[ A former permanent representative of Israel to the United
Nations said he was very puzzled by the constant concern which the
world is showing for the Palestinian people. He cited U.S. actions
after Sept. 11 as a model for what Israel should do]
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PAST LIES ABOUT WAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST ARE GETTING IN THE WAY OF THE
TRUTH TODAY  
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Zeynep Tufekci
October 31, 2023
New York Times
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_ A former permanent representative of Israel to the United Nations
said he was very puzzled by the constant concern which the world is
showing for the Palestinian people. He cited U.S. actions after Sept.
11 as a model for what Israel should do _

Colin Powell, Timothy A. Clary/Agence France-Presse (AFP) // New York
Times

 

Moshe Lavi, whose relatives have been taken hostage by Hamas, recently
talked to a group of New York Times journalists about his family’s
agony.

His pained voice turned to anger when he recounted encountering
disbelief that Hamas committed terrible atrocities when it attacked
Israel. Lavi seemed especially bewildered by people “arguing over
the semantics” of whether people were beheaded or their heads fell
off or even whether there were hostages in Gaza.

In one particularly gruesome twist, there’s been an uproar over
whether Hamas had beheaded babies — an unverified claim
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President Biden repeated before the White House walked it back and has
been subject to much discussion since.

Indeed, since Hamas did murder children and take others as hostages,
should it get credit if it didn’t also behead them? It’s an
appalling thought.

Some of this skepticism is surely the result of antisemitism. But
that’s not all that’s going on.

One key reason for some of the incidents of doubt is the suspicion
that horrendous but false or exaggerated claims are being used as a
rationale for war — and there are many such historical examples,
most notably the Iraq war.

Recently, a former permanent representative of Israel to the United
Nations told Britain’s Sky News that he was “very puzzled by the
constant concern which the world,” he said, “is showing for the
Palestinian people.” He cited U.S. actions after Sept. 11 as a model
for what Israel should do in response to Hamas’s shocking massacre
of civilians on Oct. 7, which many have called Israel’s Sept. 11.

But if the U.S. response after Sept. 11 is a model, it is as a model
of what not to do.

After the attacks, the United States received deep global sympathy.
Many Muslims around the world were furious about this blemish upon
Islam, even if they opposed U.S. policies: Citizens held vigils
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politicians condemned the attacks and clerics repudiated them
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mosque sermons. (The idea that Muslims widely celebrated the attacks
has been repeatedly shown to be false or traces back to a few
instances of dubious clarity.)

But, instead of mobilizing that widespread global sympathy to try to
isolate the extremists, the United States chose to wage a reckless and
destructive war in Iraq, driven by an impulsive desire for vengeance
and justified by falsehoods about weapons of mass destruction.

The Bush administration’s lies in the lead-up to the war, the fiasco
of its occupation and the chaos, violence and death that the invasion
set off have deeply and indelibly damaged the standing and credibility
of the United States and its allies.

People in the region were seared by images of Iraqi institutions
— hospitals
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being looted while the U.S. military did
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shot as they returned home from a hospital
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at checkpoints
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they missed a hand signal
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of the torture and sadism
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People also saw how occupation policies, like the quick and
thoughtless disbanding of the Iraqi Army, contributed to the creation
of ISIS
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decade later.

In the Middle East, the devastating aftermath of that war —
justified by false claims — has never ended.

To make matters worse, the Israeli government has a long history
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making false claims and denying responsibility for atrocities that
later proved to be its doing.

In one example of many, in 2014, four boys younger than 13
were killed by Israeli airstrikes
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playing by themselves at a beach — three of them hit by a second
blast while desperately fleeing the initial blast.

There was first a concerted effort among some pro-Israel social media
activists to claim
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explosions were due to a Hamas rocket misfiring. The Israeli military
initially claimed that
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target of this strike was Hamas terrorist operatives.” However, the
beach was near a hotel housing journalists
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Western outlets, including at least one from
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New York Times, who witnessed the killings. The Guardian reported
that journalists
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visited the area in the aftermath saw no weapons or equipment
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that kids regularly played there.

Israel then
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and exonerated itself. Peter Lerner, then a spokesman for the Israel
Defense Forces, said that it had targeted a
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belonging to Hamas’s Naval Police and Naval Force (including naval
commandos) and which was utilized exclusively by militants.”

But The Telegraph, whose correspondent also witnessed the incident,
reported that some of the journalists
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had seen the bombing said there had been “no attempt to interview
them.”

