Political Cynic dissects the Political Propaganda.

Note: There is almost something Biblical about Hamas playing the role of David, and Israel playing the role of a sleeping Goliath in the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel. Or have I broken the rules of Western Decorum?

Headline: Israel at war: an explosive moment in the Middle East

Sub-headline: After the week’s horrors, friends of the country should help it by urging restraint.

https://www.ft.com/content/22c402fc-4c79-4b5f-8002-d46605bc4f0f

Like that other 19th Century Journalistic antique The Economist, The Financial Times, are not the last gasp of The British Empire, but are its Twin Ghosts. The first two paragraphs of this Editorial Boards Opinion:

Only in the days that followed was the true horror of last Saturday’s attack by Hamas on Israel laid bare. Women, children and elderly among the dead; 260 music festival-goers slaughtered; an 85-year-old woman among more than 100 Israelis hauled off to the cellars of Gaza. The death toll of at least 1,200 was the largest number of Jews killed in a single day since the Holocaust. The assault has been compared, in its human cost and trauma to Israel’s national psyche, to “a 9/11 and a Pearl Harbor wrapped into one”. The repercussions, after Israel on Friday gave 1.1mn Palestinians 24 hours to leave northern Gaza ahead of an expected invasion of the Hamas-ruled strip, threaten to be devastating. This is spiralling into a war whose like the Middle East has not seen for decades.

The state of Israel has the right to defend itself against a murderous assault, free its hostages and restore its people’s faith in their security. The impulse to crush Hamas and extract a price for Israelis’ suffering is powerful and comprehensible. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has nurtured an image as the guarantor of his nation’s safety, is under pressure to respond with maximum force.

…

Note: If all else fails in journalism, Political Melodrama will not just suffice, but is demanded! I’ve put in bold font a selection of this journalistic hyperbole. I could only stomach the first paragraph.

Note: Paragraph 3

Yet ordering half of Gaza’s population from their homes smacks of the forced displacement Palestinians have suffered since 1948. A siege denying water, food and power to the impoverished territory — followed by a ground offensive — looks like collective punishment of civilians, who mostly have little love for Hamas, for the crimes of an extremist group. At least 1,800 Palestinians have already died in Israel’s bombardment. That Hamas trampled on the rules of war with its barbarities would not make it right for Israel to do so.

Note: The above rhetoric softens a bit and adopts a moralizing tone. should The Reader be surprised?

Let me make more selective quotations:

Note: a bit of wisdom ?

Yet among the greatest help friends of Israel can give is to warn of the perils, for itself and for the wider Middle East, of a response that causes mass civilian casualties among Palestinians.

Note: The hyperbolic self-congratulation of Anthony Blinken via the declaration of ‘We democracies’.

As Antony Blinken, US secretary of state, declared in Tel Aviv: “We democracies distinguish ourselves from terrorists by striving for a different standard, even when it’s difficult.”

Note: This reads like deliberate political naivete!

Even as it fights to root out Hamas, Israel should do all it can to follow the principles of post-second world war humanitarian law: to distinguish between combatants and civilians, minimise harm to populations, and take only militarily necessary actions. In Gaza, whose 2.3mn people, nearly half of them children, have little means of escape, that will be exceptionally hard.

Note: more key sentences:

Appearing to do otherwise would jeopardise international support and sympathy for Israel and may fuel a catastrophic regional conflict.

…

Western capitals should maximise diplomatic efforts, with regional neighbours, to secure Israeli hostages’ release and ensure de-escalation. They must strive, too, to establish humanitarian corridors out of Gaza.

Note: The pressing question of the above quotation is where might those Palestinians go?

…

Israel deserves the world’s sympathy.

Note: The Intractable Problem, equal to Melodrama

In a land of two peoples locked in enduring conflict, ending the cycle of violence requires finding a viable way for Israelis and Palestinians to live side by side, in dignity.

Note: Final comments

Not one mention of what the Palestinians have endured since 1948? Or that Israel is the beneficiaries of The Belfour Declaration and Sykes-Picot, in sum European Colonialism. The Financial Times is sometimes proficient at writing History Made To Measure, yet here there are gaping holes, in its, for want of a better descriptor, arguments about Zionism’s prima facie virtues.

Political Cynic