“Gaza Is the Horror That Can’t Be Denied. But Israelis Will Try,“ writes Dahlia Scheindlin in a long piece in Haaretz, about the war that’s been going on in Gaza for over a year. Her point is pretty straightforward: Israelis always deny the atrocities they commit, no matter how strong the evidence — and they have been doing so from 1948 until today.

To prove her point, Scheindlin provides a series of cases from the last 76 years in which, she claims, both the State of Israel and Israelis were guilty of horrible crimes, but they refused to acknowledge their guilt, denied the obvious facts, and proclaimed their innocence.

But Scheindlin’s examples can be dismantled and falsified. Indeed, her hit piece against Israel serves as an excellent example of the propaganda war that’s been waged against Israel for decades. The goal of this war is to slander Israel and blame the Jewish State for the most terrible crimes — regardless of the facts.

Genocide and War Crimes in Gaza

Scheindlin starts with the worst accusation of all: genocide, and how both Palestinians and Israelis respond to this accusation:

And nothing inflames the debate more than the word “genocide.”

For Palestinians, genocide is a descriptive fact – anything else is a lie. For international courts, it is a legal convention, the International Court of Justice is deliberating South Africa’s charges, according to a high bar of evidence… For many Israelis, the word is an antisemitic plot and a lie.

Israel’s government already flatly denies lesser charges – war crimes, ethnic cleansing, a second Nakba…

In other words: for the Palestinians, genocide is being waged against them; for Israelis, the accusation is baseless; and the independent body of jurists — the International Court of Justice (ICJ — will decide who’s right. And in any case, even if there is no genocide, it’s clear that Israel is guilty of war crimes, which it also denies.

But the rejection of the claim that Israel commit systematic war crimes is not unique to Israel. In fact, it is consensus amongst non-Israeli military experts — high officers and scholars of war and military affairs from democratic countries who examined, studied and expressed their professional conclusion about Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.

And the experts’ conclusion is that Israel does not engage in deliberate and unnecessary killing of civilians, and that it abides by the laws of war.

Among these experts are John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, who said:

Israel has followed the laws of war, legal obligations, best practices in civilian harm mitigation and still found a way to reduce civilian casualties to historically low levels.

Sir John McColl, former Deputy Commander of NATO Forces: “I know Israel’s doing all it can to save civilians.”

Andrew Fox, lecturer at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst: “…all the actions they have taken since [Oct 7], are justified both morally and from a national security perspective.”

Geoffrey Corn, Chair of Military Law at Texas Tech Univ. & Lt Col US Army, and Lt. General George Smith: “Israel consistently implements its legal obligation to avoid, whenever feasibly, [civilian deaths].”

Colonel Richard Kemp, former Commander of the British troops in Afghanistan: “No army takes more precaution than the Israel Defense Forces in order to prevent civil casualties.”

Vincenzo Camporini, former head of the Italian armed forces, together with a group of retired generals from UK & US militaries: “[The] IDF has developed and implemented innovative procedures to mitigate the risk to civilians arising from attacks on valid military objectives.”

Others who support this view include Gen. Mark Milley, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. David Petraeus, former commander of the American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And a group of 7 US high ranking officers concluded in a special report that: Israel’s “[in] overall compliance with the Laws of Armed Conflict.”

There is no parallel group of that level who accuses Israel of violating the laws of war, or in deliberate unnecessary mass murder of civilian population. This is not “Israeli denialism.” Rather, it is the consensus amongst the relevant professionals.

“The Nakba” — 1948

Then Scheindlin turns to Israel’s great “original sin”: the flight of hundreds of thousands of Arabs from what became Israel, during the 1948 War of Independence. Here too, Israel denied its guilt and concealed the truth:

Israel’s leadership classified the archives related to the Nakba during the War of Independence, while David Ben-Gurion painstakingly cultivated the idea that most Palestinians left at their leaders’ instruction… Archives were declassified, scholars pieced together terrible truths, and Israel reclassified the material.

What “terrible truths” were revealed with the declassification of the archives?

The historian Professor Benny Morris, the prominent researcher of those archives in the early 1980s, concluded his book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem with these words:

The Palestinian refugee problem was born of war, not by design, Jewish or Arab. It was largely a by-product of Arab and Jewish fears and of the protracted, bitter fighting that characterized the first Arab-Israeli war; in smaller part, it was the deliberate creation of Jewish and Arab military commanders and politicians (p. 286).

