The 'Israeli take'

According to the Sun-Herald of July 23, Australian journalists gathered “with uncommon enthusiasm” at Sydney's Quay restaurant last week to hear Hirsh Goodman's “Israeli take” on the current conflict in the Middle East.

Goodman, of the Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University and guest of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), told them that Tehran was pulling the strings of Hezbollah, who were visiting “another 9-11” on Israel.

Although both the Sydney Morning Herald (in a string of editorials from July 15-22) and The Australian have been dining out on Goodman's “Israeli take”, it was predictably only Murdoch's The Australian which pigged out on his 9-11 hype.

In a bizarre page-length editorial on July 22, which could have been written by Goodman himself, we were told that “In facing down Iran, Israel's cause is the cause of the whole world. The simple fact of the Israeli ideal, that Jews stand and fight, rather than appease their enemies, will always apply, even if it creates Armageddon in the Middle East.”

Armageddon no less! And this from a newspaper which, in an even more bizarre page-length editorial the day before, had the gall to attack redoubtable Israel critic, Antony Loewenstein, as emotional.

As always, to get a more nuanced understanding of events than the “Israeli take” endlessly regurgitated in the Australian press, one has to turn to the Internet, to commentary by veteran Israeli peacenik, Uri Avnery, for example.

Avnery, a relentless critic of the Israeli junk food industry, informs us that Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader “is far from being a marionette of Iran or Syria. He heads an authentic Lebanese movement, and calculates his own balance sheet of pros and cons. If he had been asked by Iran and or Syria to do something - for which there is no proof - and he saw that it was contrary to the aims of his movement, he would not have done it.”

Why then did he authorise the capture of two Israeli soldiers? For Avnery the timing was crucial:

Two weeks before, the Israeli army had started a war against the population of the Gaza Strip. There too, the pretext was provided by a guerrilla action in which an Israeli soldier was captured. The Israeli Government used the opportunity to destroy the newly elected Palestinian Government, dominated by Hamas ... One thing is clear: Nasrallah would not have started this vicious circle of violence if the Palestinians had not called for help. Either from cool calculation, or from true moral outrage, or from both - Nasrallah rushed to the rescue of beleaguered Palestine.

The pretext for Israel's war against the people of Lebanon was also provided by a guerrilla action in which Israeli soldiers were captured. Israel's take of course, dutifully reflected in our print media, is that, but for what it calls the “kidnapping” of its troops, all would today be quiet on its northern front.

Leaving aside the fact that kidnapping-hostage taking has long been an Israeli art form, with hundreds of Palestinian (and Lebanese) “suspects” taken from their homes and locked up without charge or trial over the years (occasioning not a flicker of interest from the Australian media), we get no sense from the Israeli take - or its echo in the Australian media - that there might have been far more to this than a mere case of provocation justifying an act of self-defence, that indeed such a provocation may have been just the kind of pretext Israel was looking for to wade into Lebanon.

Lebanon's naharnet.com quoted Jane's Foreign Report newsletter in 2002 as saying that “Israel had laid down plans for bombing every power plant in Beirut and forcing the Lebanese Government to hold its meetings under candlelight”. The same report also quoted a senior Israeli government official as saying that “the population of northern Israel from Kiryat Shmona to Haifa will be evacuated into underground bomb shelters for three to five days while the Israeli army would bomb Lebanon back to the Stone Age.”

Confirming Jane's, the San Francisco Chronicle's Matthew Kalman revealed on July 21 that “Israel's military response by air, land and sea to what it considered a provocation last week by Hezbollah militants is unfolding according to a plan finalised more than a year ago.”

Kalman quoted Israeli professor of political science, Gerald Steinberg, as saying that “Of all of Israel's wars ... this was the one for which Israel was the most prepared ... the preparation began in May 2000, immediately after the Israeli withdrawal ... By 2004, the military campaign scheduled to last about three weeks that we're seeing now had already been blocked out and, in the last year or two, it's been simulated and rehearsed across the board.”

The Australian print media's “Israeli take” on these events has generally precluded any discussion of previous Israeli assaults on Lebanon which might have helped readers contextualise its latest and made them more resistant to 9-11 hype. The Herald's editorial of July 14 did, to its credit, point out the futility of Israel's 18-year occupation of Lebanon following its 1982 invasion, but in an appalling gaffe wrote, “The Israeli army rolled into southern Lebanon in 1982 seeking to wipe out the PLO which had sought cover alongside the Shiite Hezbollah militia”. The point being that Hezbollah did not come into existence until after, and in response to, the Israeli invasion.

If Israel's 1982 invasion and occupation of Lebanon led to the creation of Hezbollah, its 1996 “Grapes of Wrath” offensive and its massacre of 109 Lebanese refugees at a UN compound near Qana in south Lebanon served to cement its place in Lebanese affairs. Israel's record in Lebanon has been one of failure heaped on failure. But from the perspective of the “Israeli take” in our print media who would know?

If the Australian print media's adoption of the “Israeli take” were not sufficient reason to desert it for the Internet, its approach to those obscene photos showing Israeli girls writing “To Hezbollah with love from Israel” on artillery shells is.

A common trope in The Australian, the Herald and The Daily Telegraph over the years (coinciding with the Palestinian textbook hoax) has been the canard that Palestinian children are deliberately indoctrinated to hate Israel - as opposed to hating those who shoot, wound, arrest, torture, dispossess or otherwise persecute them and their families.

The Daily Telegraph, for example, on its front page of December 11, 2001 featured a photograph of Palestinian children, taken in a refugee camp in Lebanon, dressed as suicide bombers. “Dressed up to kill”, screamed the 3cm headline. The accompanying text described these children as “filled with hate” and quoted a child psychologist's assumption that their parents had brainwashed them into thinking this was “the way to paradise”. It then degenerated even further by suggesting a parallel with Al-Qaida's recruitment methods.

The Daily Telegraph of July 19 this year featured the Israeli girls with the caption “Pens are as mighty as a missile ... Israeli girls write messages on artillery shells bound for southern Lebanon.” A more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger 1 cm side heading read, “What hope for peace in a hell like this?”. This was followed by a sympathetic: “Their hair in pigtails and bracelets on their wrists, they could be ordinary girls doodling away with marker pens. But instead they are scrawling inflammatory messages on deadly missiles to be fired over the border into Lebanon. These Israeli girls have grown up in a region accustomed to violence - and there seems little hope that the next generation will embrace peace.”

No hint of indoctrination here, these girls were simply victims of their environment. The fact that journalist Luke McIlveen had before him a genuine example of the pornography of war, a photo opportunity staged by some blunderer in Israeli military PR, could not possibly, in a Murdoch publication with a full-on “Israeli take”, tempt him into drawing some pretty damning conclusions. Maybe in Piers Akerman's column the next day? No way. Piers' column was predictably titled “War zone whingers suddenly Australian”.

The Australian, too chose one of these photos for its front page, captioning it “Israeli girls write messages in Hebrew on shells ready to be fired towards Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon.” Not only was there no critical commentary to follow - there was in fact no commentary whatever.

However, sensing that some of us have memories of opinion pieces (Israel apologist, Greg Sheridan, is one that comes to mind) and editorials lambasting the Palestinians for allegedly miseducating their children, The Australian acted pre-emptively in an editorial in the same issue: “Those who condemn images of Israeli girls writing messages on artillery shells are rarely if ever heard denouncing the relentless propaganda that brainwashes Palestinian children and celebrates the deeds of suicide bombers.”

Of course, it's the “Israeli take” that determines who is brainwashed by “relentless propaganda” and who isn't. Thank God for the Internet!