Kicking off in Israel

[Calculon]

Weird, there's no paywall for me

[Tichtheid]

I clicked on the link, read a few sentences, clicked off then when I went back there was a paywall.

They seem to be talking about October the 7th. That was horrendous, I don't think anyone has disputed that.

It doesn't justify what has followed though, they have levelled parts of the country in response and are continuing to do so - total "ground zero" type annihilation seems to be the goal.

[Calculon]

I tend to use NPR on my mobile and the link opens fine there, you just have to refresh it when it does the paywall thing, maybe it's different on a laptop.

the article doesn't try and justify anything, it's about what Hamas did to Israeli women and girls, actions that are widely dismissed as lies by pro Palestinian supporters.

maybe i missed this but what do you think Isreal's response should have been after the October 7th attack?

[Guy Smiley]

actions that are widely dismissed as lies by pro Palestinian supporters.

Are they? I follow a few Left leaning online entities, some ardently supportive of Palestine. None of the profiles I've seen have gone anywhere near denial of the atrocities committed that day. Most people seem to agree that Hamas are beyond the pale, a terrorist organisation with no genuine regard for its own citizens.

Where the debate gets skewed, I think... is in the wider coverage of the conflict and the roles of the main players leading up to it. Israel is heavily supported by what you could call 'the machine'... the heavy media that swings the most clout. So we get easy access to one side of this story, one which I personally treat with some scepticsm because the battleground includes public relations and propaganda (from both sides). That's where a lot of kickback stems from, I think... neither side are innocent here, both have been operating outside of the law for years and yet we are constantly told that one side is, well, less than human while the other is only defending itself... while it carries out a large scale atrocity. A lot of people see the injustice and there is an emotional response to that.

[Calculon]

yes they are, pretty much the default position from what i've seen of Palestinian supporters on social media

[C69]

I've not seen denial of the October 7th atrocities either.
I have seen the initial propaganda stating that the attacks on Gaza will be surgical and civilians are not at risk. Tbh this bullshit has stopped now. Now the IDF just say the collateral deaths will be looked at.
The sexual violence by HAMAS and the IDF is appalling.

[Uncle fester]

You're "debating" with a guy who when under the cosh starts firing out terms like "katlicks". More fool you for debating in good faith.

[Calculon]

I've not seen denial of the October 7th atrocities either.

good for you, and if you want it to stay like that don't go on twitter

[C69]

I've not seen denial of the October 7th atrocities either.

good for you, and if you want it to stay like that don't go on twitter

I don't have twitter
"Lasses and benders"

[sefton]

You can find any view to justify your own bias if you look for it on Twitter.

[Calculon]

I've not seen denial of the October 7th atrocities either.

good for you, and if you want it to stay like that don't go on twitter

I don't have twitter
"Lasses and benders"

you claim to have a subscription to Haaretz, so you can read this and if you're feeling kind post it on here

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/202 ... ffabf10000

this is also quite interesting

https://www.jpost.com/israel-hamas-war/article-777918

Spoiler

Show

Over 70% of Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip support Hamas' decision to carry out the October 7 Massacre and the vast majority do not believe that Hamas carried out atrocities during the massacre, according to a new poll published by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) on Wednesday.
The poll found that there were "significant differences" between the attitudes of West Bank residents and Gaza residents. In the West Bank, 82% believed that Hamas' decision to launch the attack was correct and only 12% said it was incorrect, while in Gaza, 57% said it was correct and 37% said it was incorrect.

Additionally, while 85% of West Bank Palestinians expressed satisfaction with Hamas' behavior in the war, only 52% of Gazan Palestinians felt the same. In reference to specifically Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, 57% of West Bank residents expressed satisfaction with his role, while 43% of Gazans said the same.

Palestinians in general expressed disappointment with Fatah and the PA, with only 22% expressing satisfaction with Fatah's role in the war and only 14% expressing satisfaction with the PA's role.
Among the respondents, 85% said that they did not see videos showing the atrocities committed by Hamas against Israeli civilians on October 7. Only 7% of respondents said that they believed that Hamas committed such atrocities.
The poll found that 95% of Palestinians believe Israel has committed war crimes during the war, while only 10% said that they believe Hamas has committed such crimes.

[Calculon]

You can find any view to justify your own bias if you look for it on Twitter.

when i said the fake hospital was an obvious fake you referenced alex jones and called me a wingnut, but thanks for that

[Guy Smiley]

You can find any view to justify your own bias if you look for it on Twitter.

when i said the fake hospital was an obvious fake you referenced alex jones and called me a wingnut, but thanks for that

Speaking of hospitals, the IDF never did find that evidence to support attacking Al Shifa, did they.

Maybe it was just another regrettable mistake.

[sefton]

You can find any view to justify your own bias if you look for it on Twitter.

when i said the fake hospital was an obvious fake you referenced alex jones and called me a wingnut, but thanks for that

I’d call you a liar but I’ll be generous and assume you have some memory issues.

[C69]

good for you, and if you want it to stay like that don't go on twitter

I don't have twitter
"Lasses and benders"

you claim to have a subscription to Haaretz, so you can read this and if you're feeling kind post it on here

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/202 ... ffabf10000

this is also quite interesting

https://www.jpost.com/israel-hamas-war/article-777918

Spoiler

Show

Over 70% of Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip support Hamas' decision to carry out the October 7 Massacre and the vast majority do not believe that Hamas carried out atrocities during the massacre, according to a new poll published by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) on Wednesday.
The poll found that there were "significant differences" between the attitudes of West Bank residents and Gaza residents. In the West Bank, 82% believed that Hamas' decision to launch the attack was correct and only 12% said it was incorrect, while in Gaza, 57% said it was correct and 37% said it was incorrect.

Additionally, while 85% of West Bank Palestinians expressed satisfaction with Hamas' behavior in the war, only 52% of Gazan Palestinians felt the same. In reference to specifically Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, 57% of West Bank residents expressed satisfaction with his role, while 43% of Gazans said the same.

Palestinians in general expressed disappointment with Fatah and the PA, with only 22% expressing satisfaction with Fatah's role in the war and only 14% expressing satisfaction with the PA's role.
Among the respondents, 85% said that they did not see videos showing the atrocities committed by Hamas against Israeli civilians on October 7. Only 7% of respondents said that they believed that Hamas committed such atrocities.
The poll found that 95% of Palestinians believe Israel has committed war crimes during the war, while only 10% said that they believe Hamas has committed such crimes.

Not really a Sagi Cohen fan myself.
Now give me Gideon Levy and you may realise why I subscribe to Haaretz.

Conspiracy Theories and Lies | Denial of Hamas' October 7 Massacre Is Gaining Pace Online
Denial of Hamas' atrocities is gaining traction online as more and more people play down the terror group's responsibility for its brutal murders, rapes and destruction

Denial of the atrocities of October 7 or attempts to downplay Hamas’ role have been gaining traction on social media – to the point that some Israelis are following suit, even lawmakers.

The false posts mix lies and baseless allegations – against the backdrop of antisemitism and anti-Israel stances. Conspiracy theorists don’t claim that the entire event was fabricated, but they say the death toll is much lower than reported.

From victim to victimizer: Why some E. J'lem Arabs feel drawn to October 7 conspiracies
Israel's dead: The names of those killed in Hamas massacres and the Israel-Hamas war
Israeli mother willing to become Hamas hostage to reunite with daughters
They argue that Hamas didn’t plan to kill civilians and mainly targeted soldiers, that atrocities such as rape and beheadings didn’t take place, and that most of the civilians murdered were actually killed in an exchange of fire or by the Israeli army.
Like other fake news campaigns, these theories rely on snippets of evidence while completely ignoring anything that contradicts them. One video that went viral claims that all the deaths at Kibbutz Be’eri were the work of Israeli tanks that lost control and simply shelled houses.
The video relies on isolated comments in the media – in a few cases, the army really did have to shell houses where terrorists had barricaded themselves a few days into the war. And it wasn’t clear if Israeli civilians were inside.

As is typical, this video relies on one statement, in this case a comment on the radio by a survivor who said that hostages at Be’eri were shot by the army.

An Israeli Arab lawmaker claimed that 'no babies were slaughtered ... and no women were raped.'

The deniers completely ignore the plethora of videos and photos showing that Hamas murdered Israelis and burned their houses. The conspiracy theorists highlight the minority of cases in which Hamas left hostages alive, with the deniers concluding that the army killed its own citizens and that Hamas actually acted humanely.

The deniers’ bottom line is that Hamas attacked merely to take hostages in the hope of exchanging them for Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails, and that Israel invents myths to justify its bombing of Gaza.

Many conspiracy theorists say the army simply followed instructions under the famous Hannibal Directive, which the army under then-Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot canceled in 2016. In certain situations, the directive allowed the endangering of a soldier’s life in order to prevent an abduction.

Somehow the misperception has taken root of “unwritten permission” to let soldiers be killed so that they aren’t taken prisoner, but the army has reiterated that this is false.
Another video claims that the massacre at the rave near Kibbutz Re’im never took place. Instead, it asserts that the killings there stemmed from an exchange of fire between the army and police on one side and Hamas on the other.

The deniers claim that Hamas was on its way to Israeli army bases, encountered police and army roadblocks, and the revelers who fled the party got caught in the crossfire. The deniers note the many cars in the area that were burned and riddled with bullets.

This ignores the many testimonies and videos including those showing Hamas terrorists throwing grenades into shelters, as well as a recently published video showing the party’s bar area strewn with corpses.

