Israel is responding aggressively and appropriately to two recent public relations challenges, suggesting Jerusalem understands the gravity of its situation as well as the fact that it is in the right on both.
The first is the “famine” libel. Israel is asking the IPC, the multinational monitor, to retract its debunked report on Gaza City. According to Reuters, the Israeli Foreign Ministry is warning that “if a new report were not presented within two weeks, Israel would continue to challenge the assessment and would ask the IPC’s donors to halt their financial support.”
Good. Israel can no longer afford to simply be correct on the merits. If corrupt global agencies are going to insert themselves as partisans into this war then they’ll learn to take a (metaphorical) punch.
As a reminder, Israel first meticulously proved the report false based on the IPC’s own data, which suggests the agency is not merely incompetent but corrupt and compromised.
Indeed, it’s clear the report was released as a preemptive attack on Israel’s new operation in Gaza City. The IPC simply declared famine in the one place in Gaza that the IDF was looking to enter, which was also the one place in Gaza relatively untouched by the war. Still, it’s important to have the numbers on your side, and Israel did (all emphasis in the original):
“The report relied on only half of the data actually collected in July — five sub-samples covering 7,519 children, described on pages 49–50 of the FRC report, with a combined average of roughly 16% — just above the threshold.
“By contrast, a Nutrition Cluster presentation released on August 8 — a week before the August 15 cut-off date — reported the full July sample of 15,749 children. Those results showed unweighted and weighted GAM rates of 13.5% and 12.2%, respectively — both well below the famine threshold.”
So the data were clear: no famine. That the IPC chose to manipulate the data for political purposes suggests the agency has forfeited its legitimacy. Additionally:
“The IPC itself acknowledged that available data on non-trauma mortality were nowhere near the famine threshold of 2 deaths per 10,000 people per day. Based on its own population estimate for Gaza Governorate — about 937,600 people — this threshold would correspond to roughly 188 non-trauma deaths per day. By contrast, the Hamas-run Ministry of Health reported that as of 15 August the five-day moving average across all of Gaza was just six ‘malnutrition-related deaths’ per day.
“Even if every one of these had occurred in Gaza City and were actual malnutrition-related excess deaths, the non-trauma death rate would still be an order of magnitude lower than the famine threshold.”
It didn’t have the numbers on its side, so the IPC made them up, claiming that the difference was made up of unreported (imaginary) cases.
Again, Israel seems to understand the gravity of the IPC’s corrupt interference on behalf of a terrorist organization. There is no reason for Israel to let up on the agency, and so far, it isn’t.
Then there is the lingering question of how to respond to the impending recognition of a Palestinian state by France and others joining the bandwagon. As I argued previously, this is a unilateral move by the Palestinians and their supporters, and so it must be parried with a unilateral move by Israel.
As France continues to up the ante, so must Israel. France suggested—then claimed it was an error when Yigal Carmon caught it—that it would support a Palestinian “right of return,” a euphemism for the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. So Israeli leaders know France is at least considering such a move. Paris is also contemplating opening an embassy in Ramallah.
What to do? Amit Segal points to an interesting piece by Yoram Ettinger (in Hebrew) on a meeting of Benjamin Netanyahu’s inner circle about whether, how, and where to apply sovereignty to parts of Judea and Samaria. Certainly this is under consideration apart from the French declaration of Palestinian statehood, but apparently the Israeli government is considering making such action a direct response to unilateral measures by European states, France included.
This makes sense: Unilateral moves that chip away at Israeli sovereignty will be met with unilateral moves that reclaim Israeli sovereignty. At the same time, it’s a highly controversial step that will no doubt earn passionate denunciations and maybe more. Israel has to decide whether the reward is worth the risk, and will likely at least wait to see what happens at the UN General Assembly next month.
But here’s a key quote Ettinger supplies from an unnamed participant in the meeting with Netanyahu: “It is not enough to close a French consulate in the face of recognition of a Palestinian state.” The logic is clear: recognition of a Palestinian state on disputed land would contravene the Oslo Accords and all that followed directly from that track. If France—or anybody else—is going to take a lighter to three decades of diplomacy and compromise, they’re going to get burned.
