This past weekend, dKos was atwitter with an explosive diary and video posted about the hostilities between Hamas and Israel. A diarist posted a now-deleted diary that purported to have video of an Israeli air strike that hit a Gaza mosque and killed innocent civilians engaged in prayer.
The video was truly haunting--frantic people, screaming in a language that most of us don't understand, desperately trying to find their loved ones, and injured or dead human beings lying amidst rubble. It was enough to make the most hardened advocate for Israel horrified, let alone those who generally take the side of the Palestinians. Innocent people lay bruised and battered, and gave what was supposed to be a first-hand, real time account of the devastation of Israel's campaign against Gaza.
Then the diary vanished, deleted by its author. Conspiracy theories popped up about why it was deleted. The video, as it turns out was a lie. Oh, the people in the video suffered needlessly and were just as innocent a group of victims as initially thought. The only problem is that the video was not of an Israeli air strike. Nor was it a video from Iraq, as suggested in the comments of that diary. It was not even an old video of a past Israeli strike. It was, in fact, what the Israelis euphemistically term a "work accident."
Israel dryly refers to prematurely exploded instrumentalities of her Palestinian neighbors as "work accidents." That is to say, it applies whenever a bomb or missile intended to kill Israelis instead explodes in Palestinian territories prior to launch. That's what the video in question was about.
According to CBS News, in 2005, a "pickup truck carrying masked Islamic militants and homemade rockets blew up at a Hamas rally...killing more than a dozen Palestinians, including children, and wounding dozens more." Predictably, Hamas blamed the Israeli Defense Forces. Israel denied any strike, there was no evidence of a strike, "and the Palestinian Interior Ministry said the blast was set off by the mishandling of explosives."
From CBS News, also came this photograph from the Hamas accident:
Two things to notice about that link--the date in the URL (9/23/2005), and how it compares to a screen grab from the LiveLeak video, as discovered by a Reddit.com user:
Relying on one source alone is a bad idea, so anyone who wishes to follow up further on this can read about the Hamas blast from the BBC and Yediot Ahronot. You may also wish to watch the video in question, though it is graphic as all hell (literally).
Whether the deaths were caused by Israeli bombs or Hamas missiles, there was still a tragic loss of innocent life. Yet in disturbingly familiar fashion, those with either policy differences, extreme animus toward the State of Israel, or something in between leaped on this as evidence of the Evil Zionist Entity's callous disregard for human life.
It was eerily reminiscent of the fabled "Jenin Massacre." Back in 2002, the IDF was engaged in a conflict with Palestinian gunmen on the West Bank. The last vestiges of post-Oslo peace had been destroyed, and forces mostly loyal to then-Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat squared off against the IDF. With alarming success rates, Palestinian suicide bombers had repeatedly infiltrated Israel's security blocks, and blown themselves up in crowded civilian establishments, and Israel in turn launched what they termed "Operation Defensive Shield."
Left-leaning media sources, particularly those in Europe, teemed with stories of a gross Israeli massacre of innocent life. Phil Reeves, a columnist with the largely pro-Palestinian newspaper, The Independent wrote in particularly graphic detail:
A monstrous war crime that Israel has tried to cover up for a fortnight has finally been exposed. Its troops have caused devastation in the centre of the Jenin refugee camp, reached yesterday by The Independent, where thousands of people are still living amid the ruins.
[...]
A quiet. sad-looking young man called Kamal Anis led us across the wasteland, littered now with detritus of what were once households, foam rubber, torn clothes, shoes, tin cans, children's toys. He suddenly stopped. This was a mass grave, he said, pointing.
We stared at a mound of debris. Here, he said, he saw the Israeli soldiers pile 30 bodies beneath a half-wrecked house. When the pile was complete, they bulldozed the building, bringing its ruins down on the corpses. Then they flattened the area with a tank. We could not see the bodies. But we could smell them.
Sounds absolutely horrible. But something didn't seem right. Indeed, soon Western media outlets began to uncover what really happened in Jenin. It turns out that the "massacre" was nothing more than a lie. Even Palestinian fighters said there was no wholesale killing:
As for the infamous Israeli massacre, reporters who visited Jenin trying to document it came up empty-handed. The New York Times did dozens of interviews and found "no solid evidence of large-scale, deliberate killing of civilians." The Washington Post said "no evidence has surfaced to support allegations by Palestinian groups and aid organizations of large-scale massacres or executions by Israeli troops."
"What really happened? The myth of Jenin grows"
The Globe and Mail
Marcus Gee
Saturday, April 27, 2002 - Print Edition, Page A17
JENIN, West Bank - Palestinian Authority allegations that a large-scale massacre of civilians was committed by Israeli troops during their invasion of the refugee camp here appear to be crumbling under the weight of eyewitness accounts from Palestinian fighters who participated in the battle and camp residents who remained in their homes until the final hours of the fighting.
"Claims of massacre go unsupported by Palestinian fighters"
Boston Globe
Charles A. Radin, Globe Staff and Dan Ephron, Globe Correspondent
4/29/2002
Thus, our old friend, Phil Reeves had to eat his own words:
It was clear that the debate over the awful events in Jenin four months ago is still dominated by whether there was a massacre, even though it has long been obvious that one did not occur.
[...]
Palestinian officials must bear much blame for this. Some days after the fighting subsided in Jenin – after claiming the lives of 23 Israeli soldiers and an estimated 52 Palestinian fighters and civilians – I telephoned a very senior Palestinian official to see whether he would now at least privately concede that claims of a massacre were untrue. "No," he replied, "There is no question there was a massacre. It definitely happened." By then, I was sure he was wrong. I suspect he did, too.
[...]
My report that day – written by candle-light in the damaged refugee home in the camp, where we spent the night – was highly personalised. Its intention was to try to convey a sense of what it was like inside the camp from which the outside world had, for days, been barred.
In the preceding days, Israeli army officials and the Palestinians had been talking about three-figure casualties. We – wrongly – said the same.
Reeves deserves credit for owning up to his mistake, but it is one we consistently see repeated by those whose underlying purpose is to communicate that "Israel Sucks," and are disinterested in how factual the basis of their claims are. Blame Israel now, and then sort out the facts is far too often the M.O. Just as we saw with the Jenin "massacre" that never was, we now see it with things like the Gaza video that was all the rage here for a weekend.