Other lies include an attempt to refute any claim that Hamas committed atrocities such as rape, beheadings, murders of babies and burnings of victims alive. One weapon is actually artificial intelligence, which the deniers use to cast doubt on real photos. On X, formerly Twitter, deniers repeatedly claim that gruesome images – including a photo of a dead baby – are the fake work of AI tools.
Other weapons include the few cases of false or unsubstantiated claims by Israelis; for example, the false claim about a baby that was “baked in an oven” by Hamas terrorists. These isolated cases have become ammunition in the hands of deniers.

The conspiracy theories have largely been spread by social media users abroad, notably thenames_ahmad, Max Blumenthal and Jackson Hinkle. Some Israelis are slowly following suit. For example, one Israeli X user caused a stir this week by claiming that only about 400 people were killed – and not massacred – on October 7. He repeated the crossfire and Hannibal Directive myths.

He wrote that Hamas didn’t want a massacre but only to take control of Israeli communities near Gaza. On Sunday, Iman Khatib-Yassin, a lawmaker for the United Arab List party, claimed that “no babies were slaughtered ... and no women were raped.” She apologized after the chairman of her party, Mansour Abbas, strongly condemned her.

The custodians of social media sites do very little to combat the flood of fake news. Instagram removed a video denying the murders at Be’eri, but the footage is still widely available on X and TikTok.

Emotional triggering

Such posts are part of the “post-truth” reality of recent years. “In the past we could rely on what was in front of our eyes, but today – due to manipulations, deepfakes and the use of various technologies – we’re in a world where no matter what you see, it’s not enough to be definitive,” says Asa Shapira, the head of the marketing and advertising track at Tel Aviv University’s communications department.

“It threatens Western culture because democracies need agreement on what reality is. It undermines the ability to agree on the reality that’s out there.”
Shapira says a number of phenomena fuel fake news, disinformation and conspiracy theories like those denying October 7. “The goal of the social media algorithm is to flood [the reader with] posts that will produce a higher level of engagement,” he says.

“Emotionally stimulating content presses on our nerves – and this emotional triggering is fertile ground for fake news. The algorithms also create a sounding board where we’re only exposed to certain posts, not to those that undermine our worldview.”

Also, we suffer from confirmation bias: People are inclined to believe something that aligns with their worldview and reject something that challenges it.

“If you come across fake news or manipulation, you won’t look at it with a critical eye if it bolsters your worldview. And when I see information I don’t agree with, I’ll come up with explanations about why it’s incorrect – and this will bolster my opposing position,” Shapira says.

“There’s a feeling that the world has gone crazy and become populist – and the engine for this is social media, which drives a shallow, emotionally biased and simplistic debate.”

[C69]

Good peice by Levy from Dec 23rd

Opinion | By Trying to Humiliate Gaza to Its Core, Israel Is the One Being Humiliated

As if all this were not enough – the thousands of dead children, the death toll nearing 20,000, the hundreds of thousands uprooted from their homes, the tens of thousands of wounded and the starvation, disease and destruction in Gaza – on top of this, they must also be humiliated. Humiliated to the core, so that they learn.

Israelis are still captive to Netanyahu's doctrine
The 'accidental' execution of a civilian must be a reminder: Immorality kills
Israeli jails must not become execution facilities for Palestinians
We must show them (and ourselves) who they are (and who we are). To show how strong we are and how weak they are. It's good for morale. It's good for the soldiers. It's good for the home front. A Hanukkah gift of humiliated Palestinians: What could bring more joy?

There is no greater proof that we have lost our way than the despicable attempts to humiliate the Palestinians for all to see. There is no greater proof of moral weakness than the need to humiliate them in their defeat.

Open gallery view
Israeli military vehicles are seen in the town of Tul Karm, West Bank, Wednesday, Nov. 22, 2023.Credit: Majdi Mohammed /AP
We are like Hamas; if they are such monsters, then we can also be, just a little. After expunging the lives of the Gazans, their property, their homes and their children, we will now also crush what remains of their dignity. We will force them to their knees, until they surrender.


Images and videos from last week: dozens of men on their knees, wearing only underpants, their hands tied behind their backs, their eyes blindfolded, their gazes lowered. One group is on a razed street, another in a sand pit, soldiers standing over them.

Open gallery view
Hamas fighters surrender to the Israeli army on Thursday, in north Gaza.Credit: Use according to Section 27a of the Copyright Law
Bingo, a victory image. A few of the soldiers are masked; perhaps they are ashamed of their behavior – we can only hope. Their victims are young men and also older ones; some are fat, with potbellies, others gaunt, some have pale skin and others are scorched by the hardships of the war. Perhaps their children watched them, perhaps their wives; that would heighten the achievement.

According to reports, they were removed from a UN Relief and Works Agency shelter in Beit Lahia and detained for questioning. No one knows for sure if any of them were even Hamas members. After the victory photo, they were taken to an unknown location, their fate unclear. Who even cares, besides their loved ones?

Open gallery view
This image grab from a video posted on social media shows an Israeli soldier standing guard next to stripped-off, detained Palestinians in Gaza, this week.Credit: - - AFP
What good does it do? This isn't the first time the Israeli army has stripped Palestinians this way in order to humiliate them. Such "walks of shame" were held in the past in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and Lebanon. Wanted and unwanted men in underpants, for all to see.

That's what Israel does, and it's important to record the event and to spread the images. But the truth is that the images humiliate the Israel Defense Forces much more than they humiliate its naked victims.

But even this public undressing was not sufficient humiliation of them in this accursed war. Two weeks after the war broke out, IDF and Shin Bet security service forces took over the home of senior Hamas official Saleh al-Arouri, in the West Bank of village of Aroura – Arouri is now based in Lebanon – and attached to its facade an enormous Arabic-language banner that reads: "Here was Arouri's home, which became the headquarters of Abu Al-Nimr of the Shin Bet." Poor agent Abu Al-Nimr: His HQ was destroyed a few days later, and with it the spectacular display, but the taste of the infantile humiliation remains.

Open gallery view
Palestinians walk on a damaged road following an Israeli military raid in Jenin refugee camp, last month.Credit: Majdi Mohammed /AP
In Gaza, our forces destroyed the parliament building and the courthouse. Why? Why not? In the Jenin refugee camp, in the West Bank, they smashed all the monuments, including the "key of return" at its entrance.

The army also destroyed and plundered the great, tin horse at the hospital entrance, constructed by a German sculptor from the wreckage of destroyed Palestinian ambulances, a monument to the dead. In Tul Karm it demolished the Yasser Arafat memorial. Soon we'll scorch their consciousness too.

Open gallery view
IDF soldiers in the Gaza Strip on Monday.Credit: IDF Spokesperson's Unit
And the height of the grotesquerie: The commander of the Nahal Infantry Brigade's 932nd Battalion, in an IDF Spokesperson's Unit video, flaunts Ismail Haniyeh's credit card, which expired in 2019. Kudos to the IDF. "You fled like cowards and we even got to your credit card," the officer babbles.

Commentators explained that perhaps it was the credit card of someone with the same name: Our Haniyeh hasn't lived here for a long time. But Haniyeh's son lives here, and the IDF spokesperson neither rests nor sleeps: Here are the receipts that prove he bought jewelry. The great victory is closer than ever.

[C69]

Tbh I quite like Hass as well

Opinion | Israel Killed Thousands of Children in Gaza. How Can So Many Israelis Remain Indifferent?
For decades we've been brought up believing that only military force can ensure the state's survival, while denying rights to the Palestinians. That's just one of many sad answers to the question


The Gaza Strip is gradually being erased, along with its families, its people, its children, their smiles and laughter. What enables the majority of Jewish Israelis to support this systematic and mass erasure?

What enables them to see it as the only suitable response to the massacre that Hamas and its accomplices perpetrated, to the military humiliation of Israel and to the indescribable suffering of the hostages, the wounded, the survivors, their families and the families of the hundreds killed?

- Advertisement -

Israel's military is erasing the streets of Gaza's cities and the alleys of its refugee camps. It's erasing Gaza's beach promenades, villages and its unexpected yet existing agricultural areas. It's erasing its cultural institutions, universities and archaeological sites.

Open gallery view
A woman in Rafah in southern Gaza on Saturday. We Jews have assumed a monopoly on the suffering caused by the cruelty of the Other.Credit: Mohammed Abed/AFP
Hamas' military infrastructure is being destroyed and may be destroyed entirely. Thousands of its armed men are being killed and will be killed. But the organization will be rebuilt; it and its leaders will flourish in every community and place where the erasure of Gaza continues.


What enables the majority of Jewish Israelis to remain unshocked by the fact that in about two months we've killed around 7,000 children (a provisional figure) with the help of America's improved bombs?

What enables most of the Jews not to gasp in horror at the crowding of 1.8 million or 1.9 million people into about 120 square kilometers (46 square miles), a "safe area" that's constantly being bombed? What's preventing those Jewish Israelis from screaming when they hear about the thirst and hunger of 2.2 million Palestinian civilians and the diseases spreading due to the crowding, the water shortage and the out-of-action hospitals?

In Israel, 20,000 Gazans are responsible for their own deaths. I've never been so ashamed
A Gazan dilemma: When saving your life is expulsion by Israel
The Israeli army has dropped the restraint in Gaza, and data shows unprecedented killing
What enables this erasure and the slaying of children with both our active and passive participation? Here are some answers:

• For decades we've been educated to believe that only military force can ensure the state's survival and ability to flourish, while denying rights to the Palestinian people.

• We've erased any "context" – incitement has made this word a synonym for support of Hamas and justification of its horrors.

• We Jews have assumed a monopoly on the suffering caused by the cruelty of the Other.

• We've chosen not to look at the unbearable pictures of trembling Palestinian children, faces gray with dust, being rescued from between bombed concrete walls. And there's no way of knowing who's more fortunate: those children or the ones who were killed.

