If Hamas is a terrorist organization so is Israel. Wake up Israel, quit persecuting Palestinians. You of all people should know better.
3
Re: Large photo on front page (Thurs. 5/17)
The pic looks astonishingly like Michelangelo's, "The Pieta". Is there Any remote possibility it could have been staged??
What idiot places a child in harms way?
Just asking.
13
There have been Jews continuously living in Israel since maybe the mid-1400s B.C.
10
Ain't religion grand?
2
Thanks to Ari Lieberman, "This last month, Israeli archaeologists, working in limestone cave outside of the central Israeli city of Modiin, unearthed a rare, 2,000-year-old coin from the early part of the second century. The coin was minted by Jews during the Bar Kochva Revolt against Rome, which began in the year 132 C.E. The revolt was led by Shimon Bar Kochva who led the Jews in several successful campaigns and temporarily succeeded in ejecting Rome’s legions from Jerusalem and large swaths of Judea. Engraved on one side of the coin is a seven-branched date tree bearing two bunches of dates, and the Hebrew inscription “Shin-mem-ayin” (“שמע”) for Shimon. The reverse side depicts a grape leaf as well as the abbreviated inscription, “Leherut Yerushalayim” or “For the Freedom of Jerusalem.” The Palestinian's can issue all the denials they want and can close their eyes to reality but the historical truth of archaeology is unwavering. I’m still waiting for the Palestinians to unearth a 2,000 year-old coin bearing the inscription of Palestinian forefathers, alongside a yearning to fight for the freedom of “Al Quds.”
12
"a symptom of these venomous and simplistic times"...the author.
What is so simplistic about what started out as refugee camp of people fleeing a place they could no longer call home and where they were not welcome any more.
2
If the end game is to take all the land, then Israel should just do it and finish this up once and for all. Push the Palestinians out to Syria.
6
Thank you for this well-informed explanation for that remarkable photograph showing the leader of Hamas signaling victory on the day he orchestrated the injury and deaths of his people. Readers should contemplate the cynical exploitation that results in his exultation.
17
If media around the world did not consistent serve up the Hamas version of events then events like Monday's would not happen because Hamas would have no purpose for them.
A far more accurate headline to Monday's events would be:
'50 members of extremist Islamist group Hamas die storming Israeli border'
And a byline of:
'Hamas continues to encourage a cult of martyrdom in Gaza'.
That would be an accurate description of events and would reduce the gains Hamas gets from engineering such conflict.
18
When Hamas offers a vision for peace, I will be impressed. Otherwise, I have no sympathy for Hamas members who are killed in terrorism operations.
13
Excellent article. Based on most of the comments below, Matti Friedman and the New York Times proved that too many readers have already fallen for the Hamas Split-Screen Fallacy. For those who are concerned with the lives of innocent people, and I am among them, I would suggest to consider the following : convince Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood / Erdogan to stop Hamas leaders to force Gazans into mass suicidal terror intended to eliminate Israel.
12
The bottom line (as usual): Hamas leaders are the worst liars on the face of the earth. They force Israel to use live bullets.
And then they say Israel "fired on a peaceful demonstration while it was marching."
Tell it to the marines (and stay away from that fence).
7
Those who have recommended certain comments and made them Most Recommended about this and related articles might want to study Middle East history, religion, and ethnicity, as they seem to think all would be well, especially among Palestinians and Israelis, if it weren't for Israel, Trump, and/or America. It is actually rather patronizing and condescending of them to think Arabs, Iranians, and Turks are not as capable of self-serving, cruel, and manipulative mischief and violence as are Americans and Israelis.
I would also suggest that readers show as much concern for Syrians, who have been slaughtered in a couple orders of magnitude greater numbers than the Palestinians. In general, comments and recommends are ten times as common for articles concerning the latter than the former.
And. perhaps they would consider denouncing religious fanaticism among Muslims (and Hindus and Buddhists) with the same justifiable intensity with which they denounce such among Christians and Jews.
Also, when speaking of inalienable rights, why is it that many here consider national rights that disregard the rights of women, gay people, ethnic, and religious minorities as the legitimately primary rights? It's not clear to me that either Hamas or Fatah is likely to acknowledge much other than national rights. A Christian Palestinian leading Hamas? Not likely! A lesbian Palestinian leading the P.A.? Not likely!
Palestinians are as capable of cruel, and manipulative mischief as are Israelis.
7
Mr. Friedman states that "Israeli soldiers facing Gaza have no good choices."; however fails to note what good choices Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank have living in the conditions they currently live. What are the "Good choices" that people who have been disposed of their land and thrown into an open air prison where utilities and trade are controlled by the very same country that was created on top of the land of their ancestors. Palestinians deserve a state and deserve compensation for the land lost. A 2 state solution is no longer viable, the only solution is a single, democratic state where your rights do not depend on ethnicity or religion (as is the current situation in Israel). By definition a Jewish state cannot be democratic than a christian or Muslim one, a state where your religion determines your birthright regardless of where you were born cannot call itself democratic with a straight face. When it comes to Israel, it seems, is the only place western liberal really question the notion that all men are created equal and justify the the displacement and active colonization of a land that less than 100 years ago was mostly owned and inhabited by the native population. Israel is and active act of colonization, with colonist from Europe, Russia and other countries forcibly displacing the local population and calling foul when the local population dares react. I ask myself what other ethnicity would react differently?
2
Thank you, Matti Friedman, for bringing forth what was being withheld from public view. As can be seen by some of the other comments, some people will continue to believe what they wish to believe, no matter what compelling information is presented to them. In their minds, Israel will always be evil, as long as it exists.
24
pretty confused by assertion that many of protesters tried to rush the fence, but it statistically must've been a small % of the overall numbers of people protesting?
1
What is absolutely stunning to see as you read this article is the author's ability to dehumanize Palestinians, terrorist and non-terrorist. Is he suggesting that all the civilians in the body counts were terrorists? As a read I could not be certain, but was as clear as a bell is his complete indifference to the ones that were civilians.
Israel and authors such as this one have had the upper hand in the fallacy business here. What this man tried to do in this article and what Israel does every day is scream to the world "There are second class citizens in this world and they are expendable!"
And the sad fact is that, more and more, the world believes this fallacy...
3
Did you even read the article?
He stated that most of those who died were Hamas or PIJ members. He also stated that the deaths were tragic and fair minded people could debate about the nature of Israel's response.
He then further stated that the goal of this from Hama's viewpoint was to get simplistic responses that say 'Israel bad - they must be stopped' because the news media and readers will not delve into what really happened.
And he's exactly right.
14
You seem to suggest that it's simply that Hamas was better at optics than those who supported moving the US embassy to Jerusalem.
If the optics of this situation are terrible, it's because troops firing on protesters has always been toxic as far back as our own Boston Massacre in 1770; and because the proponents of the move are singularly inept.
5
They weren't protestors they were violent rioters storming the border - in full knowledge of the likely response.
Given that over 80% of those killed were active and admitted members of known terrorist groups it is laughable to suggest that Monday's 'protest' was anything other than a violent aggressive and cynical riot.
12
"What are the open-fire orders on the India-Pakistan border, for example? "
I believe this analogy does not apply, both Pakistan and India are independent countries, each with a national army.
4
The statement "The press coverage on Monday was a major Hamas success in a war whose battlefield isn’t really Gaza, but the brains of foreign audiences" perfectly encapsulates the journalist's fallacy of thinking that a snapshot captures an entire history.
Yes, the current drama is staged for newbies, but a much larger number have followed this tragic and entirely predictable tale for most of its seven decade duration.
W.H. Auden's poem "September 1, 1939" was illuminating then, and is illuminating today:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
The first evil was the suffocating terms of peace imposed on Germany in 1919, which sowed the seeds of fascism less than two decades later.
The second evil was opportunistic Zionism barging into the chaos left behind by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire with Western military experience and international funding, and declaring a state before indigenous Palestinians who had been occupied for centuries had a chance to awaken and organize themselves. That sowed the seeds of enmity by Palestinians, who discovered that they had only traded one master for another, before ever getting to experience freedom.
Israel could have chosen to be magnanimous toward their neighbors, instead they chose to press their comparative power advantage instead, annexing more and more land, first by war then by settlement activity.
Evil was done to Palestinians, now they are doing evil in return.
4
I'm afraid there are some serious errors in your post.
Israel has been 'magnanimous' to use your words - consider the following:
1947-48 - Partion accepted
1948 - 5 Arab armies backed by Palestinian irregulars attack the Jewish state.
1948-1967 - 20 straight years of terrorism against the Israelis despite no 'occupation' of WB&GS.
1948-1967 - No movement to create a Palestinian state but total acceptance by the local Arab population of Egyptian and Jordanian rule
1967 - 3 Arab countries attack Israel and lose.
1973 - 2 Arab countries attack Israel on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar - they lose again.
1979 - Israel returns Sinai to Egypt for a cold peace deal
Perhaps it's not all the fault of Israel?
13
Over 50 percent of Israel’s Jewish population comes not from Europe but from Arab nations such as Iraq and Egypt. They were driven out over the years. Baghdad was 40 percent Jewish a century ago. Alexandria was a Jewish city. Where do these people live now? Tel Aviv. Haifa. Jerusalem. It undoes your whole thesis, doesn’t it? Also, Auden hated that poem. He’d never let it be republished. He considered it a lie. Did you know that?
10
Thank you for pointing out the censorship and re-branding allowed by the media. Hamas's successful censorship of the media illustrates the larger problem that there is an overall censorship of the Palestinians by Hamas and Fatah. All voices that would disagree with Hamas or Fatah are silenced, e.g., can you think of what would happen to a Palestinian who would oppose these attempts to violate the border or state that the treaties offered no less than 3 times should have been accepted to save lives and allow the building of a Palestinian state? Western media assists this censorship by never publishing a dissenting opinion (as they surely publish differing Israeli and Jewish opinions), and this helps perpetuate the conflict onto future generations.
18
If Gazans want peace, if they want independence, if they want an end to the blockade and if they want an end to the cowards urging their children to their senseless deaths, they should overthrow Hamas,
26
When will we see Sheikh Ismaeil Haneiya of Hamas leading the rush to the fence and glorious martyrdom?
17
Hahaha. What a joke. He leads from behind. He likes that view.
4
Man, you guys are really invested in blaming everyone for the massacre of Palestinians but the people who pulled the trigger. I already knew the Times was absurdly pro-Israel in every respect, but this takes the cake. Shameful.
Can't wait for the op-ed blaming immigrant children for the detention camps Trump just opened.
5
Israel once held the moral high ground, but that train left the station about 30 years ago. Now you have its defenders writing stories like this...ah there is good reason for apartheid and occupation....our decent into barbarity and oppression is the fault of our victims! Look, their terrorists are despicable too !
The real issue is the tribalism and the lizard brain. The Israelis, once a credibly liberal response to a massive wrong, now perpetrate the misery they valiantly opposed.
4
Really! Really! One wonders if people who claim such things ever heard of the Tantura Massacre of May 22-23, 1948. There was never any credibility whatsoever; that they have taken German National Socialism as a model for their proposed establishment of hegemony in the Middle East, at the expense of the rightful owners of the land is without question. Witness the litany of "massive wrongs" perpetrated by these villains.
I wonder, has Robert been to Israel, or Gaza?
Is Israel apartheid? No.
How many Arabs living in Israel? About 20% of the population.
How many Jews in Gaza today? Zero.
9
Who brings an 8 month old baby to a violent protest?! https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/world/middleeast/layla-ghandour-gaza.... emc=edit_th_180517&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=502586200517
17
Leftists are guilty of the opposite of otherizing; call it same-izing. Israel is a country whose people are mostly Western secular-minded, the immense majority of whom are greatly troubled by the killings at the border fence.
In contrast, Palestinian society makes it a habit to celebrate those who kill innocent men, women, and even children. No doubt many individual Palestinians are aghast at this, but the larger culture evidently is not. This is not right-wing propaganda. It's a verifiable fact. Leftists who engage in same-izing would have us believe that Palestinian culture isn't problematic in the least, or that terrorism is, as Jean-Paul Sartre put it, "the last resort of the oppressed" (something, by the way, that Camus rejected).
What troubles me most about the loudest defenders of Palestinian behavior is that they tend also to be the most inveterate critics of their own countries. There is a kind of self-hating that has sprung up in the West, and this is but the latest manifestation of it, considering that Israel is seen as another example of Western hegemony in the region. There are many right-wingers who don't care about Palestinians. For those of us who do, in Israel and around the world, we should help them to create accountable institutions; to rid themselves of leaders who exploit them; to disavow revanchism and anti-Semitism; and show them that the objective of building their society must replace that of trying to destroy another.
19
Wow, one has to make an almost impossible stretch to come up with such theorizing. "Same-izing"? How does a Palestinian civilian protest more than half a century of continuous dehumanizing and theft of livelihood and land without being dismissed just as a pawn to Hamas. Sixty killed and thousands of injured Palestinians and zero injured Israelis and the NY Times response is at least three articles, including this one, that essentially find a way to blame the victim. I don't know how you can treat someone as "the Other" more than the Palestinian has been treated. One has to be devoid of any sense of empathy, let alone logic, to surmise the Palestinian as being treated as "same." Also, describing a country built on prioritizing one religious denomination above all as secular shows again the limits of your objectivity.
You are absolutely right. Hamas has a great ability to tell a story. Keep it simple.
Hamas says, “Our land is stolen. We are ghettoed in an open air prison. Our airport is destroyed and no seaport hence no economic activity. We have nothing to lose”. Very simple. Gazans respond, “Give us liberty or give us death”. This actually resonates with the international audience.
A somewhat obscure Prussian military philosopher once said, “War is merely a continuation of politics by other means” (approx. translation). He continues to say that the military victory of the war is irrelevant and what is important is the political advantage one gets by the war.
Using that yardstick, Hamas won the war.
1
How about a simple thought experiment: suppose it were the case that the Israeli forces fired unjustly or war-crime-illegally on the dozens who were killed and the thousands who were injured. Just imagine a scenario (a parallel universe, if you will) where this happened to be the case. Would those who are strictly pro-Israel then admit to being in the wrong? Of course not, they would never admit to being wrong, no matter what. Therefore, it is logically and scientifically impossible to distinguish between whether they are presenting a reasonable argument or if it is a position held by fanatic-dogmatic-"religious" conviction. It is yet one more aspect of the hypermodernist tragedy of discourse where the identifiable references of true and false have vanished. All sides in this mess have contributed to this "disappearance of reality" (Jean Baudrillard).
No matter what the truth is, people will still blame Israel. Most of the people killed on Monday were Hamas soldiers dressed in civilian clothes, but people still talk about the "unarmed children", with their firebombs, burning kites, and other weapons. According to a Gazan doctor, the baby who died on Tuesday had a pre-existing condition and did not die from the tear gas, but her mother brought her to a war-zone anyway. Of course, people remember only the death, not that it had nothing to do with the IDF. Children carrying weapons are just as lethal as adults. Hamas burned tires to make a smoke screen which made it harder for the sharp-shooters. Picking off those who are actually carrying out the violence kills fewer people than indiscriminate shooting. There is less criticism of Assad gassing tens of thousands of his citizens because Arabs killing Arabs don't count.
Israel told the Gazans to stay away while Hamas bused in families to their war zone. They are responsible for every single death, but there are still Arabs who think "martyring" their children is a holy calling. There is a quote attributed to Golda Meir, “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”
21
"Is there something Israel could have done to defuse things beforehand?"
Seriously? Mr. Friedman, I must assume that living in the cloud of propaganda and fear hovering over Israel prevents you from seeing what is so very obvious to the rest of the world. Israel has had seventy years to make appropriate compensation, demonstrate genuine atonement, and negotiate sensible arrangements for those who want to return. Seventy years.
Hamas no doubt involves a number of hateful and ruthless fanatics. It is obvious that any real solution must begin by defusing that hatred, and equally obvious that failure to do so demonstrates equally unscrupulous attitudes and behavior on the part of the current Israeli leadership who recognize but are unwilling to accept that at this point the only viable solution is a real democracy rather than a pseudo-democratic theocracy.
