Jonathan Cook
Mar 28, 2024For weeks, as Gaza was battered with bombs
and the body count in the tiny enclave rose inexorably, western publics
had little choice but to rely on Israel’s word for what happened on 7
October. Some 1,150 Israelis were killed during an unprecedented attack
on Israeli communities and military posts next to Gaza.
Beheaded
babies, a pregnant woman with her womb cut open and the foetus stabbed,
children put in ovens, hundreds of people burned alive, mutilation of
corpses, a systematic campaign of indescribably savage rapes and acts of
necrophilia.
Western politicians and media lapped it up,
repeating the allegations uncritically while ignoring Israel’s
genocidal rhetoric and increasingly genocidal military operations these
claims supported.
Then, as the mountain of bodies in
Gaza grew still higher, the supposed evidence was shared with a few,
select western journalists and influencers. They were invited to private screenings of footage carefully curated by Israeli officials to paint the worst possible picture of the Hamas operation.
These
new initiates offered few details but implied the footage confirmed
many of the horrors. They readily repeated Israeli claims that Hamas was
“worse than Isis”, the Islamic State group.
The impression of unparalleled depravity from Hamas was reinforced by the willingness of the western media to allow Israeli spokespeople, Israel’s supporters and western politicians
to continue spreading unchallenged the claim that Hamas had committed
unspeakable, sadistic atrocities – from beheading and burning babies to
carrying out a campaign of rapes.
The only journalist in the British mainstream media to dissent was Owen Jones.
Agreeing that Israel’s video showed terrible crimes committed against
civilians, he noted that none of the barbarous acts listed above were
included.
What was shown instead were the kind of terrible crimes against civilians all too familiar in wars and uprisings.
Whitewashing genocide
Jones faced a barrage of attacks from colleagues accusing him of being an atrocity apologist. His own newspaper, the Guardian, appears to have prevented him from writing about Gaza in its pages as a consequence.
Now,
after nearly six months, the exclusive narrative stranglehold on those
events by Israel and its media acolytes has finally been broken.
Last week, Al Jazeera aired an hour-long documentary,
called simply “October 7”, that lets western publics see for themselves
what took place. It seems that Jones’ account was closest to the truth.
Yet,
Al Jazeera’s film goes further still, divulging for the first time to a
wider audience facts that have been all over the Israeli media for
months but have been carefully excluded from western coverage. The
reason is clear: those facts would implicate Israel in some of the
atrocities it has been ascribing to Hamas for months.
Middle East Eye highlighted these glaring plot holes in the West’s media narrative way back in December. Nothing has been done to correct the record since.
The
establishment media has proved it is not to be trusted. For months it
has credulously recited Israeli propaganda in support of a genocide.
But
that is only part of the indictment against it. Its continuing refusal
to report on the mounting evidence of Israel’s perpetration of crimes
against its own civilians and soldiers on 7 October suggests it has been
intentionally whitewashing Israel’s slaughter in Gaza.
Al
Jazeera’s investigations unit has gathered many hundreds of hours of
film from bodycams worn by Hamas fighters and Israeli soldiers, dashcams
and CCTV to compile its myth-busting documentary.
It demonstrates five things that upend the dominant narrative that has been imposed by Israel and the western media.
First,
the crimes Hamas committed against civilians in Israel on 7 October -
and those it did not - have been used to overshadow the fact that it
carried out a spectacularly sophisticated military operation on 7
October in breaking out of a long-besieged Gaza.
The group
knocked out Israel’s top-flight surveillance systems that had kept the
enclave’s 2.3 million inhabitants imprisoned for decades. It smashed
holes in Israel’s highly fortified barrier surrounding Gaza in at least
10 locations. And it caught unawares Israel’s many military camps next
to the enclave that had been enforcing the occupation at arms’ length.
More than 350 Israeli soldiers, armed police and guards were killed that day.
A colonial arrogance
Second, the documentary undermines the conspiracy theory that Israeli leaders allowed the Hamas attack to justify the ethnic cleansing of Gaza – a plan Israel has been actively working on since at least 2007, when it appears to have received US approval.
