WHOME DO YOU BELIEVE???-URI AVENERY

[tarekk]

Whom to Believe? Well...

Uri Avnery

October 25, 2003



www.gush-shalom.org/archives/article273_heb.html (Hebrew)

www.gush-shalom.org/archives/article273.html (English)



"Whom do you believe?" asked General Ya'akov Amidror on TV with subdued
anger, "the army spokesman or Hamas?"



General (reserves) Amidror is the highest religious officer in our army. In
the past he has raised several public storms with some utterances
denigrating secular Israelis, saying that they are not real Jews. He has a
sharp mind, much above the average in the army command, and his intellect is
fully employed in serving his extremist views - both the extremist religious
and the extremist nationalist ones.



His question was intended to be rhetorical. After all, the answer is self-
evident: on one side there is the IDF, "the most moral and most humane army
in the world", as it calls itself, and on the other side there is a bunch of
crazy murderers, so what's the problem?



But, according to Amidror himself, the reverse is happening. The world
believes Hamas and does not believe the IDF spokesman. The Israeli public
believes Hamas. Even cabinet ministers and Knesset members believe Hamas and
do not believe the army spokesman.



The crisis of confidence was revealed in all its harshness by a series of
events last week in the Gaza Strip. According to the Palestinians, the army
fired air-to-surface missiles at a car in which there were two Hamas
militants. When people from the neighborhood crowded around the smashed car
to see if the could help the victims, they were attacked by another missile.
All in all 14 Palestinians were killed, among them a doctor who had rushed
there to help, and dozens of others, including many women and children, were
wounded.



"A big lie!" the Army Spokesman angrily announced. The army did not fire
another missile at all. It did not hurt civilians! It's just another vicious
Palestinian slander!



So there are two opposing versions, which are completely incompatible. A
matter of either-or. One of the two sides is lying. But who?



The Palestinian version is supported by the TV and video coverage of the
killed, the funerals, the wounded delivered to the hospitals, as well as by
doctors and journalists, local and foreign. The army version is supported by
the host of Israeli "military correspondents" and "Arab affairs reporters"
on TV, the radio and the newspapers who, almost to a man, repeat the
official line like robots, as if they themselves had investigated and come
to this conclusion.



This time even the heavy artillery joined the battle, headed by Haaretz
military commentator Ze'ev Shiff, whose independent judgements are often
uncannily similar to those of the army command. The Air Force commander,
already up to his neck in the affair of the rebellious combat pilots, took
an unprecedented step and had the official version, denying the Palestinian
story, circulated at all Air force bases.



To reinforce its own story, the Air Force published, after a delay of 24
hours, a clip shot during the action by an army drone (unmanned aircraft).
It clearly shows two missiles fired at the suspect car, with hardly any
civilians in the vicinity. The devoted military correspondents even used
their stopwatches to measure the seconds between missile A and missile B.



So here we have a perfect riddle. A factual clip against the eye-witness
account of the journalists. What would Sherlok Holmes have said?



Well. Perhaps a Palestinian propagandist of genius invented the whole thing.
The civilians committed suicide or shot each other, dozens of others wounded
themselves, all in order to besmirch the IDF with a monstrous lie. (By the
same logic, the father of little Muhammad al- Dura killed his son, at the
beginning of the present intifada, in order to slander our brave and upright
soldiers).



Another possibility is that not two, but three missiles were used - the two
seen in the clip and a third one later on. In order to find out, one has to
view the whole film, not just an excerpt. And perhaps we are dealing with
two different events altogether.



If the Israeli media were truly independent, instead of being a department
of the security establishment, a dozen Israeli journalists would have rushed
to Gaza on the same day, interviewed the dozens of wounded in the hospitals,
compared the evidence, visited the families of the dead and taken testimony
from eye-witnesses, confronting these with the army version. But apart from
Amira Hass and a Palestinian correspondent of Channel 2, this kind of
independent investigation has disappeared long ago from our media (and
perhaps never existed.)



There remains the rhetorical question posed by General Amidror: Whom to
believe?



The Minister of the Interior Avraham Poraz (Shinui party) and the Knesset
member Zahava Gal'on (Meretz) chose, so it seems, the Palestinian version
and acted accordingly. So did a large number of other public personalities.
That was what raised the hackles of the army.



But even if we take the official version on trust, we would have to raise
another question: WHY do so many people, in Israel and throughout the world,
believe the Palestinians? In other words, why do they not believe the army
spokesman?



There were times when the army spokesman was believed without reservation.
During the 50s, I was often asked by foreign journalists whether to believe
the army statements. My answer invariably was: Sure, our army does not lie.



These days are long gone. The occupation, which has corrupted everything,
has corrupted the army statements, too. During the first intifada, the IDF
published hundreds of statements that were manifestly mendacious.
Children "lost their lives" when the army "shot into the air" (giving rise
to bitter jokes about "flying children"). Palestinians were killed
while "trying to wrest weapons from the hands of soldiers". Tall stories.
Baron von Munchhausen would have been envious. Since then, the situation has
become even worse.



During the last 20 years I have followed the work of foreign correspondents,
neutral, pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli, and almost all of them trust the
Palestinians more than official Israeli spokespersons.



When things get tough, official spokespersons bring up the Jenin affair. The
Palestinians claimed that during the "Defensive Shield" operation in April
2002 a massacre occurred there. This proved to be an exaggeration, but the
things that did indeed happen there were terrible enough. For example, many
houses were demolished by the drunken driver of a giant army bulldozer,
without any idea whether the inhabitants were still inside. The
terminological battle over the word "massacre" distracted attention from
what actually happened.



Credibility is worth more then gold. It takes years to build up, but just a
few minutes to destroy. Now this affair shows that the credibility of the
army spokesman has fallen into an abyss.



"Whom do you believe?" the general asked. Well?hmm?it's not pleasant to say,
but?

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