About The Day That Changed The World
Backstory on an exhausting project, on the Gaza War and how we talk about it, and a problem with the "news".
In this Real Story Weekend Special I’ll be dealing with some good news and some bad news and some inside stories on the far side of the paywall. I’m also contemplating some changes around The Real Story, which I’ll get into down there. But up top today, to close out a working shift that seemed to go on forever, and to get straight to a story I’ll probably be covering for God knows how long yet. . .
Four Months In. Nothing Is The Same. Nothing Has Changed.
Yes, that’s a contradiction. I’m deliberately poking around with contradictions here. I’ve been on this story almost fulltime since October 7 and I’m sad and I’m weary, and I have no right to complain yet here I am, complaining, and I’m not really complaining.
In the National Post, to coincide with the Gaza War’s four-month mark, I had the whole front page and two full inside pages, much of which is derived from my time in Israel among the wounded and the heartbroken and the shellshocked.
Also this week, a column about the unbearable agony endured by the Palestinians in Gaza, how to come to terms with it, why we all need to make it a priority of our attention, and why we haven’t been able to. A contradiction for you, right there in the headline: The Palestinians' western 'friends' are the Palestinians' worst enemies.
In this newsletter I was going to get into the directly-related hounding, public humiliation and defenestration of the unforgivably Jewish Silena Robinson, Advanced Education Minister in British Columbia. In firing Robinson, Premier David Eby capitulated to some of the most horrible people you’ll meet in a day’s walk, among them the Canadian affiliates of a Palestinian terror group I’ve been watching closely, and I mean very closely, a terrorist-listed group that has noticed the disgrace in British Columbia and commented approvingly.
I will be getting into the Robinson story with a good bit of disturbing and unreported news in a coming newsletter, but this edition of the Real Story had already turned into something like a magazine before that information came to my attention. For now, I’ll say this much:
What these gargoyles were allowed to get away with is a milestone. It’s an instructive and alarming lesson in just how far the cultural rot has spread in Canada, and I’m not especially pleased with the way my colleagues in the news media have handled the Robinson story, I regret to say.
Down below the paywall I’ll have some inside baseball about the centrepiece I wrote for the National Post, what I couldn’t get into it, what went weird with it and so on. In the main, I’m very proud of it and proud of the National Post for assigning me to it and letting me have at a big story in a very big way. It’s something that doesn’t happen often in the dailies these days.
But first I want to deal with what I was getting at separately in this week’s column in the Post and the Ottawa Citizen. It goes directly to what U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinkin, Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet and the Israel Defence Forces understand to be the most pressing and complex immediate challenge the Gaza War presents to the whole world.
It’s about how to prevent Gaza from becoming a necropolis.
Try to get your head around the geopolitical and cultural implications of that prospect. Gaza is already a vast human abattoir. Now imagine Gaza as a vast, smoking tomb.
My own view on this, long story short: Decent and intelligent people need to take over the conversation about Palestinian suffering. The entire public debate about the plight and the predicament of the Palestinians of Gaza has got to be wrenched from the clutches of the Globalize The Intifada lobby. The so-called “pro-Palestine’ constituency that has enjoyed so much generous real estate in the news media does not give a damn about the people of Gaza.
Do forgive my tone but I’m afraid I’m losing my patience, possessed of a weighty bias that comes from a lifetime in the journalism racket. It’s high bloody time journalists on the Israel-Palestine story disengage from transparently disingenuous reporting exercises undertaken under the lame pretext of providing “balanced” coverage.
Disaster upon catastrophe upon debacle upon dilemma. . .
The dilemma’s current fulcrum is what I described in the National Post as the near merger of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) with Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, otherwise known as Hamas - the theocratic-fascist Khomeinist proxy that seized Gaza from the Palestinian Authority in a bloody putsch back in 2007 and carried off the multi-front October 7 surprise attack that has plunged the whole world into disarray.
And I do mean the whole world. If you don’t believe me, when you’re done here read my spread in the Post. I mean the whole damn world:
Even so, I strongly urge Real Story subscribers to disabuse themselves of the American-inflected preoccupation with some imminent threat of a “wider war” in the Greater Middle East. That wider war has been been underway for years. Here’s me in the Ottawa Citizen four years ago: Forget the carnage in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon. Apparently, it's only war if the Americans are involved. By then, the death toll just on the Syrian front was already twice the combined death toll from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It is very true that the region-wide war is more intense and precipitous now than in a generation. The latest: As Israelis were sitting down to shabbat dinners Friday night, sirens were wailing all over the country. A barrage of Hezbollah rockets was streaming into Israel from Lebanese territory over a 48 hour period. At least 90 missiles were taken out by the Iron Dome system. It was the largest Hezbollah missile attack in 18 years.
The Hezbollah attack followed on a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad a couple of days earlier that took out Abu Bakr al-Saadi, a senior commander of the leading Khomeinist proxy militia in Iraq, Kataib Hezbollah. The strike was in response to scores of attacks on American interests throughout the region since October 7. It came years too late.
Three years ago, there was still a slim hope that the barbaric suppression of Iraqi civil society on Tehran’s behalf might be resisted in the streets. Back then, the Iraqi democracy activist Faisal Saeed Al Mutar told me the democratic movement was still strong, despite the Tehran-backed militias’ immense influence within Iraq’s ruling elites and the Khomeinist-directed assassination campaign that was slowly obliterating the young movement’s leadership.
“People are bombarded by negative stories, but there are a lot of people fighting the good fight, and they need as much support as possible,” Al Mutar told me. But that support never came. Americans were bored with stories out of Iraq. The NATO countries couldn’t give a damn.
