From the Irish Times, A Lot of Irish Bull

One more anti-Israel article has just appeared in The Irish Times – the paper has published a long series of them — offering a lot of Irish bull and also the other kind. More about the article can be found here: “Palestinian Terrorism and Holocaust Denialism Given Free Pass in Confused Op-Ed,” by Rachel O’Donoghue, Honest Reporting, May 22, 2023:

Muddled, melodramatic and mistaken are some of the words that could be used to describe the latest anti-Israel opinion piece published by the Irish Times this week.

The article, jointly bylined by Palestinian human rights lawyer and activist Zaha Hassan and Daniel Levy, the president of the US/Middle East Project and former Israeli negotiator under Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin, is ostensibly about how Ireland can help Palestinians (and Israelis) by becoming a “more robust voice in Europe and beyond.”

However, far from setting out this bold vision of a new Irish-Israeli-Palestinian peace partnership, the op-ed instead reads like nothing more than an unfair diatribe against the Jewish state.

The problems start in the first paragraph:

Gaza is again, perhaps fleetingly, in the headlines. An Israeli assassination strike, inevitably inflicting civilian casualties, led to rockets being launched towards Israel and waves of Israeli bombings. Palestinians in Gaza have been under an Israeli land and sea blockade for 16 years. A very simple fact about Gaza that is rarely mentioned is that it is overwhelmingly a community of refugees; 70 percent of its population live in refugee camps. Many were expelled from areas in today’s Israel just on the other side of the electrified, highly surveilled and fiercely guarded prison-like fence surrounding the enclave.

First, there is the obvious issue of confusing the timeline of the latest Israel-Islamic Jihad conflagration — specifically, Hassan and Levy’s assertion that Israel’s “assassination strike” to take out senior figures in the Gaza-based terror group started the conflict. The truth is that Islamic Jihad fired the opening salvo with a volley of 100 rockets into Israel following the death of one of its commanders as the result of a hunger strike in prison.

It was on May 2 that the recent conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) began. On that day, after the announcement of the death of Khader Adnan, a hunger-striker and PIJ commander, the PIJ launched 104 rockets from Gaza into Israel. The Israelis prepared their response during the next week, and on May 9 began Operation Shield and Arrow with a spectacular attack that took out three senior commanders of the PIJ in Gaza. During the five days of fighting, Israel managed to hit 422 targets, including weapons warehouses, weapons production facilities, command-and-control centers, tunnels, and much else besides. The PIJ hurled more than 1,400 rockets at Israel, but most were intercepted, some fell short in Gaza itself. (killing one adult and three children), and of those that did land in Israel, a handful damaged or destroyed a few houses, but not a single military target was hit. PIJ rockets killed exactly one Israeli and one Palestinian working in Israel. The Irish Times story ignores the PIJ’s volley of rockets on May 2 that began the conflict, and starts, misleadingly, with the May 9 response by Israel to that volley.

The article also does not provide enough information when it states that 70% of the people in Gaza still live in camps. There are two reasons for that. First, there is the colossal corruption at the top of Hamas, where just two of its leaders, Khaled Meshaal and Moussa abu Marzouk, have skimmed from donors’ aid $2.5 billion apiece, and lesser leaders have been allowed to help themselves to a few million. Second, Hamas chose to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a vast network of tunnels under Gaza — now destroyed — as well as on weapons. There was little left over to spend on housing for the ordinary people of the Strip. And that is why so many of them remain in camps.

Second, aside from failing to mention that Egypt also maintains a blockade on Gaza for security purposes, the colorful description of the coastal enclave as being surrounded by an “electrified, highly surveilled and fiercely guarded prison-like fence” is plainly false.

Rather, the barrier that runs the length of the border merely has electronic sensors designed to detect tunnels being dug underneath — not to electrocute every person who unwittingly touches it.

The Irish Times article claims that there is an electrified “prison-like fence” that surrounds Gaza, that would, impliedly, cause great physical harm to any Gazan trying to cross into Israel. But there is no such electrified fence. There are instead electronic sensors – a very different thing – that have been put in place to detect terror tunnels being dug from Gaza into Israel.

