The media assault against Israel

The American media is doing all it can to undermine Israel’s case for war. I’m not just talking about those anti-Israel bloviators whom Noah Pollak amusingly call the “juicebox mafia,” but the opinion pages of major American newspapers have been mobilized to condemn Israel.

Following up on his paper’s poorly argued editorial criticizing Israel yesterday, Jackson Diehl weighed in with Olmert’s Final Failure:

Israel’s new battle with Hamas in Gaza means that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will be remembered for fighting two bloody and wasteful mini-wars in less than three years in power. The first one, in Lebanon during the summer of 2006, punished but failed to defeat or even permanently injure Hezbollah, which is politically and militarily stronger today than it was before Olmert took office. This one will probably have about the same effect on Hamas, which almost certainly will still control Gaza, and retain the capacity to strike Israel, when Olmert leaves office in a few months.

It’s astonishing that anyone, presumably as informed as Diehl – who was once the Post’s Jerusalem bureau chief – could write something so unserious. (Richard Boudreaux of the LA Times highlights a number of differences between Israel’s justified attack against Gaza with its justified attack against Hezbollah. via memeorandum)

Israel struck at Gaza not for some frivolous reason, but because the situation was intolerable. Wtih roughly 250,000 of its citizens in rocket range from Gaza and Hamas having used a ceasefire to improve its ability to strike at those citizens, Israel had to act. The point of the attack isn’t to force another ceasefire – that would be frivolous as the failure in Lebanon turned otu to be – but to significantly degrade Hamas’s abilities. I expect that part of what Israel will need to do before it stops is to kill the likes of Haniyeh, Zahar, and Abu Tir.

The end of the op-ed is disturbing too. In the next to last paragraph, Diehl writes:

Worst of all, Abbas followed in a long tradition of previous Palestinian leaders by reacting to a far-reaching Israeli offer with an uncourageous demurral. Olmert has never publicly disclosed the terms he discussed with Abbas, but sources say he went well beyond what Israel agreed to at the Camp David talks of 2000, previously the closest approach to a deal. I’m told Olmert offered to support the groundbreaking concession of allowing thousands of Palestinian refugees to “return” to Israel over a period of years; he also agreed to divide Jerusalem between Israel and Palestine. Abbas, like Yasser Arafat at Camp David, refused to sign on to a compromise that the world would have hailed.

This is Olmert’s failure. How could he go further than Camp David? The Palestinians would be rewarded for their refusal to accept the terms of Camp David if Abbas had had the guts to accept Olmert’s offer. But Diehl whitewashes what went on. If this report is correct, Abbas “refused” to make peace. That’s hardly Olmert’s fault. It doesn’t occur to Diehl that even the “moderate” Palestinians might not be committed to a peaceful resolution of their conflict with Israel. Finally Diehl concludes:

So Olmert, like Ehud Barak eight years ago, will end his term as prime minister by bombing rather than liberating Palestinians. He will be remembered for his wars — but it may be many years before Israel again has a leader as willing to make peace.

If the current fighting leads to an actual victory over Hamas then Olmert will get a small measure of credit in an otherwise dismal record. But Diehl ought not to mourn the lack of an Israeli leader willing to make peace, when he has noted that it was Abbas who refused Olmert’s stupidly generous terms. The lack of peace doesn’t result from the lack of (misplaced) Israeli efforts.

It’s a measure of how awful and ill-informed Diehl’s op-ed was that it was endorsed by anti-Israel and antisemitic pundit, Helena Coban.

But the Post isn’t done. Today it features an op-ed by Palestinian “moderate” Daoud Kuttab, Has Israel revived Hamas?, Kuttab starts with:

In its efforts to stop amateur rockets from nagging the residents of some of its southern cities, Israel appears to have given new life to the fledging Islamic movement in Palestine.