4
A New York Times reporter described how IDF soldiers shot a woman who was simply yelling at them from too-close to the border. Even though she was unarmed, not even with a rock, and even though she stayed on her side of the border and did not attack the fence, she was shot in the abdomen. This is not acceptable behavior by any 'civilized' military.
3
Thanks for this insightful piece. I'm a lifelong American liberal Democrat who frankly thinks the move of the US Embassy to Jerusalem and the Trump hard line against Hamas are positive moves, after the dithering decades of Bush and Obama, who achieved absolutely nothing toward peace in Israel and Palestine. A strong dose of realism is in order. Now that Syria is largely depopulated, shouldn't Syria welcome the Palestinians as refugees with offers of land and work? I see a beautiful exodus for the Palestinian people to the promised land of Syria.
13
So the embassy move is helping Peace in the region?
I'm not really feeling the whole Liberal Democrat thing from your language or ideas.
1
This is a good column & a worthy back story to the tragic events on the border between Israel & Gaza.
According to this article, of the 60 deaths at the hands of the Israeli Army this week, 53 were members of armed fighters.
"(On Wednesday a Hamas leader, Salah Bardawil, told a Hamas TV station that 50 of the dead were Hamas members. The militant group Islamic Jihad claimed three others.)".
Altogether these are too many tragic deaths. However, by Hamas's & Islamic Jihad's own admissions over 88% of the dead were fighters, bent on attacking Israelis.
However, when it comes to Israel, whichever side you choose to support, the facts are always distorted & the truth is long lost to the narrative you believe.
The current "leadership" for both Israel & the Palestinian People aren't interested in building a lasting peace based on mutual trust & respect. Both sides continue to maneuver for positions that win them support from different regional & world political circles.
The peoples on the ground in Israel/Palestine continue to live in a world of a never ending cycle of distrust & violence. They are all victims of cynical political manilupulations, forced to continue this death dance for the entertainment of callous & grotesque leaders who have lost the ability to feel pain & loss & compassion.
To attain lasting peace, leaders must emerge who are willing to break the cycle of violence, rethink their jaded jargon & make tough choices & take risks for peace for both peoples.
6
I must say that between this Op-Ed piece and Bret Stephens column perhaps actual facts are being inserted into this discussion. I wonder how many other western news organizations are compliant with reporting information they know to be wrong but at risk of having someone killed?
It never does cease to amaze me how we use our Western European values and impose them on people who don't share the same values. The word "desperate" keeps showing up in the news and reader comments when we know that many of the 9/11 terrorists came from wealthy families. They weren't desperate but they were committed. In the west, we would never expose our children to a knowingly harmful or violent situation but in Gaza children were exposed with the result of being killed or injured. Is that a matter of desperation? I think not. We read how those killed are considered martyred but, more importantly, how the families are compensated for martyrs. At least 3-4 generations of Palestinians have been wasted. At what point do Palestinian parents say, "Enough. No more of my children to die for nothing but propaganda".
Oh....and for the hundredth time.... Since 2005, Gaza isn't occupied by Israel (it was given back to the Palestinian Authority).
27
The other part of the story that is missing is Hamas' deep-seated relationship with Iran. You know who wants to take out Iran wherever it may appear? Saudi Arabia and other oil rich states. Additionally, Egypt recently gave back some Islands to Saudi Arabia (appeasement/good will gesture) and Egypt does not like Hamas meddling with Egyptian affairs in the Sinai (see story about allowing Israel to bomb the Sinai to eradicate extremists). Really, Gaza's only chance of survival might be Israel.
4
Granted Hamas is a bad actor, but what would it take for a Palestinian civilian to protest the horrifying life he or she is subjected to without a barrage of articles discounting their voice and suffering as just a mere extension of Hamas's plot to get attention. What would it take Mr Friedman to hear their screams, and acknowledge their pain and their losses?
God help us from our continued disdain for these peoples' decades old pain and suffering.
4
Pretty amazing that the posts captured under "NYT Picks" (for the most part) miss the point of this article entirely...and blame the Israeli army for protecting its borders. Meanwhile, the "Readers Picks" section is mostly filled with acknowledgment and agreement with this piece. Somewhat reinforces what the writer is saying - that the media outlets want to keep the story simple.
The most startling and egregious part of this piece is the admission right at the top that the AP and other news organizations kowtow to terrorist demands to censor the story. Rather than report that terrorists are dressed as civilians and hiding among women and children, the media is comfortable being complicit in the terrorist PR campaign. Truly chilling.
22
Wow, that is a thought-provoking piece! Being 6,000 miles and 2000 years away from the fighting does leave one's perspective a bit myopic. I still don't know that just shooting people is a good solution, but I see your point. Letting people willing to commit suicide into Israel is not a good idea. If only America was back to working at brokering peace instead of fanning the flames of Netanyahu's desire.
4
You can't always rely on what you see on TV. If you bother to do your homework, you'll find there's always two sides to the story.
2
The author mentions “Hamas” 17 times, “Palestinian” just once. This is the other side of the split-screen. The “complicated human tragedy” of Palestinian refugees is replaced by a “venomous and simplistic story” of Hamas fighters. The organizer of the March of Return, Ahmed Abu Artima has stated, “I want to live with Israelis in a single state, without apartheid.” This is too apparently complicated for this split-screen opinion writer who writes instead the more venomous idea that the goal of the march is “erasing Israel.”
Hamas and Likud are two sides of the same coin. Neither could survive without the other. The way forward is two reject them both and to serve the desire of the great majority of Israelis and Palestinians to live together in peace as they once did, for thousands of years.
5
"I came to respect Hamas for its keen ability to tell a story."
Is respect really the word you're looking for?
1
Hamas is a straw man for Israeli apologists. However evil and manipulative Hamas is, Israeli bullets and bombs kill a hugely disproportionate number innocent people. Just recently it was Israeli sniper bullets that killed 60 and wounded well over a thousand. Were the Israeli soldiers responding to an immediate, lethal threat when they took those lives? Of course not - it was a hugely disproportionate use of force and it was not an isolated incident. It was par for the course in a brutal on-going occupation. Stop making excuses for the wholesale slaughter of largely unarmed Palestinians.
6
If the border run had been on Egypt, Turkey, or even the U.S., the death toll would have been in the thousands. These ridiculous comments are based solely on pre-judged and biased ideas, fed by the narrative invented by the Hamas.
Of course they were responding to an immediate and lethal threat of thousands of people entering into Israeli sovereign territory. These are not protests as you know them in the U.S.
8
Thank you for telling the truth, Matti! It is desperately lacking in the narrative between Israel and Palestine.
10
Trump and Netanyahu handed Hamas this story on a silver platter. The world wants a two state solution and the "leaders'" actions have intentionally thrown a monkey wrench into this.
When 40,000 desperate prisoners in Gaza show up to march possibly to their deaths, something fundamental has to change. Trump and Netanyahu have shown no desire to change anything. And the weekly killings go on.
Yes, Hamas has been terrible for the Palestinian people and their actions will only lead those people off a cliff. But building a wall around Gaza and the West Bank and pretending the humanitarian crisis doesn't exist is every bit as bad.
Israel is an occupying force who have kettled millions of people in what is an open prison for decades. Now their apologists are everywhere blaming the victims. This is another attempt to put lipstick on the pig.
5
Israel has not occupied Gaza in 10 years but why consider facts?
11
thank you
9
great piece...its chilling to know that journalists can be manipulated to publish lies that bolster the Palestinian narrative.
19
Since 1947 the Palestinians have been sold the "Brooklyn Bridge" that they will destroy Israel. Over 70 years three generations have been raised on this dark fantasy. They don't build for the future; they don't build farms, schools, and hospitals; they build rockets, weapons and tunnels. Rather than use their weapons to protect their children they use their children as weapons. Their dream: an invasion. Their goals for their children: not that they become doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, or farmers - the Zionist dream - but that they become martyrs.
My parents and in-laws, who survived the Holocaust, did not raise me, my brothers, sisters, and cousins to kill Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, whose parents built and guarded the Nazi Concentration Camps, or the French and other occupied peoples who handed Jews over to the Nazi, or the Americans who declined to bomb the train tracks. They raised us to live our lives. "For me," my mother used to say, "my life, and your success, are the best revenge."
The Palestinians could learn from my mother. "Forget Israel," she would say, "and focus on the future.
17
If those in the "Occupying Society" would "forget Israel" the world would, indeed, be a better place.
Another disgusting piece justifying Israeli slaughter and maiming by blaming and gaslighting the true victims-- the Palestinian people suffering under 70 straight years of illegal war crimes and occupation. All while Israel keeps stealing more and more of their land, crops, water, and even breath. 75 military sniper murders and 2700 deliberate maimings including paralyzing young men and boys to impose economic hardship, misery, and suffering on the Palestinian people writ large is hard to justify, but somehow you did it. Israel locked 3 million human beings in the open-air prison of Gaza over a decade ago, systematically bombing, starving, then "mowing the grass" by murdering hundreds of unarmed, desperate humans at a time, but it's all Hamas' fault. Amazing moral cowardice on your part, but at least you didn't fall for Papestinian "manipulation." Wow.
6
Lets blame Hamas, lets blame the Palestinians, lets absolve of any wrong doing. Really?
It seems to me that pushing a people to live in squalor and misery and treating them like prisoners of war in their own land is wrong.
It seems to me that indiscriminately shooting them and their children dead, removing them from their land to give it to Jewish settlers is wrong.
It seems to me that the United States moving its embassy to Jerusalem and provoking a worse situation is wrong.
It seems to me that a people that suffered as intensely as the Jews did would be kinder, but I was wrong.
5
You realized that the protests were not organized by Hamas alone, don't you? Perhaps you don't because of your political affiliations, or perhaps because of your simplistic ideological bias around the "two sides" narrative, which is deeply flawed... dangerous even. The protests came together in a much more organic fashion than you describe; multiple community groups and ad-hoc committees contributed to the protests. To ascribe them wholly to Hamas is to perpetuate a miserable story that harms everyone. Honestly, get your facts straight before you spread this kind of hate in the guise of reason. This opinion is ignorant; NYT readers, ignore it and educate yourself about the complexities on the ground.
2
So, "compexities" to you means a one sided narrative. Makes sense to me...
2
Reading this article as well as others regarding this situation reminded me of what my late father told me a long time ago. He was in Officer training at Camp Lejeune during the Korean War and in his class regarding Foreign countries/affairs this Captain who was teaching the class stated that there will never be peace in the Middle East with the state of Israel being where it is. So we here we are 70 years later and he was right. Now with that said, if push comes to shove and I am force to choose between the two side, I'll make my bed with the Israelis. I don't agree with their settlement policies but they don't use their people as cannon fodder like Hamas. What should happen now is the Israelis and the Egyptians should really put the squeeze on Gaza until it implodes unto itself. This is the bed Hamas had made for itself. Once that happens maybe the people of the Gaza will be able to truly move forward.
15
Thank you, Mr. Friedman, for your opinion article, but obviously, it is weighted on the side of the Israelis. As an American having watched this struggle for most of my life, I remain conflicted about who is "right" and who is "wrong", but I don't believe that the US moving our embassy was necessary nor was it wise. It seems to me that having done so at this time has slammed the door on helping to bring peace to the region (if peace is actually an option for these warring factions).
We have effectively chosen a side in the conflict, and I'm not certain that it was the right side. Netanyahu and Trump are two birds of a feather, and I trust neither.
2
Listen Chris, and every one else considering that the embassy move is a problem.
We are talking about a building, a building that will serve better both sides.
JUST A CONSTRUCTED PIECE OF INFRASTRUCTURE!
What's really happens here is that one side is scaring to death everybody who dares to contradict it.
Simple freedom of speech cartoons about it kill, a little wrong word causes mayhem, millenary ruins are blown up due to to some obscure fetichistic offense, abused women are stoned to death, so on and so forth.
No, it is not a building, better be understood before is too late.
4
The bottom line in any argument concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that Israel must stop stealing land, stop using live ammunition against protesters, respect the Geneva Conventions, and seriously negotiate an end to their brutal occupation.
Israel is hoping that the Palestinian population grow so weary of being stateless and oppressed that they leave for other countries. They sank the 'road map' by contravening their agreement to stop building settlements.
As a Jew I despair seeing our diaspora traditions of justice trampled by a state formed for only one people - a state that can never be truly democratic. And, due to their land grabs, the only solution at this point is a federated state or one state solution that protects the rights of all peoples.
89
This seems like a speech rather than a response to the article in question. I suggest you read it, it may be eye opening for you.
57
Stopping the theft of land is incredibly hard when you're not doing it in the first place. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. A peaceful one-state solution is a fiction, a replay of 1948 India with violent infighting between Hundus and Muslims.
Israel needs to withdraw from the West Bank and East Jerusalem, because it's the right thing to do. It also needs to brace itself for violent attacks from Palestinians, which will continue for the foreseeable future regardless of what we do. And for self-righteous criticism from ignorants like you.
38
"... stop using live ammunition against protesters..."
I guess, unlike all countries of the world, they're supposed to just let tens of thousands of people, many (most?) believe you have no right to exist, breach your border? Yeah, right.
49
The Palestinians and the Israelis are at war. Each side believes in the justness of their cause, each side will use whatever weapons they have and will do whatever they must do to win. Both sides knowingly inflict indiscriminate collateral damage...Palestinian suicide bombers kill innocent non-combatants, so do Israeli soldiers firing live ammunition into crowds of unarmed protestors. Matti Friedman bemoans the lack of understanding for the plight of Israelis and denigrates the methods employed by Palestinians. Understandable, of course, but that kind of tribalistic thinking only adds to the flames. War around Israel is not going to end until both sides decide to forego violence and self-justification. Alas, that day seems a long, long way off.
1
Thank you for writing this Matti. Your words mirror a seemingly unlikely source, those of Mahmoud Al-Habbash, Advisor on Islamic Affairs and Supreme Sharia Judge. Al-Habbash's statements as this was just starting seem prophetic. He accused Hamas of deliberately setting up civilians to get killed: "You Palestinians, our people, go and die so that we'll go to the TV and media with strong declarations…The leadership in Gaza is having a good time…They gamble on the life of the young, when they have many agendas and wish to revive themselves with the blood of our people." Now a photo of a dead child is circulating everywhere, the tragedy amplified by the photo being meticulously posed and beautifully shot, deliberately invoking Medieval and Renaissance religious paintings. I found it terrible and shocking, which was the certainly the point, but kept wondering why adults were rushing into tear gas carrying infants. However, things are not as Hamas wants us believe. A Gazan doctor has told the Associated Press that the baby died from a preexisting medical condition, not tear gas. He spoke on condition of anonymity. Meantime, the child's family now claims that they carried the baby into the area as a result of a mix-up. I can't fathom what kind of mix-up would cause anyone to deliberately endanger their child, however based upon what the Gazan doctor stated it appears the child died elsewhere and then was propped up and posed as the poster child for this cause. It's truly revolting.
17
Hamas did not “time the Gaza border deaths.” It was the IDF soldiers who murdered people. The Israeli army is who timed the deaths because it was the Israeli army that murdered protestors.
47
I tried to understand your logic and the rationale for the its choice as a Times Pick.
You are suggesting that the blood of the Palestinians killed soil the Israeli army and not Hamas. This implies that had Hamas not sent "protesters" to the border wall they would have been killed anyway. If that is the case why weren't they killed prior to going to the border wall.
It is because of comments like these that defy reality and logic and its approval by a media luminary like the NYT, that attempts like these by Hamas will continue. Send their people to their death and blame Israel.
27
You seem to have a very poor understanding of what murder is. Self defense is not murder, and no country in the world would accept the definition you seem to be implying if applied to them. Border attacks are legally and morally justified, that is just the way it is. When you attack the most bedrock concept in international law, you do no favor to anybody.
