Mairav Zonszein wrote an op-ed in last week’s Washington Post. It deserves a good line-by-line fisking, starting with its title “Israel lets Jews protest the occupation. It doesn’t let Palestinians.” – but fisking every single line would take up pages, so let’s go through a few of the more blatant lies and dissembling.
Paragraph 1 LIE: “images and video of Israeli soldiers shooting live ammunition into masses of mostly unarmed Palestinians on the other side of the Gaza border fence”
There are no such images and videos because there have been no such shootings. Israeli soldiers have shot at individual combatant targets as required by law.
The fact that Hamas did its best to surround such targets with masses of people does not change the fact that Israeli soldiers did not target the masses.
Paragraph 1 LIE: “Israeli troops suppressing protests in Gaza”
Israel made no attempt whatsover to suppress protests in Gaza. It attempted to prevent Gazans from breaking through the border fence or from attacking Israel from the Gazan side of the fence. It was only partially successful, as shown by the enormous damage done by illegal Gazan attacks on Israeli forests.
PARAGRAPH 2 LIE: “Now Israel’s government is moving to make sure there are no more videos of mass shootings in the future”
Certainly Zonszein should be asked to back up that statement by providing us with videos of mass shootings. How about even one link to a video of a mass shooting? No?
PARAGRAPH 2 LIE: “Now Israel’s government is moving to make sure there are no more videos of mass shootings in the future … by considering a law that would ban anyone from filming or photographing any military operations …”
The author links to a private parliament member bill. The government has not proposed or endorsed any such legislation.
PARAGRAPH 3 LIE: “Maintaining its decades-long occupation depends on systematic suppression of dissent on both sides of the boundary fences.”
As even Hamas — the terrorist organization governing the Gaza Strip acknowledges — there is no Israeli “occupation” in Gaza.
PARAGRAPH 4 LIE: “Israel’s 1948 borders”
I suppose this is the author’s favored terminology for the 1949-1967 armistice lines. There is no country in the world that views those lines as the borders between Israel and the countries neighboring Israel.
PARAGRAPH 4 LIE: “… for the most part, when Jewish citizens protest, it’s tolerated; when Palestinian citizens protest, it’s ‘disturbing the peace’ or worse.”
Jewish protesters have been accused, tried and even convicted of disturbing the peace for protests, and worse (Jewish protesters have been convicted of “sedition”). The not-infrequent Palestinian/Arab citizens of Israel (as of December 14, only 38% of Arab citizens of Israel referred to themselves as “Palestinian”) protests have almost never been treated as “disturbing the peace” in the absence of violence.
Note that the author herself acknowledges that Israeli Arabs “had gathered in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv a couple of days earlier, also to protest Israeli military tactics in Gaza. Not a single arrest was made, and no police brutality was reported.”
To hide her admission, she refers to these Israeli Arabs who participated in the protest not as Palestinians but obliquely through the phrase “several hundred Israelis, predominantly Jews”.
PARAGRAPH 9 LIE: “Israel’s High Court of Justice has sided with the military, sanctioning the use of live ammunition because the IDF says it acts only in self-defense.”
The military did not “say[] it acts only in self-defense” and the Israeli High Court of Justice did not “side with the military” or rule in its favor because the IDF “says it acts only in self-defense.”
The Washington Post should retract the article and publish and apology to its readers for not bothering to fact-check this drivel before publishing it.
There’s so much more that can be ripped apart in the article, feel free to continue fisking it in the comments section below…