#755 Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert

To:       Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From:   Jerry Verlin, Editor  (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj:    Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #755, 6/21/15

This Week In The Inq:  AP Article on Israel’s Gaza Report Misleads on 3 Counts

Monday’s Inq (Philly Inquirer, Mon, 6/15/15, A9, AP, “Israel Issues Its Own Report on Gaza Fight”) ran an AP article on Israel’s just-issued 200+ page analysis of last summer’s Israel-Hamas war.  The AP account did Israel injustice.

The AP wrote:

Palestinians have said that the Israeli army violated the rules of war, which include giving adequate warning to civilians, using proportionate force and distinguishing between civilians and combatants.  They have pointed to the high civilian casualty count as evidence.

[a]  Warning Civilians:  Having cited the Arab side accusing Israel of violating rules of war specifically by not giving adequate warning to civilians, the AP obligated itself, in its report on Israel’s report, to say what Israel had to say, if anything, in its report about its warnings to Gaza civilians.  Numbered paragraphs 292 – 309, referenced in the Table of Contents as

  1. IDF Conduct of Operations during the 2014 Gaza Conflict
  2. IDF Conduct during the 2014 Gaza conflict
  3. Precautions in Attack
  4. Provision of Effective Advance Warnings

addressed this in depth.  But this AP report on Israel’s report omitted Israel’s report’s specific response to this Arab Israeli-war-crime accusation which this AP report itself specifically cited.

But, war being a two-sided occurrence, where balanced reporting cried out for AP reference on warning civilians was on how much warning the no-Israeli-warnings-howling Arab side gave Israeli civilians of their being by happenstance in the path of military targets at which the war’s Arab side was aiming its rockets and mortars.  Here’s Israel’s report on how much concern “Palestinians” had in this war for the safety of Israel’s civilians:

  1. The 2014 Gaza Conflict and the period immediately preceding it represented the most intense period of rocket and mortar fire against Israel’s civilian population in the nation’s history, during which approximately 4,000 rockets and mortars were launched against Israel’s civilian population, at ranges threatening about six million Israelis (approximately 70% of Israel’s population).

Israel’s report’s paragraph #228 had this to say about Israel’s ability to warn its own citizens of Arab rocket attacks aimed at them:  “Thousands of rockets and mortars were fired from the Gaza Strip into southern Israel, with almost no time for warning residents to seek shelter.”  What did the AP, after citing Arab accusations of Israel not warning Arab civilians, have to say about Arabs warning Israeli civilians?  Nothing.

[b]  Proportionality:  The second Arab accusation of Israeli rules of war violations cited by this AP report on Israel’s 2014 Israel-Hamas war report referenced “using proportionate force.”  Here, too, the Israeli report addressed this, and here too the AP’s report on Israel’s report ignored this key part of Israel’s report.  Paragraph 317 of the Israeli report stated that “the rule of proportionality” relates to whether expected civilian deaths and injuries, and damage to civilian property, “would be excessive in relation to the military advantage anticipated” in the attack.  Israel’s report includes an in-depth defense of the proportionality of Israel’s response against Hamas, again not referenced by the Arab-accusation citing AP.

And here again, by citing Arab accusations of IDF soldiers violating proportionality by firing back at Arabs firing from civilian areas, the AP obligated itself, by any measure of balanced reporting, to reference the civilian damage-military advantage proportionality of Arabs aiming rockets at civilian areas in which the Israeli military was not even present.

[c]  “the high civilian casualty count”:  The AP, in the quotation above from its report Monday on Israel’s report, wrote that Palestinian Arabs “have pointed to the high civilian casualty count as evidence” of Israel’s violation of war rules.  The AP here states “the high civilian casualty count” as a statement of fact, but that AP “fact” is directly contested.

On CAMERA’s website is a 9/19/14 posting quoting Israeli Brig. Gen. Amikam Norkin, Israel Air Force chief of staff, that

Israel was able to far surpass an international average of five innocents killed for each targeted terrorist. He said preliminary data from Protective Edge indicates “we’re slowly closing in on numbers of one to one.”

