Violence and Understanding in Gaza

The British Broadsheets' Coverage of the War

D. Kaposi

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137439505
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Violence and Understanding in Gaza is the first comprehensive investigation of the British broadsheets' coverage of the Gaza War. Written in accessible language and engaging style, it critiques the newspapers' output, which it is argued replicates the black and white logic of war instead of focusing on negotiations and peace.

1

Introduction: Violence and Understanding in the Armed Conflict of Gaza

Introduction

This book presents a case study: it offers an analysis of the British broadsheets’ coverage of a war, examining the breadth and depth of their content, and as such, it attempts to examine various ways of understanding violence.

As has been regularly noted, the war of Gaza between 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009 occupies a special page in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was ‘the first major armed struggle between Israel and Hamas, as distinguished between Israel and the PLO and Fatah’ (Cordesman, 2009, p. 1), reflecting the new political constellation where the traditional political role of advocating Palestinian interests was overtaken by Hamas from Fatah. It was also an event which not only rendered the highest number of Palestinian casualties and properties destroyed in any Israeli offensive (cf. Amnesty International, 2009, p. 2), but was argued to be ‘qualitatively different from any previous military action by Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory’ (Goldstone Report, 2011, p. 291).

Whilst the major issues of war inevitably concern the places and people directly involved, regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the role of the Western media and the perception of the population of the main Western stakeholders in the conflict also warrant special attention. In particular, recent debates to be reviewed later in this introduction suggest that another (to be sure, metaphorical) war is taking place in the British media to present and understand the events, with conservative publications taking it upon themselves to advocate Israeli interests and left-liberal ones supporting Palestinians. As any outcome of the conflict will by necessity be predicated on the meanings associated with it, analytic attention must therefore be paid to the ‘scene of commentary’ in Britain and how the British media engage with the issues occurring in the Middle East.

The first task of this case study is therefore to offer a systematic, multi-method analysis of the ways the British national broadsheets (i.e., Daily Telegraph, The Times, Guardian, Independent, Financial Times) engaged with the ‘Gaza war’ and made sense of violence and the context surrounding it. As such, the book promises to provide insight into dominant ways of thinking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and makes suggestions regarding how to change these dominant ways of thinking so that they do justice to the terrible tragedies of war and the noble aspirations of peace in the region (Ben-Ami, 2006; Morris, 1999).

Thus, in a broader sense, this book also presents a case study in understanding violence. For war, first and foremost, is an act of violence rendering people (always too many people) dead on its way. It is not evident, and it is not meaningful in itself. It has to be understood as such: acts of violence need to be incorporated into a framework of interpretation (Walzer, 2000). This will not nullify the tragedy that is death and glamorize the violence that is war. But it is indeed the only way to create conditions where death does not lead to more death and violence to even more violence. As such, there is nothing inevitable about acts of understanding when it comes to violence. Therefore, the second aspect of this case study is the understanding of the British broadsheets’ coverage of the armed conflict of Gaza as an act of understanding.

As subsequent chapters of this book will focus on this topic with considerable exclusivity, leaving historical and political facts and insights aside in their pursuit of understanding the broadsheets’ texts on their own terms, it is the task of this chapter to set the scene and present relevant details. It will introduce the reader to three aspects of this context. First, the story of the armed conflict itself will be narrated. Then, various reports investigating the legality of the war will be presented. Finally, the status of debates over Israel, Palestine and the media will be engaged with. The introduction will conclude by briefly describing the coming chapters of the book.

Violence: the chronicle of the armed conflict

Mirroring the conflict between Israel and Palestinians (Ben-Ami, 2006; Morris, 1999), the relevant narrative context for the war can be construed from many perspectives. As will be reflected on later in this introduction, any narration of the conflict generates extraordinary tension and has inevitable moral and political dimensions. To construe this story of human relations is itself a story of human relations. For these reasons, no comprehensive attempt will be made to overview the historical details. A brief sketch of events preceding the intensification of the armed conflict as well as the barebones of the war itself will have to suffice.¹

Events of immediate relevance may be said to have started in the autumn of 2005, when Israel unilaterally abolished its civilian and military presence in the Gaza Strip, which it had occupied (and populated in parts with Israeli civilians) following its war with Egypt, Syria and Jordan in 1967. In notable respects, this was a momentous decision and one without precedent. Israel’s stance on war and peace had hitherto been dominated by a doctrine whereby it would only willingly relinquish territory gained in war in exchange for peace (cf. Morris, 1999; Shlaim, 2004). As suggested by the fact that Israel acted unilaterally, peace was not a prospect when Israel withdrew its forces from the Strip. From the perspective of its own history and the doctrines evolved to interpret this history, Israel could then be said to have taken an enormous risk to execute an unprecedented plan. Hope and trust, or, to the contrary, desperation, appeared to have overtaken the cautious realpolitik that had dominated Israeli political vocabulary. Predictably, the withdrawal caused an extraordinary rift within Israeli society.