True,
Israeli intelligence officials involved in the surveillance of Gaza had
been warning that Hamas was preparing a major operation. But those
warnings were discounted not because of a conspiracy. After all, none of
the senior echelons in Israel stood to benefit from what unfolded on 7
October.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is finished
politically as a result of the Hamas attack, and will likely end up in
jail after the current carnage in Gaza ends.
Israel’s
genocidal response to 7 October has made Israel’s brand so toxic
internationally, and more so with Arab publics in the region, that Saudi
Arabia has had to break off plans for a normalisation agreement, which had been Israel and Washington’s ultimate hope.
And
the Hamas operation has crushed the worldwide reputation of the Israeli
military for invincibility. It has inspired Yemen's Ansar Allah (the
Houthis) to attack vessels in the Red Sea. It is emboldening
Israel’s arch-enemy, Hezbollah, in neighbouring Lebanon. It has
reinvigorated the idea that resistance is possible across the
much-oppressed Middle East.
No, it was not a conspiracy that opened the door to Hamas’ attack. It was colonial arrogance,
based on a dehumanising view shared by the vast majority of Israelis
that they were the masters and that the Palestinians – their slaves –
were far too primitive to strike a meaningful blow.
The
attacks of 7 October should have forced Israelis to reassess their
dismissive attitude towards the Palestinians and address the question of
whether Israel’s decades-long regime of apartheid and brutal
subjugation could – and should – continue indefinitely.
Predictably, Israelis ignored the message of Hamas’ attack and dug deeper into their colonial mindset.
The
supposed primitivism that, it was assumed, made the Palestinians too
feeble an opponent to take on Israel’s sophisticated military machine
has now been reframed as proof of a Palestinian barbarousness that makes
Gaza’s entire population so dangerous, so threatening, that they have
to be wiped out.
The Palestinians who, most Israelis had
concluded, could be caged like battery chickens indefinitely, and in
ever-shrinking pens, are now viewed as monsters that have to be culled.
That impulse was the genesis of Israel’s current genocidal plan for
Gaza.
Suicide mission
The third point the documentary clarifies is that Hamas’s wildly successful prison break undid the larger operation.
The
group had worked so hard on the fearsome logistics of the breakout –
and prepared for a rapid and savage response from Israel’s oppressive
military machine – that it had no serious plan for dealing with a
situation it could not conceive of: the freedom to scour Israel’s
periphery, often undisturbed for many hours or days.
Hamas
fighters entering Israel had assumed that most were on a suicide
mission. According to the documentary, the fighters’ own assumption was
that between 80 and 90 per cent would not make it back.
The aim
was not to strike some kind of existential blow against Israel, as
Israeli officials have asserted ever since in their determined
rationalisation of genocide. It was to strike a blow against Israel’s
reputation for invincibility by attacking its military bases and nearby
communities, and dragging as many hostages as possible back into Gaza.
They
would then be exchanged for the thousands of Palestinian men, women and
children held in Israel’s military incarceration system – hostages labelled “prisoners”.
As
Hamas spokesman Bassem Naim explained to Al Jazeera, the breakout was
meant to thrust Gaza’s desperate plight back into the spotlight after
many years in which international interest in ending Israel’s siege had
waned.
Of discussions in the group’s political bureau, he says
the consensus was: “We have to take action. If we don’t do it, Palestine
will be forgotten, totally deleted from the international map.”
For
17 years, Gaza had gradually been strangled to death. Its population
had tried peaceful protests at the militarised fence around their
enclave and been picked off by Israeli snipers. The world had grown so
used to Palestinian suffering, it had switched off.
The 7 October
attack was intended to change that, especially by re-inspiring
solidarity with Gaza in the Arab world and by bolstering Hamas’ regional
political position.
It was intended to make it impossible for
Saudi Arabia – the main Arab power broker in Washington – to normalise
with Israel, completing the marginalisation of the Palestinian cause in
the Arab world.
Judged by these criteria, Hamas’s attack was a success.
Loss of focus
But
for many long hours – with Israel caught entirely off-guard, and with
its surveillance systems neutralised – Hamas did not face the military
counter-strike it expected.
Three factors seem to have led to a rapid erosion of discipline and purpose.
With
no meaningful enemy to confront or limit Hamas’ room for manoeuvre, the
fighters lost focus. Footage shows them squabbling about what to do
next as they freely wander around Israeli communities.
