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Twilight Zone / Trumpeting for war By Gideon Levy Tags: Israel, Hamas, Gaza  That's how it is here: Opposition to peace is always legitimate and patriotic; opposition to war is always traitorous, anti-Israel and should be hushed while broadcasting his television show "London & Kirschenbaum" this week, Yaron London acknowledged they had run into problems: "We had some trouble as we were preparing this program. We know the broad consensus is in favor of the operation - to strike them hard, but there are also other voices, not only Arab Israelis, but Jews, too. We found a few Jews who believe the operation must be halted, or shouldn't have been launched at all, and that political negotiations should be held. This is not my view. I called for a different line in articles I've written. But their voice needs to be heard, too. Wall-to-wall consensus spells disaster. But they were too frightened. Other voices are being terrorized into silence." Afterward London told his interviewee, Amir Peretz, that he'd planned to bring on residents of the Gaza area who held "the other view," but unfortunately, "terror" had silenced them. Terror or no terror, I know more than a few Jews who hold the "other" view and who would be glad to make their voices heard - for instance, the hundreds who took to the Cinematheque plaza in Tel Aviv on Saturday night to demonstrate against the Israel Defense Forces operation. But the London & Kirschenbaum crew somehow failed to find them - production problems, apparently. At any rate, on the most opinionated program of all, their voice was not heard and "the other view" remained unspoken on television - beaten down, ostracized, forbidden to be heard. Shortly before London delivered his self-justifying sermon, someone who holds the other view, MK Ahmed Tibi, was invited to the "Erev Hadash" ("New Evening") studio. What transpired there is destined to become a cult classic: a horror show of screaming and insults. Veins threatened to burst and throats grew hoarse with strain. Dan Margalit, the show's host: "You're always telling stories ... You don't answer the question." Tibi: "I answer what I want to answer." Margalit: "Tone it down. Speak like a civilized human being." Tibi: "I am a civilized human being." Margalit: "Speak to me with respect, sir." Finally, Margalit was satisfied and instructed his co-host, Ronen Bergman: "Let him speak." Tibi tried then to say that the whole difference between the parties boils down to Hamas' demand that the crossings be opened - and Margalit chuckled loudly. Advertisement Try to recall: When else have you ever heard Margalit, or any other television interviewer, scolding a politician, "You're always telling stories"? Do they speak like that to Benjamin Netanyahu? Ehud Barak? Tzipi Livni? Don't they "tell stories" sometimes? And when have you heard an interviewer speak in such a condescending way - "Speak like a civilized human being"? Nerves are frayed, you understand, and the Arabs (or the heretic Jews) are bothersome. Because that's how it is in Israel. Opposition to peace is always legitimate, patriotic and may be loudly proclaimed; opposition to war is always traitorous, anti-Israel, illegitimate and should be hushed. We can debate the cost of peace forever; we won't say a word about the cost of war. Movement toward peace is heckled, military operations are cheered. At least in the beginning. Criticism of war must wait. It certainly cannot be expressed while the war can still be changed, dissuaded, prevented, stopped, restrained. This is the test of the media's courage and truth, and time after time, war after war, it fails. Only generals and military analysts are invited to the television studios, the same people who sat in the same studios during the last war and the one before it, the same people who led us into the last war and the one before it, because they possess the only wisdom and insight there is. Because that's how it is in Israel: The first days of war, any war, are the darkest. None of this "Quiet, we're shooting." Oh, no. Rather, we get a unified chorus throughout the television studios, eagerly and stridently urging more strikes, more killing, calling on Israel to keep pounding and expanding and obliterating, waxing enthusiastic over every bombardment and gaping in admiration over every shelling, a war that is never enough. Only afterward, when the smoke clears and the battle fog lifts, when the victory turns out to be a defeat and the achievements turn out to be illusory, does the other voice, the voice of wisdom and criticism, arise, and sometimes it, too, becomes the voice of the consensus. Always belatedly, always atrociously late. Quiet, we're shooting? On June 6, 1982, over 25 years ago, when Israel embarked on the first Lebanon War, perhaps Israel's most foolish war, my late friend Amiram Nir published his formative article: "Quiet We're Shooting": "Now there is no opposition, no Likud or Ma'arakh, no religious or secular, rich or poor. Now we are all one people, in uniform. Now we are shooting, so keep quiet." Nir didn't really mean quiet. Israel doesn't want quiet. It wants a loud voice, but only the voice of belligerency, nationalism, violence, propaganda, the prevailing, accepted opinion - and alongside it, there must be quiet. Total quiet. Absolute quiet. On the first day of this war, the television showed horrifying images. Hardly anything was concealed. Split screens showed the terror in Ashkelon on one side and the grief in Gaza on the other. Granted, on the English Al-Jazeera channel, an excellent and balanced station whose Gazan reporter Ayman Mohyeldin deserves a Pulitzer, the horror was more horrifying and the despair less comfortable. But our channels also showed plenty of shattered Palestinian bodies being loaded onto pickup trucks. Worst of all, this did not change anything, did not arouse any protest. This time there was no need to obscure the suffering or blur its scope. We've become so indifferent, Israel's heart has become so hardened, that we can take in such harsh images and remain just as apathetic. Apathy? Well, not entirely. The truth is that, once in a while, the harsh images did provoke a mild worry: What will they do to the "Israeli PR effort"? Maybe they'll hurt us? That's right - just us, once again. How ludicrous it was to hear Channel 10 foreign correspondent Ilan Goren chiding the world media for daring to show these pictures. The media prepared for this war