Bank “who have accepted Israel’s right to exist…they have gotten nothing from this Israeli government except further and further settlement growth. So Palestinians don’t see that nonviolence and acceptance of Israel’s right to exist has gotten them anywhere. That’s what frightens me. That’s what really strengthens Hamas.”
Hill said that, for U.S. legislators, supporting Israel is “like kissing a baby. It’s the safest position to take.”
“Right now is an opportunity for the U.S. to exercise moral leadership and speak against this offensive siege that’s being waged in Gaza,” he said.
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Maher Sees Necessity for Civilian Casualties
On his Friday Aug. 1 HBO show, Bill Maher said Israel should not be viewed as the “bad actor” in the current conflict.
Referring to Palestinian and Israeli deaths (1,700 Palestinians, 64 Israeli soldiers and three Israeli civilians as of Aug. 3) Maher said: "It's a war. It's a war that Hamas started and somehow when Israel reacts to this they have to do everything that doesn't kill any civilians.
“People die in wars. Now, I've said this before on this show, if the situation was reversed, Hamas would kill every single person in Israel. The reason why that is not happening is because they can't. Because they can't doesn't make them good, it makes them weak."
Maher said there is a “double standard” which ignores brutal tactics of groups like ISIS in Iraq but pillories Israel in the court of public opinion for civilian casualties in its own conflict.
Geraldo Rivera Is Israel Critic
While Fox news host Sean Hannity has been a strong supporter of Israel and a critic of Hamas, Fox commentator Geraldo Rivera has emerged as a critic of Israel, citing the number of Palestinian civilian casualties vs. the number of military and civilian Israeli casualties.
Rivera on July 31 noted 1,300 Palestinians (as of that date) had died and that 30% to 40% were children. “This is undermining Israel,” he said. “This is the worst thing for Israel's stature and standing in the world. It's fueling anti-Semitism, and it's going to do very, very little but prolong this crisis."
Edelman is providing communications support to Panama’s Ministry of Commerce and Industries under an agreement capped at $97,100 per month.
Ballard Partners has recruited State Department veteran Matt Bryza as a senior policy advisor.
Teneo has extended its contract with the Salama Bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation for an additional four months to July 31, adding another $1.8M in fees to the New York firm’s coffers.
The Syrian Kurdish militia recruits Jim Dornan Strategies to press Congress for continued support in their battle against ISIS and Syrian president Bashar Assad.
The Government of Hungary has hired Strategic Improvisation Inc. to generate positive media coverage and combat negative press coverage of the Central European country. (6 reader comments)
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