Tag: Opinions

On the evening of Tuesday, October 17 a strike on Gaza’s al-Ahli Arab Hospital, often called the Baptist Hospital, killed at least 500 people, mostly children and women.

The scenes from the massacre, as described by witness and displayed in videos broadcast by news networks, were as grisly as can be imagined.

Images revealed body parts scattered across the hospital grounds and doctors performing emergency surgeries in corridors without anaesthesia. Video footage from inside the hospital showed Palestinian parents screaming and crying at the side of their dead children.

Palestinian officials blamed the explosion on one of the many Israeli bombs dropped on Gaza since October 7.

Israel, meanwhile, has predictably claimed that a misfired Palestinian rocket was responsible for the massacre at the hospital.

Israel’s response to the hospital bombing – a war crime under international law – is consistent with its usual.

The routine goes something like this: Israel commits a human rights atrocity, immediately denies having anything to do with it, says it has solid evidence that Palestinians committed the crime, and then just waits to see if someone manages to prove what really happened. If it eventually becomes clear that Israel did indeed carry out the atrocity, it silently accepts responsibility, but by then, the world’s focus has already moved on to other matters.

Israel performed this exact routine just last year, after it murdered Palestinian-American journalist and Al Jazeera veteran Shireen Abu Akleh.

Immediately after the May 2022 murder, then-Israeli Prime Minister Neftali Bennett blamed Palestinians for “throwing blame at Israel without basis.” At the time, Bennett said, “according to the information we have gathered, it appears likely that armed Palestinians – who were firing indiscriminately at the time – were responsible for the unfortunate death of the journalist.”  Then-Defence Minister Benny Gantz stated confidently that “no [Israeli] gunfire was directed at the journalist,” and that the Israeli army had “seen footage of indiscriminate shooting by Palestinian terrorists”.

Later in 2022, though, and following multiple independent investigations proving without a shadow of doubt that Abu Akleh had been killed by Israeli fire, the Israeli government finally admitted that it was a “high possibility” that it was an Israeli bullet that killed the journalist wearing a clearly marked press vest and helmet.

Nevertheless, Israel’s initial denials were picked up prominently by Western media outlets, casting significant doubt over Israel’s culpability in the murder.

The same routine was also followed in 2003, when Israel murdered 23-year-old American student Rachel Corrie. Corrie was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer as she tried to prevent the illegal demolitions of Palestinian homes. Immediately after killing Corrie, the Israeli army had said it was an unfortunate accident caused by Corrie herself.

In September 2000, during the second Palestinian intifada, the Arab world was moved by images of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy, Mohammed Al-Durrah, crying and hiding behind his father, Jamal Al-Durrah, before ultimately being shot and killed by an Israeli sniper.

Mohammed’s murder at the hands of the Israeli army was clearly caught on video. But even this did not prevent Israel from following its usual routine and trying to deflect responsibility.

In the immediate aftermath of the child’s murder, Israeli officials claimed that it was “significantly more likely that Palestinian gunmen were the source of the [gunfire that killed Al-Durrah].”

Over the years, the same scenario played out over and over again as Israel repeatedly committed atrocities, denied responsibility and walked back its baseless denials only when the evidence to the contrary became too compelling and the world’s attention had moved elsewhere.

This course of action proved beneficial for Israel as it bought it precious time in the court of public opinion. With Israeli voices dominating Western media reports, this post-atrocity routine helped Israel create a contested media narrative, and cast doubt over clear evidence of its crimes and excesses.

In this sense, the Western media coverage of and narrative on the al-Ahli Hospital bombing has been predictable.

There is already a large body of academic research suggesting mainstream Western news media sympathise with Israel and largely ignore or downplay its human rights violations against Palestinians.

Over the first 10-days of the current crisis, Western media behaved as anticipated. Outlets privileged Israeli point of views, suppressed Palestinian voices, and repeatedly talked of “Israeli self-defence” and “Palestinian aggression”.

In the days before the hospital bombing, BBC News ran multiple reports about alleged Hamas tunnels under public buildings, including schools and hospitals. It doesn’t need much explaining how this kind of uncritical repeating of Israeli propaganda by Western media organisations helps Israel perform its deceptive post-atrocity-routine effectively.

When the dust settles, independent investigations will inevitably show that Israel, which had already been bombing across Gaza’s residential buildings, mosques, banks, and universities, and had already killed thousands of Gaza Palestinians, including 750 children, is responsible for bombing al-Ahli Hospital.

And when the dust settles, Western media likely won’t give as much light to Israel’s guilt as it did to its denials.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

The contention that the roots of Israel’s current political crisis are to be found in its policies towards the Palestinian people is gaining currency. According to this perspective, the authoritarian legislative agenda of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, and the methods deployed to achieve it, represent the inevitable and inescapable culmination of Israel’s 75 years of oppression and repression of the Palestinian people, and particularly its systematic eradication of the rule of law in the Arab territories it has occupied since 1967.