About 20 years later, more archival materials were declassified, and they brought Morris to somewhat revise his findings:

Birth Revisited describes many more atrocities and expulsions than were recorded in the original version of the book. But, at the same time, a far greater proportion of the 700,000 Arab refugees were ordered or advised by their fellow Arabs to abandon their homes than I had previously registered. It is clear from the new documentation that the Palestinian leadership in principle opposed the Arab flight from December 1947 to April 1948, while at the same time encouraging or ordering a great many villages to send away their women, children and old folk, to be out of harm’s way. Whole villages, especially in the Jewish- dominated coastal plain, were also ordered to evacuate.

In other words: the declassification of the archives revealed a reality of harsh war, and not unprecedented atrocities committed by Israel. In addition, even if most Arabs didn’t leave at the behest of their leaders, it was definitely true for many of them. This idea is not an invention of David Ben-Gurion, but a simple historical fact, which Dahlia Scheindlin happens to dislike.

The Tantura “Massacre” Affair

Scheindlin also mentions the story of the massacre that he IDF allegedly committed in the Arab village Tantura in 1948, according to the MA dissertation by Teddy Katz from 1998, which sparked an uproar:

Fellow academics unleashed smear campaigns and interviewees retracted their testimonies to Teddy Katz, whose master’s thesis chronicled a massacre by Israeli forces at Tantura in 1948 (that story is captured in an astonishing, eponymous film).

How many lies can be put in one sentence? First, there was no “smear campaign” by “fellow academics.” There were veteran, reputable historians who published their findings that there is no evidence of a massacre in Tantura, and that Teddy Katz’s thesis does not meet minimal academic standards.

Second of all, Katz’s interviewees did not “retract their testimonies.” They sued him, claiming that he distorted their testimonies unrecognizably, in order to support his pre-determined conclusion. And indeed, the trial revealed significant gaps between the recorded testimonies and how they have been quoted in the thesis, as well as other distortions and lies.

The Al-Dura Affair

Dahlia Scheindlin’s piece reaches the beginning of the first Intifada:

In recent years, denial efforts often focus on individual cases, picking apart tiny details to prove Israel’s innocence… Examples of these micro-denials include a cottage industry that emerged over years to prove that 12-year-old Mohammed al-Dura was not killed by Israeli fire in 2000, during the second intifada

The phrase “cottage industry” refers to “a business or manufacturing activity carried on in a person’s home.” That is, Scheindlin insinuates that the claims that Israel didn’t kill Mohammed al-Dura are based on some conspiracy theorists who investigated the case privately.

This claim has no basis. An Israeli investigative commission determined that the case of al-Durrah’s death was unclear, and that at the end of the infamous video supposedly showing his demise, the boy is seen alive. Moreover, the barrage of bullets that struck the boy could not have been fired from an IDF position, according to an Israeli police forensic expert, who took part in investigating the case. Dr. Yehuda David, who claimed to have already treated bullet scars on al-Durrah in 1994, was acquitted in a libel suit filed against him in French court.

But even if Sheindlin claims that all the above investigations and conclusions are Israeli propaganda, two main points stand:

1. The video clip showing al-Durrah’s death contains zero evidence that the IDF killed the boy.
2. Even if we accept the unproven allegation that al-Durrah died by IDF fire, he was not intentionally murdered, but rather caught in the crossfire between Israelis and armed Palestinians.

Which raises the question: why is Mohammed al-Dura’s death discussed 24 years after the event? The reason? It serves as a major propaganda tool to incite terrorism and murder against Jews and Israelis. That’s why it became a symbol.

Scheindlin is blind to the fact that in her efforts to malign Israel she only exposes the nature of anti-Israeli propaganda.

The Explosion at Al-Ahli Hospital

Scheindlin uses another case of the Palestinian propaganda, which in contrast to the al-Dura case, failed to become a major source for anti-Israeli propaganda:

If a terrible incident is wrongly attributed to Israel – such as the explosions at the Al-Ahli hospital early in the war, most likely by misfired munitions from Palestinian militias – this is leveraged as proof that Israel is innocent in all other cases.

Reminder: In the hour following the explosion at the Al-Ahli Hospital on October 17 2023, Hamas authorities claimed that Israel bombed the hospital and the people in it. The Palestinian Ministry of Health announced that 500 people were killed by the blast. Many major international media outlets accepted the Palestinian version as is, and delivered it to the world.

Only in the hours and days afterwards did evidence accumulate proving that it was a fabrication.

Media outlets and intelligence agencies around the world reached the conclusion: a failed Palestinian rocket hit the hospital’s parking lot, and the number of dead was lower by orders of magnitude than the initial claim.