The piece goes on to state that approximately 750,000 Palestinians were “expelled” when the state of Israel was formed, while conveniently forgetting the fact that many Palestinian refugees were created when the nascent Jewish state was invaded by Arab armies sworn to destroy it.

Arabs in Mandatory Palestine – they didn’t become “Palestinians” until the late 1960s – were not “expelled” during the 1948 war. Beginning late in 1947, just after the Arab states rejected the UN’s Partition Resolution, the Arabs began leaving the area, having been warned by Arab broadcasts that a military conflict was in the offing. It was the Arabs outside Mandatory Palestine who urged the Arabs of Palestine to leave, to get out of way of the invading Arab armies; they were assured that they would soon be able to return to their homes once the Jews were defeated. Some Israeli officials, such as the mayor of Haifa, urged the Arabs to stay. So did the Israeli labor union, Histadrut, to no avail. The Irish article also gets its numbers wrong. It claims that “750,000 Arabs” were “expelled.” But a 1949 Government of Israel census counted 160,000 Arabs living in the country after the war. In 1947, a total of 809,100 Arabs lived in the same area. This means that at most, 650,000 Palestinian Arabs could have become refugees – 100,000 less than the figure given in the Irish Times article.

However, the most appalling part of the entire article is the several references to the Holocaust and using the unique horror that was the systematic murder of six million Jews by the Nazis to frame the Nakba:

At the same time Palestinian acknowledgment of the enormity and tragedy of the Holocaust cannot negate the Palestinian experience of the Nakba, absolve those who perpetrated it, or ignore the price still being paid by Palestinians.”

Yet, there has been little in the way of Palestinian “acknowledgment” of the Holocaust, and, in fact, the opposite is true: Gaza’s rulers Hamas have repeatedly denied the scope of the Holocaust, while just last week, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas compared Israel to Nazis after previously insisting that Israel was responsible for “50 Holocausts.”

What Palestinian “acknowledgement of the enormity and tragedy of the Holocaust” do the writers of this appalling article have in mind? There has been no such acknowledgement. Instead, there has been both outright Holocaust denial, by Hamas, as well as its variant, Holocaust minimization, by the P.A. Hamas has since 2000 denied the very existence of the Holocaust, posting the following on its official website, in response:

Following the special international conference in Stockholm concerning the alleged Jewish Holocaust during World War II, a senior leading member of The Islamic Resistance Movement — Hamas–states the following:

This conference bears a clear Zionist goal, aimed at forging history by hiding the truth about the so-called Holocaust, which is an alleged and invented story with no basis. . . . The invention of these grand illusions of an alleged crime that never occurred, ignoring the millions of dead European victims of Nazism during the war, clearly reveals the racist Zionist face, which believes in the superiority of the Jewish race over the rest of the nations.

Not only does this attempt to focus on an alleged story ignore the suffering of our people and disregard the massacres committed by the Zionists against them, such as Dir Yasin, Kafr Qasem, Tanturah, Jerusalem, Hebron and Sabra and Shatila–not to mention the massacres committed by the enemy against the people of our nation, such as in Bahr al-Baqr and Qana, the killing of thousands of Egyptian captives, and so on–but the story itself has no proof. . . . The Zionist entity is using psychological and ideological terrorism through the Stockholm conference and the alleged Nazi Holocaust. . . .

We call the free scholars of the world and its vital forces to expose the crimes of global Zionism against our people, our nation, and against all human civilization, and to refute them and not to fear the hostility of the Jews and their ideological terrorism or their influence through which they shut mouths and prevent objective, unbiased scholars from revealing the Zionist claims as lies. By these methods, the Jews in the world flout scientific methods of research whenever that research contradicts their racist interests.

That’s Hamas, completely denying that there ever was a Holocaust. Mahmoud Abbas and the P.A. are not quite so dismissive; they admit there might have been deaths of “a few hundred thousand” Jews, but even those deaths they attribute mostly to typhus and other diseases rather than to deliberate murder. Later today we’ll take a look at how Mahmoud Abbas, the “moderate” Abbas, has chosen to deal with the Holocaust.