Some additionally suggest that Netanyahu and his far-right allies’ primary motivation for promoting the legislative programme is to acquire powers with which to more intensively dispossess the Palestinian people.

It is an admittedly appealing argument, especially for those making the point that Israel’s claim to be a “Jewish and democratic state” is in fact a confession of ethnocracy and for those seeking to promote the inclusion of Palestinian rights within the agenda of the movement protesting the government’s reform plan.

The idea that Israel is experiencing a blowback in its domestic politics from its policies towards the Palestinians does have some basis in reality. To state the obvious, a Jewish supremacist regime necessarily empowers Jewish supremacists.

This, coupled with expansionist policies which require systematic violence and the permanent subjugation and dehumanisation of the Palestinian people, has over time elevated the most extremist and messianic leaders to the pinnacle of power.

As in similar situations throughout history, such forces tend to view any obstacle to their objectives, including established institutions and dissenting members of their own community, as disloyal elements that need to be neutralised.

The above notwithstanding, to interpret Israel’s current crisis as an organic product of its policies towards the Palestinians, or as a domestic replication of Israeli methods of rule vis-à-vis the Palestinians, is to fundamentally misunderstand both the nature of this crisis and the Palestinian reality.

Clearly, mass demonstrations carried out by Israelis at regular intervals throughout the country have not been criminalised, and those participating have, when confronted, encountered police forces using batons and water cannon rather than military units with snipers who shoot to maim and kill. Whatever one may think of Netanyahu and his plans for the Israeli judiciary, his government was constituted on the basis of an election and his agenda is being adopted by a parliament that the overwhelming majority of Israeli citizens embrace as the legitimate if not exclusive representation of their collective political will.

All this is a rather far cry from the Palestinian reality of being ruled by a foreign military government under a colonial regime imposing extraterritorial legislation by force.

The assertion that this crisis could have been averted if Israel had adopted a constitution may well be mistaken since constitutions, like judiciaries, can be revised and indeed replaced altogether.

More clearly nonsensical is the claim that Israel refrained from adopting one because it would otherwise have to declare its borders, and either enshrine equality for all its citizens or formally proclaim ethnocracy.

Constitutions do not delineate borders. And it is a matter of record that Israel’s 1948 declaration of statehood promised equality to those it was in the process of ethnically cleansing from their homeland, and that in 2018, the Knesset adopted a Basic Law defining Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people rather than of the citizens of the state.

Israel’s failure to adopt a constitution primarily reflects its founders’ unwillingness to take a position on the vexed question of religion and state, thus avoiding polarisation between the rabbinical establishment and secular elites. These two sides have clashed over the definition of Jewishness, but have displayed remarkable consensus on denying Palestinians their rights.

Similarly, the current crisis is first and foremost an internal dispute within Israel’s Jewish population and elites about the governance of their ethnocracy and the role of its institutions.

If advocates of the government’s agenda state that it will better enable them to dispossess the Palestinians and annex their lands, which indeed it will, this reflects marketing more than motivation. In Israel, apartheid sells better than authoritarianism, and “Nakba Now!” rates better than letting crooked politicians off the hook. The government would hardly garner the same level of support for its judicial agenda if it were to proclaim a key objective is to enable senior politicians like Netanyahu and Aryeh Deri to dodge accountability for corruption indictments.

The broad Israeli consensus on the dispossession of the Palestinians has also been apparent in the fact that most protest organisers have actively fought to exclude the rights of Palestinians – including of those who are Israeli citizens – from their movement.

Meanwhile, Western governments also seem more incensed by the institutional degradation of Israel’s ethnocracy than its existence or persistence. Criticisms, condemnations, and boycotts of Israel, its government, military, and economy, considered taboo if undertaken in response to its eradication of Palestinian rights and lives, are proudly announced and even encouraged in defence of a judiciary that is institutionally guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The priority of the West – and its sole interest in the matter – is the stability of its strategic ally. That’s how the “rules-based international order” works – rules and rights only enter the equation if violated by rivals and adversaries.

Yet this crisis is, in significant part, of the West’s own making. For decades, and increasingly in recent years, it has ensured total impunity for Israeli leaders. It is only natural that these leaders conduct themselves like spoiled toddlers, grabbing and smashing anything and everything within reach, and directing tantrums at their enablers in Washington and Brussels at the slightest hint of reservation about their course of action.

They have, through endless repetition, been desensitised by their Western sponsors to consideration of consequence. It no longer exists in their calculations, and they have as a result become incapable of inhibition.

It might additionally be observed that it is a little rich for the West to spend decades celebrating Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, losing no opportunity to strengthen it with acts of commission and omission, and then have a meltdown about the entirely predictable consequences of doing so – primarily because Israeli authoritarianism complicates their Middle Eastern policies in ways that support for apartheid never could.

It is in this sense that impunity has come home to roost. As always, the price will be paid within the region, mainly by Palestinians and, to lesser extent, by Israelis as well.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.