That was
compounded by the influx of other armed Palestinians who piggybacked on
Hamas’ successful breakout and the lack of an Israeli response. Many
suddenly found themselves with the chance to loot or settle scores with
Israel – by killing Israelis – for years of suffering in Gaza.
And
the third factor was Hamas stumbling into the Nova music festival,
which had been relocated by the organisers at short notice close to the
fence around Gaza.
It quickly became the scene of some of the
worst atrocities, though none resembling the savage excesses described
by Israel and the western media.
Footage shows, for example,
Palestinian fighters throwing grenades into concrete shelters where many
dozens of festivalgoers were sheltering from the Hamas attack. In one
clip, a man who runs out is gunned down.
Fourth, Al Jazeera was
able to confirm that the most extreme, sadistic and depraved atrocities
never took place. They were fabricated by Israeli soldiers, officials
and emergency responders.
One figure central to this deception
was Yossi Landau, a leader of the Jewish religious emergency response
organisation, Zaka. He and his staff concocted outlandish tales that
were readily amplified not only by a credulous western press corps but
by senior US officials too.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken
graphically told of a family of four being butchered at the breakfast
table. The father’s eye was gouged out in front of his two children,
aged eight and six. The mother’s breast was cut off. The girl’s foot was
amputated, and the boy’s fingers cut off, before they were all
executed. The executioners then sat down and had a meal next to their
victims.
Except the evidence shows none of that actually happened.
Landau
has also claimed that Hamas tied up dozens of children and burned them
alive at Kibbutz Be’eri. Elsewhere, he has recalled a pregnant woman who
was shot dead and her belly cut open and the foetus stabbed.
Officials
at the kibbutz deny any evidence for these atrocities. Landau’s
accounts do not tally with any of the known facts. Only two babies died
on 7 October, both killed unintentionally.
When challenged, Landau
offers to show Al Jazeera a photo on his phone of the stabbed foetus,
but is filmed admitting he is unable to do so.
Fabricating atrocities
Similarly, Al
Jazeera’s research finds no evidence of systematic or mass rape on 7
October. In fact, it is Israel that has been blocking efforts by
international bodies to investigate any sexual violence that day.
Respected
outlets like the New York Times, the BBC and Guardian have repeatedly
breathed credibility into the claims of systematic rape by Hamas, but
only by unquestioningly repeating Israeli atrocity propaganda.
Madeleine
Rees, secretary general of the Women’s International League for Peace
and Freedom, told Al Jazeera: “A state has instrumentalised the horrific
attacks on women in order, we believe, to justify an attack on Gaza, of
which the majority suffering are other women.”
In other cases,
Israel has blamed Hamas for mutilating the bodies of Israeli victims,
including by driving over them, smashing their pelvises. In several
cases, Al Jazeera’s investigation showed that the bodies were of Hamas
fighters mutilated or driven over by Israeli soldiers.
The
documentary notes that reporting by the Israeli media – followed by the
western media – “focuses not on the crimes they [Hamas] committed but on
the crimes they did not”.
The question is why, when there were
plenty of real atrocities by Hamas to report, did Israel feel the need
to fabricate even worse ones? And why, especially after the initial
fabrication of beheaded babies was debunked, did the western media carry
on credulously recycling improbable stories of Hamas savagery?
The
answer to the first question is that Israel needed to manufacture a
favourable political climate that would excuse its genocide in Gaza as
necessary.
Netanyahu is shown congratulating Zaka’s leaders on their role in influencing world opinion:
“We need to buy time, which we gain by turning to world leaders and to
public opinion. You have an important role in influencing public
opinion, which also influences leaders.”
The answer to the
second is that western journalists’ racist preconceptions ensured they
would be easily persuaded that brown people were capable of such
barbarity.
'Hannibal directive'
Fifth, Al Jazeera documents months of Israeli
media coverage demonstrating that some of the atrocities blamed on Hamas
– particularly relating to the burning alive of Israelis – were actually Israel’s responsibility.
Deprived
of functioning surveillance, an enraged Israeli military machine lashed
out blindly. Video footage from Apache helicopters shows them firing
wildly on cars and figures heading towards Gaza, unable to determine
whether they are targeting fleeing Hamas fighters or Israelis taken
hostage by Hamas.
