Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Gaza Conspiracy Tales

I think we should draw up a list of the conspiracy tales radical/progressives, liberals, dupes, Hamas fellow-travellers and anti-Zionists (anti-Semites we can ignore) create and promote. There is also Peter Beinart's list of myths but that only counts as one as he claims "establishment" Jews made it up as well as Barghouti's list and also Aaron David Miller's list of five.

There was the one about how Hamas wasn't involved directly in the kidnapping of the three teenagers in June.

Yesterday Jon Donnison of the BBC pulled the rug out from under the Israeli government’s pretext for the Gaza onslaught with a series of tweets about a conversation he’d had with Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld about the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens in the West Bank in June. The boys were not killed by Hamas, Rosenfeld told Donnison, as he reported on Twitter:

That spun out to the next one, that Israel exploited Hamas' alleged uninvolvement to invade Gaza or this version:

Netanyahu exploited their kidnapping to achieve a political objective against Hamas and to undermine the recently inked unity deal between the two Palestinian rival factions, Hamas and Fatah (which was also a possible goal of those who carried out the kidnapping).

And 'better' stated here:

...it was soon clear that the Netanyahu government was actually using its incursions to try to stabilize the Palestinian Authority, by removing any challenge from Hamas activists in the West Bank and containing them in the Gaza Strip. It swiftly emerged that military, police and intelligence operations in the West Bank were exploiting the kidnappings as an opportunity for a kind of housecleaning operation in the West Bank of Hamas leadership and resources—bombing supposed headquarters, detaining and questioning activists and their families and rounding up previously released political prisoners.

Next was the real reason for invading Gaza wasn't just to kill Gazans, as Gideon Levy claimed,

Killing Arabs to restore quiet
Since the first Lebanon war over 30 years ago, Israel's main strategy has been killing Arabs. The current atrocious war in Gaza is no different.

but to control the off-shore gas:

IDF's Gaza assault is to control Palestinian gas, avert Israeli energy crisis
Israel's defence minister has confirmed that military plans to 'uproot Hamas' are about dominating Gaza's gas reserves

Then, there was the one that the tunnels were only meant to attack soldiers:

For weeks we’ve been hearing about the threat the Gaza tunnels pose to Israeli civilians. In reality, every tunnel so far has been used against military targets alone.

Now, I see, we have this: