Gazza: How You Tell The Story

 When Amna Nawaz opens every PBS News Hour with a story and the accompanying images of the children killed in the day's Israeli bombing of a Gazza Hospital, how much difference does it make if she adds, after the first few sentences, "Israel says Hamas has established its control center in the tunnels beneath the hospital"?

Amna Nawaz

By the time you get to this Israeli explanation, which is not presented as an established fact but as a lame explanation, you are so stunned by the suffering of the children and their parents, nothing can undo the story of the dead children, not even the story that Hamas may be hiding behind the skirts of women and children.

I've watched PBS News Hour every day since the October 7 attack by Hamas and yesterday, more than a month into the reporting, was the first time I ever saw images of the teenagers who were fleeing Hamas at that concert, who were sprayed with gasoline and set afire so only their crispy critter bodies were visible, barely recognizable, and that was on a cell phone of an Israeli soldier being interviewed about his attempts to go to the concert site to try to rescue civilians under attack. And that interview was deep into the News Hour. By that time, I imagine, many viewers were pretty numb.

Israeli Babies burned by Hamas

And nothing was said about the moral difference, if there is one, between the direct intention to immolate children by the Hamas attackers and the willingness of the Israelis to kill children inadvertently, in an attempt to kill Hamas.

Is there a difference between the man who aims his gun to shoot and kill a child and the man who drops a bomb, knowing he may well kill a child, but who drops it anyway? One intends to kill the child; the other is simply willing to allow it to happen.

Ms. Nawaz did a longish interview with a woman who heads an organization which tracks the deaths of journalists in war zones and she noted the high number of casualties among Palestinian journalists in Gazza and she says we cannot get a clear picture of what is actually happening there, if Israel keeps killing journalists trying to report from Gazza.

At which point, I found myself asking: What on God's green earth are journalists doing there, if not expecting they might be killed? Again, is are the Israelis intentionally killing journalists? This is the tacit implication.

And then there was the bit where a Palestinian journalist, wearing his blue "Press" helmet, tears it off, and also his flak vest, and exclaims: "They care nothing about the martyred children!"

Wait. "Martyred" children? 

How about dead children? 

As soon as he calls them "martyred" you might ask whether or not this is a "journalist,"  a reporter, or a propagandist. 

In fact, to her credit, Ms. Nawaz did ask someone about the claim most Palestinian "journalists" make no pretense of objectivity and have become propagandists.

John Hersey was a journalist when he wrote "Hiroshima" and his report on what happened to the children there never strayed into the "martyred" territory. What he reported, with no adjectives, just simple declarative sentences, was horrifying enough.

The real story, of course, is that total war, which is what Hamas launched and Israel responded to, is by its nature going to kill as many or more innocent civilians as it does soldiers, just as Americans and Brits did at Dresden, Hamburg, Berlin and as Americans did with their fire bombing of Japan even before Hiroshima. In fact, the author of the Japanese bombing, Curtis Lemay, took his show to Vietnam and continued killing women and children from the air in that theater. 

The story which I'd like to see reported is what the Israelis hope to accomplish. We keep hearing interviews with the words, "We have to destroy Hamas," as if you can kill every last Hamas fighter and expect that to destroy Hamas. Can you kill an idea?

Some PBS person did ask some Israeli about that and he replied, "Well, you Americans won your war on terrorism, after 9/11. You killed ISIS and all the leaders of Al Qaeda." But nobody followed up with a question about, "Really? What happened in Iraq and Afghanistan? Did we really win there?"

Read Christopher Hitchens in 2009: he said the combination of a very Right Wing Israeli government which encouraged settlement of disputed land in the West Bank and a Palestinian insurrection which rejects the Palestinian Authority's willingness to accept the existence of Israel, is a potent bomb waiting to explode. 

And that was 2009. 

Can the rise of Bibi Netanyahu and his Right Wing be unrelated to the appeal of Hamas?

I have no way of knowing what the issues are in Gazza and Israel. All I know is that, unlike other foreign imbroglio's, like Bosnia and Kosovo and Ukraine and Afghanistan and, most especially, Vietnam, where I thought by reading and listening and watching the reports coming out of those areas from war correspondents like Kurt Shork and others, I had the sense I was getting a story which might be comprehensible.

Kurt Shork 

With Gazza, I have no such sense. 

It's a hot mess and our best press, PBS News, even though they've sent Nick Shiffrin and Ms. Nawaz over there occasionally, have done nothing to really inform. In some effort to appear objective, they have opened themselves to reasonable suspicion of being biased by the horrible sights of dead Palestinian children.

They do interview people who keep saying things like, "We need a humanitarian pause!" And I keep thinking: What do these people actually know? I know as much as this dumbo.

And it's not like the Palestinians do not have a valid complaint, going right back to 1948. 

But where are the stories about the complexities of that history? 

And where is the penetrating discussion you might have had if Christopher Hitchens were still alive.

It was Hitchens, after all, who observed: Many nations today have had their origins in a crime, or at least in some injustice. The question is how do you proceed now?

PBS has interviewed all the government officials and NGO talking heads, but the real penetrating analysis by people like Hitchens is distinctly absent.  Too many empty suits on The News Hour. What they need is to figure out who are the folks who really might help America understand this conundrum and put them on. 

So far, all they've got is David Brooks and Jonathan Capehart, and to their great credit, they at least do not try to say more than they know.