In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill explains why Hamas is so willing to literally sacrifice Palestinian lives for media coverage:
A 2007 map of the West Bank and Gaza, showing Israeli settlements
Via Wikimedia Commons
It is becoming increasingly clear that Hamas pushes Gaza’s people into harm’s way because it knows their suffering will strike a chord across the West. Because it knows images of their hardship will be shared widely, wept over, and held up as proof of the allegedly uniquely barbarous nature of the Jewish State. Hamas knows there is a hunger among the West’s so-called progressives for evidence of Palestinian pain, and by extension of Israeli evil, and it is more than willing to feed this hunger.
The clashes at the Gaza border, in which more than 60 Palestinians were killed and hundreds injured, cannot be viewed in isolation from Western liberals’ peculiar and disproportionate obsession with Israel. It now seems undeniable that this was no instinctive, grassroots protest, but rather one that was carefully orchestrated by Hamas. As a New York Times reporter described it, after midday prayers clerics and leaders of Hamas ‘urged thousands of worshippers to join the protests’. And Hamas’s urging was littered with false claims. It told people ‘the fence had already been breached’ and Palestinians were ‘flooding into Israel’. This was a lie. A Washington Post reporter details how Hamas’s leaders told people to keep attacking the border fence because ‘Israeli soldiers [are] fleeing their positions’. In truth, as Hamas knew only too well, the IDF was reinforcing its positions.
Israel had made clear, including in an airdrop of leaflets, that anyone who sought to dismantle the fence in Gaza, the de facto border between this part of Palestine and Israel, risked coming to harm. And still Hamas encouraged the protesters to strike at the fence. Still it sought to swell the angry ranks by pleading with people to go from their mosques to the border. Why would it do this? Why would the governing party of a territory knowingly put that territory’s citizens into serious danger?
This is the rub. This is the central question. And the answer is a disturbing one: Hamas does this because it knows it will benefit politically and morally if Palestinians suffer. It knows there is a market for stories of Palestinian pain, and it is happy to flood that market.
Writing in the New York Times last week, Matti Friedman, a former AP desk editor in Jerusalem, touched upon this trade in Palestinian horror. He said that during his years reporting from the Middle East he even developed a certain respect for Hamas’s ‘keen ability to tell a story’. Hamas’s great insight was to recognise that the vast majority of the Western media wanted ‘a simple story about villains and victims’, says Friedman. Most Western reporters and commentators weren’t interested in nuance and certainly not in any reading of events that might seek to understand the Israeli position. No, they wanted stories of ‘dead human beings’, made dead by ‘unwarranted Israeli slaughter’, says Friedman.
