Our Wednesday News Analysis | Israel-Palestine war: Israel is caught lying time and again. And yet we never learn

A man carries a rescued Palestinian girl from the rubble of a building after an Israeli air strike at the Rafah refugee camp, in the southern Gaza Strip, on 17 October 2023 (AFP)

Western politicians and media act as if they are caught in a permanent spell, sympathetically indulging even the most wildly improbable denials from Israel that it has committed war crimes.

As Lenin famously observed: "A lie told often enough becomes the truth".

We can go further. It never matters how often Israel is caught out in a lie, because its next lie will be given the benefit of the doubt. Western media refuse to learn from the past.

The Israeli military has a long track record of compulsively concocting face-saving falsehoods - disinformation that vilifies the very Palestinian people it has oppressed for decades.

The latest example came a few days ago.

Israel vigorously kicked up dust to obscure its responsibility for hitting the al-Ahli Baptist hospital in Gaza City last Tuesday, killing many hundreds of Palestinians sheltering in its grounds. Faced with Israel’s relentless campaign of bombing, families had assumed they would be safest close to a Christian institution.

Drawing on previous experience, Israel rightly assumes that by the time the dust settles - and the truth emerges - the world will have moved on. The lie will stand...

Read more: Israel-Palestine war: Israel is caught lying time and again. And yet we never learn

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OUR MAIN DILEMMAS

Source: The Times of Israel
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/our-main-dilemmas/

By Gershon Baskin
Published October 22, 2023

Destruction from Israeli aerial bombardment in Gaza City, October 11, 2023. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)

Here are the main dilemmas we all face – especially the decision makers and the questions that I am asking myself and struggling with:

• How to bring the hostages home – all of them – without surrendering to Hamas?
• How to ensure that Hamas will not be ruling Gaza and continuing to threaten Israel without killing so many more innocent Palestinian civilians and without totally flattening Gaza?
• How to ensure that Gaza will not be led by Hamas and that it will be demilitarized after the war?
• How to bring about a reconstruction of Gaza, demilitarized, unify Gaza with the West Bank and East Jerusalem once again, have deep and need reforms in the Palestinian Authority, including democratic elections for a new leadership?
• How to end the delusion that Israel can rule over another people and their land and have peace?
• How to end the delusion that more than 2 million people can be kept in an open-air prison for 18 years and expect to have quiet?
• How to create a new vision and plan for re-engagement between Israel and Palestine towards a new and genuine peace process leading to the possibility of living in peace?
• How to ensure that our neighbors in Jordan and Egypt will not be overthrown because of the ongoing war in Gaza and the death and destruction of so many civilians?
• How do we enlist the active constructive support of Arab countries, those with peace agreements with Israel and those without peace agreements with Israel, in the post-war period?
• How to accomplish all of the above with a ceasefire and no ground incursion into Gaza?

Read more: Our main dilemmas

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‘RELIGIOUS RECKONING’ IN THE TIME OF GENOCIDE: WHO INVENTED ZIONISM? – ILAN PAPPE

Source: Palestine Chronicle
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/religious-reckoning-in-the-time-of-genocide-who-invented-zionism-ilan-pappe/

By Ilan Pappe
Published October 18, 2023

An old Palestinian woman and a Nakba survivor sitting in front of her humble dwelling in the Shati Refugee Camp in the besieged Gaza Strip. (Photo: Mahmoud Ajjour, The Palestine Chronicle)

As soon as Israel declared war on besieged Gaza on October 7, Western leaders solidified behind their favorite Middle Eastern state. Most enthusiastic support came from Britain.

Though other Western countries showed immediate sympathy and support for Israel, Britain’s support in particular, is worth a pause.

Israel is not simply a British ally. It is also a British creation. In the article below, written only a few days before the start of the war between Israel and Palestinian resistance, historian Ilan Pappe argues that Zionism was actually an outcome of a Christian historical process, as opposed to being a purely European Jewish phenomenon.

The West in general, and Germany in particular, have tried to make amends for centuries of antisemitism as indeed they should. Rather than contemplate the ills of racism that continue to guide Western societies, their penance usually translates to blind support for the state of Israel and its policies.

What the West – and in particular Britain and the USA – abhor is to assume any responsibility for Western Islamophobic historical attitudes that shaped the Zionist project. Nor have the British ruling classes – including parts of Anglo-Jewish aristocracy – recognized the role their imperial and antisemitic worldview played in facilitating and expanding the Zionization of Palestine...

Read more: ‘Religious Reckoning’ in the Time of Genocide: Who Invented Zionism? – ILAN PAPPE