An appendix to Israel’s new report bears this out:

  1. According to the data gathered by the IDF (as of April 30, 2015), 2,125 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip were killed in the course of the 2014 Gaza Conflict. Out of this number: 936 (44% of total fatalities) have been identified as militants. Out of the number of militants, 631 (67% of the militants killed) were affiliated with Hamas, 201 (22% of the militants killed) were affiliated with Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and 104 (11% of the militants killed) were affiliated with other terror organisations.15
  1. The IDF has classified 761 (36% of the total) fatalities from the 2014 Gaza Conflict as uninvolved civilians, either because there was no indication that they were involved in the hostilities or because they were assumed to be uninvolved based upon their age and gender.16 This number regrettably includes 369 children under the age of 15 (16% of total fatalities), 284 women (13% of total fatalities), and 108 men (5% of total fatalities).
  1. The IDF’s identification process is ongoing. In particular, the IDF is still trying to make an accurate determination as to whether an additional 428 males between the ages of 16-50 (20% of total fatalities and almost all of the unclassified fatalities) were involved or uninvolved in the hostilities. Based on the IDF’s past experience, it is highly probable that in the upcoming months,

new information will surface demonstrating that some of these individuals were involved in combat against Israel in the 2014 Gaza Conflict. 

  1. Conclusion 
  1. The number of fatalities in the course of the 2014 Gaza Conflict — though unfortunate — does not imply that IDF actions violated the principle of proportionality. Moreover, any estimation of the breakdown of civilian versus militant fatalities must be undertaken carefully, on the basis of reliable information and a rigorous methodology. The need for a careful examination of such statistics is especially important given Hamas’s efforts to manipulate the number of civilian fatalities from hostilities with Israel.

It seems incredible that the world’s most influential news service, in writing a report on Israel’s newly issued report on last summer’s Hamas war, would quote Arabs’ accusations of Israel violating the rules of war on warning civilians and violating civilian damage-military advantage proportionality rules without either [1] referencing the sections of Israel’s report that specifically answer those accusations, or [2] referencing Arabs’ own actions in that war perpetrating those very war rules’ violations.

It seems further incredible that an AP would state “the high civilian casualty count” of that war as a flat statement of fact, given, despite Hamas’ chosen battleground,  the far-below-normal civilian casualty percentage that actually occurred in that war.

Oh, and did I mention that – as with its last summer articles on an Arab rocket landing near Israel’s airport, and on Israelis fleeing their homes in Israel, our beloved hometown Inq accompanied its AP report Monday on Israel’s report on last summer’s Hamas war, which included section after section on its trauma to civilians, particularly children, in Israel, with an Inq-selected photo of traumatized children in Gaza?  Oops, almost missed it.

[And if it seems to you inexplicable that Israel itself, in writing a report defending its actions in last’s summer’s Hamas war, a report that describes in great depth that war’s traumatic impact on relentlessly-rocketed civilians in Israel, would title its report “The 2014 Gaza Conflict” report, as though Gaza had been the exclusive theatre of action, and would call Hamas, Islamic Jihad et ilk “militants,” welcome to the world in which everyone appreciates words’ power but us.]

And, speaking of things from last summer, read on (as Sid says), if you will.

Unexpected Summer Rerun: “Israel’s Supporters Must Stop Using These 13 Phrases”

Last July, Algemeiner.com ran an article Lee Bender and I wrote urging supporters of Israel to cease mouthing Jewish homeland-delegitimizing expressions so-beloved by the Western media and those who do not mean Israel well.  We gave 13 examples, with explanations.  It got a fair run on “most read” in Commentary | Opinion, and quite a number of mostly favorable reader comments, to others of which we replied.  And then it faded, as Commentary | Opinion articles  do, into the oblivion of if-you-really-want-to-read-it-you-have-to-go-look-for-it land.  So I was surprised, in accessing Algemeiner this week, to see that “13 Phrases,” apparently driven by a few new reader exchanges, had popped back into the top 4.

Here’s that list of 13 phrases we should ban from our mouths.  In a world that views the “Mideast peace process” as the development of the timetable in which Israel will withdraw its “settlements” from “East” Jerusalem and the “occupied West Bank,” it is the “Palestinian” narrative, purveyed by phrases including those that Lee and I cite, that has to be fought.  And we have to begin with ourselves:

  1. “West Bank”
  2. “’East’ Jerusalem or ‘traditionally Arab East’ Jerusalem”
  3. “The U.N. sought to create Jewish and ‘Palestinian’ states”
  4. “1948 was the ‘creation’ or ‘founding’ of Israel”
  5. “The war that followed Israel’s creation”
  6. “Palestinian refugees of the war that followed Israel’s creation’ or ‘the Palestinian refugee issue’”
  7. “Israel ‘seized’ Arab lands in 1967”
  8. “Israel’s ‘1967 borders’”
  9. “Israeli-occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem”
  10. “Jewish settlers and settlements” versus “Palestinian residents of neighborhoods and villages”
  11. “Israel’s ‘Jewish state’ recognition is ‘a new stumbling block’”
  12. “Palestinians accept and Israel rejects a Two-State Solution”
  13. “The Palestinians”

In recent memory, Father’s Day has been good for a bottle of bourbon.  In a couple of hours, we’ll see.

Regards,
Jerry