Open gallery view
A woman and two children in Rafah on Saturday. We remember every massacre of Israelis by Palestinians. We forget every massacre of Palestinians by Israelis.Credit: Mohammed Abed/AFP
• Every mass or gradual killing that we've been carrying out against the Palestinians for years, every theft, humiliation and abuse passes through thousands of media, psychological and academic filters. The sifted product is our conviction that the Palestinians are better off than the Somalis or Syrians, so they shouldn't complain.

• We remember every massacre of Israelis by Palestinians. We forget every massacre of Palestinians by Israelis.

• For decades we've gotten used to living in comfort while five minutes away Israel (in other words, us) demolishes Palestinian homes and builds for Jews, channels water to Jews and makes Palestinians go thirsty. All the rest is written in the reports of the rights groups HaMoked, B'Tselem and Adalah.


• For decades we've been ignoring the "moderate" Palestinians' warning that the continuous grab of freedom and land and the settlers' violence – assisted by the state and inspired by its violence – narrow their children's horizons and generate despair and faith in arms only and revenge.

• We've embraced an essentialist worldview: The Palestinians are terrorists because that's the way they are. They were born with genes for hating us – the offspring of Roman Emperor Titus and the pogromists of East Europe's Khmelnytsky Uprising of the 17th century.

• We're convinced that we're a democracy, even though for 56 years we've been ruling over millions of subjects without civil rights, controlling their land, money and economy.

• We have profound racist contempt for the Palestinians, which we developed to justify, both cognitively and psychologically, our trampling over them.

Open gallery view
Medics tend to children injured during Israeli bombardment at Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis on the southern Gaza Strip on December 16, 2023.Credit: MAHMUD HAMS - AFP
• We've been in denial of Palestinian history and the rootedness of Palestinian existence between the river and the sea.

• The erasure of Gaza is possible because since 1994 we have deliberately missed the opportunity – offered to us by the Palestinians – to shed some of our traits as a dispossessing and settling entity and let them have a state on 22 percent of the area west of the Jordan River (including Gaza). I wrote in July 2021 that "in all the heat of the talk about apartheid, a dynamic, active and dangerous dimension of it – the Jewish settler colonialism – has become dulled and blunted.

"According to the ideology and policies of Jewish settler colonialism, the Palestinians are superfluous. In short, it is possible, worthwhile and desirable to live without the Palestinians in this country between the river and the sea. Their existence here is conditional, dependent on our wishes and our goodwill – a matter of time.

"The ideology of 'superfluousness' is a poison that spreads especially when the process of settler colonialism is at its height. ... Settler colonialism is a continuous process of grabbing land, distorting historical borders, reshaping them and then expelling indigenous peoples."

I referred to the "superfluousness" of the Palestinians in the West Bank and warned about the intentions to expel them. I assumed then that the viewing of Gazans as superfluous sufficed with severing them from their people and their families on the other side of the Erez checkpoint that separates Gaza from the rest of the land (Israel and the West Bank).

But now the "superfluousness" is being reflected in expulsion, disguised as voluntary under the shelling. It's being reflected in the physical erasure of the Gazans, and in plans to return Jewish settlers to Gaza. Woe to them and woe to us.

[Hugo]

Good peice by Levy from Dec 23rd

Opinion | By Trying to Humiliate Gaza to Its Core, Israel Is the One Being Humiliated

As if all this were not enough – the thousands of dead children, the death toll nearing 20,000, the hundreds of thousands uprooted from their homes, the tens of thousands of wounded and the starvation, disease and destruction in Gaza – on top of this, they must also be humiliated. Humiliated to the core, so that they learn.

Israelis are still captive to Netanyahu's doctrine
The 'accidental' execution of a civilian must be a reminder: Immorality kills
Israeli jails must not become execution facilities for Palestinians
We must show them (and ourselves) who they are (and who we are). To show how strong we are and how weak they are. It's good for morale. It's good for the soldiers. It's good for the home front. A Hanukkah gift of humiliated Palestinians: What could bring more joy?

There is no greater proof that we have lost our way than the despicable attempts to humiliate the Palestinians for all to see. There is no greater proof of moral weakness than the need to humiliate them in their defeat.

Open gallery view
Israeli military vehicles are seen in the town of Tul Karm, West Bank, Wednesday, Nov. 22, 2023.Credit: Majdi Mohammed /AP
We are like Hamas; if they are such monsters, then we can also be, just a little. After expunging the lives of the Gazans, their property, their homes and their children, we will now also crush what remains of their dignity. We will force them to their knees, until they surrender.


Images and videos from last week: dozens of men on their knees, wearing only underpants, their hands tied behind their backs, their eyes blindfolded, their gazes lowered. One group is on a razed street, another in a sand pit, soldiers standing over them.

Open gallery view
Hamas fighters surrender to the Israeli army on Thursday, in north Gaza.Credit: Use according to Section 27a of the Copyright Law
Bingo, a victory image. A few of the soldiers are masked; perhaps they are ashamed of their behavior – we can only hope. Their victims are young men and also older ones; some are fat, with potbellies, others gaunt, some have pale skin and others are scorched by the hardships of the war. Perhaps their children watched them, perhaps their wives; that would heighten the achievement.

According to reports, they were removed from a UN Relief and Works Agency shelter in Beit Lahia and detained for questioning. No one knows for sure if any of them were even Hamas members. After the victory photo, they were taken to an unknown location, their fate unclear. Who even cares, besides their loved ones?

Open gallery view
This image grab from a video posted on social media shows an Israeli soldier standing guard next to stripped-off, detained Palestinians in Gaza, this week.Credit: - - AFP
What good does it do? This isn't the first time the Israeli army has stripped Palestinians this way in order to humiliate them. Such "walks of shame" were held in the past in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and Lebanon. Wanted and unwanted men in underpants, for all to see.

That's what Israel does, and it's important to record the event and to spread the images. But the truth is that the images humiliate the Israel Defense Forces much more than they humiliate its naked victims.

But even this public undressing was not sufficient humiliation of them in this accursed war. Two weeks after the war broke out, IDF and Shin Bet security service forces took over the home of senior Hamas official Saleh al-Arouri, in the West Bank of village of Aroura – Arouri is now based in Lebanon – and attached to its facade an enormous Arabic-language banner that reads: "Here was Arouri's home, which became the headquarters of Abu Al-Nimr of the Shin Bet." Poor agent Abu Al-Nimr: His HQ was destroyed a few days later, and with it the spectacular display, but the taste of the infantile humiliation remains.

Open gallery view
Palestinians walk on a damaged road following an Israeli military raid in Jenin refugee camp, last month.Credit: Majdi Mohammed /AP
In Gaza, our forces destroyed the parliament building and the courthouse. Why? Why not? In the Jenin refugee camp, in the West Bank, they smashed all the monuments, including the "key of return" at its entrance.

The army also destroyed and plundered the great, tin horse at the hospital entrance, constructed by a German sculptor from the wreckage of destroyed Palestinian ambulances, a monument to the dead. In Tul Karm it demolished the Yasser Arafat memorial. Soon we'll scorch their consciousness too.

Open gallery view
IDF soldiers in the Gaza Strip on Monday.Credit: IDF Spokesperson's Unit
And the height of the grotesquerie: The commander of the Nahal Infantry Brigade's 932nd Battalion, in an IDF Spokesperson's Unit video, flaunts Ismail Haniyeh's credit card, which expired in 2019. Kudos to the IDF. "You fled like cowards and we even got to your credit card," the officer babbles.

Commentators explained that perhaps it was the credit card of someone with the same name: Our Haniyeh hasn't lived here for a long time. But Haniyeh's son lives here, and the IDF spokesperson neither rests nor sleeps: Here are the receipts that prove he bought jewelry. The great victory is closer than ever.

Yeah, they have shown themselves to be bullies. Its like the stuff that was happening at Guantanamo Bay, the soldiers look like monsters who revel in the dehumanisation of their prisoners not realising that they have also lost their humanity.

[Uncle fester]

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67133675

Y'all get what Israel is trying to do here?

Make Egypt accept Palestinian refugees and clear the Gaza strip of Palestinians. There's a term for this...

[C69]

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67133675

Y'all get what Israel is trying to do here?

Make Egypt accept Palestinian refugees and clear the Gaza strip of Palestinians. There's a term for this...

Ethnically cleansing.
Called it day 1

[Guy Smiley]

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67133675

Y'all get what Israel is trying to do here?

Make Egypt accept Palestinian refugees and clear the Gaza strip of Palestinians. There's a term for this...

Ethnically cleansing.
Called it day 1

No no no no... you've got it all wrong. Israel has a rIgHt tO dEfeNd iTsElf

[Deepsouth]

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67133675

Y'all get what Israel is trying to do here?

Make Egypt accept Palestinian refugees and clear the Gaza strip of Palestinians. There's a term for this...

Ethnically cleansing.
Called it day 1

No no no no... you've got it all wrong. Israel has a rIgHt tO dEfeNd iTsElf

What a bunch of screaming banshees. Thank god we haven't had to rely on you said gentleman for our protection.

The state of you...

[Hugo]

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67133675

Y'all get what Israel is trying to do here?

Make Egypt accept Palestinian refugees and clear the Gaza strip of Palestinians. There's a term for this...

21st century Trail of Tears.

[Eugenius]

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/docu ... r-in-gaza/


Decent overview .

[Gumboot]

What a bunch of screaming banshees. Thank god we haven't had to rely on you said gentleman for our protection.

The state of you...

Another sterling contribution from the bored's resident arbiter of decorum.

Many thanks, kind sir.

[Rhubarb & Custard]

What I wonder would Egypt want to go along to get along if that's the 'plan'?

[Enzedder]

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67133675

Y'all get what Israel is trying to do here?