15
There is so much that is unexamined in your comment; such as what did the "Protesters" intend to do after they successfully breached the Isreali border? Was any thought whatsoever given to the results of "success" or was this "March" intended from the beginning to be a failure? The marchers approached the borders with some intent? What was that intent? The artical addresses Isreali alternatives to defending their borders--how would you have the Israelis defend their borders? Are you opposed entirely to the existence of Israel? Your comment provides little light?
18
Remind me, please. Which group is it who is illegally occupying territory of the other? Hamas trespassing on Israeli land? Or, Israel stealing land beyond the borders the world granted to it after W. W.II?
5
So if you believe in the "borders granted to it", then you accept Israel's right to exist. So why no condemnation of the attacks and threats directed at Israel over the last 70 years (long before any occupation or settlements)?
8
Who can make the peace? There is one side that can and that is Israel. When will they have wise leadership?
4
This is on Trump and Netanyahu, PERIOD. Two corrupt, power hungry megalomaniac " leaders ". This is a fiasco of their making.
3
This article (and Nikki Haley) insist that the events in Gaza are the work of a Hamas initiave. However, an Arabist writing in LeMonde states definitively that the Return March was not conceived by Hamas but by a youth movement in Gaza. Hamas had to scramble to avoid being left out of the initiiative altogether. See "Non, les Palestiniens de Gaza ne sont pas des jouets du Hamas" by Jean-Pierre Filiu, Le Monde, 22 April 2018
4
Americans have issues with certain groups. Look at MeToo, Black Lives Matter, the Muslim bans, and the “animals” coming across the southern border. Then there are the Jews, that somewhat invisible but persistent issue. I live in Minneapolis, the city that was the anti-Semitic capital of the U. S at least through the 50’s. Israel seemed a solution to the Jewish problem, as Liberia was for freed slaves. Israel was a nice, distant place for those people not murdered in the Holocaust to go. But sometime after June of 1967, for Americans Israel went from lovable underdog to evil oppressor. Since Americans are an expectional race, we are best positioned to point out the flaws of others. We dealt with great restraint in dealing with the savages, slaves, Chinese railroad workers, and immigrants in general to be able to critique Israel. As with president Obama, critics of Israel are not displaying latent racism, they are criticizing policy. All one needs to know about who is at fault is to watch the 90 second story on the news or read a Twitter feed to confirm what you already knew. Those Jews are at it again.
1
I can hardly believe I am reading the New York Times this morning. Two thought pieces on the criminality of the Palestinian regime and its complicit Western press, and another piece admitting the Trump campaign was set up for the ridiculous Russia collusion fiasco by the FBI and CIA, using an Australian diplomat to boot! What a world!
4
Simplistic stories? Here I will tell you one. God gave all the land to the Jewish people. After the Romans dispersed the Jews Israel was empty. Then came the founding of the state of Israel. Everyone hated them because everyone is Anti-Semitic. The State sometimes does the wrong thing, sometimes they are too nice to the Arabs. The Arabs are all terrorists who want to run the Israelis into the sea. Whenever the subject of the settlements arises it is clear that there would be no problems if it wasn't for Hamas. .....that is the story that seems to be politically correct in the broadcast media, congress, and this administration.
7
Israel was threatened an attacked by Arabs long before the "occupation" or settlements.
6
The Israelis killing and wounding so many Palestinians sounds like an act of God. The callous arrogance is breath-taking. "All you need to do is get people killed on camera." It's as though the Jews defending the border were compelled by some force beyond their control. Hamas made them kill medics and protesters. What could those heavily armed soldiers do?
3
What exactly do you think those "protesters" planned to do once they broke through the fence?
6
I think everyone knows that Hamas sacrifices its own children for publicity. Many in the world are simply complicit with Hamas as a politically correct excuse for thinly veiled anti-semitism.
20
So, critics of shooting children are anti-semitic. This is an ugly argument.
1
Thanks for a great column!
17
"Let us not today fling accusation at the murderers. What cause have we to complain about their fierce hatred to us? For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived."
Moshe Dayan, 1956.
5
In another op-ed, a Hamas supporter proudly boasted that he got more than 100 of his people killed. For nothing. Or for the public relations coup of portraying them as victims.
17
The NY Times World section has an article of a Palestinian grandmother bringing her 8 month old granddaughter to the protests. They both died as a result of tear gas. The fury I felt was for the grandmother: who in their right mind would bring an infant to a protest, which has involved burning tires, molotov cocktails, etc., knowing the Israeli forces have a tendency to respond aggressively? The Palestinian martyrdom is getting them nowhere in this struggle.
17
The image of Mr. Haneiya flashing the "victory" sign after dozens of his countrymen were shot and killed gives ample credence to the saying "a picture is worth a thousand words."
The aging, sclerotic Fatah leadership does not value human lie, but Hamas values human life even less, if that is possible. They send Palestinian grandmothers to the border fence with Israel, as the NYT has recently reported, to provoke the IDF into responding. Twisted.
Yet they remain "popular" among's Gazans.
Israel should wait patiently for new Palestinian leadership to emerge. Its difficult to see reconciliation of any kind with groups that hide their 20-something male "soldiers" behind the skirts of aging females.
21
Unless I am mistaken, I have not seen the Times, Post, NPR or any other western publication report as news that 50 of the "innocents" who lost their lives during yesterday's "riots" were Hamas fighters. Their silence is telling.
15
The author talks of a "border" between Israel and Gaza as if Gaza is a seperate nation. Gaza is an open air prison that is under land and naval blockade by Israel. The Gazans were protesting their captors.
A lot of people are blaming Hamas for this but the fact remains that Israeli soldiers aimed their guns at Palestinian civilians and shot them in cold blood.
4
Reminds me of the husband caught in flagrante by is wife: "Who you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?"
4
Palestinians are the worst-governed people on earth, next to perhaps the North Koreans. In the words of Abba Eban, they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. They could have had a peaceful and prosperous state guaranteed by many nations, if they wanted it. And they are not welcome in neighboring Arab states either, which have similar border fences.
15
You want to hear fallacy? you can get it from the horse's mouth if you listen to Mahmoud al-Zahar' co-founder of Hamas as he speaks to Al Jazeera on May 13, 2018 and says that the terror group was “deceiving the public” when it spoke of “peaceful resistance”. Another Hamas official on Wednesday acknowledged that 50 of the 62 Palestinians reported killed during Gaza border riots on Monday and Tuesday were members of the Islamist terrorist group, bringing the total number of known members of terror groups among the fatalities up to 53.
14
Hamas admitted that 50 of the 62 deaths were their fighters. That stat says it all as far as how hard the Israelis tried to target combatants only.
14
To paraphrase Golda Meir
“there will be peace when Hamas shows more love for their children than hatred for Jews and Israelis’..
Funny thing about hatred is that it is so viscerally satisfying – it cuts off feelings of pain, desire, longing, fear as compared with love which comes with all the baggage of responsibility, guilt, ambition and a thousand conflicting demands upon the individual
10
Hamas,Hezbollah,ISIS,Taliban....., & hundreds of like minded organisations can take plentiful of photos of its citizens in various states of Energy Levels.No use.
From Dead to Bounciful,the photos aren’t going to evoke any emotions of despair or euphoria in the viewers.
Gone are the days,when readers got disturbed on viewing visuals.
The people are innured from such subtle or blatant propaganda photos & are blasé in their calculated indifference.
Hamas evokes contempt & so does its photos.Gloomier photos invites ridicules.
Regarding Gaza: Hamas "took it over" in 2008 the way Barack Obama "took over" the US the same year--via an election.
If it's true that a very few of the press "could be trusted to present dead human beings not as victims of the terrorist group that controls their lives, or of a tragic confluence of events, but of an unwarranted Israeli slaughter," that's because the Israeli army killed them, while maintaining an illegal control of all Gaza's borders, including the air and sea. The "terrorist group that controls their lives" is not Hamas but the occupying State of Israel. Hamas "took over" Gaza in 2006 the same way Barack Obama "took over" the United States in 2008: through a Democratic election.
2
Except that America has held more elections since then, and Hamas has decidedly not.
1
Yes, an interesting perspective, pointing to the inevitable debate over the loss of "innocent" lives. The real mistake the Israelis have made is the gratuitous decision of their leaders to divisively align themselves with an American president who is rapidly becoming one of the most despised figures of our time. Perhaps the impact of Trump's policies are still TBD despite their gross callousness and nefarious intent. But the black stain that the State of Israel has acquired by identifying itself with this pervert of democratic values will be hard for Jews like myself to accept. Unfortunately, this strategic political error by the Israelis will long outlive any passing tactical propaganda victory experienced by Hamas.
3
You should watch The Occupation of the American Mind if you want to understand how the story is told in the US.
What an impressive article that so clearly describes the situation. I am 'shocked' that the NYT would publish it...
7
When one truly understands the story of Palestine, one must blame the sinister and nefarious game plan of the US and the post bellum Europeans to create another colonial state to seize the energy resources of the Arabs in Middle East. United Nations is deeply involved in this abhorrent, genocidal campaign against the Indigenous population. European in Palestine must return to Europe for peace to exist. The Palestinians will resist till the end of time.
1
The Palestinians have energy resources?
Hamas is all about media manipulation. Playing with fatality numbers, injury numbers, parading dead babies in front of cameras; this is essentially all they do. This is essentially their "product”.
Just look at how they victimize and abuse their newborns:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2MMjc8ZXlI
These are toddlers. By the age of 18, many young Palestinians are so thoroughly indoctrinated and brainwashed with virulent hatred they require little encouragement to strap on a suicide vest or sneak into Israel and randomly stab innocent citizens.
This is Hamas’ other “product”: the assembly-line creation of young assassins willing to die. This is symptomatic of a deeply-flawed and unacceptable cultural bubble growing in Gaza and the West Bank. No one would tolerate such a culture of death in any civilized society. Yet we somehow make allowances for the Palestinians and couch their wickedly brutal culture as the result of Israeli oppression. We somehow make allowances for murder, and the stated ideology for (mass) murder, as a display of empathy to a people who we are told are solely victims. I’m sorry, but the crimes start with the children- once they have been indoctrinated the cycle continues endlessly.
11
Oh, so this explains everything. Because Hamas is trying to create a narrative (something Israel's "friends"--and I put the word 'friends" in quotation marks because this kind of friendship is daily diminishing actual friendship for Israel) actual deaths don't count.
2
Far be it from me to advise young Palestinians on the matter of how to conduct their demonstrations and riots.
They are far more practiced at these activities than I am.
But if I was a young Israeli soldier seeing 40,000 wild-eyed people run straight at me trying to force their way across their border with knives or stones or can openers or fire bombs or whatever in their hands, I know exactly what I would do in my pants.
And after I cleaned myself up, or maybe before, I know exactly what I would want to do with the rifle in my hand.
Who, trying to look out for himself and his country, wouldn’t?
The people of Gaza need to get themselves different leaders and different tactics. Next time without the can openers.
13
The author seeks to perpetuate another version of the split-screen falacy: the besieged Israeli soldier trying to do the right thing under impossible circumstances and the devious and murderous Palestinian protestor attempting to infiltrate and kill. It's not only the Western observer trapped by their own blindness.
1
Perhaps Israel and the IDF could avoid these heart-rending moral choices (e.g., whether to shoot a child or risk letting in an armed adult) if they didn't force Gazans to live in an open air prison in the first place.
1
Sadly, the pose of the Hamas leader in the photo says it all. Dozens of people have just died, and he is smiling. He may have won a propaganda battle, but no benefit has been achieved for his people, and the protest he is leading seeks explicitly to destroy Israel, not to work with Israel for the peace and dignity of the Palestinian people.
13
So Hamas dressed up like unarmed civilians and then to further the charade kept provoking the soldiers until they were forced to shoot them. Uh ... okay. If someone is unarmed then deadly force is excessive regardless of their affiliation.
Funny, we immediately accept the 'Army of Islam's' account of what happened in Duma based on videos they produced of them spraying water on children without the pretense of an investigation. No trickery there but explanations are accepted based on who gives them.
3
In the new dictionary, "unarmed" means throwing molotov cocktails, wielding knives, burning tires, sending airborne incendiary devices to opposing troops, and storming a border fence. Good to know.
9
The greatest publicity break for Hamas is Bibi Netanyahu.
His arrogance, smirks, catering to Trump, and support for illegal and immoral settlements is the best advertisement for the false narrative of an arrogant Israel vs. a besieged Gaza. What does he stand for? In the US he would be seen as a Tea Party type loon. He is now the face of Israel and as such the Israeli's lose.
It is one thing to be strong and defend yourself, and another to be arrogant and uncaring. Hamas could not have paid for a better advertising agency than the Likud.
2
bravo. what we all know, but when we try explain get shouted down as racist or anti-muslim etc. good job. thanks nyt for publishing.
5
Thank you for an honest look at the situation
7
This is indeed a great article, both in explaining Hamas' cowardly exploitation if it's own people as human shields, and the media's general white-washing in favor of a narrative as follows: rich Big Israel = bad (despite behind a thriving democracy surrounded by threats), and poor little Palestinians = Good (many of them are, which is what makes this so sad!) despite the millions in terror funding from Iran and various "mosque charities", and their leadership/Hamas squandering all of their aid money on expensive tunnels, rockets, fruitless conflict that only "Costs" the avg Palestinian, and private jets.
7
When Israel gave back the Sinai Peninsula in 1977 to Anwar Sadat, Sadat told Israel to keep Gaza. He was right.
In 2004 Bibi told Ariel Sharon not to return Gaza to its residents. He also was right.
When Abbas told the Gazans not to vote in Hamas, he was right.
9
I believe Israel deliberately and relentlessly takes action that provoke outrage among Palestinians then uses that outrage to justify violence and further oppression.
Hamas' "keen ability to tell a story" is no different from Friedman's. He says that "a simple story about victims would stick....whether because of ideological sympathy, coercion or ignorance". By deflecting from the victims, Friedman shows the exact same "sympathy.. ignorance..". In his telling the IDF who didn't suffer a single casualty was justified in killing some 60 people and maiming several hundreds. He finds it significant that several of the victims were members of Hamas. Is that so strange in the case of a Gazan? If I remember correctly, aside from ultra-orthodox, almost every Israeli citizen has been a member of the IDF: does that make everyone of them a potential combatant?
This is such a tragedy: as long as we have Friedmans around, and there are millions of them, we will continue to have, paraphrasing George Wallace: "Occupation now, occupation forever"! No freedom for the Palestinians.
3
Dear NYT. Thank you for publishing this brilliant and above-all honest piece by Matti Friedman. So many clever things he writes, completely destroying any logical person's criticism of Israel's response to the terrorism on its border. After all the insanely biased reporting against Israel in your esteemed newspaper, it is refreshing to have honest and correct analysis.
People often say that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. In South Africa people said this with reference to Nelson Mandela. So, a couple of things to note:
1) Mandela never denied the right of the Afrikaners to live and to exist. HAMAS does this to Israel.
2) Mandela never tried to murder white people, he negotiated with them.
The commentators blaming Israel for the "open-air" prison that they say Gaza is ignore facts: Gaza was productive before Israel gave it to the Palestinians and left in 2006. Electing a terrorist group was not wise, if they even won that election fairly. Many people admit that HAMAs forced people to vote for them.
Above all, as so many have said, what would the people of the USA, UK, France etc do if there were murderous masses on their border wanting to tear their hearts out?
11
Hamas is a terrorist organization. As a terrorist organization they are all too happy to make martyrs out of innocently led people who have bought into their dispossessed--victim narrative.
5
That closing paragraph is very, very misleading: "For someone looking out from here, that’s the real split-screen effect: On one side, a complicated human tragedy in a corner of a region spinning out of control. On the other, a venomous and simplistic story, a symptom of these venomous and simplistic times." That sounds wonderfully open-minded and balanced, but the actual thrust of the article is itself venomous and simplistic - it's just simplistic in a different way to the alternative narrative.