very well. No commission of inquiry, no Winograd or Doner, will be able to argue the media did not prepare for it. For many months, we received scary reports about how Hamas was building power and arming itself. Tunnels, bunkers, long-range missiles, a growing army. No one made a peep, no one was the least bit skeptical. The fact that this is a pathetic organization firing half-empty pipes from a besieged and imprisoned land, facing an army that possesses every weapon in the world, was obscured. Also obscured was the fact that the first significant violation of the cease-fire came from our side: the bombing of a tunnel, on the day the cease-fire was declared. Also obscured was the siege: Two and a half years of journalistic closure, during which we could not enter Gaza, during which not a peep of protest was heard from Israel's journalists, left their mark. The hardships of life in besieged Gaza before this war were not on the Israeli agenda. Some assuaged their not-very-tortured consciences by claiming there was no siege; some said they had it coming, and some wished to see even more starvation and darkness. But the siege was hidden from view. After the preparatory stage came the assessment of the situation: It cannot go on like this, said all the analysts, proclaiming that the answer would have to be military, only military. The frightened people of Sderot became the only victims in the field. Not the Gazan children who don't even have a notebook in which to record their terrifying experiences, not the adults who had no cement to erect tombstones for their dead, not the drivers who fueled their vehicles with used cooking oil, not the doctors who operated without electricity or the families who shivered in the cold in their impoverished homes. They are not the victims of the-situation-that-cannot-continue. And then came the echoing media campaign: Go to war already, hit them hard, a military operation, action, reprisal, deterrence - something. The latest to take this line was the nation's columnist, Nahum Barnea, who got a haircut last week in Sderot and, of course, didn't pass up the opportunity to share the experience with his readers, and immediately afterward ripped into Defense Minister Ehud Barak, the day before he dispatched the planes on their killing missions. "Where is the minister and where is the defense?" screamed his unforgettable headline. But this wasn't the headline of the week in the nation's newspaper. Gleeful after the outbreak of the war, on the day after the Black Shabbat when more than 200 people were killed and 1,000 wounded in Gaza, at least a third of the dead civilians - 70 were traffic cops at their graduation ceremony, young men in desperate search of a livelihood who thought they'd found it in the police and instead found death from the skies - the very next day, in the festive format reserved for fresh wars, the main headline blared in big letters: "Half a Million Israelis Under Fire." Just like that - simply, modestly and with the understatement and professionalism typical of a newspaper that knows what matters to its readers. Anyone who wanted to know what happened in Gaza on that Black Shabbat, and not just in Sderot and Netivot ("Netivot of Death" was the subtle, proportional headline), had to go all the way to page 13 to find out, very briefly, what newspaper readers and television viewers around the world already knew: Something appalling happened in Gaza. When a historian eventually examines the archives, it will all be clear to him: He'll understand that, for Israel, 200, 300 and then 400 Palestinians killed isn't much of a story, that we have a supremely "conscripted" media for whom disturbing images of what our country and our pilots have wrought in Gaza are just a PR problem, that all is permissible for Israel and the Palestinians deserve all they get, and that Israel unanimously cheers for war, any war. That we've become so powerful that we've become brutalized and blinded to the point of total desensitization Bookmark to del.icio.us   Humanitarian initiative There is a way for Israel to prove it is committed to universal moral values. Top Targets An Islamist site is compiling a list of U.K. Jews to target over Gaza op.   1.   thank you 14:57  |  rachel 05/01/09

Read & React Yossi Melman: Excellent intel on Gaza shows Israel learned from Lebanon errors Responses: 9 Barak Ravid: Gaza op has ended Israel's honeymoon with Turkey Responses: 7 At least two Lebanon rockets hit north Israel; IDF responds with shells Responses: 22 Nasrallah: Hezbollah will make Lebanon war look like a walk in the park Responses: 18 Gideon Lichfield: So, why isn't Israel winning the PR war? Responses: 6 More Headlines 14:00 IDF officer killed during battle with Hamas militants in Gaza 13:13 At least two Lebanon rockets hit north Israel; IDF responds with shells 11:10 ANALYSIS / Rocket fire on North is realization of Iranian threat 13:59 4 people wounded when Gaza mortar shell strikes west Negev 10:23 Palestinian shot dead after trying to blow up settlement gas station 13:25 Hamas executes collaborators and restricts Fatah movement 07:29 ANALYSIS / Excellent intel on Gaza shows Israel learned from its errors in Lebanon 07:34 ANALYSIS / Israel's three alternatives for the future of the Gaza war 13:40 Mubarak invites Olmert to Cairo to discuss Gaza truce offer 18:20 Get up to the minute coverage of the warfare in Gaza directly to your email 13:48 Red Cross: Israel breaking law, letting children starve in Gaza 03:17 Iran's Larijani meets Hamas political chief Meshal in Damascus 13:17 IDF sources: Conditions not yet optimal for Gaza exit 06:22 ANALYSIS / Gaza op has put an end to Israel's honeymoon with Turkey 22:58 Rice: Gaza truce needed, but must not allow return to 'status quo ante' 05:00 48-hours after her wedding, IDF officer enters Gaza with her troops 21:27 Obama vows to 'engage immediately' on Mideast once inaugurated 05:51 Lindenstrauss blasts slow handling of evacuated Gaza settlers' plight 06:14 Tel Aviv judge defends right of Arab anti-war protesters 07:21 Israeli tennis star Shahar Peer faces Gaza protest while playing in New Zealand 01:51 German court rules Nazi hit man unfit to stand trial 06:44 El Al asks frequent flyers to donate points to lone soldiers 20:40 In battle for public opinion, IDF Web site puts female face forward Previous Editions Select Day 07 jan 06 jan 05 jan 04 jan 02 jan 01 jan 31 dec 30 dec 29 dec 28 dec 26 dec 25 dec

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