Make Egypt accept Palestinian refugees and clear the Gaza strip of Palestinians. There's a term for this...

Ethnically cleansing.
Called it day 1

No no no no... you've got it all wrong. Israel has a rIgHt tO dEfeNd iTsElf

They do - and they have done it well for 80 years. They have proven they are happy to make peace if countries recognise their right to exist (see Egypt).

[Guy Smiley]

Spare me the propaganda Enz...

Israel can and has defended itself well, of course. This is way beyond that now... way beyond any excuse making. As for making peace, Israel has violated more of the ceasefires between themselves and the Palestinians than than the home side.

[Calculon]

You can find any view to justify your own bias if you look for it on Twitter.

when i said the fake hospital was an obvious fake you referenced alex jones and called me a wingnut, but thanks for that

I’d call you a liar but I’ll be generous and assume you have some memory issues.

I meant hospital bombing video which was obviously staged but you probably still think is genuine because you're so free of bias

[Calculon]

Spoiler

Show

Conspiracy Theories and Lies | Denial of Hamas' October 7 Massacre Is Gaining Pace Online
Denial of Hamas' atrocities is gaining traction online as more and more people play down the terror group's responsibility for its brutal murders, rapes and destruction

Denial of the atrocities of October 7 or attempts to downplay Hamas’ role have been gaining traction on social media – to the point that some Israelis are following suit, even lawmakers.

The false posts mix lies and baseless allegations – against the backdrop of antisemitism and anti-Israel stances. Conspiracy theorists don’t claim that the entire event was fabricated, but they say the death toll is much lower than reported.

From victim to victimizer: Why some E. J'lem Arabs feel drawn to October 7 conspiracies
Israel's dead: The names of those killed in Hamas massacres and the Israel-Hamas war
Israeli mother willing to become Hamas hostage to reunite with daughters
They argue that Hamas didn’t plan to kill civilians and mainly targeted soldiers, that atrocities such as rape and beheadings didn’t take place, and that most of the civilians murdered were actually killed in an exchange of fire or by the Israeli army.
Like other fake news campaigns, these theories rely on snippets of evidence while completely ignoring anything that contradicts them. One video that went viral claims that all the deaths at Kibbutz Be’eri were the work of Israeli tanks that lost control and simply shelled houses.
The video relies on isolated comments in the media – in a few cases, the army really did have to shell houses where terrorists had barricaded themselves a few days into the war. And it wasn’t clear if Israeli civilians were inside.

As is typical, this video relies on one statement, in this case a comment on the radio by a survivor who said that hostages at Be’eri were shot by the army.

An Israeli Arab lawmaker claimed that 'no babies were slaughtered ... and no women were raped.'

The deniers completely ignore the plethora of videos and photos showing that Hamas murdered Israelis and burned their houses. The conspiracy theorists highlight the minority of cases in which Hamas left hostages alive, with the deniers concluding that the army killed its own citizens and that Hamas actually acted humanely.

The deniers’ bottom line is that Hamas attacked merely to take hostages in the hope of exchanging them for Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails, and that Israel invents myths to justify its bombing of Gaza.

Many conspiracy theorists say the army simply followed instructions under the famous Hannibal Directive, which the army under then-Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot canceled in 2016. In certain situations, the directive allowed the endangering of a soldier’s life in order to prevent an abduction.

Somehow the misperception has taken root of “unwritten permission” to let soldiers be killed so that they aren’t taken prisoner, but the army has reiterated that this is false.
Another video claims that the massacre at the rave near Kibbutz Re’im never took place. Instead, it asserts that the killings there stemmed from an exchange of fire between the army and police on one side and Hamas on the other.

The deniers claim that Hamas was on its way to Israeli army bases, encountered police and army roadblocks, and the revelers who fled the party got caught in the crossfire. The deniers note the many cars in the area that were burned and riddled with bullets.

This ignores the many testimonies and videos including those showing Hamas terrorists throwing grenades into shelters, as well as a recently published video showing the party’s bar area strewn with corpses.

Other lies include an attempt to refute any claim that Hamas committed atrocities such as rape, beheadings, murders of babies and burnings of victims alive. One weapon is actually artificial intelligence, which the deniers use to cast doubt on real photos. On X, formerly Twitter, deniers repeatedly claim that gruesome images – including a photo of a dead baby – are the fake work of AI tools.
Other weapons include the few cases of false or unsubstantiated claims by Israelis; for example, the false claim about a baby that was “baked in an oven” by Hamas terrorists. These isolated cases have become ammunition in the hands of deniers.

The conspiracy theories have largely been spread by social media users abroad, notably thenames_ahmad, Max Blumenthal and Jackson Hinkle. Some Israelis are slowly following suit. For example, one Israeli X user caused a stir this week by claiming that only about 400 people were killed – and not massacred – on October 7. He repeated the crossfire and Hannibal Directive myths.

He wrote that Hamas didn’t want a massacre but only to take control of Israeli communities near Gaza. On Sunday, Iman Khatib-Yassin, a lawmaker for the United Arab List party, claimed that “no babies were slaughtered ... and no women were raped.” She apologized after the chairman of her party, Mansour Abbas, strongly condemned her.

The custodians of social media sites do very little to combat the flood of fake news. Instagram removed a video denying the murders at Be’eri, but the footage is still widely available on X and TikTok.

Emotional triggering

Such posts are part of the “post-truth” reality of recent years. “In the past we could rely on what was in front of our eyes, but today – due to manipulations, deepfakes and the use of various technologies – we’re in a world where no matter what you see, it’s not enough to be definitive,” says Asa Shapira, the head of the marketing and advertising track at Tel Aviv University’s communications department.

“It threatens Western culture because democracies need agreement on what reality is. It undermines the ability to agree on the reality that’s out there.”
Shapira says a number of phenomena fuel fake news, disinformation and conspiracy theories like those denying October 7. “The goal of the social media algorithm is to flood [the reader with] posts that will produce a higher level of engagement,” he says.

“Emotionally stimulating content presses on our nerves – and this emotional triggering is fertile ground for fake news. The algorithms also create a sounding board where we’re only exposed to certain posts, not to those that undermine our worldview.”

Also, we suffer from confirmation bias: People are inclined to believe something that aligns with their worldview and reject something that challenges it.

“If you come across fake news or manipulation, you won’t look at it with a critical eye if it bolsters your worldview. And when I see information I don’t agree with, I’ll come up with explanations about why it’s incorrect – and this will bolster my opposing position,” Shapira says.

“There’s a feeling that the world has gone crazy and become populist – and the engine for this is social media, which drives a shallow, emotionally biased and simplistic debate.”

[Uncle fester]

What I wonder would Egypt want to go along to get along if that's the 'plan'?

Very very hard sell that. They won't go along with it for the same reason that Arab countries won't provide a security force for Gaza.

[C69]

when i said the fake hospital was an obvious fake you referenced alex jones and called me a wingnut, but thanks for that

I’d call you a liar but I’ll be generous and assume you have some memory issues.

I meant hospital bombing video which was obviously staged but you probably still think is genuine because you're so free of bias

Perhaps you need to free yourself of bias and be more sceptical. Read sources from all angles. I post it as you don't have a subscription.


Graet piece here from an Israeli News source thatis actually trying to be objective. The coverage in Israel is shocking and the attempts at shutting down the press quite Orwellian.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/202 ... d3ea560000

How Israeli Media Became a Wartime Government Propaganda Arm
After criticism of those in power in the initial days after the Hamas attack of October 7, the news channels have since devoted themselves to national morale, exclusively relying on official military statements and completely ignoring Palestinian casualties




The Gaza war is unfolding on Israelis' various screens via straightforward, unquestioning reporting of the Israeli military's official accounts, plus a daily press briefing by military spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari. The coverage meanwhile downplays critical questions that have arisen during the conflict, like how much the ground maneuver endangers the lives of the Israeli hostages in Gaza.

The deaths of thousands of Palestinian families in Gaza are ignored, and the Israeli media's coverage shows images of destroyed buildings without mentioning the possibility of people being buried beneath the rubble. Only a few on-air voices challenge the establishment's perception, even though the war broke out because of excessive reliance on pre-established concepts.

'Israelis don't see images from Gaza because our journalists are not doing their job'
Israelis need the army spokesman's lies to keep believing we're winning
The Israeli army thwarts most Hamas attacks but pays heavily for the few that succeed
There is an obsessive repetition that the reports have been approved for publication by military censors. The media also gives too much attention to emotionality at the expense of hard news reports regarding the subject of the hostages. Perhaps more than anything, the media landscape is marked by endless forms of self-censorship.


Journalists and media researchers fear that Israeli broadcasting is returning to bad habits as part of an effort to lift morale and maintain solidarity with soldiers risking their lives in Gaza – and, in doing so, is failing to show the reality in Gaza.
"The problem is that this is detrimental to the role of the journalist because viewers get used to not treating the other side as human beings and then don't understand why the whole world, which sees the difficult images from Gaza, turns its back on us and treats Israel as the aggressor."

David Gurevitz, a cultural researcher and lecturer in the School of Media Studies at the College of Management Academic Studies in Rishon Letzion, says that "at first after the war broke out, the broadcast media played a responsible role. Now it's becoming a propaganda arm of the government, full of populism and fiery patriotism. What motivates the media is the desire to appeal to the public and get high ratings."

'There are no explicit instructions, but there's this kind of vibe that allows no place for stories of Gazan victims in the news broadcasts.'

It's hard to argue with the claim that in the first days after the Hamas massacres, Israeli television showed commendable professionalism at perhaps the most difficult time Israel had ever known. "After the evil and terrible failure of October 7, it was the media that mediated between the frightened civilians and the collapsed government and military, gave voice to the cries of the murdered, demanded answers, and served as a platform for traumatized Israelis," says Gurevitz.