There's an old adage (perhaps Australian?) that if self-interest is in the race then that's the horse to back, so, personally, I'm just as skeptical of Mr Friedman's self-serving narrative as I am of Hamas'.
1
The literal smokescreen from the burning tires was a giveaway. Why would the protesters need to mask their efforts if they were so noble in spirit? Was it to hide gunfire coming from Hamas directed at the Israeli soldiers? The western media did the bidding of Hamas by reporting the incident as a human tragedy instead of the Hamas terrorist act that it was, notwithstanding the initiating flagrant foul by Trump and Netanyahu ratcheting up the unrest with an in-your-face embassy relocation. Another Ivanka photo-op and her dolt husbands speech about peace while gunfire was being exchanged was not worth the bloodshed.
5
We must also ask why a mother brings an 8-month old baby, who we are now finding out was already sick, to a border-breaching ripe with burning rubber tires, flaming kites in sky, rocketfire and gunfire.
When I first saw that image on screen I thought, "brilliant media manipulation." Which it is. And it's Hamas first and only playing card. They play it well. And we fall for it every time. But this time it appears Hamas is being held to a slightly higher level of scrutiny. Perhaps this is a 'teachable moment' for those who are typically pro-Palestinian whenever the conflict hits the front page.
11
Clever Hamas knows that "All you need to do is get people killed on camera."
I can't express how repulsed I am at this sanguine, dismissive, dishonest diction.
The unarmed people we've watched die were not "gotten to be killed." Real people, with brains, consciences, and guns, shot them.
Anybody ought to know that you shouldn't shoot unarmed people on camera. I literally cannot believe that so many people with brains and consciences feel justified shooting unarmed people on camera--and that an even larger number of people with brains and consciences are willing to back them up.
I can't breathe.
2
A Roger Cohen op-ed excoriating Israel for one thing or another would result in hundreds of responses (let's be conservative and keep the number at 150); this one, so far, only seven (now eight, if this is accepted). And the Cohen op-ed comments would mostly be filled with anti-Israel and/anti-Netanyahu vitriol.
These comments, interestingly, so far at least, agree with Friedman, making the Israel attitude among NYT readers 150-7. Only seven contributors understand the brilliant, yet dark and vicious strategy of Hamas, a bunch of Iran-supported thugs who are openly willing to sacrifice children and non-combatant women on the altar of favorable press from most of the world. A group of brilliant strategists who know how to put Israel into an untenable situation, using civilians as shields in numerous ways.
If their work wasn't evil, it would be enviable.
6
This is not about Hamas or storytelling.
This is about what happens when you pen 2 million people into a prison and poison their water.
This is about what happens when you shoot those prisoners who want to escape.
2
Comparing that border to India-Pakistan is weak to say the least.
Hamas set a trap and Israel feel right into it. The actions of the Israelis are being rightfully condemned by most of the world as barbaric.
Yes Hamas is a terrorist organization and they hoped to creat a PR bonanza. Israel gave Hamas what they wanted.
1
I think that Israel is despised almost as much in the US now as Trump. They are both powerful bullies. Netanyahu does not want peace. Moving the embassy was salt in the wound. Live bullets against against protestors - feed up - insane.
You would have thought that for Israelis the Warsaw Ghetto would be etched on their psyche. Israel has made Gaza like the Warsaw Ghetto. Only instead of sending the Palestinians off to die, they are just letting them die in place. The sad thing is, this is the Palestinians home, but recently claimed through war by the Israelis because the Bible says they were there 2000 years ago. The Israelis have power, money and the backing of the US, the Palestinians do not. Over $3.8 billion tax dollars to Israel a year to pay for killing Palestinians.
Gaza is the worlds largest open air prison. The Gazans are not allowed to travel. Water is too poor for irrigation and 97% is contaminated with sewage. Severe restriction on goods entering and leaving. Unemployment is 44% and poverty rate is 63%. Israel is like White Apartheid South Africa was.
3
And now Ireland is dressing down Israel while the mayor of Dublin is calling for a boycott of next year's Eurovision contest because the winner being an Israeli requires next year's contest to be held in Jerusalem. Ignorance? Misunderstanding? Or 1000 years of being hard-wired by Irish Catholicism that the "Jews killed Christ" cloaked as human rights rhetoric?
9
....and yet neither of those scenes on the split screen had to happen.
It was not crucial that the US relocate the embassy to Jerusalem. It was done simply to appease Bibi and throw shade on Obama.
And also to please a bunch of whacked-out religious end-timers.
Yet another crime committed for the Trumpistas.
Hamas is using the same pr tools as the color revolutions that are often instigation by Washington and supported by the Times.
Sure, they put Israeli soldiers in a hard position. But under pressure people show their true face. And in the case of the Israeli army that is one of contempt for Palestinians and a very low threshold for applying deadly force.
This will be nothing new for anyone following the news from Israel. There are almost daily incidents where we see the same attitudes. Unfortunately they seldom reach the international press.
1
Friedman’s correct in every important way. A great column.
7
A very well done piece of writing. It should be compulsory reading for the CNN crew that eats up Hamas propaganda like ice cream on a hot day. It's a no-brainer that the best way to prevent this senseless killing is simply don't storm the border fence. But as Matti Friedman underscores Hamas's purpose is simply to pile up dead bodies of its own people for propaganda purposes. Thank you CNN for helping in the killing. You're as much to blame as the bullets fired for the deaths of these manipulated 'victims'. They're victims of their own fanatical Islamic regime that has little regard for life of its own people or anyone else's.
8
There are two choices: Peace and Production, OR Death and Destruction. Hamas, and the Arabs in Gaza and indeed, the entire Middle East, continually choose the latter option. Hamas willingly sacrifices civilians, including women and children, and then celebrates that death-cult sacrifice, as evidenced by the photo of the tribal sheikh in this article.
10
So the only way of stopping people from storming a fence is to shoot and kill them, by the dozens?
Really?
1
One question that is not asked is why the Palestinians are called "refugees." According to the UN, a refugee is a person displaced from his/her home. This applies to refugees everywhere in the world except for the Palestinians. They, and only they, pass their refugee status on from one generation to the next. And why, after WWI, WWII, and all of the other conflicts, are refugees settled in other countries, often quite successfully, except for the Palestinians? This includes the tens of thousands of Jews expelled from Arab lands after the formation of Israel. Because the UN prohibits Palestinians from being settled in other countries, in order to keep the conflict alive.
4
Despicable behavior from a desperate people who have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
1
How are we as human beings supposed to interact
with one another as we walk the earth?
And, how are God's children, and his servants,
supposed to conduct themselves in business
transactions? "Especially" in transactions that
represent him?
Obviously, we've all come short of the glory of God.
(Rom 3:23)
But, irregardless of one's beliefs. As sentient beings,
a solution can be found for the Palestinians in Gaza, if
a solution is really sought.
There are plenty of men, and women, of good will in this world, who can come together, and work out a place(s)
for the Palestinians to relocate so they can move forward
with their lives.
Common sense would seem to suggest that the neigh-
boring countries should be at the forefront of any plan
of action, as they're the ones who have to live with the constant neighborhood unrest.
The United Nations can host this gathering, after all,
that's why they were created.
2
I’m an ex-israeli american who left Israel because of my humanistic objection to the palestinian-territories occupation. Both my sons didn't serve in the israeli army because of this reason, the older even spend 2 years in the prison for this - and I completely supported them.
Yet, I strongly feel that there is another side to this bloody conflict - consistently ignored by many western progressives - the antisemitism inherent in the fundamental Islam (which, unfortunately, make big majority of the islamic societies today.)
This islamic fundamentalism is the main problem of the middle east today, and the only way to solve this problem should go through Islam-reformism (similar to the ones Judaism and Christianity already had)
4
Middle East peace is not as complicated as people make it seem, honestly. Start with some basic principles:
1. Israel has a right to exist. Their endless backing by the US, their high quality weaponry and training and unconfirmed ownership or lease of nuclear weapons means Israel would likely vaporize Jerusalem before it is conquered by Arabs again. Game over, move on.
2. The polite community of nations cannot allow for the result of war to be occupation and annexation. Israel should retreat to pre-1967 borders and wall off Arab Jerusalem from Israeli Jerusalem and install a DMZ buffer around Gaza Strip and West Bank.
3. Gaza Strip and West Bank cannot be managed as one Palestine. This is clearly impossible as there will never be open and unencumbered transit between the two territories via Israel.
4. Upon passage of two state solution, Israel and Palestine Provinces sign NNPT to discourage nukes from the Mid East.
5. Israel gives West Bank a flyover corridor to allow the enclave to thrive.
6. Arab countries utilize Gulf state economic model to encourage Islamic banking and bird cage capitalism. Wind and solar with a strong energy grid should be top priorities to allow for the reboot of cottage industry.
7. Lastly, Israel acknowledges that 93% land preservation is a cynical ploy to force land scarcity in the nation. Either Israel should open up land preserves to development or encourage a lawful, high-density model of Zionism.
1
I have an idea how to stop the people storming the fences. Do what has worked for 70 years: Don't unilaterally open a US embassy in Jerusalem against nothing asked of Israel.
1
I really appreciate Mr. Friedman presenting this thought provoking piece. Like many Americans, I am coming to this story late...mostly out of sheer laziness and an unwillingness to try to unravel in my own mind the snarl of everything that is "The Middle East". It is, to put it mildly, a daunting task. There is a chance that I bring a different, ignorant if you will, perspective.
So I will start with a simple question. Overlords aside, what do the Palestinian people (the inhabitants of Gaza and the West Bank) actually want as a reasonable outcome? I think we are pretty clear on what the Israeli people want. And we've heard a lot about what the terrorist groups and random thugs that have taken control of the occupied territories want, but what do the people who actually live in (is in the right word?) Gaza or the West Bank actually want? Has anyone asked? Does anyone know? Surely they aren't all just truly blindly following these thugs?
And please, don't just clap back at me that they are all rabid anit-semites and want all jews to die and to burn everything in Israel to the ground. That's simplistic and arrogant thinking. Because I refuse to believe that there is nothing, absolutely nothing in their hearts other than hate and spite.
4
Do the Muslim Arab members of the IDF fire on the Palestinians in good conscience? Don’t the Muslim and Christian Arab-Israelis also stand to lose with unbridled immigration of stateless Arabs? I do not know why the Israeli government ignores their most effective PR weapon, the Israelis of Palestinian heritage, who would speak out and fight to preserve their citizenship and status in the Israeli state.
1
Spot on. These nuances - yes, those nasty things call details - are getting entirely overlooked in so much of the discussion around what's taking place in the region. Frankly, I'm surprised and disappointed at how easily Hamas hoodwinked so many people to believe its story.
Cynical manipulation at its best.
2
This article provides a reasonable counterargument to the emotional response the killings have educed. Israel is in a difficult position with regard to the defense of its territory and it may well have needed to use lethal force on the Gaza demonstrators.
What it doesn't answer, and what none of these kinds of pieces answer, is the tendency of the Israelis to believe that everyone who criticizes them is deluded or simple minded. The problem extends far beyond these tactical events, which are simply symbolic, to the attitude and behavior of Israel for the many years of the Netanyahu government. There has been no good faith effort to advance a plan for peace by those in charge and a further hardening of the toxic bias against the Palestinians that exists in Israel (it isn't about two people who are both suffering because of each other and deserve better- it is about one people who deserve for the "other" to simply disappear).
The "optics" of what happens on the Gaza border is played out in the minds of Europeans and Americans against this very clear subtext. It seems amazing to me that Israeli writers and commentators cannot see it. As the author says- Hamas tells a good story. Perhaps he should examine more carefully why it is a story so easy to sell.
1
"the tendency of the Israelis to believe that everyone who criticizes them is deluded or simple minded"
You accuse an entire people of making generalizations, with a sweeping generalization?
Clearly, you have never been to Israel, or probably even spoken to an Israeli, for if you have you'd realize that Israelis hold a wide range of views and debate passionately with one another on most issues.
4
*Any* country has a right to defend its sovereign border. And by force if necessary.
It's 'Politics 101' for a corrupt regime like Hamas to deflect attention from itself towards an outside enemy like Israel.
4
Some things to keep in mind.
1) There are NO good guys here. They are all willing to kill children, on both sides. Some of them are worse than others.
2) These protests, and deaths, had been going on for over a week. No excuse the Israeli army had no better tactics. Even rubber bullets would have been better.
3) The eyewitness account in this newspaper of Israeli soldiers shooting live bullets first at the feet of, and then into a small unarmed group proves point #1.
4) Netanyahu is a lousy strategist. Israel loses the battle of world opinion once again. He thinks it doesn't matter. In the long run he is wrong. American Jews abandon Israel, the Jewish state will not long survive.
5) The status quo is NOT a good long-term strategy for Israel. See point 4. It is even worse for the Palestinians. The "comparative advantage" does not, contrary to what the Israelis think, work in their advantage. They have much more to lose.
None of the analysis changes the basic facts: Palestinians are penned up without hope in a ghetto in Gaza by Israel and Egypt. Israel has been illegally expanding in the West Bank to a point where a two state solution may not be viable. The founding of Israel dislocated thousands of Palestinians. In a religious state, those of a different religion are second class citizens. Israel is sabotaging the ability of Palestinians to build in Jerusalem and elsewhere, while facilitating building by Jews and settlers.
If we allow religion to be used to justify aggression, whether it's Evangelicals, ultra-orthodox Jews, or radical Muslims, and regardless of whether the aggressors are true believers, or merely using religion to justify their power grab, we will not live in a civilized world.
1
Polish Warsaw Ghetto 1940
Palestinian Ghetto 2018 on
2, 000 calories (subsistance) a day and barely potable water.
Israel and its settlements have destroyed 800, 000 Palestinian olive trees.
1
There were many, many reports and videos of people being shot 50 to 200 meters from the fence, often doing nothing at all when they were shot. Plus the fence has three parts and no one even made it through the first part, so even those rushing the fence were not a threat justifying lethal force at the time they were shot. If you do not deal with those facts then you are ignoring what really happened and writing a fiction that you find justifiable. It is convenient to make this about Hamas and claim that the shooting was only in response to Palestinians imminently about to break through the fence, but this is a lie. The simple fact is that Palestinian lives mean less than nothing to Israel now. As Gideon Levy wrote in Haaretz, if the IDF had shot 60 stray dogs there would have been a great uprising of protest in Israel, but for 60 Palestinians, nothing. Hamas is the boogeyman upon which everything can be blamed, blinding Israelis to the wonton shooting of the innocent. I am a Jew and fell in love with Israel at one time, but I could not be more disgusted with it now. As once-proud Germans should have become disgusted with their country in the 1930s. It is not genocide yet, but the absolute lack of regard for Palestinian life is the very same attitude out of which genocides have been built.
3
Israel is holding nearly 2 million people in a ghetto (or perhaps, as some have said, it is an open-air prison). This is a problem. People are trying to escape. Some of them are no doubt violent. But until Israel deals with the fundamental issue of having caged the indigenous population into one of the most densely packed corners on earth to make way for a religiously and ethnically pure state, the prisoners will continue their attempts at escape.
Gaza shares a border with Egypt as well. Try asking yourself why Gazans don't simply use that passageway to get everything they need.
6
We're also handed a simplistic narrative from Israeli officials. Israel has the right to defend its borders. The question of how is never, ever addressed.
I doubt Hezbollah or Assad could engineer getting 40,000 people to risk their lives protesting from Lebanon and Syria, and the situation in Lebanon is completely different, so the obvious lethal force is appropriate there. But Gaza?
Does Israel have to play its role so perfectly in the Hamas narrative? In an earlier iteration, when Hamas fighters hid behind children, did a few Israeli soldiers have to fire into the children?
Israel seems to have given up trying to control the narrative possibly because no matter what, they get bad press. Very well, but why complain when the split screen goes out? Why not change the narrative? Are you suggesting that expertise thinks this narrative is proper somehow?
