Compare and Contrast


Here are two contrasting articles on the Israel-Gaza conflict - one by Melanie Phillips writing in The Times and the other by Paul Mason from Channel 4 News which was published in The Guardian.

Now while Melanie Phillips makes some valid points about Hamas and Israel's right to defend itself, I think she palpably fails to hold Israel to account for the break down in the peace process and the complete lack of progress, in recent years, towards a 'two state' solution.    

Because while Hamas is a problem and a pariah even in much of the Arab world, the same is not true of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority which is nominally Israel's 'partner for peace' in the occupied West Bank - Fatah having been kicked out of Gaza by Hamas, several years ago, at the point of a gun.

So Israel can't have it both ways and if you ask me, the best answer to Hamas is to press ahead in negotiations with the representatives of Palestinian people who do want to live in peace with Israel, which would isolate the terrorist element in return for offering Israel proper guarantees about its future and long-term security.   


You’re not getting the real truth about Gaza


By Melanie Phillips - The Times

Innocent civilians will continue to die until the brutal manipulations of Hamas are exposed

Ed Miliband has berated David Cameron for not condemning Israel’s attacks in Gaza. No 10 says it is shocked that Mr Miliband is making political capital out of the war. Meanwhile Philip Hammond, the foreign secretary, says the suffering in Gaza is intolerable and has called for an unconditional humanitarian ceasefire.

The exchanges illustrate the widespread incomprehension of the nature of this conflict and the uniquely dreadful dilemma it poses.

The civilian suffering, particularly the dead and injured children, is indeed appalling and tragic. No one of any conscience could fail to be horrified. With these sickening images regularly broadcast on TV, and with interviewers all but accusing Israeli spokesmen of being cruel and reckless child-killers, it is no surprise that much of the public is being inflamed against Israel.

People don’t realise, however, how their emotions are being manipulated. They are not being shown how Hamas is using its own people as human shields and sacrifices, to enable it to continue firing rockets at Israeli civilians and to increase its own civilian casualties in order to turn western opinion against Israel.

It has built no shelters, forcing civilians to use UN schools, for instance, instead. It has ordered Gazans to ignore Israeli warnings to flee their houses and stay put under bombardment.

Declassified Israeli aerial pictures show rocket launchers situated in mosques, schools and playgrounds. Hamas rockets have been found stashed in three UN-run schools. A senior UN official, John Ging, has said Hamas “are firing their rockets into Israel from the vicinity of UN facilities and residential areas”.

Shifa hospital also acts as a Hamas command centre. Reporters know this, as they often conduct interviews there with Hamas spokesmen. Yet this detail is generally denied to the public. Nor are the public informed about rocket fire from that hospital. A Finnish journalist was a lone exception when she recently reported that a rocket was launched from the hospital’s parking lot.

Such war crimes aren’t usually publicised because reporters work under an implicit threat. One Spanish journalist admitted: “We did see Hamas people launching rockets close to our hotel, but if ever we dared point our camera on them they would simply shoot at us and kill us.”

Instead, news reports parrot the Hamas line. So the “overwhelming majority” of the casualties are reported to be civilian. In fact, an analysis by Al Jazeera shows that most of those killed have been young men of fighting age, not women, children or old people. Rules published by Hamas order anyone talking to the media to describe all Gaza casualties as “innocent civilians” and ensure “there is no evidence of rockets being fired from Gaza population centres”.

There is also virtually no reporting of Gazan casualties caused by Hamas’s own rockets falling short. Last Monday, there were explosions in a kindergarten and Shifa’s outpatient clinic. The media immediately blamed Israeli airstrikes. Yet both Israel and official Palestinian media blamed misfired Hamas rockets — a fact endorsed by a reporter who said he could only do so once he left Gaza and escaped Hamas intimidation.

The Israelis take more care than any other army to avoid harming civilians, warning them by leaflet, phone, text or warning shots to flee. Their rules of engagement restrict them from attacking where they know civilians are present, although when gunfire comes from a hospital or school the IDF are entitled to return fire. They have also aborted dozens of attacks when civilians are present. Yet it is the Israelis who are vilified as child-killers.

Ed Miliband says he condemns what Hamas is doing. How else, though, is Hamas to be stopped? Israel has stuck to every ceasefire. Hamas has broken every one of them, although it denies doing so.

The thousands of rocket attacks from Gaza in recent years have forced the residents of southern Israel to race for the shelters. The tunnels into Israel pose an even graver threat of mass murder and kidnappings of Israelis.

All decent people want an end to the deaths of innocents. But Hamas refuses to stop trying to murder Israeli civilians. It stated aim is to destroy Israel and kill every Jew. Philip Hammond said: “We understand that Israel has concerns and that Hamas has concerns” — as if there were a moral equivalence between those bent on genocide and their victims.