Nurit Canetti, chairwoman of the Union of Journalists in Israel and a presenter of a current affairs program on Army Radio, agrees. "The press understood the burden placed on its shoulders, and fulfilled its role to keep the public informed about what was going on when everyone was in the dark, to give a platform to people who had been abandoned and to illuminate the places where the country failed, did not function or simply crumbled," she says. "The journalists were the only ones who spoke to the bereaved families and the hostages' families."

It was this professional conduct that has led to a flourish of in-depth documentary work, such as stories about the fiascos involving the IDF spotters' warnings and the hostages in Be'eri. These reports were produced "without waiting for official answers from the state; the media invested resources and presented audiences with stories in all their complexities. On that subject, they still deserve a medal," Canetti says.

But amid the heavy sense of responsibility in broadcasters, a sense has surfaced of constant fear of offending the families of the hostages or the dead – which has led to self-censorship.

"On the one hand, delving into sensitive issues is our responsibility, but on the other, it's hard to deal with because of the difficulty the public has," she says. "So, again we aren't debating things that clearly will land on the public's desk in the future. When will we talk about the high number of reservists being killed, about friendly fire and the military accidents that are creating many victims, about the growing violence in the West Bank?


'After the evil and terrible failure of October 7, it was the media that mediated between the frightened civilians and the collapsed government and military.'

"There's fear of the public and its reaction, and fear of the politicians because everything is again becoming political, and 'the poison machine'" – as the network of incendiary, right-wing commentators and broadcasters that supports Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and attacks his purported enemies – "is very intense."

Two and a half months after the outbreak of the war, it's difficult to avoid the nagging questions that arise. How and why has the news coverage of events declined to the low point to which it has sunk now. Can the media's current conduct be compared to prior wars? Who benefits from partial and biased reporting? How can the rest of this war be expected to look on the screen?

The transformation that Israeli TV has undergone since the beginning of the war can summarized in the case of Channel 12 anchor Danny Kushmaro. In the initial days of the war, there was an outpouring of praise for him over the grief in his eyes, and this newspaper called him "the national libido," someone who had experienced the shockwaves "and bravely withstood them."

"He said the right things and when he reported from the field, it looked like were he to start a political party and run for the Knesset, he would have won the election," says Mordecai Naor, a writer and Israeli history and media researcher.

"The matter of holding the government accountable was very uncharacteristic of Channel 12, and they did it because they felt that they were speaking on behalf of the public," says Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler, a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute. "The criticism of the government was an expression of patriotism."
That was followed by Israel's ground invasion of the Gaza Strip and a new version of Danny Kushmaro, who brought a plastic rifle from the battlefield and waved it around in the studio. Gurevitz, the cultural researcher, was less enamored with the news anchor at that point.

"He became one of the prominent representatives of the hardline rhetoric, an example of a man who had quit his journalistic role of reporting, criticizing, and looking at things in a complex manner, instead speaking all the time about 'the human animals' [of Hamas] from a self-righteous standpoint."

It should be noted that, at least for the time being, Channel 12's Friday evening Ulpan Shishi news program doesn't currently have a panelist to fill the role that Boaz Bismuth played as the resident Netanyahu supporter. After Bismuth, now a Knesset member, left the show to enter politics, he was replaced on the show by Danielle Roth-Avneri. She has not been on air since the war began.

Freed from official messaging, the show has taken a relatively critical line against the government and, in recent weeks, has seen its ratings jump to levels it hadn't seen since the first COVID lockdown – more than 17 percent of the entire population in the first two weeks of December.

And yet, there's a sense that the general tone at the station has changed. "Guy Peleg has his regular segment on Friday evening in which he says that Netanyahu is a danger to the country. That doesn't represent the broadcasts during the course of the week," Gurevitz says.

'The journalists were the only ones who spoke to the bereaved families and the hostages' families.'

Open gallery view
Nurit Canetti.
Credit: Hadas Parush
Last month, Peleg, the channel's legal commentator, expressed concern on Ulpan Shishi over the Israeli media's commitment to maintaining national morale during a report on efforts in the Prime Minister's Office to gather evidence against the military over its conduct leading up to the war, against protocol.

Referring to the franchise holder at Channel 12, Peleg said: "Keshet, our employer, can conduct a campaign about unity and people can hang flags the length and breadth of the country, but the prime minister is fragmenting us."

Despite Netanyahu's low level of support and trust from the public, every wartime statement he makes to the media has been broadcast live. But with all due respect to Kushmaro (or Netanyahu), the most prominent figure who must be examined to understand the coverage of the war is IDF Spokesman Hagari.

Unlike many of Netanyahu's cabinet ministers, Hagari is perceived as credible and popular – to such an extent, says Gurevitz, that the public "treat him as though he were sacred, without any criticism, and with endless deference such that we have never seen for an IDF spokesman. There's total acceptance of him on the news broadcasts." Hagari's live daily briefings have become a regular fixture on the evening news as if he were an on-air talent who transcended a single station.

"The formula is fairly fixed," Gurevitz says, referring to the order of the main 8 P.M. news broadcasts, "with the main news from the battlefield, two commentators, 'suffering and bravery' features – the soldiers who have fallen in battle and the hostages' stories – and the IDF spokesman's news conference."

Each evening, Hagari makes sure to note the names of the most recent fallen soldiers and says that the entire military is embracing their families. By contrast, the deaths of thousands of Palestinian children are entirely absent from the news and current affairs coverage.

"From the moment that the army entered Gaza on the ground, we've really been spoon-fed by the IDF spokesman," says Shwartz Altshuler, noting that in the initial days following the October 7 slaughter in border communities, the media managed to find creative ways to report from the ground, even when being at the scene posed a risk.

"But since the [ground entry into Gaza on October 27], the distorted picture of the world that we have been seeing is mainly based on the [IDF] spokesman, and that should not be happening," she says. "We have to examine what's broadcast from inside Gaza and what they're showing on the media abroad and paint a picture that reflects reality."

Journalist Ben Caspit, considered to be in the political center and as a left-wing counterpoint to Amit Segal on Channel 12 and Yinon Magal on the right-wing Channel 14, described in a tweet the suffering in Gaza being ignored as a moral necessity: "Why should we turn our attention [to Gaza]? They've earned that hell fairly, and I don't have a milligram of empathy."

'The atmosphere in the newsroom is that Hamas is fabricating everything and that all the numbers and stories coming out of Gaza need to be taken with a lot of caution – that there actually isn't any basis for showing anything.'

"Numbers such as 20,000 dead become abstract when you don't see the difficult images," Gurevitz warns. "The Israeli audience isn't capable of accommodating two kinds of pain together, seeing and identifying with the human victim on the other side as such, and the media follows suit."

Naor attributes the Israeli media's decision to ignore the suffering on the other side to the continued suffering of the 129 hostages abducted from Israel who are still held in Gaza. "The blow that we sustained caused us to harden our hearts and averted interest in the suffering of others," he says. "Around the world, they're trying to create a balance between the [two] sides, and we don't have that privilege because we know exactly what happened to us and still don't know what will happen down the line with the hostages. It's a catch-22 because the second the knife is at our throats, we unite around patriotism."

The news reporter who spoke with Haaretz said, "The atmosphere in the newsroom is that Hamas is fabricating everything and that all the numbers and stories coming out of Gaza need to be taken with a lot of caution – that there actually isn't any basis for showing anything. It's a complicated situation. I'm conscious of the role that we have in maintaining national morale. I'm not saying that we need to show [things as] 50-50 but can't at least 20 percent of the coverage be about [casualties in Gaza]? Ten percent? Even that's not happening."

Shwartz Altshuler's assessment is that the main motive for the Israeli coverage of Gaza isn't actually a lack of empathy for the Palestinians living there but rather the relationship with the IDF spokesman and a lack of access to content that isn't suspected of being biased in favor of the Palestinians. Unlike in prior wars, the IDF has been largely preventing foreign reporters from entering Gaza.

"It's a complicated story of contact with sources and wheeling and dealing over information, 'what the IDF spokesman gives me,' Shwartz Altshuler says. "I like the IDF spokesman, but the assumption that everything that he provides is the absolute truth is unreasonable. A journalist who takes information from the IDF spokesman and transmits it 'as is' is betraying their job."

The nonexistent babies

Yishai Cohen, the political editor of the ultra-Orthodox news website Kikar Hashabbat, who is also a guest commentator for Channel 12, has experience in this regard. On November 28, he tweeted a short promo for an interview with Lt. Col. (res.) Yaron Buskila of the IDF's Gaza Division in which Buskila claimed that on October 7, he saw babies "hanging in a row on a clothesline" at Kfar Azza, which had been invaded by Hamas terrorists.

The story hadn't been reported earlier, and for good reason. No babies had been killed at Kfar Azza, as Haaretz reporter Amir Tibon quickly pointed out to Cohen.

" admit that I hadn't thought I need to check the veracity of a story coming from a lieutenant colonel," Cohen replied in explaining why he deleted the tweet just a few minutes after posting it. "I made a mistake."

Open gallery view
Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler.
The interview with Buskila, who is the director of operations at the Israel Defense and Security Forum nonprofit, which is identified with the right wing, had been offered to Cohen by the IDF spokesman. A representative of the spokesman's office was present at the interview.

Following Buskila's statement about the babies, the spokesman's office is no longer offering press interviews or meetings. In a statement from the spokesman's office in response to a request for comment, the office said, "An investigation was conducted, and the necessary lessons were drawn."

A related issue is the narrow range of views presented on media outlets' various panel discussions. Most of the commentators– including large numbers of reporters and people previously in positions of authority who have crowded the studios since the outbreak of the war – use the same source, Shwartz Altshuler says.