“Nagging?” What an immoral declaration. OK, this fellow was “nagged” to death. The Post ought to stick to allowing terrorists op-eds instead of phony “moderates.” Kuttab’s all too predictable argument is that by attacking Hamas Israeli has succeeded in making Hamas more popular. Maybe he spoke too soon. The question is whether Israel will fight to win or not. If Israel fights to win, then Kuttab would do well to remember:

Take, for example, Israel’s targeted assassination of Hamas leaders Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, and Ismail Abu Shanab in 2004. With its top leadership eliminated in a span of only a few months, Hamas was in utter disarray. Specifically, after Yassin’s death, Hamas never found a religious leader to fill the void. His death made Hamas increasingly vulnerable to the widely held perception that it was simply a group of violent terrorists with no religious mandate.

Israel can defeat Hamas if it kills the right people and sufficiently degrades Hamas’s offensive capabilities. Kuttab isn’t serious, but he served the needs of the Post’s editorial staff by adding one more voice of objection to Israel defending its citizens.

The editors of the Post, unwilling to leave bad enough alone, have added an unsigned editorial to their campaign against Israel, Divided on Gaza.

If the Lebanon war is any indication, the bloodshed in Gaza — which is being endlessly looped on Arab satellite channels across the region — will strengthen the Iranian camp at the expense of the secular Sunni forces. Thousands of people joined pro-Hamas rallies in Beirut, Cairo and Amman, Jordan, yesterday. Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader whose popularity soared after he survived his battle with Israel, delivered a fiery speech in which he demanded that Egypt open its border with Gaza “and help Gazans in their struggle.” The weak and unpopular government of President Hosni Mubarak allowed some aid deliveries yesterday and will find it hard to resist further concessions if the fighting continues.

Of course allowing the Iranian camp to declare victory strengthens it. As I argued yesterday, the Post should be using its reportorial abilities to expose the Iranian threat and leave the fighting to Israel. (The Post can’t even bring itself to mention that Israel, too, is allowing emergency deliveries into Gaza and treating the wounded in Israeli hospitals.) If Israel defeats Hamas and kills some of its leaders, those street demonstrations will prove nothing.

Israel was offering upbeat assessments of its air offensive yesterday even while warning that it could continue for some time and possibly expand to ground operations. Yet, as in Lebanon, no decisive military victory is likely: Israel will not be able to topple Hamas unless it fully reoccupies Gaza, and it will probably not be able even to stop the rocket attacks on its cities without some kind of political settlement. For that, Israel will need the mediation of Egypt, Saudi Arabia or other Sunni states. Israel must be careful not to allow its military campaign to undermine its own diplomatic end game — or to hand another political victory to an Iranian regime that remains a far greater threat to Israel than Hamas is.

Maybe no decisive military victory is possible. But my guess is that Israel has some specific goals in mind and that when it achieves them – and only then – will it stop. Even it achieves its goals would the Post grant Israel the victory? My guess, based on its current offensive, is that it won’t. Maybe the Post’s editors ought to stop shedding so many crocodile tears. Based on the editorial’s they’ve run and the op-ed’s they’ve commissioned, it’s clear that they object to Israel defending itself.

The New York Times has finally weighed in too with War over Gaza. Surprisingly, it’s marginally less hostile to Israel than the Washington Post has been. Still it suffers from its own bit of silliness:

We hope he does not mean a ground war. That, or any prolonged military action, would be disastrous for Israel and lead to wider regional instability. Mr. Barak and Israel’s foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, both candidates to succeed Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in elections set for February, must not be drawn any further into a competition with the front-runner, Benjamin Netanyahu, over who is the biggest hawk.

If a ground war defeats Hamas, it won’t lead to greater regional instability. Hamas and other Iranian proxies are sources of instability. Defeating them is a good thing. And Barak, Livni and Olmert are hardly hawks.They are doing what they see as being necessary to defend their citizens. The imputation of cynicism is disappointing if not unexpected.

(The NYT actually had a somewhat sympathetic op-ed towards Israel by Benny Morris.)

What are the antidotes to this editorial poison?

Read Sderot under Siege by David Keyes. David Bernstein’s takedown Glenn Greenwald is excellent. Jack’s got a second roundup and is working on a third. Israelly Cool and the Muqata are still liveblogging. And while not all posts are about Israel, I’ve put together a link to the best pro-Israel blogs through Google Reader here.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.