From other perspectives, however, its action was seen either as an act of pure self-interest or downright detrimental to the prospects of peace. It was claimed that the decision was prompted merely by matters of convenience, as Israel’s pragmatic leaders calculated that the costs of occupying a densely populated territory were simply too high. Others suspected a straightforwardly malicious course of events where not only did Israel not act in the interest of the peace process and a viable two-state solution but, to the very contrary, it simply wanted to put the peace process on hold whilst grabbing more territories from the West Bank (Halper, 2008; cf. Said, 2004).

Indeed, soon enough the very idea of a ‘withdrawal’ was also contested. For Israel, undeniably, did not completely relinquish its power over the territory and confer sovereignty to its Palestinian authorities. It retained complete oversight and control of the Gaza Strip’s borders and airspace, telecommunications, water and electricity networks.² It also continued to demarcate so called ‘no go areas’ even within the Strip itself. Thus, while it is without doubt that a certain amount of real autonomy has been conferred to the authorities of the Strip, critics were quick to point out that no complete transposition of sovereignty can be ascertained, and therefore the occupation must be said to be ongoing (Goldstone Report, 2011, p. 45; Halper, 2008; cf. Operation in Gaza, 2009, pp. 5, 11; Dershowitz, 2006, p. 2). All of this has led to a situation where many people sympathetic to Israel’s predicament consider Gaza to be a relatively autonomous territory, whilst others critical of the State of Israel and sympathetic to the miseries of the Palestinians call it but a prison.

In any case, whatever the real (or perceived) risk for the population of Israel and the rift caused within its society were, and whatever the benefits (or otherwise) of a partial autonomy were for the population of Gaza, it may be argued that the events described above led to a ‘spiral of violence’, ultimately culminating in the war itself. First, the political vacuum left by the Israeli government’s unilateral decision to withdraw from Gaza was filled by Palestinian militants claiming to have chased away the occupying power. Second, the direct absence of Israelis and the relative autonomy conferred to local authorities meant that these militant organizations could further their ‘successful’ policy of rejection by launching rockets and mortars into Southern Israel. And third, even if these invectives were mostly homemade and of no overbearing military significance³, coupled with the ever-ominous and antisemitic rhetoric Islamic militants deployed, they nonetheless constituted acts of military aggression. They terrorized considerable swathes of the Israeli population over the years and contributed to a mentality where the vast military imbalance between Israeli and Palestinian forces was never translated into Israeli citizens’ subjective feeling of safety. As a result, renewed rocket fire was met with continuous Israeli military operations in and around Gaza, resulting in anger and desperation on the Palestinian side, too – and of course, renewed bouts of rocket fire.

In January 2006, legislative elections (judged by international observers to have been conducted fairly) were held in the Palestinian Authority (i.e., the West Bank and Gaza), where the militant Hamas won over 70, and the secular-nationalist Fatah 45, of the available 132 seats. This outcome signalled a huge shift in the power balance of Palestinian politics. A radical and Islamist force came into political prominence at the expense of the traditional secular-nationalist vehicle of Palestinian aspirations; Israel’s long-time partner in dialogues for peace was replaced by a power that rejected the very idea of peace between the two nations. As a consequence, Israel imposed economic sanctions on the territory. Branding Hamas a terrorist organization, the United States and the European Union followed suit and withheld funds from the Palestinian Authority. Matters hardly improved when in June 2006 groups belonging to Hamas’s military wing conducted an incursion into Israeli territory and attacked a military post, capturing an Israeli corporal, Gilad Shalit. Israel duly tightened the economic blockade of Gaza further and conducted military operations in and around the territory.

In early 2007, following an attempt to form a united government of the Palestinian territories, a short civil war broke out between Fatah and Hamas, with the former taking full control of the West Bank, and the latter of Gaza. Accordingly, Gaza was immediately declared a ‘hostile entity’ by Israel; the Jewish state further intensified its blockade with additional restrictions placed on quantity and quality of food, goods, fuel and electricity permitted to enter the Strip. Meanwhile, Hamas continued to fire rockets into Israeli civilian territory and, by way of partially counterbalancing the blockade, established an underground tunnel system for smuggling goods as well as weapons under the Strip’s closed border with Egypt.