"So how exactly will there be multiple views and perspectives regarding reality?" She asks. "For example, Tamir Hayman, the former head of Military Intelligence, who is a commentator on Channel 12 News, is a member of a limited team of advisers to Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on the war.

"What's the difference between him and Jacob Bardugo?" she asks, referring to a close associate of Netanyahu who has worked in radio. "I don't think Hayman represents Gallant, but he does represent the defense establishment."

The issue, she says, is not just who appears on the air, but also who doesn't. Shwartz Altshuler cites revelations in the media about IDF border post spotters and an officer in Military Intelligence's Unit 8200 who had expressed concern about indications that Hamas was planning an attack before October 7. The Israel Democracy Institute fellow also asked why the channels didn't take the opportunity to feature more female commentators.

"Unlike men, they weren't part of the [mistaken] doctrine and the system that failed. Instead, again they're bringing in women to talk about psychology and men about defense," she says.

On December 4, the journalists' issued a letter calling on the directors of the TV news outlets to change the model and have at least half of the panel participants be women. But even more glaringly than the absence of women, the voices of Arab citizens of Israel have become a rarity on news broadcasts, even by the usual Israeli standards (unless their name happens to Yoseph Haddad, a high-profile pro-Israel advocate).

"The Arab community has been entirely excluded from the discourse, and therefore the public impression has been created that it doesn't exist at all in connection with these events," says Kholod Idres, the co-director of the Department for a Shared Society at the Sikkuy Association for the Advancement of Equal Opportunity nonprofit.

"The clearest example of that is that the hostages from the Arab community were totally ignored at the beginning of the war. For more than a week, with the exception of Army Radio, the main media outlets in Israel didn't mention the fact that among the hundreds of Israelis who were abducted to Gaza, there were also Arab citizens. On Channel 12, the first reference to the subject only came on October 20."

One entity that has emerged from its usual shadows is the military censor. Israeli news outlets have been highlighting the fact that various diplomatic and military news reports have been approved by the censor, even though they are not required to note it. An effort at calming the public? Not necessarily.

"[It] shows how much the media is currying favor with the audience and the establishment and wants to be embraced," Gurevitz says. "We're only broadcasting what's good for morale. We want a censor. We're not opening our mouths."

But Naor has another explanation: "I think the reporters want to convey that they're in a predicament, that is, 'we could have said more.' It's a wink and a nod. After all, no one likes to be censored."

Filling the vacuum

The full picture of the war isn't being shown, and the tours of Gaza that the IDF Spokesman's Office arranges for reporters don't really fill it out, but the media's quest for "an image of victory" explains at least some of the media's conduct.

"We'll see it more and more strongly in the coming weeks as the war begins to wane," Shwartz Altshuler predicts. The desire to portray the end of the war as a victory papering over the war's declared goal of completely defeating Hamas is mainly financial, she says, not ideological.

"The media can't indicate to the public that 'we've lost' and still sell advertising," she says. "It needs the government to create the drama and the government needs it to create the narrative."

The initial signs of the trend were seen in the emotional images of the return of the hostages to Israel. "It was a total reality show," Shwartz Altshuler says. "Content to fill a vacuum, without news value but infringing on the privacy of the hostages who have returned."

The releases were documented even though the hostages' privacy has been respected in Israeli media coverage of hostage videos released by Hamas. Also absent from the Israeli coverage are pictures from foreign media news of Palestinian prisoners whom Israel released in exchange for the hostages and their reunion with their families.

A more recent example is the images of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in Gaza, handcuffed and in their underwear – broadcast despite the assessment (reported in Haaretz) that only about 10 to 15 percent of them were actually active in Hamas or identified with the organization. (A similar photo was released in the 2014 Gaza war.)

Enlisting the media during wartime is hardly a new concept, but Gurevitz has the feeling that this time, it's more pronounced than before: "The media is now reflecting our traumatic situation and the legitimization of acting in an extreme fashion because of it, and reflects a public thirst for revenge," he says. "Revenge is something that obviously motivates armies, but it doesn't really solve problems. The harsh rhetoric and sense of hysteria don't project Israeli strength, but rather despair and a desire to see pictures of surrender at any price."

Naor, who was deputy commander of Army Radio during the 1973 Yom Kippur War (and later became commander, the equivalent of station director), thinks that even the most determined form of patriotism ultimately exhausts itself. More than any other conflict, the current war reminds him of the First Lebanon War in 1982. "Then for the first time, we saw the involvement of politics during the period of the war. Two weeks after it started, there was a media revolt against the establishment."

Open gallery view
Mordecai Naor.
Credit: Courtesy of Naor family
Naor mentions journalist Dan Shilon, who posed a question on Army Radio during the first stages of that war: "How do we get out of this entanglement?" The defense minister at the time, Ariel Sharon, tried unsuccessfully to remove Shilon from reserve duty at the station. When the IDF looked into the controversy, it concluded that Shilon was not being critical of going to war.

The massacres at Sabra and Shatila by Israel's Christian Phalangist allies were committed three months later, and Israelis took to the streets in what was dubbed "the 400,000 protest" in what is now Rabin Square in Tel Aviv. This time, too, Naor casts doubt over the argument that criticism of a war shouldn't be voiced while it is being fought ("quiet, we're shooting," as the saying goes in Hebrew). Such an approach, he says, cannot last for long.

You can't discount the shock that the events of October 7 have caused, but if anyone had hope that they would produce positive changes in the conduct of the Israeli media, they're bound to be disappointed. "Catastrophes don't create a change of reality. That requires genuine processes," Shwartz Altshuler says, pointing out that even amid the current fighting, the Israeli government hasn't stopped trying to intervene with the media for its own ends – pressing for concessions, for example, to Channel 14, a pro-Netanyahu station, and to regional radio stations.

"Why isn't anyone in television saying that Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi is exploiting 'quiet, we're shooting' to alter the television market?" she asks. No positive process will be possible, she says, without comprehensive soul-searching, which cannot wait until the war is over.

"Nowhere is a genuine discussion being held regarding questions involving media responsibility," she says. "People are busy pounding the politicians' chests, but what about when you were bolstering the paradigm that has collapsed, when you were eating whatever they fed you? When we return to the practices of 'the day before the war,' it's really painful."

Channel 12 declined to provide a response to this article.

[MungoMan]

I’d call you a liar but I’ll be generous and assume you have some memory issues.

I meant hospital bombing video which was obviously staged but you probably still think is genuine because you're so free of bias

Perhaps you need to free yourself of bias and be more sceptical. Read sources from all angles. I post it as you don't have a subscription.


Graet piece here from an Israeli News source thatis actually trying to be objective. The coverage in Israel is shocking and the attempts at shutting down the press quite Orwellian.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/202 ... d3ea560000

How Israeli Media Became a Wartime Government Propaganda Arm
After criticism of those in power in the initial days after the Hamas attack of October 7, the news channels have since devoted themselves to national morale, exclusively relying on official military statements and completely ignoring Palestinian casualties




The Gaza war is unfolding on Israelis' various screens via straightforward, unquestioning reporting of the Israeli military's official accounts, plus a daily press briefing by military spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari. The coverage meanwhile downplays critical questions that have arisen during the conflict, like how much the ground maneuver endangers the lives of the Israeli hostages in Gaza.

The deaths of thousands of Palestinian families in Gaza are ignored, and the Israeli media's coverage shows images of destroyed buildings without mentioning the possibility of people being buried beneath the rubble. Only a few on-air voices challenge the establishment's perception, even though the war broke out because of excessive reliance on pre-established concepts.

'Israelis don't see images from Gaza because our journalists are not doing their job'
Israelis need the army spokesman's lies to keep believing we're winning
The Israeli army thwarts most Hamas attacks but pays heavily for the few that succeed
There is an obsessive repetition that the reports have been approved for publication by military censors. The media also gives too much attention to emotionality at the expense of hard news reports regarding the subject of the hostages. Perhaps more than anything, the media landscape is marked by endless forms of self-censorship.


Journalists and media researchers fear that Israeli broadcasting is returning to bad habits as part of an effort to lift morale and maintain solidarity with soldiers risking their lives in Gaza – and, in doing so, is failing to show the reality in Gaza.
"The problem is that this is detrimental to the role of the journalist because viewers get used to not treating the other side as human beings and then don't understand why the whole world, which sees the difficult images from Gaza, turns its back on us and treats Israel as the aggressor."

David Gurevitz, a cultural researcher and lecturer in the School of Media Studies at the College of Management Academic Studies in Rishon Letzion, says that "at first after the war broke out, the broadcast media played a responsible role. Now it's becoming a propaganda arm of the government, full of populism and fiery patriotism. What motivates the media is the desire to appeal to the public and get high ratings."

'There are no explicit instructions, but there's this kind of vibe that allows no place for stories of Gazan victims in the news broadcasts.'

It's hard to argue with the claim that in the first days after the Hamas massacres, Israeli television showed commendable professionalism at perhaps the most difficult time Israel had ever known. "After the evil and terrible failure of October 7, it was the media that mediated between the frightened civilians and the collapsed government and military, gave voice to the cries of the murdered, demanded answers, and served as a platform for traumatized Israelis," says Gurevitz.

Nurit Canetti, chairwoman of the Union of Journalists in Israel and a presenter of a current affairs program on Army Radio, agrees. "The press understood the burden placed on its shoulders, and fulfilled its role to keep the public informed about what was going on when everyone was in the dark, to give a platform to people who had been abandoned and to illuminate the places where the country failed, did not function or simply crumbled," she says. "The journalists were the only ones who spoke to the bereaved families and the hostages' families."