One can see how this history plays out in the global upheaval over the
Hamas claim two weeks ago that an Israeli missile struck a
hospital courtyard
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Gaza. Israeli and American officials denied this and asserted that the
missile came from within Gaza. There were also initial claims that 500
people were killed in the hospital blast, leading to headlines and
global condemnations. Then the number was challenged, leading to
another round of uproar and back-and-forth.

It is certainly possible that the hospital may have been accidentally
hit by a missile fired in Gaza — such misfires have happened. But
Israel’s bombardment has also caused large civilian casualties. The
evidence isn’t conclusive
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way, and the truth remains unknown.

Yet to a family that lost members in the hospital blast — which U.S.
officials estimate killed hundreds — that squabble over exact
numbers might seem as cruel as the skepticism about the atrocities
committed by Hamas to an Israeli family that suffered during the Oct.
7 attack.

But there’s still the fact that fabricating or exaggerating
atrocities _is_ done to influence the calculus of what the public
will accept — including what costs are justified to impose on
civilians.

In 1990, after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, there was widespread
resistance in the United States to the idea of a new war — the
country had not shaken “Vietnam syndrome
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that it was best for the United States to avoid large foreign military
entanglements, both for practical and moral reasons.

It was in this context that a teenager testified before Congress in
1990 that she had seen Iraqi soldiers take premature babies out of
incubators and leave them to die on the cold floor — a shocking
assertion repeated by many high-level officials. The claim was widely
repeated by officials and the media and even by Amnesty International.

Kept secret was the fact that the witness was the daughter of the
Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States and her false testimony had
likely been organized by a public relations firm working for the
Kuwaiti government.

The shocking fabrication played a key role in the effort to sell the
war [[link removed]] to the
reluctant American public. Needing to make sure oil fields stayed in
the hands of the rulers of a tiny country created by colonial powers
in the early 20th century went only so far. Opposing an army so savage
that it commits the most unthinkable crimes is a more convincing
appeal for war.

The terrible outcome of all this history is widespread distrust and
dehumanization, as ordinary people’s loss and pain are viewed
suspiciously as a potential cudgel that will cause further loss and
pain for others.

Even people who I know have no sympathies toward Hamas or any kind of
terrorism roll their eyes at some of the recent accounts of
atrocities. “We always hear of something terrible when they want to
go to war — how convenient,” one acquaintance told me recently.

There are plenty of echoes of this on social media. “Hamas beheaded
babies, Saddam had WMD and I’m the last unicorn,” one person
posted on X. Another one said, “The ‘40 babies beheaded by
Hamas’ lie is equivalent to the WMD’s lie.”

Such sentiments are widespread.

All this highlights the importance of voices capable of retaining
trust and consistent concern for all victims.

I was heartened to see that Human Rights Watch independently verified
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of the videos of the horror on Oct. 7 and called the attacks
deliberate killings. Similarly, Amnesty International’s independent
investigation led the group to condemn
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as “cruel and brutal crimes including mass summary killings,
hostage-taking.” Both organizations have called for the attacks to
be investigated as war crimes.

Both organizations also have a history of documenting Israeli
wrongdoings, including its treatment of civilians in Gaza and the West
Bank, and both organizations have been vilified for doing so,
especially by the government of Israel
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and lawmakers
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Yet these are the kinds of independent voices that need to be heard.
In a context where many in the region and world already see the United
States as reflexively supporting Israel, no matter its conduct,
President Biden might consider elevating such independent human rights
voices rather than embracing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

As Amnesty International states
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kidnapping civilians is a war crime and the hostages should be
released, unharmed. And their families shouldn’t have to endure this
suspicion on top of their pain.

But to credibly demand that war crimes be stopped and lives respected
requires equal concern extended to all victims, including the two
million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

The victims are real — all of them — and that’s where all
efforts to rebuild credibility or to seek a solution must begin.

_[ZEYNEP TUFEKCI [[link removed]] (@zeynep
[[link removed]]) is a professor of sociology and
public affairs at Princeton University, the author of “Twitter and
Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest
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and a New York Times Opinion columnist. @zeynep
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* Israel-Gaza War
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* Israel
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* Palestine
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* Gaza
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* Gaza City
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* Palestinians
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* Hamas
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* Hostages
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* Benjamin Netanyahu
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* war crimes
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* Terrorists
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* Terrorism
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* Biden Administration
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* Afghanistan
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* Afghanistan War
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* Iraq War
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* Bush administration
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* George Bush
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* Colin Powell
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* Donald Rumsfeld
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* weapons of mass destruction
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