The events of this past week have highlighted once again the power of the anti-Israel hoax. A claim intending to prove something about Israeli policy is revealed to be false, but not before it mobilizes concerted global action against the Jewish state and is then defended on the grounds of Truthiness: the belief that something is true because of preexisting biases, even when it is directly contradicted by the facts.
Those of us who live in reality have seen the same thing happen over and over again. One relevant example of many is Jenin, the subject of similar press coverage back in 2002 during the intifada (which progressives want to globalize). It’s worth taking a quick walk down memory lane.
In April 2002, after enduring a three-month campaign of suicide bombings against Israeli civilians, the IDF went into the place from which many of those bombings sprang: the West Bank city of Jenin. Today, Jenin is a hotbed of foreign-backed terror and the single greatest threat to the Palestinian Authority’s rule. During the intifada, it was not a threat to the Palestinian government but a weapon of it.
Israel’s operation in Jenin required house-to-house urban warfare, and the propaganda machine was cranked up and ready with a framing that caught on immediately: The Jenin Massacre. One Palestinian leader at first suggested there were thousands of casualties. Eventually he settled on 500. The real number turned out to be about 50, most of whom were combatants. Israel lost 23 soldiers. As the late, great Charles Krauthammer noted at the time:
“That hand-to-hand, door-to-door combat, in an intensely built-up shantytown, among dozens of houses booby-trapped by Palestinian fighters, should have yielded somewhere between seven and 21 scattered civilian casualties is nothing less than astonishing. It testifies to the extraordinary scrupulousness of the Israeli army, which lost 23 soldiers in the battle, precisely because it did not want to cause the civilian casualties that come with aerial bombardment, as has happened everywhere from Grozny to Kabul. And yet Israel was investigated precisely for defending itself against massacres that warrant no investigation.”
Indeed, as in Gaza, where the combatant-to-civilian ratio among fatalities is close to 1:1, the Israelis were almost miraculously pinpoint in their operations. To do so required putting Israelis in more danger, which the IDF did.
Yet what was the coverage like? Tom Gross’s compendium remains the necessary text. Gross ensured that the record of the hoaxers would endure, lest they try to weasel out of accountability by citing “the fog of war.” Here are some of the press descriptions of the IDF’s mission in Jenin, as collected by Gross soon after:
London Independent: “The sweet and ghastly reek of rotting human bodies is everywhere, evidence that it is a human tomb. The people say there are hundreds of corpses, entombed beneath the dust.”
The Guardian: [Israel’s operation was] every bit as repellent in its particulars, no less distressing, and every bit as man-made” as the destruction wrought on New York by the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.
The Evening Standard: “We are talking here of massacre, and a cover-up, of genocide.”
London Times: “Rarely in more than a decade of war reporting from Bosnia, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, have I seen such deliberate destruction, such disrespect for human life.”
You’ll notice something missing from the above: U.S. media. One immense difference between then and now is that back then American newspapers didn’t fall for the propaganda and even, at times, exposed it—such as the incident in which the IDF filmed Palestinians moving corpses from before the operation into fabricated mass graves in Jenin.
The wholehearted embrace by the American media of hoax war porn has changed the landscape significantly. Our journalists once were truth tellers, at least some of the time.
There are also a couple of parallels to the current conflict. One is that the initial rumors were so appalling that even right-leaning media and its consumers in Britain joined in the criticism. Gross recalls: “The right-wing Daily Telegraph — which some in the U.K. have dubbed the ‘Daily Tel-Aviv-ograph’ because its editorials are frequently sympathetic to Israel — was hardly any less misleading in its news coverage.”
We have seen in the U.S. over the past few weeks a similar trend, though it was supercharged by false images intended to prove that Israel had a policy of systematic starvation in Gaza and newspapers that printed outright lies alongside those photos. The intent was to peel away Israel supporters abroad by hoping they’d be too proud (or too dishonest) to simply admit they got it wrong. That should sound familiar.
Another, similar, detail of the propaganda campaign: Some of it was designed to drive a wedge between Jews and Christians. A columnist for the Evening Standard accused Israel of “the willful burning of several church buildings,” and then really went off the rails: “Many young Muslims in Palestine are the children of Anglican Christians, educated at St George’s Jerusalem, who felt that their parents’ mild faith was not enough to fight the oppressor.”
Again, sound familiar?
Finally, there were the revelations that Palestinian terrorists in Jenin were using human shields and routinely violating the laws of war by using civilians as bait. How do we know? At some point they simply admitted it. According to one Palestinian bombmaker who spoke to an Egyptian outlet:
“We had more than 50 houses booby-trapped around the [Jenin] camp. We chose old and empty buildings and the houses of men who were wanted by Israel because we knew the soldiers would search for them… We cut off lengths of mains water pipes and packed them with explosives and nails. Then we placed them about four meters apart throughout the houses — in cupboards, under sinks, in sofas… the women went out to tell the soldiers that we had run out of bullets and were leaving. The women alerted the fighters as the soldiers reached the booby-trapped area.”
A Palestinian commander, speaking to Arab press, was more succinct: “Believe me, there are children stationed in the houses with explosive belts at their sides.”
The UN played a loud role in spreading misinformation and then quietly backed off once it became clear they had been lied to. In fact, as per usual, every claim of Israeli crimes turned out to be projection on the part of the Palestinians and their supporters.
The question is what lessons we have learned from the “Jenin Massacre” debacle. The answer appears to be: none. Now as then, media fed propagandistic and wildly imaginative tales of Jewish perfidy to the world in the service of an actual band of war criminals and intentional child-killers. Now as then, some on the political right were ensnared in an information operation from sources that they would normally mistrust. Now as then, a wedge was driven in between Jews and Christians with lurid tales of gleeful Jewish church-burners. Now as then, the atmosphere was waterlogged with one-way propaganda to the extent that even savvy media consumers denounced Israel.
Zooming out, we also learn something else: that despite the rise of the internet and the supposed democratization of information, the Western public stewed in a bubble. As Krauthammer so perfectly described it back in 2002:
“This is what it must have been like living in the false consciousness of Soviet communism, where everyone had to publicly and constantly pretend to believe the official lies, all the while knowing they were lies. This is what it must have been like living in the 1930s, as the necessities of appeasement created a gradual inversion of right and wrong — the Czechs, for example, pilloried by official opinion in Britain and France for selfishly standing in the way of peace at Munich.”
He concluded:
“Churchill’s great gift to civilization was not just that he rallied good against evil but also that he pierced a suffocating fog of self-deception by speaking truth to lies. Where is the Churchill of today, the official of any government, prepared to tell the United Nations that its frantic hunt for a phantom massacre by Jews — while ignoring massacre after massacre of Jews — is grotesque and perverse?”
Where indeed.