It was this professional conduct that has led to a flourish of in-depth documentary work, such as stories about the fiascos involving the IDF spotters' warnings and the hostages in Be'eri. These reports were produced "without waiting for official answers from the state; the media invested resources and presented audiences with stories in all their complexities. On that subject, they still deserve a medal," Canetti says.

But amid the heavy sense of responsibility in broadcasters, a sense has surfaced of constant fear of offending the families of the hostages or the dead – which has led to self-censorship.

"On the one hand, delving into sensitive issues is our responsibility, but on the other, it's hard to deal with because of the difficulty the public has," she says. "So, again we aren't debating things that clearly will land on the public's desk in the future. When will we talk about the high number of reservists being killed, about friendly fire and the military accidents that are creating many victims, about the growing violence in the West Bank?


'After the evil and terrible failure of October 7, it was the media that mediated between the frightened civilians and the collapsed government and military.'

"There's fear of the public and its reaction, and fear of the politicians because everything is again becoming political, and 'the poison machine'" – as the network of incendiary, right-wing commentators and broadcasters that supports Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and attacks his purported enemies – "is very intense."

Two and a half months after the outbreak of the war, it's difficult to avoid the nagging questions that arise. How and why has the news coverage of events declined to the low point to which it has sunk now. Can the media's current conduct be compared to prior wars? Who benefits from partial and biased reporting? How can the rest of this war be expected to look on the screen?

The transformation that Israeli TV has undergone since the beginning of the war can summarized in the case of Channel 12 anchor Danny Kushmaro. In the initial days of the war, there was an outpouring of praise for him over the grief in his eyes, and this newspaper called him "the national libido," someone who had experienced the shockwaves "and bravely withstood them."

"He said the right things and when he reported from the field, it looked like were he to start a political party and run for the Knesset, he would have won the election," says Mordecai Naor, a writer and Israeli history and media researcher.

"The matter of holding the government accountable was very uncharacteristic of Channel 12, and they did it because they felt that they were speaking on behalf of the public," says Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler, a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute. "The criticism of the government was an expression of patriotism."
That was followed by Israel's ground invasion of the Gaza Strip and a new version of Danny Kushmaro, who brought a plastic rifle from the battlefield and waved it around in the studio. Gurevitz, the cultural researcher, was less enamored with the news anchor at that point.

"He became one of the prominent representatives of the hardline rhetoric, an example of a man who had quit his journalistic role of reporting, criticizing, and looking at things in a complex manner, instead speaking all the time about 'the human animals' [of Hamas] from a self-righteous standpoint."

It should be noted that, at least for the time being, Channel 12's Friday evening Ulpan Shishi news program doesn't currently have a panelist to fill the role that Boaz Bismuth played as the resident Netanyahu supporter. After Bismuth, now a Knesset member, left the show to enter politics, he was replaced on the show by Danielle Roth-Avneri. She has not been on air since the war began.

Freed from official messaging, the show has taken a relatively critical line against the government and, in recent weeks, has seen its ratings jump to levels it hadn't seen since the first COVID lockdown – more than 17 percent of the entire population in the first two weeks of December.

And yet, there's a sense that the general tone at the station has changed. "Guy Peleg has his regular segment on Friday evening in which he says that Netanyahu is a danger to the country. That doesn't represent the broadcasts during the course of the week," Gurevitz says.

'The journalists were the only ones who spoke to the bereaved families and the hostages' families.'

Open gallery view
Nurit Canetti.
Credit: Hadas Parush
Last month, Peleg, the channel's legal commentator, expressed concern on Ulpan Shishi over the Israeli media's commitment to maintaining national morale during a report on efforts in the Prime Minister's Office to gather evidence against the military over its conduct leading up to the war, against protocol.

Referring to the franchise holder at Channel 12, Peleg said: "Keshet, our employer, can conduct a campaign about unity and people can hang flags the length and breadth of the country, but the prime minister is fragmenting us."

Despite Netanyahu's low level of support and trust from the public, every wartime statement he makes to the media has been broadcast live. But with all due respect to Kushmaro (or Netanyahu), the most prominent figure who must be examined to understand the coverage of the war is IDF Spokesman Hagari.

Unlike many of Netanyahu's cabinet ministers, Hagari is perceived as credible and popular – to such an extent, says Gurevitz, that the public "treat him as though he were sacred, without any criticism, and with endless deference such that we have never seen for an IDF spokesman. There's total acceptance of him on the news broadcasts." Hagari's live daily briefings have become a regular fixture on the evening news as if he were an on-air talent who transcended a single station.

"The formula is fairly fixed," Gurevitz says, referring to the order of the main 8 P.M. news broadcasts, "with the main news from the battlefield, two commentators, 'suffering and bravery' features – the soldiers who have fallen in battle and the hostages' stories – and the IDF spokesman's news conference."

Each evening, Hagari makes sure to note the names of the most recent fallen soldiers and says that the entire military is embracing their families. By contrast, the deaths of thousands of Palestinian children are entirely absent from the news and current affairs coverage.

"From the moment that the army entered Gaza on the ground, we've really been spoon-fed by the IDF spokesman," says Shwartz Altshuler, noting that in the initial days following the October 7 slaughter in border communities, the media managed to find creative ways to report from the ground, even when being at the scene posed a risk.

"But since the [ground entry into Gaza on October 27], the distorted picture of the world that we have been seeing is mainly based on the [IDF] spokesman, and that should not be happening," she says. "We have to examine what's broadcast from inside Gaza and what they're showing on the media abroad and paint a picture that reflects reality."

Journalist Ben Caspit, considered to be in the political center and as a left-wing counterpoint to Amit Segal on Channel 12 and Yinon Magal on the right-wing Channel 14, described in a tweet the suffering in Gaza being ignored as a moral necessity: "Why should we turn our attention [to Gaza]? They've earned that hell fairly, and I don't have a milligram of empathy."

'The atmosphere in the newsroom is that Hamas is fabricating everything and that all the numbers and stories coming out of Gaza need to be taken with a lot of caution – that there actually isn't any basis for showing anything.'

"Numbers such as 20,000 dead become abstract when you don't see the difficult images," Gurevitz warns. "The Israeli audience isn't capable of accommodating two kinds of pain together, seeing and identifying with the human victim on the other side as such, and the media follows suit."

Naor attributes the Israeli media's decision to ignore the suffering on the other side to the continued suffering of the 129 hostages abducted from Israel who are still held in Gaza. "The blow that we sustained caused us to harden our hearts and averted interest in the suffering of others," he says. "Around the world, they're trying to create a balance between the [two] sides, and we don't have that privilege because we know exactly what happened to us and still don't know what will happen down the line with the hostages. It's a catch-22 because the second the knife is at our throats, we unite around patriotism."

The news reporter who spoke with Haaretz said, "The atmosphere in the newsroom is that Hamas is fabricating everything and that all the numbers and stories coming out of Gaza need to be taken with a lot of caution – that there actually isn't any basis for showing anything. It's a complicated situation. I'm conscious of the role that we have in maintaining national morale. I'm not saying that we need to show [things as] 50-50 but can't at least 20 percent of the coverage be about [casualties in Gaza]? Ten percent? Even that's not happening."

Shwartz Altshuler's assessment is that the main motive for the Israeli coverage of Gaza isn't actually a lack of empathy for the Palestinians living there but rather the relationship with the IDF spokesman and a lack of access to content that isn't suspected of being biased in favor of the Palestinians. Unlike in prior wars, the IDF has been largely preventing foreign reporters from entering Gaza.

"It's a complicated story of contact with sources and wheeling and dealing over information, 'what the IDF spokesman gives me,' Shwartz Altshuler says. "I like the IDF spokesman, but the assumption that everything that he provides is the absolute truth is unreasonable. A journalist who takes information from the IDF spokesman and transmits it 'as is' is betraying their job."

The nonexistent babies

Yishai Cohen, the political editor of the ultra-Orthodox news website Kikar Hashabbat, who is also a guest commentator for Channel 12, has experience in this regard. On November 28, he tweeted a short promo for an interview with Lt. Col. (res.) Yaron Buskila of the IDF's Gaza Division in which Buskila claimed that on October 7, he saw babies "hanging in a row on a clothesline" at Kfar Azza, which had been invaded by Hamas terrorists.

The story hadn't been reported earlier, and for good reason. No babies had been killed at Kfar Azza, as Haaretz reporter Amir Tibon quickly pointed out to Cohen.

" admit that I hadn't thought I need to check the veracity of a story coming from a lieutenant colonel," Cohen replied in explaining why he deleted the tweet just a few minutes after posting it. "I made a mistake."

Open gallery view
Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler.
The interview with Buskila, who is the director of operations at the Israel Defense and Security Forum nonprofit, which is identified with the right wing, had been offered to Cohen by the IDF spokesman. A representative of the spokesman's office was present at the interview.

Following Buskila's statement about the babies, the spokesman's office is no longer offering press interviews or meetings. In a statement from the spokesman's office in response to a request for comment, the office said, "An investigation was conducted, and the necessary lessons were drawn."

A related issue is the narrow range of views presented on media outlets' various panel discussions. Most of the commentators– including large numbers of reporters and people previously in positions of authority who have crowded the studios since the outbreak of the war – use the same source, Shwartz Altshuler says.

"So how exactly will there be multiple views and perspectives regarding reality?" She asks. "For example, Tamir Hayman, the former head of Military Intelligence, who is a commentator on Channel 12 News, is a member of a limited team of advisers to Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on the war.

"What's the difference between him and Jacob Bardugo?" she asks, referring to a close associate of Netanyahu who has worked in radio. "I don't think Hayman represents Gallant, but he does represent the defense establishment."

