The Bankruptcy of the Conventional 'Pro-Israel' Position
It’s bad enough when pundits use euphemisms to minimize civilian deaths from indiscriminate bombing, but it is truly despicable when they refuse to acknowledge the deaths at all.
There was one passage in the latest Tom Friedman column that warrants a few comments:
Israel’s use of sophisticated air power, no matter how justified and precise, triggered a set of images and video [bold mine-DL], in the age of social networks, that inflamed and energized Israel’s critics around the world and exposed just how much the rising progressive left, and even some young Jews, have grown alienated from Bibi Netanyahu’s right-wing government and its willingness to abandon democratic norms to ensure perpetual Israeli control over the West Bank.
Friedman never mentions explicitly what the “images and video” showed, because that would require acknowledging the horrific loss of innocent life caused by the “sophisticated air power” that brought down residential buildings on top of their inhabitants. The bombings that caused more than 200 deaths in Gaza didn’t trigger a “set of images and video.” They triggered explosions that burned and shredded the bodies of human beings. They massacred entire extended families. They killed over sixty children. It’s bad enough when pundits use euphemisms to minimize civilian deaths from indiscriminate bombing, but it is truly despicable when they refuse to acknowledge the deaths at all.
You will search Friedman’s column in vain for any mention of the number of Palestinians killed, to say nothing of the thousands injured and 90,000 displaced. Israel spent almost two weeks of bombing one of the most densely-populated territories in the world, and the innocent victims of that campaign don’t even rate a mention in passing. He offers no explanation for why Palestinians on the Temple Mount might have been “enraged,” since he ignores the violent Israeli raids on Al-Aqsa and the ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem that set all of these events in motion. His ludicrous framing of the last two weeks is one of Israel under siege (“simultaneous five-front conflict”) rather than a series of outrages by the occupying power that caused an explosion of anger.
I suppose no one really expects anything better from Friedman, but the complete indifference to Palestinian rights, suffering, and death on display in this column reflects the bankruptcy of the conventional “pro-Israel” position.
"You will search Friedman’s column in vain for any mention of the number of Palestinians killed"
Daniel, I went back and looked - and apologies if I missed it - but in not one of your recent pieces on the fighting in Gaza do you even mention the fact that 10 Israelis were killed by Hamas rockets. Again, it's possible that I missed it, but I don't even see mention of the fact that Hamas fired more than 4,000 rockets into Israel, aimed almost exclusively at civilian targets (which last time I checked is a war crime). Just a reminder that what's good for the goose is good for the gander.