While the world’s press focuses fanatically on what Israel did or did not do in Gaza, the Sri Lankan government largely avoids accusations, condemnations, the ICC and Human Rights organisations baying for blood. Why? No Muslims or Jews or Palestinians involved. So it’s a minor issue.
The Sunday Times did afford some column space under the headline “Artillery pounds wounded Tamils trapped on beach”. Those Tamils were 1000 amputees hiding in trenches as the Sri Lankan army persecuted its war against the Tamil separatists.
The report states that more than 300 civilians were being killed or were dying due to “lack of medical care, food or water”. The only remaining hospital in the area had to close after being bombed twice by the Sri Lankan army. The UN believes more than 2800, mostly civilians, killed since the beginning of the latest offensive.
Meanwhile the Tamil Tigers are actually asking for a ceasefire. None is forthcoming from the Sri Lankan army. They now want to negotiate with the government. No such negotiations have been offered. A Tamil commander characterises it as ” a genocidal war”. He goes on:
“Continuous denial of humanitarian access to the civilian population, and non-stop artillery and aerial attacks are creating an unbearable situation”
Tigers say that they would now “respect the outcome of an independent Tamil state.
Joan Ryan MP (Lab) has called for Sri Lanka to be suspended from the Commonwealth.
Yet all this hardly receives any coverage on any news channel. If Israel is being called to account for supposed crimes where is the worldwide clamour against Sri Lanka?
My parents used to tell me about the Battle of Cable Street when Oswald Mosley tried to march through the East End of London with his Fascist black-shirts in direct provocation to the Jewish residents.
Jews and Communists and other outraged citizens blocked the way. Many were injured or arrested (including ny father and grandmother). But the blackshirt’s march did not succeed in passing through the Jewish East End.
What difference then in Umm al-Fahm when right-wing Jews want to march through an Arab-Israeli town stirring up hatred and provoking a riot? These Jews demanded Arab loyalty to the State of Israel after many Arabs have voiced support of Hamas and called for the destruction of the state. But is this provocation an answer? Can this do anything other than push loyal Israeli Arabs who want to live in peace into the arms of Hamas, Hizbollah and the rest?
The police did not want the march but it was judged to be a legal protest. Maybe legal, just as the National Front can march through Bradford if they wish. But advisable in the current tense atmosphere in the region? Advisable when Israel’s reputation is on the line around the world?
This is one of the few occasions when I have some sympathy for Israeli Arabs demonstrating against Jews. This was their East End and the right-wing Jews were their blackshirts.
But look. No one was killed. The police fired tear gas not bullets. Say this was Jews protesting in Tehran or in Yemen. That’s the difference which makes Israel a free and democratic society. It also means that some of its citizens are free to behave outrageously. Just as Arab Israelis and Jews behaved outrageously in Akko (Acre) recently rioting against each other as a result of polarised views on the Gaza conflict. And this in a town which is still an exemplar of Arab-Jewish co-existence in Israel.
The far right in Israel is literally on the march buoyed up by election successes. It is a worrying trend in Israel.
With a number of reports coming out of Israel of possible abuses and violations by Israeli soldiers it is interesting to read a couple of reactions from inside Israel.
Firstly Herb Keinon in the Jerusalem post with an excellent article here where he he reports that Alan Baker, former Foreign Ministry legal adviser has said:
it is incumbent on
Israel to investigate the allegations to show the world it is taking the matter seriously
As I have also stated, it is very important that Israel investigates ALL allegations in an open and thorough way.
“There is no doubt that Israel did not systematically go in and commit war crimes,” Baker said.
He said that in isolated incidents, things may have happened that caused innocent people to be killed, and that it was in Israel’s interest to investigate itself, and prosecute where necessary.
Exactly right. This is the key issue that makes Israel different from its enemeies and many of the countries who so gloatingly read about Israel’s internal breast-beating over these allegations. Israel is seen as part of the western democracies and is held to account to uphold international law. No other country in the region would be remotely interested in investigating potential crimes in their military. Only truly democratic open societies can do this. Israel has to do it, not to placate foreign media or governments, it must do it to retain its self-respect as a nation, whatever the findings reveal.
The ‘good’ bit in the title comes from yNetnews.com where soldiers who took part in the Gaza conflict rebut claims of immoral conduct.
I don’t believe there were soldiers who were looking to kill (Palestinians) for no reason,” said 21-year-old Givati Brigade soldier Assaf Danziger, who was lightly injured three days before the conclusion of Operation Cast Lead.
“What happened there was not enjoyable to anyone; we wanted it to end as soon as possible and tried to avoid contact with innocent civilians,” he said.
According to Danziger, soldiers were given specific orders to open fire only at armed terrorists or people who posed a threat. “There were no incidents of vandalism at any of the buildings we occupied. We did only what was justified and acted out of necessity. No one shot at civilians. People walked by us freely,” he recounted.
Other stories of soldiers being berated by colleagues for stealing even a can of drink and being made to put it back, of soldiers who cleaned apartments where they had been billeted and folded sheets and blankets go unreported. *
But please read this article in the JP which offers a firm and fair answer to the concerted attack and demonization of Israel being waged by the Guardian newspaper and also this article referenced in it: a leading article in the Independent which is well balanced apart from the headline – here’s a quote:
It is true that all armies suffer occasional breakdowns in discipline. And we should not make the mistake of holding Israeli soldiers to a higher standard of conduct than we expect from our own. We in Britain should remember that Baha Mousa, an Iraqi hotel receptionist, was beaten to death in the custody of British troops in Basra in 2003 and none of our soldiers was convicted of this killing. American military personnel were guilty of appalling abuses of prisoners in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison.