The issue, she says, is not just who appears on the air, but also who doesn't. Shwartz Altshuler cites revelations in the media about IDF border post spotters and an officer in Military Intelligence's Unit 8200 who had expressed concern about indications that Hamas was planning an attack before October 7. The Israel Democracy Institute fellow also asked why the channels didn't take the opportunity to feature more female commentators.

"Unlike men, they weren't part of the [mistaken] doctrine and the system that failed. Instead, again they're bringing in women to talk about psychology and men about defense," she says.

On December 4, the journalists' issued a letter calling on the directors of the TV news outlets to change the model and have at least half of the panel participants be women. But even more glaringly than the absence of women, the voices of Arab citizens of Israel have become a rarity on news broadcasts, even by the usual Israeli standards (unless their name happens to Yoseph Haddad, a high-profile pro-Israel advocate).

"The Arab community has been entirely excluded from the discourse, and therefore the public impression has been created that it doesn't exist at all in connection with these events," says Kholod Idres, the co-director of the Department for a Shared Society at the Sikkuy Association for the Advancement of Equal Opportunity nonprofit.

"The clearest example of that is that the hostages from the Arab community were totally ignored at the beginning of the war. For more than a week, with the exception of Army Radio, the main media outlets in Israel didn't mention the fact that among the hundreds of Israelis who were abducted to Gaza, there were also Arab citizens. On Channel 12, the first reference to the subject only came on October 20."

One entity that has emerged from its usual shadows is the military censor. Israeli news outlets have been highlighting the fact that various diplomatic and military news reports have been approved by the censor, even though they are not required to note it. An effort at calming the public? Not necessarily.

"[It] shows how much the media is currying favor with the audience and the establishment and wants to be embraced," Gurevitz says. "We're only broadcasting what's good for morale. We want a censor. We're not opening our mouths."

But Naor has another explanation: "I think the reporters want to convey that they're in a predicament, that is, 'we could have said more.' It's a wink and a nod. After all, no one likes to be censored."

Filling the vacuum

The full picture of the war isn't being shown, and the tours of Gaza that the IDF Spokesman's Office arranges for reporters don't really fill it out, but the media's quest for "an image of victory" explains at least some of the media's conduct.

"We'll see it more and more strongly in the coming weeks as the war begins to wane," Shwartz Altshuler predicts. The desire to portray the end of the war as a victory papering over the war's declared goal of completely defeating Hamas is mainly financial, she says, not ideological.

"The media can't indicate to the public that 'we've lost' and still sell advertising," she says. "It needs the government to create the drama and the government needs it to create the narrative."

The initial signs of the trend were seen in the emotional images of the return of the hostages to Israel. "It was a total reality show," Shwartz Altshuler says. "Content to fill a vacuum, without news value but infringing on the privacy of the hostages who have returned."

The releases were documented even though the hostages' privacy has been respected in Israeli media coverage of hostage videos released by Hamas. Also absent from the Israeli coverage are pictures from foreign media news of Palestinian prisoners whom Israel released in exchange for the hostages and their reunion with their families.

A more recent example is the images of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in Gaza, handcuffed and in their underwear – broadcast despite the assessment (reported in Haaretz) that only about 10 to 15 percent of them were actually active in Hamas or identified with the organization. (A similar photo was released in the 2014 Gaza war.)

Enlisting the media during wartime is hardly a new concept, but Gurevitz has the feeling that this time, it's more pronounced than before: "The media is now reflecting our traumatic situation and the legitimization of acting in an extreme fashion because of it, and reflects a public thirst for revenge," he says. "Revenge is something that obviously motivates armies, but it doesn't really solve problems. The harsh rhetoric and sense of hysteria don't project Israeli strength, but rather despair and a desire to see pictures of surrender at any price."

Naor, who was deputy commander of Army Radio during the 1973 Yom Kippur War (and later became commander, the equivalent of station director), thinks that even the most determined form of patriotism ultimately exhausts itself. More than any other conflict, the current war reminds him of the First Lebanon War in 1982. "Then for the first time, we saw the involvement of politics during the period of the war. Two weeks after it started, there was a media revolt against the establishment."

Open gallery view
Mordecai Naor.
Credit: Courtesy of Naor family
Naor mentions journalist Dan Shilon, who posed a question on Army Radio during the first stages of that war: "How do we get out of this entanglement?" The defense minister at the time, Ariel Sharon, tried unsuccessfully to remove Shilon from reserve duty at the station. When the IDF looked into the controversy, it concluded that Shilon was not being critical of going to war.

The massacres at Sabra and Shatila by Israel's Christian Phalangist allies were committed three months later, and Israelis took to the streets in what was dubbed "the 400,000 protest" in what is now Rabin Square in Tel Aviv. This time, too, Naor casts doubt over the argument that criticism of a war shouldn't be voiced while it is being fought ("quiet, we're shooting," as the saying goes in Hebrew). Such an approach, he says, cannot last for long.

You can't discount the shock that the events of October 7 have caused, but if anyone had hope that they would produce positive changes in the conduct of the Israeli media, they're bound to be disappointed. "Catastrophes don't create a change of reality. That requires genuine processes," Shwartz Altshuler says, pointing out that even amid the current fighting, the Israeli government hasn't stopped trying to intervene with the media for its own ends – pressing for concessions, for example, to Channel 14, a pro-Netanyahu station, and to regional radio stations.

"Why isn't anyone in television saying that Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi is exploiting 'quiet, we're shooting' to alter the television market?" she asks. No positive process will be possible, she says, without comprehensive soul-searching, which cannot wait until the war is over.

"Nowhere is a genuine discussion being held regarding questions involving media responsibility," she says. "People are busy pounding the politicians' chests, but what about when you were bolstering the paradigm that has collapsed, when you were eating whatever they fed you? When we return to the practices of 'the day before the war,' it's really painful."

Channel 12 declined to provide a response to this article.

ABC News (Straya) ran a similar piece a few weeks back.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-10/ ... /103206528

[Guy Smiley]

Posted that ABC piece a few weeks ago... naturally denounced by the faithful.

The Israeli Supreme Court has rejected Bibi's attempt to overrule the court...

The legislation the court struck down was passed last July. It limits the Supreme Court's oversight of government actions and policies and ends the court's ability to strike down government decisions and appointments on the basis of "reasonability."

which throws several curve balls into the mix. On the face of it it's a defeat for Bibi and a relief for those wary of absolute elected power, but due to (my limited understanding of) the complex nature of Israeli Law and the lack of an absolute constitution style of overriding protection, it throws more uncertainty into the mix because with a war on, all sorts of claims for extreme measures can be made and matters related to the protection of democratic process become sidelined or drowned out. Israel's political situation gets even messier.

https://www.axios.com/2024/01/01/israel ... nyahu-gaza

[C69]

Posted that ABC piece a few weeks ago... naturally denounced by the faithful.

The Israeli Supreme Court has rejected Bibi's attempt to overrule the court...

The legislation the court struck down was passed last July. It limits the Supreme Court's oversight of government actions and policies and ends the court's ability to strike down government decisions and appointments on the basis of "reasonability."

which throws several curve balls into the mix. On the face of it it's a defeat for Bibi and a relief for those wary of absolute elected power, but due to (my limited understanding of) the complex nature of Israeli Law and the lack of an absolute constitution style of overriding protection, it throws more uncertainty into the mix because with a war on, all sorts of claims for extreme measures can be made and matters related to the protection of democratic process become sidelined or drowned out. Israel's political situation gets even messier.

https://www.axios.com/2024/01/01/israel ... nyahu-gaza

Yip that's why I'll continue to rebutt the moroins who shout antisemetism by posting an alternative Israeli viewpoint.
From one of Israels oldest Newspapers that won't be silenced

[Hugo]

I saw a piece on Haaretz (spelling?) a few weeks back that was actually really critical of the USAs support of Netanyahu.

Credit where its due I've always thought Israel has a very diverse electorate politically and intellectually. You have every party under the sun in their Parliament and some real diversity of thought in the wider society.

[Calculon]

Unfortunate to see Isreal moving in the wrong direction but the majority of Israelis still have a liberal democratic mindset. Not something you can say for their neighbours.

[sefton]

when i said the fake hospital was an obvious fake you referenced alex jones and called me a wingnut, but thanks for that

I’d call you a liar but I’ll be generous and assume you have some memory issues.

I meant hospital bombing video which was obviously staged but you probably still think is genuine because you're so free of bias

Find the thread and the quote, it was nothing to do with the bombing.

[Calculon]

You can find any view to justify your own bias if you look for it on Twitter.

when i said the fake hospital was an obvious fake you referenced alex jones and called me a wingnut, but thanks for that

Speaking of hospitals, the IDF never did find that evidence to support attacking Al Shifa, did they.

Maybe it was just another regrettable mistake.

https://apnews.com/article/hamas-intell ... ed92c4f821

[C69]

when i said the fake hospital was an obvious fake you referenced alex jones and called me a wingnut, but thanks for that

Speaking of hospitals, the IDF never did find that evidence to support attacking Al Shifa, did they.

Maybe it was just another regrettable mistake.

https://apnews.com/article/hamas-intell ... ed92c4f821

So Israeli's biggest backer is confident that HAMAS used the hospital. Fair enough show the evidence
USA and Israeli intelligence has been way off on the matters for years. Look at the confidence in WMD or the confidence the IDF had when they shot the white Flag waving Israeli hostages.
How the fuck did Israel intelligence allow HAMAS such an infrastructure to be constructed in the first place.
Or how did the Israeli intelligence allow HAMAS to strike with such butchery on Oct 7 when they were warned time and time again about terrorist incursions and build up of HAMAS forces.
I'd take so called intelligence reports from these sources with as much of a pinch of salt as I take HAMAS reports seriously.
Let's see evidence not fabrication, smoke and mirrors and just plain lies and bullshit propaganda.