GAZA

IT IS A testament to the standards of journalism now abroad that the oldest propaganda trick in the book is being practiced in Gaza and swallowed in the West like a ration pack.

If truth is the first casualty in any war, then the last tactic is always the humanitarian ambush.

The artistic presentation of singularly thin and deformed children, in the arms of well-fed mothers and surrounded by robust family members, never seems to spark questions in the minds of a western media fed a story it is just desperate to believe: that Israel is starving the population of Gaza to death.

Israel has gotten itself into a mess in Gaza, any idiot can see that. It’s spent almost two years chasing Hamas up and down the strip. Now, it can hardly go forward and it doesn’t seem able to go back. It has bombed the place to a pulp and still Hamas exists and still the hostages Israel seeks to free are in captivity. All that is left is a civilian population, scrambling for food in the chaos of war.

In two years, Israel has gone from being the original victim in all this to being the perpetrator of “genocide”: western media only deals in victims and the word “genocide” is thrown about these days like spit on the wind. If you want to know what genuine genocide looks like, study the Holocaust, Rwanda, Armenia, episodes like that. This is not genocide. This is war. It’s ugly. Chaotic. The weakest usually suffer most. Armies in retreat often offer up their civilians to slow the advance of the enemy. Guerilla armies swim in the ocean of their people (Yes, Mao!).

The irony, of people from countries who dropped nuclear weapons, carpet bombed, starved and used chemicals on enemies to win their wars, calling Israel out for genocide in Gaza, cannot be lost on anyone with half a brain*.

The civilians of Gaza, many of whom support Hamas, cheer Hamas, and once upon a time actually elected Hamas, and quite a few of whom are Hamas, are suffering. If you start a war and the enemy is stronger and hits back, you are probably going to suffer. That is how you defeat your enemy. You make them suffer until they surrender. Hamas launched this war with brutal intent, possibly in the hope that Benjamin Netanyahu would do exactly as he has done. Again, this is an old strategy: you do something your enemy cannot, will not, forgive. It entices your enemy to come down hard on your own people, hardening them further against that enemy and bringing those of your own people who were perhaps a little soft at first in behind you. That’s the theory. It has to be handled with care because just a little too much suffering can cause your own population to turn on you. Hamas is at that stage right now, hence the move from battlefield news, where it is not doing so well, to stories of starving and suffering children, where it can definitely win. The humanitarian ambush tactic.

Even recognition of a Palestinian state will not give Hamas any more than Gaza. And that’s where it was ruling before all this. They are not wanted in the other Palestinian territory, the West Bank. Indeed, the big story here is the silence of the West Bank during all this, but that does not suit many media narratives. So, it’s ignored. Where is the huge rising of West Bank Palestinians in support of their Gazan brothers and sisters? There should be brutal gun battles, especially in the illegal Jewish settlement areas. Truth is the West Bank authority, the old PLO/Fatah (remember them?), probably want Israel to wipe Hamas out because Hamas threw them out of power in Gaza decades ago.

A bleeding heart is all very nice when you have no skin in the game. When it’s your skin at stake, that heart freezes over very quickly.

*It is the policy of the Kookaburra Bugle that establishing a Jewish state in an area overwhelmingly Arab and Islamic, was pure folly, however well-intentioned it may have been. The perfidy of promising Jews a homeland in Palestine speaks for itself. The Palestinian Arabs were wickedly short-changed by European imperialist realpolitik. In other words, shit happens. Israel now exists, actually voted into existence by the United Nations. Yes. And in doing so they ignited a blood feud. And groups like Hamas want to wipe Israel and its Jewish inhabitants off the face of the earth. While Israel’s right want the mirror image. Go figure – ED