We should bear in mind too that this testimony was made public by a concerned Israeli academic. Whatever crimes might be laid at the door of the IDF, it should not be Israeli society on trial here. Indeed, it is a tribute to the openness of Israel’s democracy, that we have learned of these allegations. Nor does the conduct of Israeli troops invalidate the overall objective of Operation Cast Lead, namely to stop Hamas firing rockets into towns in southern Israel.
This is the point. Unless Israel is perfect it is the most appaling state in the world. Ever since its formation Israel has faced an existential threat from its neighbours. It’s hardly surprising that Israel is drifting to the right and its people increasingly brutalised by continuous attacks and fear of attacks. Even so, abuses and crimes cannot be dismissed. They must be investigated and, if proved true, action must be taken against perpetrators. If proved true, Israel must do some serious soul searching about the future conduct of its military.
* 26/03/2009 This was my poorly remembered reading of a YnetNews article which I can now quote:
A Paratroopers Brigade soldier who also participated in the war called the claims “nonsense”. Speaking on condition of anonymity, he said, “It is true that in war morality can be interpreted in many different ways, and there are always a few idiots who act inappropriately, but most of the soldiers represented Israel honorably and with a high degree of morality.
“For instance, on three separate occasions my company commander checked soldiers’ bags for stolen goods. Those who stole the smallest things, like candy, were severely punished,” he said.
“We were forbidden from sleeping in Palestinians’ beds even when we had no alternate accommodations, and we didn’t touch any of their food even after we hadn’t had enough to eat for two days.”
HonestReporting.com has released its analysis of what it claims to be the BBC’s biased coverage during the Gaza conflict. Biased against Israel, off course.
The report which can be seen here begins with a telling comparison to the conflict in Sri Lanka between government forces and the Tamil Tiger separatists.
During the conflict, the BBC published, on average, 4.5 articles every day dealing with the fighting. In contrast, BBC coverage of the Sri Lankan government’s campaign against the Tamil Tigers group — a conflict that resulted in an estimated 2,000 civilian deaths in January of 2009 — produced barely one article a day.
According to human rights organizations, the conflict in Sri Lanka includes intentional attacks by both sides on civilians, attacks on hospitals (twenty attacks from December through February alone), and the use of human shields. Yet the BBC gives this conflict, estimated to have resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, less than one quarter the average daily coverage of the Gaza conflict. If the BBC is going to focus this much on Gaza, it must expect scrutiny of that coverage.
This discrepancy is something that I and many others have pointed out previously and will be the subject of a post I intend to write shortly.
One of the main thrusts of the HonestReporting analysis is the discrepancy between accounts coming from Gaza and those emanating from the Israeli side. The report points out how unsubstantiated claims went either unquestioned or received a token warning of the BBC’s inability to authenticate claims.
Emotive images often accompanied the reports even though these images were often unrelated to the actual events being reported. Unverifiable atrocities were reported unquestioned.
The reports concluded:
The BBC’s coverage of the Gaza conflict painted a picture of an Israeli attack that intentionally targeted civilians and may have included war crimes. Specifically:
The BBC relied upon Palestinians who were given the opportunity to make dubious accusations without any supporting evidence.
The BBC published image after image of Palestinians suffering under Israeli attacks while giving readers few views of the impact that the conflict was having on Israeli civilians living under a constant and daily rocket barrage.
The most damning Palestinian statements about the Israeli operations were highlighted on the side of the articles, while Israeli statements were almost never treated in the same way.
The analysis looked at every report on the BBC and the BBC website during the conflict and various diagrams are produced to back up claims of an extremely skewed coverage which showed Israel in a negative light with little attention given to the hundreds of thousands of Israelis condemned to years of rocket and mortar attacks. Many sources used by the BBC were dubious, to say the least, in that they came directly from or were almost certainly channelled through Hamas or its supporters or those it had most likely intimidated or threatened (although this, too, of course is difficult to prove or assess).
The most egregious ‘lie’ was that of the ‘bombing; of an UNRWA school which made such headlines at the time, especially as John Ging, UNRWA’s head of staff in Gaza first claimed more than 40 civilians had been killed INSIDE the school and later had to recant and admit that the shells fell outside the school. But the damage was done and the BBC continued reporting 40 deaths only for it to be revealed there were ‘only’ 12, of which 9 were Hamas operatives who had used the vicinity of the school to fire at IDF troops. The truth was not reported with the same sensationalism as the initial lie and thus the the smear sticks.
Although the report is an excellent analysis, I must take issue with part of its interpretation of the statistics. Here is a table of the findings I have made:
Palestinian
Israeli
Eyewitness Accounts
40
18
Palestinian Casualties/Destruction
Israeli Soldiers
Israeli casualties/destruction
Hamas Terrorists
Images
215
53
34
11
Palestinian Position
Israeli Position
Highlighted Quotations
33
3
Now, I do not want to be an apologist for the BBC but most of the action was taking place in Gaza. And even though rockets were falling on Israel throughout the conflict it is undeniable that it was Gaza where there was a huge battle raging and hundreds of people (almost all Palestinians) dying, not Israel.
For me the statistics are not the key element of the bias; what is key is the quality of the reporting and the lack of concern, especially by Jeremy Bowen, for proper journalistic norms. Hearsay and dubious sourcing, gullibility and a predisposition against the Israeli position, assumptions of guilt without proof, hectoring of Israeli spokespersons; all these were what characterised the BBC’s coverage.
Even now as terrible stories come out of Israel the BBC and others are still making assumptions about the veracity of the reports simply because they are from Israelis without waiting for the full investigations to be carried out. At least Israel takes the accusations seriously; when Hamas is challenged to respond to accusations of abuses it basically sticks two fingers up – hardly surprising; since when did terrorists ever abide by any international laws or conventions? That’s why they are designated terrorists in the first place.