Scheindlin doesn’t provide an example for someone who claims the Al-Ahli case proves that “Israel is innocent in all other cases.” But the case does showcase the motivation of the industry of lies to defame Israel at every opportunity, as well as the willingness of the international media to embrace every anti-Israeli lie, as long as that lie is not clearly exposed.

Northern Gaza

Finally, Scheindlin moves to discuss the IDF’s activity in the Northern Gaza Strip in recent weeks:

Israel is still starving, bombing and expelling the population of northern Gaza. Many suspect it is implementing the “General’s Plan,” which seeks to empty northern Gaza of Palestinians…

She also describes the proceedings in Israeli court regarding the paucity of humanitarian supplies entering northern Gaza. She writes about the call of Israeli settler leaders and coalition members to establish settlements there. The conclusion is clear: Israel is slaughtering, starving, and expelling hundreds of thousands of civilians in order to build settlements in their stead.

Meanwhile, this is the version of the IDF regarding the operation in Northern Gaza Strip (as far as Scheindlin is concerned, this is merely typical Israeli “denialism”):

The Israel Defense Forces said Sunday that troops had encircled Jabaliya amid a new ground operation targeting efforts by Hamas to reestablish itself in northern Gaza. […]

Amid the expanded operation, the IDF announced on Sunday that it was preparing to evacuate civilians from the entire north of Gaza and would increase the size of the Israeli-designated humanitarian zone in the southern Strip.

The zone, where the vast majority of the Gazan population currently reside, is where most humanitarian aid is being delivered. There are also field hospitals there.

The military also said it was opening up two evacuation routes for Palestinians — along the Salah a-Din road and the coastal road.

The evacuation order’s purpose, according to the IDF, is to minimize the damage to the Palestinian population, while fighting Hamas and preventing the terror organization from tightening its hold in the region.

Which version should we believe — the IDF’s or Dahlia Scheindlin’s?

Well, it’s easy to believe Sceindlin if we ignore the military reality on the ground and Hamas’ modus operandi. And Hamas’ reality on the ground, as explained by a recent document by the Washington Institute, is that Hamas is maintaining “shadow governance” wherever the IDF hasn’t cleared completely of the terror organization’s presence:

Hamas has employed various methods to demonstrate a presence on the ground, provide essential emergency services to the people, and—most important—prevent any other potential players from stepping into its shoes.

These methods include, among others, taking over the humanitarian aid and its distribution to the population; establishment of terror command centers and ammo depots well inside the civilian population; and violently preventing civilians from leaving to the humanitarian zones, including by shooting those who dare evacuate.

These are the conditions that Hamas created, which require evacuating the civilians, in order to fulfill the two goals: to end Hamas’ rule in Gaza, and to minimize civilian casualties.

Regarding the expansion of humanitarian zones, Scheindlin writes:

The IDF says it has expanded the humanitarian zones for Gazans, but Tania Hary, executive director of Gisha, an Israeli NGO working on human rights in Gaza and the lead petitioner, rejects that term: “There is nothing actually humanitarian about the humanitarian zone … there’s not enough aid or shelter for people there, and airstrikes still take place in the zone

And again, it’s very easy to portray Israel as a monster, as long as we ignore Hamas’ existence and the ways it chooses to operate throughout Gaza, even a year after it chose to start a war. And so Scheindlin hides from her readers the systematic theft of humanitarian supplies by Hamas; Hamas officials who hide in the humanitarian zones; the firing of rockets from those zones; and the use of humanitarian zones to establish command centers, weapon workshops, ammunition storages, and bases to launch attacks against Israeli forces.

Conclusion

It’s very easy to incriminate the Jewish State and portray her in a monstrous light, when you believe any lie that her enemies tell about her, and dismiss any evidence that exonerates Israel as worthless “denialism.” That how Dahlia Scheindlin dismisses the professional assessments of military experts regarding Israel’s conduct of war; what historians say about the 1948 war; the real meaning of the al-Dura and Al-Ahli hospital affairs; and what’s going on in the Northern Gaza Strip and the humanitarian zones.

Dahlia Scheindlin wanted to write an indictment against the Israelis’ propensity to reject and deny their crimes. But ironically, the manifest that she wrote is a good example of the way Israel’s haters would blame the Jewish State for anything, disregarding inconvenient facts.

Shlomi Ben Meir is a contributor to CAMERA, where a version of this article first appeared. 

The post The Disgusting Lies of Haaretz first appeared on Algemeiner.com.