In at least one case, an Israeli tank
fired a shell into a building in Kibbutz Be’eri, killing the 12 Israeli
hostages inside. One, 12-year-old Liel Hetsroni, whose charred remains
meant she could not be identified for weeks, became the poster child for Israel’s campaign to tar Hamas as barbarians for burning her alive.
The
commander in charge of the rescue efforts at Be’eri, Colonel Golan
Vach, is shown fabricating to the media a story about the house Israel
itself had shelled. He claimed Hamas had executed and burned eight
babies in the house. In fact, no babies were killed there – and those
who did die in the house were killed by Israel.
The widespread
devastation in kibbutz communities – still blamed on Hamas – suggests
that Israel’s shelling of this particular house was far from a one-off.
It is impossible to determine how many more Israelis were killed by
“friendly fire”.
These deaths appear to have been related to the
hurried invocation by Israel that day of its so-called “Hannibal
directive” – a secretive military protocol to kill Israeli soldiers to
prevent them from being taken hostage and becoming bargaining chips for
the release of Palestinians held hostage in Israeli jails.
In
this case, the directive looks to have been repurposed and used against
Israeli civilians too. Extraordinarily, though there has been furious
debate inside Israel about the Hannibal directive’s use on 7 October,
the western media has remained completely silent on the subject.
Woeful imbalance
The
one issue largely overlooked by Al Jazeera is the astonishing failure
of the western media across the board to cover 7 October seriously or
investigate any of the atrocities independently of Israel’s own
self-serving accounts.
The question hanging over Al Jazeera’s
documentary is this: how is it possible that no British or US media
organisation has undertaken the task that Al Jazeera took on? And
further, why is it that none of them appear ready to use Al Jazeera’s
coverage as an opportunity to revisit the events of 7 October?
In
part, that is because they themselves would be indicted by any
reassessment of the past five months. Their coverage has been woefully
unbalanced: wide-eyed acceptance of any Israeli claim of Hamas
atrocities, and similar wide-eyed acceptance of any Israeli excuse for
its slaughter and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinian children
in Gaza.
But the problem runs deeper.
This is not the first
time that Al Jazeera has shamed the western press corps on a subject
that has dominated headlines for months or years.
Back in 2017, an Al Jazeera investigation called The Lobby
showed that Israel was behind a campaign to smear Palestinian
solidarity activists as antisemites in Britain, with Jeremy Corbyn the
ultimate target.
That smear campaign continued to be wildly
successful even after the Al Jazeera series aired, not least because
the investigation was uniformly ignored. British media outlets swallowed
every piece of disinformation spread by Israeli lobbyists on the issue
of antisemitism.
A follow-up on a similar disinformation
campaign waged by the pro-Israel lobby in the US was never broadcast,
apparently after diplomatic threats from Washington to Qatar. The series
was eventually leaked to the Electronic Intifada website.
Then 18 months ago, Al Jazeera broadcast an investigation called The Labour Files,
showing how senior officials in Britain’s Labour Party, assisted by the
UK media, waged a covert plot to stop Corbyn from ever becoming prime
minister. Corbyn, Labour’s democratically elected leader, was an
outspoken critic of Israel and supporter of justice for the Palestinian
people.
Once again, the British media, which had played
such a critical role in helping to destroy Corbyn, ignored the Al
Jazeera investigation.
There is a pattern here that can be ignored only through wilful blindness.
Israel
and its partisans have unfettered access to western establishments,
where they fabricate claims and smears that are readily amplified by a
credulous press corps.
And those claims only ever work to
Israel’s advantage, and harm the cause of ending decades of brutal
subjugation of the Palestinian people by an Israeli apartheid regime now
committing genocide.
Al Jazeera has once again shown that, on
matters that western establishments consider the most vital to their
interests – such as support for a highly militarised client state
promoting the West’s control over the oil-rich Middle East – the western
press is not a watchdog on power but the establishment’s public
relations arm.
Al Jazeera’s investigation has not just revealed
the lies Israel spread about 7 October to justify its genocide in Gaza.
It reveals the utter complicity of western journalists in that genocide.
Source: https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/we-were-lied-into-the-gaza-genocide
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