This article fails in one fundamental way: it does not address, at all, the larger context in which all of this is taking place. Hamas would not have the support that it does if Israel was not doing everything it can to settle every inch of Palestine (except Gaza, which it operates as a prison) and destroy any hope of a future for Palestinians. It is disingenuous to talk about Hamas' tactics without considering the ruthlessness of the enemy it is fighting and the history of Israel's constant violence, occupation and settlement of Palestinian lands. Remember, no matter what Hamas does or does not do or say, Israel has absolutely no right to be building settlements in Palestine. Yet its continued settlement activities underline its determination to keep the Palestinians in permanent servitude. Under those conditions, can Hamas really be blamed for using every trick in its arsenal or with fighting a PR campaign to gain some kind of advantage? If Israel wasn't willing to kill Palestinians, Hamas would not have a weapon. If Israel wasn't willing to close all avenues to a just peace, there would be no grounds for the conflict. Blaming weak, oppressed people for resorting to the only means at their disposal - i.e., throwing their bodies against their oppressors and trying to turn world public opinion - is a pretty weak argument.
2
Ever heard of water cannons?
1
So the Hamas have learned to use the media. WOW. What a shock! Did the Israelis?, yes but the Israelis learned to play American journalists many many years (50) ago. I know I use to live in the ME and was always surprise by the narratives printed in American newspapers. The narratives were often in opposition to the facts I saw on the ground. Refugee camps. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been living in refugee camps for 70 years in countries where they have no citizen rights. Three generations have had few opportunities of employment, education and emigration, often without a passport. The Palestinians are now desperate, they know they are going to be shut out of Jerusalem. The Palestinians just want to be free as any people want. Why is that idea so scary to the Israelis? The Israelis remind me of the British of the 18th century. When the Founders of our country ( I am assuming you are an American citizen) signed the Declaration of Independence, they put their lives, their families’ lives and fortunes in peril. If the phrase had existed in the 18th century the British would have called them a terrorist organization. After all they shot rockets at the British. Today we revere our Founders. The Israelis need to grant the Palestinians full rights to citizenship. The historic mistake the Israelis made was to declare Israel a Jewish State. In order to do that they pushed the Palestinian Christian and Muslim populations off their land seventy years ago.
1
Unfortunately the writer ignores why Gaza is such a desperate place, and repeats the implication that the movement of Gazans to escape the gigantic open air prison Israel has built is only due to Hamas. In actual fact, as a number of sources have reported, the movement owes relatively little to Hamas, but is very much a grass roots phenomenon. People are living in horrid conditions created by Israel, often within close proximity to the lands they and/or their ancestors were expelled from 70 years ago, and people like this writer can't imagine why they'd be willing to risk their lives for freedom.
Trying to blame Hamas for the fact that Israeli soldiers shot and killed unarmed people is ridiculous, and shows just how impoverished the Israeli narrative has become. No wonder the Israelis are losing ground in the court of world opinion.
1
Interestingly, the Hamas leaders were nowhere near the fence. They left that to the little people they roused to sacrifice themselves.
4
Great piece, thank you.
4
If Israel wants to avoid future PR failures, it should make it a top priority to quickly negotiate a fair solution to this conflict. As long as Israel continues to oppress the Palestinians—and use deadly force against them when they resist their oppression—there will continue to be ample opportunities for the Palestinians to achieve PR victories.
1
Thank you for this article. Your point is vital.
The interests of peace are not served by newspapers and journalists suppressing the actual identity of armed Hamas fighters amidst the so-called "protestors".
Please write up an article for The New Yorker and send it in as I'd like to think it would be published. Also I hope you get this information and any photos out other news outlets and more importantly send it through all the social media and TV outlets. The true victims of Hamas are the people and the violent devious means of the terrorist group must be given wider coverage.
4
People who have any hope of things improving and a better life do not riot and risk dying at the hands of heavily armed military forces. In 1967, Israel had a great opportunity to actually aid the Palestinians freed from the Egyptian and Jordanian yoke. They could have determined to assist them in forming a viable state and achieving first world standards. Instead, Israel fussed and fretted in military occupation and eventually adopted the motto of "all of the land with none of the people." This has been Israel's guide ever since. It has been slightly modified for world consumption to " all of the useful land and natural resources and full control of everyone and everything including the air and water and you can have the rest".
Israel is quite satisfied with the status quo which includes occasional Israeli losses and periodically "mowing the grass" by slaughtering some Palestinians to insure"security since the ethnic cleansing and colonial genocide that was so successful in the 18th and 19th centuries is no longer permitted in the 21st. There is no end game.
3
"Thinking is the Most Difficult Work; This is Why So Few (People) Do it"
(Henry Ford)
"Many Israelis, myself included, were horrified to see the number of fatalities reach 60."
Ah, the arbitrary number presented as the line at which we should be "horrified". "Oh no!" you think. "How could that happen? 59 fatalities - well, that's probably o.k. But, 60? God help us!"
If we are being realistic about who's doing what, then perhaps we should allow ourselves space to consider that Israel's de facto policy on the Palestinians amounts to imprisonment with occasional mass slaughters to ensure that they know who is the boss. Yes, Hamas has a good PR shop, but Israel just got away with killing 60 people, injuring thousands, and continues to get away with running what amounts to an extra-judicial prison camp. It continues to amaze me how much bloodshed and cruelty a country/religion with Israel's philosophy and history is willing to put up with in the name of security.
1
Narrative manipulation notwithstanding, babies are dead. Children are dead. Young men are crippled for life. Unemployment in Gaza rages. The blockade remains. Settlements continue being built in the west bank. Israeli nationalists march through Palestinian neighborhoods in a show of both power and disrespect. The taxpayers of the United States subsidize this to the tune of billions of dollars annually.
To quote Rabin: "Enough of blood and tears. Enough."
1
The problem of Arab intimidation of reporters that Mr. Friedman describes is an old one. It goes back at least to the Lebanon war and was dealt with by Ze'ev Chafets' book "Double Vision." To gain understanding, dust it off and re-read it.
3
The use of lethal force to subdue protesters is illegal under international law. Women and children have been killed and wounded, as well as thousands injured, including journalists.
The Israelis will argue that this was a case of “self-defense.” Considering the loss of life and the number of injured, it should be said that the Israel did a wonderful job.
No one needed a split-screen on television to perceive the disproportionate response to this demonstration.
Thank you for this article, which will, undoubtedly, earn you some hate mail. It seems entirely plausible, moreover, that some of those casualties were Hamas-abetted "suicides-by-Israeli." A world gone mad: hundreds of people running into live gun fire at the border countered by the incompetent and loathsome Jared Kushner at the podium in Jerusalem.
1
Hamas played the media like a fiddle. It tried to turn the US Embassy's opening into a "human tragedy". It failed, despite the usual suspects' plaintive reporting. One only has to look at that video of the "victims" covered with white sheets (but still very much alive) to see how devious Hamas can be. It's not the first time a "casualty" has miraculously come alive after the media has moved on.
4
When one doesn’t have armies to fight, you use all other ways to win a battle.
I so agree with this article. Thank you NY Times for giving an Israeli a voice, belatedly, but finally.
7
Lately, writers at conservative publications (and websites) have argued that Martin Luther King organized the Selma march so as many protesters as possible would be shown getting maimed or killed on TV--for the public relations value to the civil rights movement.
Matti Friedman's op-ed says exactly the same thing.
It, too, is drivel.
1
OF COURSE, Israelis must defend their borders but if they'd set out to make themselves Hamas's dupes and the world's pariah, they couldn't have done it better than they did.
Sniper rifles? Please. These are military devices that fire deadly tumble bullets intended not to disable but to kill, from up to 2500 metres away. To claim that tear gas and rubber bullets can't stop pedestrians doesn't pass the sniff test, and not even the Israeli authorities claim the demonstrators were armed.
It is inescapable that Israel is indifferent to civilian casualties, so it's difficult to be sympathetic if the world condemns...
1
I'm curious -- is there any other country in the world where the US embassy is NOT in the capital? I can't think of one, but that doesn't mean there isn't. Anyhow, it's hard to understand the fuss over locating our embassy in a country's capital, other than it angers a bunch of people who want to kill all Israelis.
6
Israel has repeatedly attacked Gaza killing 1000s of innocents all in the name of going after Hamas and by extension Iran. The ugly dishonest murderous game Israel plays is down right disgusting. This recent massacre with the Trump Administration and the Israelis concocting the story that Hamas provoked a wanton attack on an unarmed crowd. The immediate escalation to lethal force was used in a situation that could have been resolved much differently. The Palestinians are once again treated in a racist vicious manner. While the fat cats sat stupidly luxuriating in their recent grabbing of Jerusalem as the capital for Netanyahu's settler gov't.
4
I have no, zero sympathy for Hamas or anyone who follows them.
4
I think there is a missed point in this op-ed, which is that all media is about telling stories. Hamas is deliberately trying to manipulate circumstances to get sympathy from western observers - but that is nothing new or unusual. The ANC in South Africa under apartheid had an armed wing which carried out assassinations and guerrilla strikes, but also peaceful demonstrations designed to get foreign sympathy.
Effective narratives make use of existing circumstances. Just as the Trump and Netanyahu governments made use of the 70th anniversary of Israel's founding to highlight the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem to advance a narrative, so Hamas used the same anniversary (and event) to make the point that Palestinians in Gaza are still living in hopeless circumstances. That doesn't make Hamas manipulative - that makes them media-savvy, and you might as well criticize protests at the G8 summits for being 'manipulative' for conflicting with police during their marches.
Personally, I hope Hamas learns from this incident that they gain more by playing to the Western media than they do by firing rockets or planting bombs. Whether you agree with their aims or not (and I oppose nearly all of the Hamas Charter), I think nearly everyone would agree that decreasing the violence is a positive step forward.
2
Why are the Palestinians living in misery and poverty? Perhaps because they choose terrorists to represent them? Most of the time people's circumstances are due the choices they make.
4
Interesting point. I see one problem though: 40,000 people did show up. It's not exactly like Hamas marched them to the Gaza line at gun point. These people feel disabused. Hamas may have manipulated their feelings to their own advantage. However, under these circumstances, I would be out protesting too. The public sentiment was there anyway.
3
Setting aside political considerations, I think we all can agree that there are ways of stopping people from storming a fence that don't involve shooting and killing them by the scores.
62
I'm not sure, if faced with that onslaught, I could think of those ways.
13
Name some of these ways please.
23
“By the scores” would be mowing them down if the terrorists got through the fence on their way to killing anyone who lives in the nearest kibbutz. Israel actually showed great restraint and prevented much greater loss of life.
27
Mr. Friedman is following press protocol in not implying any prejudice on the part of Israel's fierce critics, be they from the Middle East or westerners.
Could we at least assume Mr. Erdogan is anti-Semitic? Talk about a despot with plenty of blood on his hands ranting against Israel. Sadly, many critics here in America are of a similar persuasion. Anti-Jewish/Semitic feelings fill a very broad spectrum, and I wonder if those folks are even aware that the intense anger Israel arouses is usually on that line.
It would be a welcomed change to read military experts who can offer their perspectives on better, safer, but secure methods of riot control. Expertise criticism is different from tossing harsh language and terminology around.
9
I'm not naive about what Hamas and the Palestinians are doing. But I think to myself, being willing to die by rushing a border with no weapon (other than a rock or a flaming tire) is something only a very desperate person would be willing to do. And if you are a leader of a desperate people, and you have no weapons, how is sending a few dozen soldiers (the author calls them terrorists) to die in this way, any different from sending soldiers to war with weapons, knowing many of them will die? How is this different from any other nation state that sends their young men to die in battle?
I dare say that if the author were born a Palestinian, he might feel as desperate. He might even be willing to die for his people's freedom. Or send others to die.
And rubber bullets, tear gas and water cannons would be equally effective and far less deadly. Even if someone broke through the barrier, they could easily be subdued.
And the split screen we saw was jarring. It was morally outrageous. On one side, people are free to pursue their dreams and are thriving economically. On the other side, they are desperate to live decent, fulfilling, free lives, but they are under the constant pressure of occupation. It's disturbing to see people suffer so much. Is the author suggesting we are wrong, or naive, to feel for them?
72
You are so naive. There's a fence there because Hamas and PLO blew up buses and pizza places full of Israeli civilians, and Hamas wants Israel destroyed. It's in their charter. What if Hamas stopped firing rockets and digging infiltration tunnels into Israel, renounced violence, admitted Israel's right to exist and built a desalinization plant, and other peaceable projects instead? Do you think Israel would still blockade Gaza? Why do the Egyptians also blockade the border? Because of evil Jews? You are being played by Hamas.
39
Imagine, if you can, if you were raised in a society in which streets and schools were named for martyrs, in which murals of the faces of suicide bombers embellished your streets, and the tv only played one official narrative. Imagine that the books from which you learned in school depicted your neighbors, the Jews, as blood thirsty capitalists without morals, if the books were wiped of the holocaust, any history of Jewish presence in Israel, and the thousands of years of Jewish persecution. Imagine if your friends and neighbors were honored for their dead martyrs and actually lived better from the stipends they receive from the government after their deaths. Now intensify all this with abject poverty and lack of the freedom to move, to succeed in life. If you can imagine this, you are getting close to Gazan reality and perhaps you can imagine why many will knowingly rush the border to their deaths.
25
This is typical - the 2 people who exchanged views - of how the knottiest political problems CANNOT be put to a vote. Both the author, Mr. Friedman, and "Steve from Westchester" are right in pointing out that there is a major element of "manipulation" going on here.... And "shame on Mr. Mullen for not seeing how "equally evil" it is to send literally foolish women and teens to their deaths.
HOWEVER, I cannot agree more with Mr. Mullen about their desperation, ... and while one can understand why an Israeli government might not bemoan that all that much, THEY SHOULD.
When a state - Israel - was founded because a relatively powerless 10 million person minority was systematically brutalized, ... that state SHOULD be mindful of parallels that are no stretch at all.
But make no mistake - this is not "non-violent" resistance. That's not in Hamas' DNA. Sadly, both Israel and Palestine are currently very ill-served by their leaders. I would argue that - since 1967, say - the Palestinians have been the far greater victims of that mal-representation. How many trillions of dollars have literally been pumped out of neighboring Arab countries during that time? Had the Palestinian leaders chosen to focus on a better life for the people they ostensibly represented - rather than the destruction of Israel - we wouldn't be at this point.
It's almost "Biblical" - Mandela secured independence & then corruption prevailed. Arafat's corruption doomed his people to both non-freedom & poverty.
8
This kid is probably too young to remember the first split screen. I believe it was a football game and a space launch in the mid 60's. Those events were independent. Why anyone cared about the VaTech game at the time is a mystery to me. Space launches were of more interest at the time. These events were attached at the hip. The causal issue that "required" the split screen metaphor in this case was the ballyhooed opening of the embassy in Jerusalem. It was attended by our Grifter in Chiefs daughter and a bunch of prosperty preachers. Why did the taxpayer need to blow cash sending this horrible contingent to do nothing more than open a building that was already built? So blame Hamas if you must. Clearly those who run the organization are not angels. But neither are we, the Israelis or the other actors. These are desperate times for the ignored and poor of the world. Desperate times call for desperate deeds.
4
"The press coverage on Monday was a major Hamas success in a war whose battlefield isn’t really Gaza, but the brains of foreign audiences."
It would take a more convincing argument than the above to get me to unsee and unread what looks like an obvious misuse of overwhelming force on the part of Israel. Barbed-wire and bullets are a cheap way to contain lives that are held cheap by what I have to assume to be the majority of Israeli citizens.
A much bigger investment is needed. I hear our American president, the self-styled builder of "big beautiful walls" is eager to get started on one paid for by another country. The evangelical base would be overjoyed to see a wall that rivals that of Jericho begin to rise in The Holy Land. Perhaps the three billion dollars of military aid gifted to Israel could serve as a down payment.
1
Thank you, thank you, thank you, for having the courage to commit truth.
10
There are no "good guys" in this situation.