And now here we are, and Palestinian bodies are being piled onto the region’s already towering corpse heaps. The “international community” is still not helping. It can be reasonably estimated that 20,000 non-combatants have been killed in Gaza so far.
Israeli authorities estimate that about a fifth of the humanitarian-aid convoys that have passed into Gaza since October 7 have been redirected from UNRWA to supply depots controlled by Hamas, which Netanyahu has pledged to obliterate entirely, after having disgorged its fighters from the militarized subterranean city it had constructed under UNRWA’s nose.
The latest: The IDF command reckons it has eliminated 18 out of 24 Hamas battalions and the plan is to go full metal jacket into the last Hamas bastion, Rafah, on the Egyptian border. A million Gazan civilians - half the population of the Gaza Strip - have fled there.
This would be an especially bloody and horrible phase of a war most Israelis reckoned would be over by now, and it could be the tipping point in a rapidly deteriorating relationship between the White House and Netanyahu’s war cabinet. A military operation in Rafah “would be a disaster” says U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby, “and it’s not something that we would support.”
In my column I introduce readers to the great Palestinian patriot Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, who has lost at least 30 members of his family in Gaza since the war began. In keeping with this newsletter’s attention to true things that seem like contradictions, here’s what Ahmed says: “UNRWA is a garbage mafia organization that rakes in millions and millions of dollars. They have harmed us in so many ways. And they are absolutely 1,000 percent essential and necessary for the foreseeable future.”
Another apparent contradiction, which isn’t really: Ahmed is unconvinced that there’s any good sense in the IDF’s objectives and overall strategy, quite apart from being personally devastated by the impact. And like most Israelis he loathes Netanyahu. But when it comes to UNRWA, the IDF agrees with Ahmed, and Ahmed more or less agrees with Netanyahu when he says “UNRWA is totally infiltrated with Hamas.”
Benny Gantz, the war cabinet minister most likely to eventually replace the wildly unpopular Netanyahu whenever that opportunity might arise, parts company with Netanyahu when it comes to UNRWA. Gantz says it’s possible to get humanitarian aid around Hamas, but still through UNRWA.
Gantz cannot be called doveish, by the way. Gantz proposes to hunt Hamas to the ends of the earth: “There will be no sanctuary cities, no sanctuary houses. We will go wherever we need to in order to eradicate child murderers—above and below ground, in Gaza and around the world.” This is why I like Gantz.
In any case, the debate is coming to a head.
One plan well in its advanced stages, which may or may not get off the ground: The IDF and international agencies would directly distribute aid to Gaza’s civilians. The operation would begin with the establishment of a designated humanitarian compound in the north-central area of the Gaza Strip.
The IDF is not pleased with the idea. Israel’s beloved soldiers are risking their lives in Gaza to fight a necessary war, not to do what UN agencies are failing to do.
Just to be clear: Despite the impression you’ll get from too many of my colleagues in the news media who persist in platforming the most horrible elements of the activist milieu and continue to amplify ‘pro-Palestine’ voices that are nothing of the kind, Israel is not blocking aid to Gaza.
It’s complicated, but IDF officers overseeing the provision of humanitarian aid say there is no shortage of water inside Gaza and there is no shortage of food. The problem is what happens after the aid trucks get across the border. More aid is getting through from Israel than the UN can handle, for one thing. For another thing, Hamas is hijacking and hoarding humanitarian aid for its own purposes.
Here’s IDF Colonel Moshe Tetro, who heads the Coordination and Liaison Administration for Gaza: “The bottom line is that we are constantly facing false reports, some of which come directly from officials in international agencies. . . there is a great distance between the truth and the lies and propaganda that sadly the international community and also the media promotes, choosing to repeat the narrative of a barbaric terror organization without even checking the facts.”
And - like my opinion should count for anything - here’s where I’m in total agreement with Ahmed, which I put this way in my column:
Now more than ever, there should be a worldwide movement to force Israeli authorities, the United Nations’ various agencies and western governments to focus on relieving the suffering of the Palestinians of Gaza. But here’s what’s standing in the way: the Palestinians’ western “friends” are the Palestinians’ worst enemies. They’ve sucked the life out of every conversation where measures to lift the weight of agony from the Palestinians of Gaza should be the only item on the agenda.
One last thing before we get into the catacombs on the other side of the paywall.
From years of following this story and several visits to Israel and briefly the West Bank, one conclusion I reached early on, which I set out in some detail here, is this: Among the various Palestinian terrorist organizations, messianic Jewish settler movements, hardline Israeli political factions and Islamist jihadi fronts that have stood in the way of an abiding peace in the Holy Land, none can match UNRWA’s impressive pedigree in sabotage and obstruction.
It’s because ever since 1959, UNRWA’s primary purpose has been to sustain a massive and expanding “Palestinian refugee” population in the delusion that Israel is a temporary aberration, and that Israel’s victory over the Arab States in 1947-49 can and will and should be reversed.
It’s because what UNRWA has incubated and nourished is a confected Palestinian national identity built upon a mythology of unique victimhood, unforgivable dispossession, the glorification of violence and martyrdom, and the eternal wickedness of the Jews. The result: Black September, Fatah, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the lot.
Even so, and for one last thing that seems like a contradiction, I agree with our friend Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib when he says UNRWA can’t be just defunded, broken up and binned. As he put it to me in our conversation, to do that would be to incite close to six million suddenly unmoored and stateless Arabs from 58 “refugee camps” in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan in what would likely form up as a death march towards Jerusalem.
On that cheerful note, I’ll turn to some news and possible changes here at The Real Story, and some background to the centrepiece I wrote for the National Post and some things that went sideways.