Gaza through the eyes of Israel and the UN
Twice in the past week I have attended events focusing on Israel’s assault on Gaza. Last week an organisation called Just Journalism invited me to participate in a debate at Hampstead Town Hall.
Yesterday another organisation called Hoping invited me to a private gathering in Notting Hill to hear the UNRWA director in Gaza, John Ging, give an account of what is happening there.
Just Journalism is an apparently well-heeled organisation, to judge by its glossy literature. It purports to be a media monitoring organisation.
In truth it does a very thorough job of extracting all reports and articles that allow the slightest criticism of Israel. The strong implication is that these reports represent bias and are simply wrong.
The Just Journalism debate produced the charge that I was a “traitor”, to loud applause, but was otherwise good natured. I was shocked to find a widespread belief in the hall that the BBC was an Islamist propaganda machine.
There was no tolerance whatever for any consideration that the invasion of Gaza had been in some way misguided or that there had even been errors in carrying it out.
Rather, the arguments were entered that most media accounts of UN schools hit etc were simply wrong. I would draw your attention to Jonathan Miller (our own correspondent), who entered Gaza from Egypt within hours of the Israelis calling a ceasefire. His blog details exactly what he assessed had happened in some of these specific incidents, including the UN schools.
John Ging gave a very dispassionate view of where we are now in Gaza. He says the rule of law is the only hope, that confidence on both sides has to be rebuilt from the bottom up, and that there is little point attempting to sway minds at the top – they are rigidly fixed on both sides. He sees adherence to the rule of law offering hope on both sides.
He described war crimes by both sides – Hamas rockets on Sderot, Israeli assaults on unarmed civilians in Gaza. He expressed the hope that the new evidence now coming out of the Israeli forces themselves is proving vital in this regard. He held out the hope that there will be prosecutions on both sides and that “justice and truth” will flow from both sides.
Hoping, by the way, is a small children’s charity operating in the occupied territories.
I said in the Hampstead debate that as an optimist, I had never been so depressed by the prospects for a solution in the Middle East as now. John Ging’s testimony and relative optimism is a beacon.