Only cynical leaders using masses of deluded people for their own ends, and who are quite invested in the conflict status quo.
This will not end anytime soon. And if it ever does, it will not end well, for either side.
2
Very well put.
Interestingly, it is not only the shootings that are put on Israel's shoulders, but even the overall situation in Gaza.
Gaza had open borders and a functioning economy in the forty years from the 1967 war until Hamas's seizure of power. Infant mortality went from being the worst in the region to nearly the best, and life expectancy went from the lowest to nearly the highest. But then Hamas seized power and started shooting rockets, and things began to change.
Hamas has rejected every opportunity to improve life in Gaza, including rejecting an offer to have its own airport. As senior Hamas leader Mahmoud Al-Zahar has admitted, "If we wanted to turn the Gaza Strip into Singapore, we could have achieved that with our own hands." In Hamas's own words, it is responsible for the fact that 1.8 million people are being deprived of economic and infrastructure development opportunities.
Yet it is Israel that gets blamed for the Gazan deprivation that is dutifully reported in the media, time and again.
This can only stop if there is a concerted effort by the media to maintain journalistic integrity, to report facts as they are and not just what a specific regime or government permits. When one reporter is pressured to hide the truth, that journalistic integrity should lead all reporters to say that we cannot report from here at all. But given that papers need to be sold to make money, I fear that none of the major players will stand up for the truth.
13
Mr. Friedman makes the absurd argument that Hamas is to blame for the thousands wounded and many killed by Israeli soldiers who are protecting a fence. He cites vile words from a Hamas leader to justify why extremely painful rubber bullets are insufficient to protect the fence forcing snipers to fire real bullets that seem to be able seek out only Hamas terrorists. Perhaps what is most upsetting is that this specious moralizing is completely irrelevant to the geopolitical reality. Israel has never been stronger while the Palestinians have no serious international support in a region where Arab nations are focused on containing Iran. Israel can simply crush the Palestinians. Gold Meir famously said there is no such thing as a Palestinian. Netanyahu might make that a reality
1
Would there have been demonstrations and death if Trump had decided to forego moving the American embassy to Jerusalem? Previous Administrations dating back to Harry Truman passed on this choice, in large part because they feared it would clearly signal the Palestinians that the United States had irrevocably chosen sides. Trump, clearly, was egged on by his right-wing fabulists who recognized that the move might in fact cause disruption and casualties, but that it was worth it in the end to hoist the American flag in Jerusalem.
Could it be that the relocation of the embassy was just as much a PR move engineered by the marketing mavens of the Trump regime as were the demonstrations in Gaza? Did anyone backing the move, including Netanyahu, calculate the chances that bloodshed would result? Or did they assume that Hamas would provoke demonstrations, which would be put down brutally to demonstrate to the world that the new U.S.-Israeli partnership has once and for all chosen suppression over negotiation?
2
Excellent article.
"Early in that war, I complied with Hamas censorship in the form of a threat to one of our Gaza reporters and cut a key detail from an article: that Hamas fighters were disguised as civilians and were being counted as civilians in the death toll. The bureau chief later wrote that printing the truth after the threat to the reporter would have meant “jeopardizing his life.” Nonetheless, we used that same casualty toll throughout the conflict and never mentioned the manipulation."
Why is there no outrage amongst the commenters about the complicity of the AP? Why no call for an investigation? I feel this is a big story that should be followed. Does anyone agree with me?
13
Thank you for your excellent piece. All week I have tried to counter ridiculous comments on Facebook that have criticized Israel to the point that they are supporting Hamas. Of course none of these people have ever been to Israel. You wrote more succinctly and more eloquently than I ever could.
13
If we applied the same standards to Israel that we do to other countries we'd be demanding either the recognition of a Palestinian State as originally mandated, or a fully secular state in which all had equal political rights regardless of religion or ethnic origins. But we're not.
And so a whole population is forced to live in conditions none of us would every accept for ourselves or for most other people.If I were a Gazan, the idea of erasing Israel from the map would probably be very attractive.
Any surprise that Hamas is popular in Gaza?
5
I wonder, have you been to Gaza?
Much of what is happening is based on jealousy. If they were industrious, and would worry more about improving their conditions than trying to "erase Israel" then their situation would change. Instead, hatred and war are the order of the day. And where does that lead to?
2
Mr. Friedman,
Thank you for this refreshing article in the wake of what has been going on in the last few days.
Ironically, this really struck me, as the New York Times exemplified Hamas' thinking pretty clearly (they didn't even update the fact that 50 of the 62 killed were Hamas members):
"The press could be trusted to present dead human beings not as victims of the terrorist group that controls their lives, or of a tragic confluence of events, but of an unwarranted Israeli slaughter."
All in all, really great piece.
12
What is your source for the '50 of 62 killed were Hamas members"? I don't doubt you - this is the first I had heard of that, and I'm curious. Both sides have an incentive to manipulate the numbers - Hamas to claim there were no (or no armed) Hamas members, the Israeli military to claim that most/all were Hamas members - so any membership numbers need to be examined closely. Since the theme of this op-ed is journalistic integrity, I think there is an incentive to make sure all claims are being sourced, so an informed public can make informed judgments.
Senior Hamas official admits 50 of those "martyred" were members of Hamas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeILvAQogJc
Senior Hamas official admits 50 "martyrs" were members of Hamas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeILvAQogJc
Thank you for a thoughtful and honest essay.
"I complied with Hamas censorship in the form of a threat to one of our Gaza reporters and cut a key detail from an article": that Hamas fighters were disguised as civilians and were being counted as civilians in the death toll. The bureau chief later wrote that printing the truth after the threat to the reporter would have meant "jeopardizing his life.""
There you have it. The press is prepared to lie to the world on behalf of a terrorist organization in order to protect one of its own.
How many more have died in consequence?
The solution would be to withdraw the reporter who was in danger and then publish the truth.
11
So Hamas got 40,000 Palestinians to risk death for absolutely no gain to them or their families, just as previous decades of terrorism have brought only misery, suffering and a morbid sense of pride.
Imagine that 40,000 Palestinians from Gaza would be willing to risk their life to stand up to Hamas and replace it with a sensible government, which would actually value the well-being of its people above all. But then that would not be the Middle East...
5
The argument that the "right to return" is a call for the destruction of Israel is false and always has been.
Allegedly, if the 780,000 Palestinians who were expelled in 1948 returned to their homes, Arabs would soon outnumber Jews and there would be no more Jewish state.
But the argument leaves out a crucial fact. The right to return was supposed to be part of final status negotiations that were agreed to in the Oslo Accords over 25 years ago. As with all of the issues raised in Oslo, few if any were considered absolute. The goal was a viable Palestinian state side by side with Israel.
There would be some border adjustments from the 67 lines and the "right to return" would in all likelihood be waived in exchange for a land swap or money.
The importance of the "right to return" was not in its literal implementation, but in its recognition as a right under international law. Each side of the negotiation has rights and each could modify them as they saw fit to reach an agreement.
But instead, this right, along with all others belonging to Palestinians has been characterized as a mortal threat to Israel. The same is said of BDS because it refers to the right to return.
This mischaracterization is designed to end dialogue. After all, how can anyone rationally discuss the destruction of Israel?
Exactly, but that's not what the "right to return" is and had Oslo been honored we would not be arguing about propaganda. These false narratives have killed the two state solution.
Excellent thoughts and observations Mr. Friedman. It really is a world turned upside down. Listening to the utter outrage of everyone from the average Times commenter from the Midwest to the Foreign minister of Ireland, you would think that Israeli commandos went into Gaza in the dark of night and began breaking down doors and rounding up women and children and shooting them in the street. Really, Israel is not doing that, but plenty of other people from around the world are now, why dont we hear the outrage about them? What Israel is doing is completely legal under international law, that is defending a sovereign state border. As Mr. Friedman rightly asks, what are the rules of engagement on the India Pakistan border, North and South Korea or the old Berlin Wall, compared to those, Israel's border is a turnstyle at a ballpark. One day when someone loses patience with Gaza, oh I dont know maybe say Egypt, the Gazans will be wishing hard for Israeli border guards.
10
The author is right. And even if he would not be: Hamas as the leaders of the Palestinians in Gaza are failing their people on insisting that their goal is the annihilation of Israel and the return of the Palestinians to what was their old lands. That is not going to happen. Ever.
Regardless of how the Palestinians got into this awful situation, these are the facts on the ground:
- Israel is much stronger than them
- The people of Israel will not go away
- Palestinians cannot go back into the lands that is now Israel and claim their old properties
Even more folly is keep doing the same thing and expect a different outcome: demonstrations and acts that get Palestinians killed by Israel so they can claim the moral high ground. Israel is also consistent in that part:
- If you attack them they will fight back and inflict great harm and damage on you (see also Lebanon/Hezbollah and Syria/Iran)
- If you try to infiltrate into Israel they will kill you
- Israel doesn't care about moral outrage elsewhere in the world. It doesn't need to because the United States will protect them, and Sunni Arab states don't care what happens to the Palestinians (they are more worried about Iran). But even if that was not the case they still don't care. They will protect their own.
So the ball is in the Palestinians court. When will they change their expectations? Only then things can change. Choosing different leaders would be a good start.
12
"If the most effective weapon in a military campaign is pictures of civilian casualties, Hamas seems to have concluded, there’s no need for a campaign at all." The bullets that killed 60 unarmed people seem to me to be much more effective weapons than any pictures.
Yes indeed. The way that Hamas(and also the PA) has played the media here in the West doesn't get the attention it deserves. They know full well what they are doing. They are doing their best to get people killed, preferably young people, women, children, in order to elicit sympathies from the West and anger towards Israel.They do this very well as far too many in the US, Canada, Europe etc seem incapable of critical thinking and just react to what they are shown. It was especially devious of the media to portray the opening of the US embassy as the "cause" of the latest Gazan uprising. In truth, Hamas conducts these "events" yearly at this time. But as you note, this has worked well for them so why not just keep at it. Americans seem to want to believe that a brutal Israeli military attacks innocent Gazans just peacefully protesting.
I wonder what Americans(or Canadians etc) sitting in their safe secure homes would demand from their governments if armed terrorists intent on entering the US or Canada and taking it over were to engage in such an attack? Would they expect our governments to just sit back and allow it to happen? I somehow doubt it. After 9/11 we turned Afghanistan into a parking lot in retribution for an attack on our shores. Only Israel is expected to allow their borders to be breached and their citizens attacked and killed.
7
The world press needs to open their eyes (and their reportage) to the tactics of leaders who sacrifice their constituents.
5
I have a distant memory of reading a little squib in the Times back in the 1950s that was less than an inch long announcing that thousands of people had drowned in a flood in China. The item interested me and I looked for a follow-up, but never came across one.
If the Gazans are looking for a successful follow-up to today’s demonstration that will be helpful to their cause, I suggest they get rid of Mr. Haneiya and the organization he heads.
5
... to today’s disaster of a demonstration ....
2
This piece offers an interesting premise; images of dead civilians are a weapon of war on one side, while on the other are assault rifles, tanks and fighter jets. Doesn't this very premise reflect the unconscionable disproportionality that is at the heart of the conflict?
Matti asks for a less “simplistic” depiction, but himself simplifies (or misstates) when he claims that the march was “meticulously timed to coincide” with the movement of the US embassy to Jerusalem. In fact the march was not organized by Hamas (though Hamas showed up as they always do) and it was planned to coincide with the 70th anniversary of Nakba (when the newly created Israeli state drove the Palestinians from their homes and into exile).
2
"Israeli soldiers facing Gaza have no good choices. They can warn people off with tear gas or rubber bullets, which are often inaccurate and ineffective, and if that doesn’t work, they can use live fire. Or they can hold their fire to spare lives and allow a breach, in which case thousands of people will surge into Israel, some of whom — the soldiers won’t know which — will be armed fighters. (On Wednesday a Hamas leader, Salah Bardawil, told a Hamas TV station that 50 of the dead were Hamas members. The militant group Islamic Jihad claimed three others.) If such a breach occurs, the death toll will be higher. And Hamas’s tactic, having proved itself, would likely be repeated by Israel’s enemies on its borders with Syria and Lebanon."
Prison guards also have few options during a prison riot. They didn't create the conditions and ideally have some understanding of their key role in public safety in maintaining a functioning prison system as a component of an overall criminal justice system (sounds idealistic, but grant the overall point).
Soldiers operate out of loyalty to the principle of protecting the right to self-determination along a country's borders or 'borders' in this case.
But Gaza is an open-air prison with an economic blockade that immiserates 2m people. Hamas would never have been democratically elected without such desperate prison conditions. They are manipulative thugs that arose out of decades of abuse. But the prison wardens are their mirror image.
1
Fantastic column! Summarizes both the complexity of the situation and the simplemindedness with which the media and most readers digest the information.
Among the questions I have is, knowing Hamas’ objectives and its desire for a high body count and casualty photo ops, was there anything the IDF could have done differently?
And would it have mattered to people who despise Israel if the death count had been 1 or 10 rather than 60? I doubt it.
4
Matti Friedman wrings his hands over the difficult position that Hamas has put Israeli soldiers on the border in. He ignores the more-than-difficult, rather, the impossible situation that Israel has put the people of Gaza in. It is not a decree from Hamas that mobilizes tens of thousand of people to the fence; it is the crushing blockade Israel has imposed.
Shame on the author of this piece for trying to make us look the other way. The fact is that what we don't see, the daily suffering and privations of Gaza, is more deadly than what we don't see. This is an open air prison and should permanently, not occasionally, shock the conscience of the world.
The author blames the "brains of foreign audiences" for not understanding the situation. It is hard to defend shooting unarmed protestors on the other side of a fence regardless of whether they are Hamas or not. Hamas is clearly to blame but Israel loses the moral high ground when it continues to racket up the already hugely disproportionate ratio of Palestinians to Israelis deaths in this conflict. Nikki Haley doesn't gain any sympathy or understanding for Israel's situation by walking out of the UN. I agree that Palestinians are their own worst enemies in this conflict and the West needs to open their eyes to this. But Israel also needs to be very careful to not overplay the powerful hand they have and maintain the moral high ground.
Ignorance - mine, in this case - is never small ... or pretty.
I think I wrote, "Why didn't they use rubber bullets?" previously, and while I found Mr. Friedman's dismissal of that "option" a little too abbreviated, common sense tells me that ... if they could have, they WOULD have.
But maybe, Mr. Friedman is onto something when he wonders toward the end of his piece whether thoughtful Israelis could come up with some tactic that is both less lethal and less - it's painful to write it - "photogenic."
I'm not being ironic when I wonder about "a wall." Of course, one (well, any liberal "one") hates the thought that construction like this will likely also be a barrier to peace talks, but
a) those seem so very remote that it isn't all that compelling;
b) reducing loss of life is SO MUCH more important; and
c) while one can look at the "Great Wall of China" and think that walls are "forever," Berlin proves otherwise.
And although Mr. Friedman doesn't touch on this, it is said that some deranged individuals essentially commit suicide by approaching US policemen in provocative ways. One has to believe that the thousands of people who heeded Hamas' call include a largish number whose lives were so miserable that death held no terror for them. (Yes, ideology plays a role, I'm sure, but people are not lemmings ... usually.)
Maybe, the Israelis need to be reproached more for a host of policies that make Gazans so willing to die than for the thousands of shots they fired on Monday.
Thank you for this piece. 'The sickness of the social media age' was in full force yesterday - even in the NYT discussion group. The ignorance of the history of the situation, the eagerness to condemn Israelis for any action and the insistence that thousands of people rushing a border fence with openly stated intent to harm was not a danger - It has been an ugly few days online. The worst thing is that people are happily repeating lies and propaganda put out by Hamas. Many Americans have always been naive about international politics but Trump aligning himself with the Israelis seems to have brought out the ugly side in so many otherwise intelligent, thoughtful liberal friends. The rush to condemn and to throw around words like genocide without understanding how often Israel and the international community has tried improving the situation is just deliberate ignorance. The repeated chant of 'blockade' and 'electricity' doesn't even account for why the blockade had to be put in place and the fact that the Egypt is part of the blockade. The Electricity is being cut because the Abbas govt will not pay for Gaza's electricity in an attempt to force Hamas to call the indefinitely postponed elections. People want to think things are black and white. One side is bad, the other good. The Gazans are victims of propaganda from the leaders they chose and the leaders that refuse to leave. Look at the West Bank and ask what they did differently?
