Marty Levine
June 21, 2024
Do we all live in the same world? Or is reality just a matter of perspective and opinion?
If you have followed Change Counts you have read my take on Israel/Palestine. I think it is based on fact, that it is based on reality. I wonder, even despair, about those who disagree with me and do not see the world as I do. Are we really living in the same reality?
One very recent event in the almost 10 months of fighting in Gaza has given me a better sense of the power of the storyteller to shape reality. With that power, how much can we shape reality to fit our desires?
Last week the Israeli military attacked a location in Gaza. That everyone agrees is true. But beyond that, we enter a hall of mirrors.
I was interested in hearing about how the Chicago Jewish United Fund is viewing Israel/Palestine after almost 10 months of war, so I joined a webinar on July 15th that was described as a briefing on the situation. Because I often criticize JUF I thought it would be important for me to hear the situation from their perspective. The presenter was Ofer Bavly, Vice President, JUF and Director General of its Israel Office.
I was surprised when he offered a detailed report on that recent IDF strike in Gaza.
He told his audience how the IDF dropped 8 tons of bombs with great precision on a compound that was the home of Rafa Salamaa, a senior Hamas military leader. Israel had scouted this location for some time because Salamaa was a close friend of Mohammed Deif the mastermind of the October 7 attack on Israel, a major ally of Yahya Sinwar, the current leader of Hamas in Gaza. Because of Deif’s high position in the Hamas hierarchy, he was the actual target of this assault .
Bavly stressed that the site being bombed was a residential compound (invoking for me the hideout where Osama Ben Ladin, the mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing, lived in when the US military found him in Pakistan). We were assured while this Gaza compound was near an area housing displaced Gazans it was not in the middle of refugees. Bavly assured us that the munitions used by Israel were precision weapons and that only Hamas fighters (he called them terrorists) were killed in the attack.
Listening to his words this was a clear example of a nation going to great lengths to meet its moral and legal responsibility to protect noncombatants even as it was going after “high value” targets.
If this is how Israel has been conducting itself over the past 10 months you would have no concern about the brutality of the war and know that accusations of war crimes or genocide are just propaganda coming from Israel haters.
This briefing of his JUF-generated audience mirrored the official statement of Israel’s military leadership
The air force and the southern command attacked, based on accurate intelligence information, in the area where the two top targets of the Hamas terrorist organization and other terrorists were hiding among civilians…The area that was attacked is an open and wooded area, with several buildings and sheds.
This was the same action that was described very differently by sources as pro-Israel as the Wall Street Journal which described the event a bit more severely than did the JUF representative:
The Israeli military dropped eight 2,000-pound bombs during its attack on Al-Mawasi on Saturday, striking civilian areas including a market, a soup kitchen and a water source. These bombs have the power to level entire neighborhoods or strike deeply into concrete bunkers, and humanitarian groups have said that using even one of these 2,000-pound (or smaller) bombs in civilian areas is a war crime. The Israeli military killed 90 people and injured at least 300 others in the attack, according to Palestinian health officials.
The day after the JUF briefing I was reading Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, and found an even more horrific telling of this event by a Gazan refugee who was in what he was told was a safe place.
Ahmed Hijazi, a Palestinian who fled Gaza after his wife gave birth to their firstborn said the attack “was an assassination of more than 100 unarmed Palestinian civilians who took refuge in this area after being forcibly displaced over ten times … an assassination of civilian martyrs, whose daily thoughts were focused on saving water, finding means of daily survival, or seeking shelter from the summer heat under the shade of a tree.”
And Haaretz published two pictures from the bomb site
Two stories about the same event.
One story is told with a strong conviction that the bombs that were dropped were precision devices that were able to be placed with surgical accuracy. The deaths resulted were justified because of the “high value” of their targets. And the additional deaths were of other combatants. There is little sympathy or concern about those who died in this telling. Rather than concern and worry about any harm done to innocent bystanders there is pride. Israel is showing the world its high moral standards even in the face of the mortal threat they face from Hamas.
The other is a story of overwhelming force being used with little concern for who it touches. That tens of thousands of Gazans had been told they must relocate to this supposedly safe place is not part of this story. That hundreds of them had been killed or wounded is not part of this picture. That the weaponry being used, 2,000 lb bombs, was not designed to be used in this way in a densely populated area is omitted.
In choosing to keep these two tellings separate from each other, to allow the horror and brutality of war to be sanitized does ease our consciences. We can avoid facing the very hard question of the value of life. Also writing in Haaretz, columnist Gideon Levy did not shy away when he said recently:
However, above all hangs the question: How many barbaric killings is Israel allowed to commit to eliminate a commander or two, however mortal and wicked they may be. This question is not asked in Israel. If anyone were to dare raise it, he’d get the automatic response, “as many as necessary….
…Is the price that the displaced of Gaza paid on Saturday proper? How many children, medics, women, elderly and simple residents will Israel kill for one Mohammed Deif? How much blood must be spilled for the military and political echelon’s appetite to wave success?
100 dead is certainly permitted. What about 1,000? I assume that most Israelis would nod in agreement. 10,000? 50,000? Just say how many is Israel allowed to kill until it’s considered a crime in its own eyes? Where does the massacre stop? The answer is predetermined: “As many as necessary.” In other words: there’s no limit.
The world we live in is complicated and often difficult to see clearly. But when we sanitize our perspective so that the human consequences are ignored we are not seeing truth we are only sparing ourselves from the pain of its complexity. That was the difficult challenge for me as one who supports a free Palestine. On October 7th, I had to struggle with was that worth 1,200 lives.?Was that worth hundreds of hostages? Was that worth the rape? I could not look away and not struggle with that.
I ask my readers who see the world as Bavly sees it to not look away from Hijazi and face the questions that Gideon Levy posed.
Unless we can see our shared humanity, we are doomed to sit comfortably listening to the tales we tell that make us proud while the world burns around us.
