What happened in Rafah last week? Anybody with even a passing interest in the news will know that an Israeli missile killed 45 civilians in a fire. Cue the predictable response: wall-to-wall footage of Palestinian outrage, international condemnation, protests on campuses, threats of EU sanctions. Each time another spadeload of fury with which to bury the memory of how this war started in the first place.
Talk about jumping to conclusions. We learned as early as October that initial reporting may not be reliable. Remember the case of the Al Ahli hospital? Ten days after the Hamas pogroms, a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket crashed into its carpark in Gaza City. The incident was portrayed as a wilful Israeli strike on a clinic that claimed an improbably large number of lives, totted up with improbable speed.
Unusually, the subsequent investigation cut through the noise, turning an incident of mass hysteria into a scandal of global misinformation. But the lesson was quickly forgotten. Which returns us to the fire in Rafah.
After a swift inquiry, on Tuesday the IDF announced that a pair of senior Hamas murderers, Yassin Rabia and Khaled Najjar, had been surgically eliminated in the Tel Sultan neighbourhood of northwest Rafah using two 37lb bombs, the smallest munitions possible in the circumstances.
They had been killed, the IDF said, more than a mile from the designated humanitarian zone and 600 feet from the nearest civilian tent. This would seem an entirely justifiable strike in an entirely justifiable war.
So how the fire? Video evidence showed a secondary explosion taking place 200 yards away from the target, setting off the blaze that claimed those innocent lives. It was likely a hidden cache of weapons. An unspeakable tragedy, yes. An Israeli war crime, no.
Although regretted by Israel, the disaster was undoubtedly celebrated by the death cult of Hamas, whose strategy of human sacrifice aims to purchase international outrage in exchange for the blood of its own people. Of this, of course, there is a ready supply, given that Hamas bars civilians from the tunnels and has built them no bomb shelters. Such is the Israelophobia of the world that these blood transactions find many eager partners. Israel’s findings received little play in the media, dwarfed many times by the portrayal of the tragedy as an open-and-shut example of Jewish barbarism.
Do we need more examples? Remember the reports that sickened the world in April, involving the alleged discovery of an Israeli mass grave at the Nasser hospital in Khan Younis? The UN human rights chief, Volker Türk, declared that he was “horrified”.
An Israeli inquiry later argued that the corpses, many of which were likely terrorists, had been buried by the Palestinians. No evidence was found to support claims that their hands had been tied. In a macabre development, IDF troops acknowledged that they had been forced to conduct exhumations at the site, following intelligence that hostages may be among the dead. They had reinterred them in a dignified manner after identification, they said. Once again, this received little coverage. Once again, the demonisation of the Jewish state received a boost.
Israelophobia, it seems, is resistant to learning the lessons of the past. Not just the recent past. Throughout history, the depiction of bloodthirsty Jewish people, rooted in the very worst anti-Semitic tropes, has eclipsed the people of reality, with their humour, their recipes, their families and neuroses, their strengths and their frailties and sins.
We are less enlightened today than we like to think.
Jake Wallis Simons is editor of the Jewish Chronicle and author of Israelophobia