5
Yes Hamas is a ruthless organization that will do anything to gain an advantage. But then so are Netanyahu and his cronies. There will be no peace because leaders on both sides want total victory. If they can't have it then they will do everything they can including violence, lies, intimidation and of course corruption to maintain themselves in power and keep the status quo of perpetual war.
Thank you so much, Matti Friedman, for the truth. You have provided something precious -- facts -- which continuously get lost in the race, by Hamas and the people they've manipulated in Gaza and abroad, to blame Israel for everything.
There is nothing (to put it mildly) about which Trump and I agree, with one exception: supporting the right of Israel to exist.
Hamas has been a daily poisoned drink for the Palestinian people in Gaza. If the Gazan people can oust Hamas, lay down their weapons, and acknowledge Israel's right to exist, then there is the possibility of peace. And I can say with near certainty that if peace does come, the Gazans will be living far better lives than they are now.
5
"When they love their children as much as they hate us we will have peace." Gold Meir.
Amongst the truest words ever spoken.
8
Thank you for the most even-handed description of these terrible events. It should come as no surprise to any thoughtful reader that the simplistic photography you see on TV (or elsewhere on the Internet) belies the complexities of this problem. So many people want to be "pro" or "anti" Israel 100%, when it is so much more complicated than that. I, for one, recognize that Israel is the only democracy in the region and the only real friend that the US has. We may be allies with states like Egypt or Saudi Arabia but they do not share our democratic values as the Israelis do. It's just that Israel exists in a very tough neighborhood and has no good choices, yet - as Israel's friend - we must pressure them to find a path to peace.
6
Those who recommended certain comments and made them Most Recommended about related articles might want to study Middle East history, religion, and ethnicity, as they seem to think all would be well, especially among Palestinians and Israelis, if it weren't for Israel, Trump, and/or America. It is actually rather patronizing and condescending of them to think Arabs, Iranians, and Turks are not as capable of self-serving, cruel, and manipulative mischief and violence as are Americans and Israelis.
I would also suggest that readers show as much concern for Syrians, who have been slaughtered in a couple orders of magnitude greater numbers than the Palestinians. In general, comments and recommends are ten times as common for articles concerning the latter than the former.
And. perhaps they would consider denouncing religious fanaticism among Muslims (and Hindus and Buddhists) with the same justifiable intensity with which they denounce such among Christians and Jews.
Also, when speaking of inalienable rights, why is it that many here consider national rights that disregard the rights of women, gay people, ethnic, and religious minorities as the legitimately primary rights? It's not clear to me that either Hamas or Fatah is likely to acknowledge much other than national rights. A Christian Palestinian leading Hamas? Not likely! A lesbian Palestinian leading the P.A.? Not likely!
Palestinians are as capable of cruel, and manipulative mischief as are Israelis. Or anyone else.
5
If it is true that the majority of the people killed on Monday were indeed soldiers, disguised as civilians, as Friedman claims, then that confirms that the Israeli soldiers were shooting indiscriminately, since they didn't know that when they fired their guns. Friedman also fails to mention that on other days, journalist, aid workers and children have been killed by the Israeli soldiers, all on their own land. Certainly she can't claim that all these people were also Hamas soldiers, nor can she claim that the 40,000 protesters were all from Hamas.
To compare the border of Gaza and Israel to the Pakistani India border is disingenuous. In that case, one country has not built a fence around the other, not permitting people to leave nor has it cut off electricity for all but four hours a day. Nor are thousands of people wounded for protesting their conditions or is one country continuing to build illegal settlements on the confiscated land. In the documentary, The Gatekeepers, six former heads of Shin Bet, the security force in the occupied territories, said that the occupation was wrong and should end. Yet she makes no mention of any of this.
I'm sure that the choices are difficult, but failing to acknowledge that the 2 million Gazans or their fellow Palestinians in the West Bank have legitimate grievances, shows that the writer is contributing to "the venonous and simplistic story" that she condemns.
47
How do you know the Israeli soldiers didn't know they were Hamas? Maybe they did know but weren't allowed to reveal it.
To look at a military engagement in which 81% of the people killed are soldiers and to conclude that the people who killed them were "shooting indiscriminately" defies all semblance of logic.
3
As an Israeli im obviously not objective. But you state:
If it is true that the majority of the people killed on Monday were indeed soldiers, disguised as civilians, as Friedman claims, then that confirms that the Israeli soldiers were shooting indiscriminately, since they didn't know that when they fired their guns.
The other option is that they were indeed Hamas operatives doing that which Hamas said they would: infiltrate Israel to instihate violence against Israeli civilians.
Doesnt it strike one as unlikely that "indiscriminate fire" on a crowd of tens of thousands causes 60 dead, of which 50 just happen to be Hamas operatives?
17
Do you realize that Gaza is a rectangle that also borders Egypt? Have you wondered why the Egyptians control that border so efficiently? Because they have been victims of Isis/Hamas terrorism as well.
20
Those who have recommended certain comments and made them Most Recommended to related articles might want to study Middle East history, religion, and ethnicity, as they seem to think all would be well, especially among Palestinians and Israelis, if it weren't for Israel, Trump, and/or America. It is actually rather patronizing and condescending of them to think Arabs, Iranians, and Turks are not as capable of self-serving, cruel, and manipulative mischief and violence as are Americans and Israelis.
I would also suggest that readers show as much concern for Syrians, who have been slaughtered in a couple orders of magnitude greater numbers than the Palestinians. In general, comments and recommends are ten times as common for articles concerning the latter than the former.
And. perhaps they would consider denouncing religious fanaticism among Muslims (and Hindus and Buddhists) with the same justifiable intensity with which they denounce such among Christians and Jews.
Also, when speaking of inalienable rights, why is it that many here consider national rights that disregard the rights of women, gay people, ethnic, and religious minorities as the legitimately primary rights? It's not clear to me that either Hamas or Fatah is likely to acknowledge much other than national rights. A Christian Palestinian leading Hamas? Not likely! A lesbian Palestinian leading the P.A.? Not likely!
Palestinians are as capable of intelligence and cynical, manipulative mischief as are Israelis.
8
Don't forget the 2,700 who were wounded, many seriously.
1
Why ask for Americans to have a nuanced view when it is clear the author genuinely believes Hamas is to blame for the deaths. He even implies the deaths are not so bad because some of them were Hamas members in disguise.
Yes, we do see that Hamas aren't "the good guys", but that doesn't mean the Gazans who died are their victims. They were killed by Israeli snipers with Israeli bullets.
I support Israel's right to exist, but only the willfully blind can ignore that the Palestinians are attempting to walk in the steps of Martin Luther King, Jr., offering up their bodies to violence and even death in order to confront a much greater power.
Jews have been perhaps the most persecuted race in history. But the shoe is on the other foot and the world is watching to see how they will act.
46
That's fascinating. I wonder if you could name any other people that have been persecuted (there are plenty) that then get watched to see how they will act. I can't think of any.
10
" that the Palestinians are attempting to walk in the steps of Martin Luther King, Jr."
You are entitled to your own OPINIONS. You are NOT entitled to your own FACTS. The Gazans are being sent to kidnap Israelis from just 100s of meters past the fence, hiding their weapons until they are within range to execute that operation. For Israel to allow them to cross the fence would be to allow them to get to Israel's towns just past the fence and execute their kidnapping mission.
31
Wow! Comparing these protestors to Marin Luther King is just crazy! MLK didn’t try to tear down fences to kill his opponents on the other side. This was no “peace march” in any sense of the words.
9
How could any nation expect to occupy millions for decades and not know the destructive consequences that would follow? How can israeli’s not know the image presented by viewing a nuclear superpower fighting off people with rocks and improvised weapons, would generate more critism and adversity? How do many Americans not know that since Oslo, settlers in occupied territories have steadily grown from a few thousand to well over a half million arousing suspicion that the object of the occupation is to create a need for even more measures to control and eventually eliminate an adversarial population?
31
The West Bank is not your business. That's between the PLA and Israel to work out, which could happen if the PLA broke with their extremist counterparts and engaged in sincere peace talks.
Just like it isn't Israel's business what goes on at the Town of Merrick Council meetings.
4
Israel does not occupy Gaza. Hamas does.
When the Palestinians get to the point of realizing that peace with their neighbors can *only* be reached is (1) they accept the neighbor's right to exist, and (2) they sit and talk to that neighbor, only then a two-state solution can be formed and the suffering of both people will end (OK, maybe not end - but at least reduced...). Actually, I'm sure most Palestinians know that already - it's their leadership they need to get rid of...
11
Oslo was designed to create an independent Palestinian State. But the Palestinian ultimately rejected it. Please tell me why.
6
Yes, a different response would have avoided this "threat." That response is a two state solution. It echoes the biblical "let my people go."
What "disdain for expertise?" The problem is quite clear. The world is trying to keep the "region from spinning out of control."
Good luck to us.
11
A negotiation track is open but the leader of the P.A. (Abbas) has refused for over a decade, to negotiate, with the exception of a few weeks that now seem to have been tokenism. For 8 of these years he had the opportunity of negotiating under the auspices of by far the most pro-Palestinian administration ever.
Perhaps "let my people go" should be unconditional? Well that was done with Gaza. Think of it as an experiment. It's now ruled by Hamas who are openly uninterested in negotiation. Their stated goals are the elimination of Israel and if their charter is to be believed (they refuse to modify it), the slaughter of all Jews. The experiment proved the difficulties that exist within Palestinian society and also the uselessness of the external critics who refuse to learn a thing.
1
There are no solutions.
If history has taught us anything it is that human are tribal. People are social animals and join or are born into defined groups. Those groups are controlled (usually be men) to forward there own agenda and beliefs. When one group sees either a threat or way to exploit another then it will aim to subdue or eradicate.
If one tribe feels that their way of life, their culture, religion, or simply their very existence then people only hear the shrillest voices. It doesn't matter what kind of government a tribe has, it could be democratic, dictatorship, communist, capitalist or theocracy, as soon as a threat, real or not, is found then the tribe act to retaliate.
That retaliation leads to leaders on both sides coming to the fore which to prove their own existence must create more divisiveness.
Only when people and resources are exhausted can there be a lull but the animosity remains and the fear again begins to grow.
The majority don't want war but then it is the majority who create the leaders and those leaders want to remain in power and the easiest way to do that is to prey on the majority's insecurities.
Hope I'm wrong.
5
Yes, you're wrong. The issues here are not intangible.
There is a piece of land to be negotiated. The Palestinians refuse to sit and negotiate.
That is 99% of the reason we are where we are today.
3
Thanks for sharing your insights gathered at close range. Games are being played on both sides (the unstated, long-range Israeli strategy seems to be to make living in all Palestinian territories so miserable that eventually its inhabitants will leave for other Arab countries), and I'm glad the Hamas games are being exposed as well, as they should be. The key issue does seem to be the continuing refusal by almost all Palestinian political entities to accept Israel's right to exist. If this had been accepted at almost any point since 1948, the two sides would probably have been able to live together if not harmoniously, then at least in relative peace. Maybe some day, the conditions will come to pass that allow the Palestinians to finally realize the immutable fact of Israel's existence and make a real peace deal. Today clearly isn't that day.
26
The Palestinian people need to face the consequences of their wildly irresponsible voting choices. Once they recognize the reason for their misery is their leadership, who publicly call for the destruction of Israel, who refuse to even acknowledge their existence (they call Israel "the occupiers") and who notoriously divert humanitarian aid for weaponry and tunnel-building, then they can move on.
But they will also need to confront their hate and will have to learn how to de-program their culture. They will have to pass legislation forbidding the teaching of hate to infants and toddlers. That's where it starts.
14
Enough with that excuse that Palestinians do not accept Israel's right to exist. It is the same with the historically ignorant to frame every discussion about conflict with "but they have hated each other for centuries, millennia".
Of course Hamas has a lot to answer for. But it is a bit of a stretch to claim it is the fault of Palestinians for what is now going on.
1
Please, list all strategies if you will.
What are:
- Israel's strategies to make Palestinian life miserable.
- Palestinian strategies to make Palestinian life miserable.
and
- Arab/Muslim strategies to make Palestinian life miserable.
I will appreciate factual consistency and thoroughness.
Factual consistency and thoroughness assist in finding that glorious day.
1
I'll listen thoughtfully to pieces that criticize Palestinians' conduct and choices (either Hamas or civilians or both) when they include sincere discussion of the other choices the Palestinians have. Talk to me, Mr. Friedman, and describe the peaceful, quiet path available to Palestinians to the formation of a stable self-government while an occupying power destroys their schools and police stations faster than they can build them. How do you propose that a community of normally flawed humans organize itself to control its own hotheads (every community has them) when an occupier makes sure they have electricity only four hours a week, no jobs, no economy, and are subject to the multiple ongoing humiliations of ghettoization and occupation? Has this author seen, in any culture, a human heart capable of making good patient decisions when the body in which it resides has nothing left to lose?
It is beyond disingenuous to criticize an occupied people for making the wrong choice when the occupier has left them with only one.
100
Karen McKim, Your description of the situation is factually incorrect. Israel withdrew completely from Gaza in 2007. It does retain control of the border to Israel, but not the one to Egypt. The border blockade is being enforced by both countries because of the actions of Hamas. You speak of the community "organising to control its own hotheads (every community has them.)" Yes, every community has them but not every community elects those hotheads to run their territory and control all government spending. The reason that Gaza is at the point of collapse is because Hamas has invested millions in missiles and tunnels to attack Israel, rather than on creating jobs and building infrastructure. Gaza has only four hours of electricity a day because the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank decided to cut its payments for it. Abbas wants Hamas to cede control of Gaza and is using every tool he has to pressure them.
166
Karen, you ask for "a sincere discussion of the other choices the Palestinians have."
Comparison Gaza and the West Bank (WB) would be relevant. Though the situation in the WB is FAR from ideal, the living conditions of its residents are vastly superior to those of the residents of Gaza. This is due to one simple reason. Fatah and the people of the WB are not engaged in a coordinated effort to try to eliminate the state of Israel.
There was a time, before the border fence in the WB, when terrorists frequently crossed into Israel. Those incidents are rare now. The fence put the brakes on them and soon the benefits of the fence became evident to both sides.
Now, as was the case before the first intifada, Palestinians in the WB are able to access jobs in Israel, travel back and forth on a daily basis, and the West Bank has access to some of the physical resources of Israel.
There is still a long way to go as the people of the WB and of Israel gradually, ever so slowly, rebuild trust. But the trend has been evident for several years.
So, what other choices do the people of Gaza have, beyond suicidal and violent protests, coupled with the launching of thousands of rockets and the construction of invasive tunnels by Hamas?
One choice they have is to accept the existence of Israel and demonstrate their intention not to be a security threat to Israel.
They have the choice of using imported concrete and steel to build homes and hospitals rather than more tunnels.
128
It is all so simple .
1. Remove and dismantle Hamas .
2. Demilitarize .
3. Declare willingness to live peacefully with Israel and immediately enter into negotiations .
15
Thank you for this great piece. I saw many of those split screen images and thought it was journalism at its worst because in that moment - it tried to absolve Hamas from its murderous rampage by trying to paint them as accidental victims. There was nothing accidental about those events. All planed and as you say - to be filmed and distributed. From suicide bombers to storming the border fence - to allowing children into conflict areas - this is Hamas - this is what they stand for. The only other group in my recent memory that I can think of that so readily sacrificed its own people was the Khmer Rouge.
144
So let's see, a country that sacrifices its young to invade and occupy a country that did it no harm. Sounds like Iraq to me.