This cyclical state of affairs continued until 19 June 2008, when both parties accepted a six-month long Egyptian-sponsored ceasefire – meaning the temporary cessation of hostilities. However, the ceasefire agreement was not without ambiguities, and in fact no text of agreement ever existed. In Hamas’s understanding, their ceasing fire would be coupled with the Israeli scrapping of the blockade; in Israel’s interpretation, it was only the easing of the restrictions that was required in exchange for Hamas ceasing fire. In turn, Israel expected Hamas to release the IDF corporal Gilad Shalit (held hostage for over two years at this point), and to stop building up its military strength and accumulating weapons through its system of tunnels beneath the Egyptian border.

The months in the aftermath of the ceasefire ‘agreement’ passed with a very significant reduction of violence on both sides. Yet the real status and value of the ceasefire has been contested ever since, as in retrospect, self-restraint on both sides may have meant little more than covering up actual preparation for war. Hamas duly continued to smuggle weapons into the Strip, expanding its arsenal with weaponry capable of penetrating deeper into Israeli territory. As such, the months of calm may actually have made it a more dangerous entity with regard to Israeli strategic objectives and civilian interests. And Israel used the time of relative calm to perfect its coming operation, hoping to banish memories of an ill-planned and ill-executed war against the Lebanese Shia ­party-cum-militia Hezbollah in 2006. Indeed, it has been argued since that the seeds of the overwhelming military success that the war to come yielded for Israel were sown during these months of careful intelligence gathering (Cordesman, 2009).

The ceasefire itself proved to be less than long-lasting. Following the period of calm, on 4 November Israeli forces conducted an incursion into Gaza. Tanks and infantry entered the Strip in an operation that was stated to be a raid on a tunnel used for smuggling weapons and that ended in the killing of six Hamas gunmen. The Palestinian organization responded with rocket fire of renewed intensity, firing 35 of them into Israel immediately after the incursion and around 200 between November and mid-December. The calm that characterized the first half of the ceasefire was never reached again.

As the by-then nominal ceasefire expired on 18 December, both parties remained ambiguous about their subsequent aims, with action not necessarily corresponding to rhetoric of conciliation.⁴ Hamas continued firing rockets and mortars into Israeli civilian territory. Israel continued to carry out limited military action in and around the Strip. In the end, Israel launched full-scale war on 27 December (dubbing it ‘Operation Cast Lead’), citing the rocket fire as casus belli.

The war started with an aerial phase, just before mid-day on 27 December: the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) hit around 100 targets within 220 seconds. According to IDF estimates, around 99 per cent of its strikes were accurate, a testimony to the planning and information-gathering that had preceded the offensive. Amongst the early targets were the headquarters of Hamas, the building of the Palestinian Legislative Council, as well as 24 police stations. The first day of the war rendered the highest ever one-day Palestinian casualties (230) in the entire history of the conflict.

The aerial phase of the war lasted until 3 January and was followed by an air-ground phase. In this second and last phase of the war, Israel’s main strategic plan was to secure the areas used by Palestinian militants to launch rockets, and to destroy the tunnels used for smuggling weapons into Gaza. To achieve this, the IDF entered Gaza from north and east, dividing the Strip in two. Air attacks continued in the south, whilst ground operations dominated in the more urbanized north. As international pressure was mounting, from 7 January onwards Israel agreed to a daily three-hour ceasefire and the opening of a ‘humanitarian corridor’ with essential goods supplied to the civilian population of the Strip. Having expanded their ground manoeuvre, entering deeper into the territory, on 15 January Israeli forces started their withdrawal (though with renewed aerial attacks around the border between Gaza and Egypt).

With no official agreement signed, first Israel and then a couple of hours (and rockets) later, Hamas announced unilateral ceasefire on 18 January. Thus the war or ‘Operation Cast Lead’ ended on the ground and gave place to its evaluation.

Responsibility: investigations in the wake of the conflict

When assessing the war, three types of consideration dominated. The first was of a narrowly military kind, concerning simple tactics, implementation, and immediate success on the ground. The second was of a strategic kind and concerned the short- or long-term objectives that were met or missed: in short, whether the war was useful. The third was of a more principled kind and concerned whether the parties’ conduct of the war conformed to universal moral and legal principles: in short, whether the war was just.

As should be clear even from this brief description of the hostilities, the ‘war’ of Gaza was overwhelmingly dominated, perhaps even defined as such, by Israel.⁵ As far as the Gaza Strip itself was concerned, Hamas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction: Violence and Understanding in the Armed Conflict of Gaza
• 2  Method of the Analysis and General Characteristics of the Newspapers
• 3  Action and Death in War
• 4  Engagements with History
• 5  Engagements with Criticism
• 6  Engagements with Antisemitism
• 7  War – Purity of Arms and Souls in the Conservative Press
• 8  War – Purity of Arms and Souls in the Liberal Press
• 9  Conclusion: Beyond Good and Evil
• Appendix – Conservative and Liberal Editorials
• Notes
• Sources
• Index