The Arab world (except for Qatar) wants Hamas destroyed. The King of Saudi Arabia condemned the “collective massacre” in Gaza but conspicuously did not blame Israel.

It comes to something, does it not, when the Arab world seems to be better disposed towards Israel, the region’s sole democracy, than much of the British political class.




Gaza is not as I expected. Amid the terror, there is hope

The world is not so blessed that it can afford to waste the lives of the 1.8 million Palestinians who live there

By Paul Mason - The Guardian


Everyday life in Gaza is becoming impossible. Photograph: Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto/Corbis

I have been reporting from Gaza all week, and, amid the stream of dead and injured civilians wheeled on trolleys before me, frantic people gesturing in my face, and nights spent in an unlit city under bombardment, I've come to a conclusion I did not expect: Gaza "works".

What I mean is that, given resources, connections with the outside world, and time, this narrow political entity could function normally. With its smooth sand, blue sea and skies, it could even become a tourist destination. It already has a massive pool of trained and educated human capital – though, sadly, its most expert people are trauma surgeons. As it is, hotels stand deserted along the beachfront in Gaza City. Their embarrassed waiters struggle to boil coffee on single flames. The fishermen in the port sneak out maybe 20 yards in canoes, while hostilities are on, 100 yards in motor boats during the sporadic ceasefires.

Everyday life, even for those with money and friends in the west, is becoming impossible. Water queues form, petrol stations are empty. Equally unnerving, for the young, urbanised kids, the internet is sporadic. I met two women – educated professionals: the top floor of their apartment block had been demolished by an Israeli rocket. Now they, too, were in the world of queues, poor hygiene, homelessness. A decent handbag does not exempt you. The currency is the shekel, but the biggest concern is gold. Palestinians keep their wealth in gold and jewellery. Around 250,000 people have been displaced and moving into a packed and filthy school, to sleep alongside the donkeys of the poor, does not strike people with gold as any better than staying and waiting for the shells to hit.

Gaza works because of Gaza's people. Since Hamas took control in 2007, the place has been run by a group designated as terrorist, and under Islamic rule. Unable to rebuild after the Israeli invasion of 2008-9, they instead built tunnels – nobody knows how long – in which the military wing of Hamas, the Qassam Brigades, live, store their rockets and fight. The tunnels are also used to bring in the essential supplies that have been banned during the seven-year siege of Gaza.

Strangely, then, for much of the day, you see the place as it might be if Hamas did not exist. Non-Hamas police keep order; women without hijabs move around as freely as the women in full veil; doctors returned from Germany and Canada saw the shattered bones of youths who have lived and may die in this small strip of land. And two-thirds of the population skip and play and wrestle – for they are children.

When this war is over, nothing good will happen in Gaza until the seige and blockade are lifted. Indeed, with 40% of the urban area unlivable because of the destruction, there will be a massive humanitarian crisis for months. Solving that crisis is not just a matter for NGOs. The way it is solved will dictate whether Gaza can survive. UNRWA, the UN agency for refugees that has opened its clean, blue-and-white schools to a dirty, chaotic surge of displaced humanity, says Gaza is "on a precipice". The hospital I've just been in has 95 blast and bullet wounds to treat, with six intensive care beds.

Logic dictates that either aid flows inwards, on an unprecedented scale, or people will flow outwards – not tomorrow, but as the weeks roll by without sanitation or power. Palestinians fear that a humanitarian crisis will be used to move them permanently off the land captured by the Israelis, and ultimately into camps in Egypt.

I have been to Muslim countries where there is deep conservatism, low education and suspicion of the west. This is not one of them. I constantly meet highly educated people who speak English; cheerful and friendly people – which is amazing in itself, given the level of terror the night brings. The world is not so blessed with educated, resourceful people that it can afford to waste the lives of 1.8 million Palestinians behind the iron grilles and the concrete walls that delimit Gaza. I have lost track of how many times I've met a young guy, 18 or 19 years old, proud not to be a fighter, a militant, or a duck-and-dive artist on the street. When you ask what his job is, the common answer is "carpenter". Working with wood – not metal or computer code – is the limit of what the blockade has enabled the skilled manual worker here to achieve.

Faced with such hopelessness, naturally, many become resigned: "Living is the same as being dead" is a phrase you hear among young men. It is the perfect rationale for the nihilist military organisation some choose to join. But its opposite is the resourcefulness that rewires a house after its front has been blown off; that sits on the carpet making bread on a hot pan after a home has been reduced to dust.

There are only two economic routes for life to flow back into Gaza and, given the bitterness of this conflict, the route from Israel will not be the main one. Egypt holds the key to Gaza's economic integration to the rest of the global economy. Open the Rafah crossing, and the need for the tunnels disappears. To the world this forlorn, impoverished and totally battered society has become a byword for impossibility and despair. But nobody has told Gazans. I found them full of hope.

• Paul Mason is economics editor of Channel 4 News. Follow him@paulmasonnews

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