1
"Hamas understood that Western news outlets wanted a simple story about villains and victims and would stick to that script, whether because of ideological sympathy, coercion or ignorance. The press could be trusted to present dead human beings not as victims of the terrorist group that controls their lives, or of a tragic confluence of events, but of an unwarranted Israeli slaughter. The willingness of reporters to cooperate with that script gave Hamas the incentive to keep using it."
Hamas has won the PR battle hands down. But wars are not won by PR. They are fighting over 1948 not 1967. They are fighting against the very existence of Israel.
As long as PR and photo-ops are more important to Hamas than the lives of Gazans, people will die, they will receive much sympathy, but a solution to their problems will not be found. What they will get is more war and death and Hamas will have even more photo-ops.
223
And even if Hamas won a temporary PR battle now mostly in Western Europe and probably on more than a few college campuses or progressive Democrat coffee clotches, eventually the truth comes out. As this article and that of Brett Stephens shows, even in the NY Times.
20
That, Mr Schwartz, is a difficult concept for the indoctrinated to get their heads around.
What surprises me is the number of people who post here on the NY Times who cannot grasp the concept either intellectually or emotionally.
12
" What they will get is more war and death and Hamas will have even more photo-ops." And more money!
10
Thank you Matti and the NYTimes
for providing balance and honesty
to the tragedy that is the Middle East.
I can imagine that most Israelis
looked on with horror, not only at
the loss of Palestinian lives, but also at
the plight of their soldier children who must
pursue military options in lieu of peace
treaties. I thought about Golda Meir’s iconic
wishes that the “Arabs love their children more
than they hate us” to punctuate
sadness for the Gaza infant who
died in the conflict.
83
What's in a name?
What a difference exists between the 2 Karen commentators?
1
Just think about when the day arrives when the tables are turned in Palestine's favor. I hope no one says how bad and reprehensible Palestinians actions are to starve their occupiers, to incarcerate their youths, to bomb their women and children. The day will come if not already here.
Thank you for this piece. I suspected that the mob was incited by hamas; such a violent Palestinian response to moving a US embassy had to have some 'outside' inspiration. I was surprised that so many folks initially blamed (or still blame) the Israelis for the fracas.
71
Hamas paid people to attend the "protest". They also bullied people and told them they would be considered conspirators if they failed to attend. They forced bus companies in Gaza to bus people to the border. Israel begged Gazans to stay away. They warned them of the dangers that would result if they attempted to breach the fence. None of this gets covered on the pages of the NYT.
2
Thank you for your first-hand account. Through that gateway goes food, and medicine and humanitarian aid FROM Israel, TO the Palestinians. From all other borders goes what? Rockets, bombs, terrorists. And yet the simplistic story is so easy to digest: Israel bad, mean, killers, occupiers -Palestinians good, blameless, victims.
Like most conflicts, this one is a complicated mess with plenty of blame and responsibility to go around. But credit to the Palestinians who have long mastered the art of manipulating the message and winning the battle for sympathy.
But have you noticed the silence from the other Arab countries? They have long since given up on trying to destroy Israel (except Iran), and have shown little to no support or aid for the Palestinians. Ever wonder why? In prior wars, Israel either took large swaths of land from her foes and often could have taken more. She did not, and gave back the conquered land. Every wonder why?
There were working greenhouses left for the Palestinians in 2005, and they were looted and destroyed. Every wonder why?
Complicated. One of the few consistent themes is the desire of one side to obliterate the other, and that desire has never been Israel's.
103
Small point of fact: Iran is not an Arab country.
This column makes some very significant points.
The demonstration could have been peaceful for the most part but even if that was true there was no way the soldiers would have known that and the possibility that there were Hamas agents among them would justify the actions that Israel took that day.
I am sure most of the Palestinians who were killed were not Hamas agents.
Maybe none of them.
It doesn't matter because as the article states if these people got through the fence Hamas agents would have too and if you think I am wrong it most likely is because you feel Hamas has the right to do what they are doing to get their agents into Israel.
You say the land was stolen or Gaza is a prison and Hamas has the right to fight for these reasons.
I will not debate that as that is something you agree with or you don't.
My opinion will not changed your opinion.
So what this really comes down to is do you think Israel has the right to defend themselves.
If you think they do then what they did has to be considered acceptable.
Now tell me what is your opinion.
17
Actually Hamas has claimed 50 of those dead as fighters.
2
It is wrong to murder. It is especially wrong to kill children. There can be no argument in favor of murder. Israel deserves our repudiation of its treatment of the Palestinians regardless of their "leaders."
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Mark Laughlin
Yet you do not condemn the Hamas tunnels built to kidnap and kill Israelis and the rockets fired into Israel that kill Israeli civilians. Hamas counts on you.
There should have been two other screens: the Gaza-Egypt border, where there were no crowds because the people knew that if they had tried to breach it illegally, the death toll would have been in the thousands, and downtown Ramallah in the West Bank, where Arabs were going about their business trying to provide for their families.
I swear, someone should tow Gaza to Turkey which seems obsessed in love with it, and let the West Bank make a deal with Israel.
Well written column. Bravo.
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Looking for the easy way out?
So the West Bank Arabs are upstanding people now. Too bad about the illegal Israeli settlements then.
Mr. Friedman, you call this "a complicated human tragedy". But it's not that complicated, if we start with the fact that over 50 people were shot in a single day. Nothing can justify that. These dead are not going to go away, no more than the Palestinians as a group are going to go away. Deal with it.
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H.L. Menken wrote:"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong"
Your comment falls in that same pool.
Hamas has stated that 50 of those killed (out of some 60) were Hamas fighters - and another organization claims 3 more.
So, Israel, in the face of thousands of people wanting to breach the fence, has picked out 50+ of the opposition's fighters and instigators then shot them.
What would happen if thousands of people, after bombarding the us with thousands of rockets, tried to storm our border?
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Then you don't believe Hamas when they said 50 fighters were among those killed? And if the border were breached. and among those fighters were others not killed, you assume that their goal is one of peaceful protest? I don't think you have read enough about the situation.
So, when you say "its not that complicated," I fear that clearly demonstrates there is a blindness to what the intent of the riotous barrier breach is intended to do. The intent is clearly bring mayhem across the border, kidnap Israelis, and hold them as ransom.
Its an awful situation, no one wants to fire teargas and live fire into crowds of young kids riled up who look at this like its a festival. But from the other side, there is real danger, and those children simply should not be there, because the true intent is being masked.
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According to reliable sources - the majority of those people killed were members of Hamas whose aim was to break down the border fence and kill or kidnap Israeli soldiers and civilians. That said, as an Israeli citizen, every death of an innocent civilian concerns me and I express that concern - but I do so only in Hebrew because the obsession with Israel in America is so prominent and the press coverage often distorted. As for "deal with it" as an Israeli who longs for peace and two states but has no illusions about Hamas and their intentions I deal with it every day.
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And Hamas's lies are bought, hook, line, and sinker, by the gullible western press. What's been interesting, hearing interviews of Palestinians, primarily on left-leaning outlets (NPR, etc.) is that not a single one has recognized Israel's right to exist within PRE-1967 borders. And not once has the interviewers pushed back even a little bit, to try to unearth what these Palestinians may want in the future. Sadly it seems that the average Palestinian, at least in Gaza, is of the same mind as Hamas, and will never accept an Israeli state, even within internationally recognized borders.
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Also remember the status of the pre 67 borders. Gaza was controlled by Egypt. The West Bank was controlled by Jordan. Palestinians had no self autonomy anywhere. Does anyone blame Egypt and Jordan for the plight of the Palestinians? Also remember that Jordan is a totally artificial creation of the West after WW!. The Hashemites were kicked out of Saudi Arabia by Ibn SAud's family and given TransJordan to rule even though the Hussein family had no connection to it.
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Reporters who do not challenge the facts and comply with the lies of Hamas are collaborators to the violence.
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Mr. Friedman's column, as several readers assert, does provide a needed corrective to the hostile depictions of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. But one doesn't have to defend Hamas to maintain that biases also distort this pro-Israeli op-ed piece.
Without much supporting evidence, Friedman strongly implies that Hamas orchestrated Monday's protest in Gaza ("about 40,000 people answered a call to show up.") The involvement of Hamas would surprise no one, but Friedman leaves the impression that a desperate people would have remained passive in the absence of sinister efforts on the part of that organization. Israel has followed a systematic policy of imprisoning Palestinians in a narrow strip of land, blocking access to jobs and medical care. Why would anyone suppose that people treated in this way would lack a strong motive for spontaneous protest?
Friedman also ignores the impact of Israel's continuing policy of building settlements on the West Bank, which exposes the Netanyahu government's real attitude toward a two-state solution.
Friedman highlights the vicious language used by Hamas leaders ("tear out the hearts" of Israelis) without noting that some Israelis express equally harsh sentiments about Palestinians. Hamas does not represent the kind of leadership that can resolve the conflicts with Israel, but the Netanyahu government plays an equally negative role with respect to the Palestinians.
Israel must protect its security, but is it really doing so?
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it seems the majority of the Israeli offenses happen in the West Bank.
Jerusalem ... settlers ... those are all West Bank problems.
So shouldn't *those* Palestinians be the most outraged? Shouldn't they be marching on the border *in* Jerusalem?
That's not what we see. What we see is happening all the way on the other side of the country in a completely different territory.
If it's a "spontaneous" protest it's a bit odd that it's not the aggrieved that are actually protesting...
Assuming that the West Bank and Gaza are *one* is one of the Western media's biggest problems in reporting on these events. They are not "one" ... they are not united ... and if the recent events illustrate anything it's that perhaps the West Bank *is* ready for peace ... while Gaza is clearly not.
Seems like we might need to be rethinking the "two state" solution if Gaza and West Bankers are so clearly divided.
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Well, just as the writer requests of Friedman to provide evidence that Hamas organized this affair (I've seen enough press coverage of these episodes to believe him, but never mind), it would behoove Mr. Lee to provide evidence of linguistic equivalence. If a leader of Hamas says "tear out the hearts," where's the Israeli leader who says something similar?
In the event, the contents of the Hamas charter, rejecting the very existence of the Jewish state, are generally well known, as is the organizing source of these Marches of Return.
I tire of the moral equivalence between Hamas and Netanyahu. I understand the general dislike of him among liberals many of whom erroneously think Bibi's politics parallel American conservative politics, but folks apparently need reminding that he was elected. True, Hamas was, too, many years ago, but their election did not include taking over the Gaza Strip and creating a massive prison for two million hapless Palestinians.
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James Lee writes, "Without much supporting evidence, Friedman strongly implies that Hamas orchestrated Monday's protest in Gaza ("about 40,000 people answered a call to show up.")"
Here is some supporting evidence, from the horse's mouth, so to speak. Mahmoud al-Zahar is the co-founder of Hamas and a senior member of the terror group’s leadership. In an interview with Al Jazeera, he said:
“This is not peaceful resistance. Has the option (of armed struggle) diminished? No. On the contrary, it is growing and developing. That’s clear. So when we talk about ‘peaceful resistance,’ we are deceiving the public. This is a peaceful resistance bolstered by a military force and by security agencies, and enjoying tremendous popular support.”
You can see the interview on YouTube:
https://www.facebook.com/memri.org/videos/10156419825859717/
You might also be interested in evidence for the claim that at least 80% of those who were killed were members of Hamas or Islamic Jihad. In a televised interview with the Palestinian Baladna news outlet, Salah Bardawil, a Hamas official, said that of the "62 people [who] were martyred, 50 of the martyrs were Hamas".
https://youtu.be/w-XCxLJi7po
Islamic Jihad has acknowledged that 3 of the martyrs were members of Islamic Jihad.
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NYT, thanks for publishing this thought provoking piece. It would be wonderful to read more commentary that does not fall into the simplistic narratives that prevent people from questioning themselves and their own assumptions.
This tendency to assume we are right most of the time is one of the greatest barriers to understanding our neighbors and appreciating that they are as valuable as we are. Only when our ideological enemies become people worthy of the same considerations we expect from ourselves will be ever be able to develop some semblance of peace.
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"1. Solve the Middle East crisis." The only question at the top of a blank piece of paper, this was the final exam my senior year in political science. this exam still strikes me as making a great point: those who know little about a complex subject are quick to claim they know the simple answer, but the more you know, the less you know for sure.
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There is no solution. Hamas and other like-minded groups will continuing fighting Israel forever; or until Israel capitulates. If Hamas is defeated, someone else will start a new organization with the same message.
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In the Middle East, the relations are all violent. This violence is often blamed on a convenient scapegoat, the West. We have seen enough of their actions by now to see that they do not value life the way Westerners do, but they duplicitously demand that Westerners value theirs.
This is an excellent column which offers some needed perspective to the horrible events of the week. I offer no support for the relocation of the US embassy to Jerusalem which was a mistake on monumental proportions by the US, but the thoughtless wasting of human life by Hamas to win a publicity contest is certainly worse or more heartless than even anything Trump could do.
Peace in the area is desperately needed, but no one in the present leadership on either side has a clue how to achieve it. Question, if they really want to achieve that goal.
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Anonomous. I appreciate your understanding of Hamas' manipulation of public opinion at the expense of their own people.
But please allow me to explain why the move of the embassy was in fact a great move. Arab Palestinians have now for years told the story that nobody can decide that Jerusalem is Israel's capital until there is a peace agreement. That is as much manipulation as what happens in Gaza.
Aside from the fact that Jerusalem has been the center of Judaism for 3000 years, Jerusalem is the city where, since 1948, Israel has the offices of the President and Prime Minister, its Supreme Court, its Parliament and most of its ministries. Jerusalem has been and IS Israel's capital. That fact and right is not up for negotiation but its denial is exactly the philosophy what keeps us from peace. That denial is denying Israel's right to exist as a Jewish State and it is not negotiable.
However none of this excludes that one day part of East Jerusalem becomes the capital of Arab Palestine.
Trump took something off the table that needed to be taken off the table a very long time ago. It was not negotiable.
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There was a proposal, years ago, that ALL of Jerusalem be SIMULTANEOUSLY the capital of both Israel and Palestine. That struck me as a brilliant and creative solution.
Qualifies as absolutely silly comment. Trump is a nightmare, grotesque, wishing to turn America into his next ego venture.
Moving the American embassy caused the deaths and injuries of enormous number of unarmed Palestinians.
But it was a grand play for Jared and Ivanka, and the racist right wing American pastors, to get news footage on Fox.
As an American citizen, who fought, quite literally, in Vietnam. This has brought me to tears and despair?
Is this the country worthy of the sacrifice so many of us have made for some who spent the war fighting sexually transmitted diseases in New York??
My God. What have we become?
Thank you Matti for your essay. for your honesty and thoughtfulness of your words. Sadly though, for most readers of The Times and the employees themselves, your words will fall on deaf ears because as you said, they want that simple story. David vs. Goliath. Right vs. Wrong. Good vs. Evil. No Israeli supporter celebrates the death of anyone; but no Israeli and no supporters of Israel will sit back and allow Jews to die unnecessarily so that people who support the Palestinian cause can feel better about getting closer to a plurality of deaths. What Hamas does is a crime, and it's beyond shameful that people in Western countries that claim want to see an end to this conflict help fuel the conflict by absolving the inhumanity that Hamas swims in. May God give strength to the people Gaza to overthrow their cruel rulers and give real peace a chance with neighbor, Israel.
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Thank you, David. That is an excellent response.
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We can hope or we can do something to make it happen.
I propose Israel and the USA attempt to reach out to Hamas and offer them many of the things they need in return for their cooperation.
Even if Hamas doesn't agree it serves a purpose.
It will tell the world that Hamas doesn't care about the things they claim are the reasons they are protesting.
If the people in Gaza can see that Hamas lies then that might be a reason they won't give their support to them.
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Don't forget Trump. Animus toward Trump causes a doubling down on these positions. I'm sure Hamas understands this better than Trump's critics.
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