I love it when a news site makes their headline ten words longer than it needs to be, just to shoehorn in some way to frame the story in a politically agreeable way. Take this headline from the front page of the Guardian’s website:
Israel ‘will do whatever it takes to avoid 7 October-style attack’ as it launches Lebanon ground raids
Sunday September 30th
The Israeli leaders are stating their intention of invading Lebanon with sweeping war aims. But we are supposed to go along with the fiction that it’s just ‘ground raids,’ like it would be totally irresponsible to say any more than that for now. That armoured brigade and airborne division massing on the border might turn around and go home any minute now.
To really plumb the depths of that headline, imagine if the Guardian had framed the October 7th 2023 attacks as
Gaza ‘will do whatever it takes to avoid Cast Lead-style attack‘ as it launches Israel ground raids
Israel must be portrayed as the victim. That’s why even in a headline, which is supposed to be brief and to the point, the purely hypothetical attack is mentioned before the actual real attack.
So moving on two days and reading the headlines from October 2nd 2024, we can easily imagine western politicians and journalists sighing with relief and leaning back in their chairs.
US THREATENS ‘SEVERE’ RESPONSE AS IRAN ATTACKS ISRAEL
Daily Express, front page, 2 October 2024
We are back on safe territory. The Iranian government is doing a mostly symbolic and nearly ineffectual thing that it did before a few months ago. Now Israel can once again be portrayed as the victim without any need for suspicious convoluted headlines.
But what is ‘severe’ in this context? What could be more severe than what the US has been helping the Israeli state to do for the last year? 40,000 dead, at least. Millions forcibly displaced and the ‘safe zones’ bombed. Millions starved. Journalists and doctors and aid workers killed in their hundreds. Ambulances bombed and shelled. Every hospital and university in the Gaza strip, destroyed. Tens of thousands imprisoned without trial, many beaten, tortured and sexually assaulted. And this hellfire has been raging for a year now with no end in sight.
IRAN MISSILE ATTACK ON ISRAEL SPARKS FEARS OF NEW WAR
Independent (UK), front page, 2 October 2024
‘Fears of new war’ are prominent in my mind too right now. But you know, the pager attacks, the assassination of Nasrallah, the bombing and the invasion were the main cues there, just for me personally. Didn’t Israel bomb Yemen just the other day? How many people did they kill – was it more or less than the one poor soul who was killed by the Iranian missiles?
ISRAEL VOWS TO RETALIATE AFTER IRAN LAUNCHES MISSILE ATTACK
The Guardian, front page, 2 October 2024
It’s jarring to see these papers rewriting history in front of our eyes. Maybe they want Wikipedia in ten years time to say that Iran started the war by launching that missile attack.
Even after the slaughter in Gaza and onslaught on the West Bank over the last year, it is still somehow possible for me to be surprised and horrified at the actions of the Israeli government. After all it has done and is still doing in Gaza and the West Bank, the Israeli state is taking the show on the road. They want an all-out regional war. Until the pager attacks, I didn’t see it. Now I see it more clearly every day. They are hell-bent on raising the stakes.
Maybe they want to grab whatever land they can and kill whoever they want to kill while the going is good. Maybe they want to drag the US in even more than they already are. I don’t know. Usually I can assess the motivations behind why states do what they do. But this is just wild. The stated war aim (ending all capacity for Hezbollah to launch rockets into northern Israel) is not achievable. But it is a blank cheque for the IDF to go in and cause as much havoc as Netanyahu wants, for as long as Netanyahu wants.
By the way, I’m not going to take up 100 of these 1000 words issuing the mandatory disclaimers. You can assume I don’t support the state which killed Jina Amini and which executed hundreds for protesting her death. Let’s move on, without wasting any more of your time and mine, and look at another headline.
US would not support Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear sites, says Biden
https://www.theguardian.com/europe, headline, 02 Oct 2024, 22:55
Well, that’s a relief. Because Iran doesn’t even have nuclear weapons. You know which country does? Israel. 88 of them. Even in the headlines about who they are not bombing yet, the unspoken assumption is that the country without nukes represents a greater nuclear threat than the one with them.
Evacuation
In these headlines there is not a hint of the horror of the war that is now starting in Lebanon, not a suggestion of the responsibility of the Israeli government. We hear of Israel evacuating villages. Phrases like ‘evacuation orders’ and ‘evacuation notices’ make it all seem formal and inevitable, as if they are helping people escape from a chemical spill or a flood. Telling people that if they don’t abandon their homes you will probably kill them is not an ‘evacuation.’ What these journalists are doing is like giving credit to a hurricane for the efforts of disaster relief workers.
Rockets
Ten times per article we are told that 60,000 civilians had to flee from northern Israel due to Hezbollah rockets. We are not told that 100,000 Lebanese civilians had to evacuate from southern Lebanon due to Israeli bombardment. That was, as of last month. Now there are one million displaced. It is presented to the world as an urgent question – what should be done about Hezbollah rockets (not Israeli bombs)? How are those Israeli civilians (not those Lebanese civilians) going to return home?
And of course, Israel could have stopped waging a one-sided war on civilians in Gaza, and thereby stopped the Hezbollah rockets, any day out of the last 360+. That offer has been on the table the whole time.
Proxies
These articles go out of their way to remind us that Iran-backed Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, is an Iran-controlled Iranian proxy in the region. They would do better to manage expectations about the coming war. Hezbollah is indeed backed by Iran, but it is also a massive political and military force with a lot of popular support in Lebanon. It’s difficult to see Israel winning. But just as the invasion is a ‘ground raid,’ Hezbollah is spoken of as if it’s just some guerrilla camp or terror network.
The right to defend itself
All my life we’ve been hearing that Israel has a right to defend itself, or even ‘herself.’ This was an infuriating and stupid line even before 2023, when somehow the balance of fatalities in the Israel-Palestine ‘conflict’ was always at least 10:1; when any visitor to the West Bank could see that an apartheid system is in force there; when, every four or five years, the IDF would ‘mow the lawn’ by killing a few thousand Gazans.
But the last year has been a horrible revelation. Somehow, things have gotten so much worse. And now Netanyahu wants to bring all this to Lebanon.
And Keir Starmer and Kemala Harris are standing up in front of the world and saying with straight faces that Israel has a right to defend itself. They’re still saying it, like nothing has happened, like that phrase has any meaning at all in this context.
Sometimes I wonder what atrocity Israel has to commit before the Americans feel obliged to stop giving them bombs. What would it take? But at moments like these I only wonder, what would it take before people like Starmer and Harris retire that self-defence line and think of some new hypocritical and stupid formula.
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