It’s not an exaggeration to state that much of the Financial Times’ (FT) content on the Oct. 7th massacre and its aftermath, and the Israeli-Palestinian issue more broadly, is often indistinguishable from content in the Guardian. Increasingly, their contributors, journalists and editors seem to have adopted the precept that Palestinians have no agency, and can never be held responsible for their violence, destructive behavior, rejectionism and antisemitism.
This illiberal worldview, that neatly categorizes the world into oppressed and oppressor, is fundamentally at odds with the Western political tradition that sees individuals as more than the sum of their group identity – that is, as moral actors whose decisions and actions should be judged on their merit, not on a moral curve based on subjective perceptions of victimhood.
The latest case in point is a FT essay (“Peace, for now: the long history of conflict between Israel and Palestine“, Oct. 15) by contributing editor Philip Stephens, about a book co-written by Robert Malley and Hussein Agha. While you can read Shany Mor’s review of the book here, what’s particularly notable in Stephens’ essay is not the review itself, but, rather, the broader context of the Oct. 7th war, and the history of the conflict, that he provides readers:
Here’s the opening:
Despair has made way for a moment of hope. The last Israeli hostages still alive have been freed by Hamas. The indiscriminate bombing that killed nearly 70,000 Palestinians, many of them children, has ended. Whatever his motives, Donald Trump did the right thing in demanding an end to Benjamin Netanyahu’s war of revenge for the Hamas attack on October 7 2023.
Rarely have so many lies, and so much propaganda, been weaved into so few words – all which serve as another example of the Abuse of Oct. 7th Memory: the centering of Israel’s response to the Oct. 7th Hamas massacre, while all but erasing, or at least obfuscating, the atrocity itself. Stephens begins by citing the number of Palestinians allegedly killed during the war, who he falsely claims were all killed by “indiscriminate” Israeli bombing, without noting the 70,000 figure come from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, and omitting that a large percentage of those killed were terrorist combatants.
The barbaric mass murder, rape torture and mutilation of 1,200 men, women and children – which started the war – is referred to at the end of the paragraph, and only as “the Hamas attack”.
Israel’s military response to Hamas’ barbaric antisemitic massacre was the opposite of “indiscriminate”, targeting Hamas terrorists who used a human shield/human sacrifice strategy, while going to what’s been described by military experts as unprecedented lengths to protect the civilian population in Gaza: the military continually warned civilian population about impending attacks and directed them to evacuate to safe zones by distributing millions of flyers, text messages, voice mails and QR codes with military maps—thereby suffering a clear military disadvantage.
Further, note Stephens’ propagandistic choice to frame Israel’s counter-attack on and after Oct. 7th as “Netanyahu’s war of revenge”, as if it was the ‘vengefulness’ of the country’s prime minister, as opposed to a national act of self-defence that’s the right of not just Israel, but all nations faced with such an act of war by a state or non-state actor.
Later in the essay, Stephens writes this, acknowledging that what he earlier described as merely Hamas “attacks” were “murderous”, though without citing the death toll, or the fact that the overwhelming majority of those butchered on Oct. 7 were civilians, and while adding additional gross disinformation:
Hamas’s murderous incursion into southern Israel has been an enduring shock to the national psyche. The indiscriminate killing of civilians by the Israel Defense Forces — deemed genocide by a UN-commissioned panel of experts — has further deepened Palestinian grievance.
Without even bothering to qualify the accusation that the IDF has ‘indiscriminately’ targeted civilians with a word such as “reportedly”, or “according to Israel’s critics”, the FT editor is not engaging in journalism, but, rather, agitprop – designed to impute maximum malevolence to the Jewish state, while airbrushing Hamas’s barbarism.
Additionally, Stephens refers to the panel which accused Israel of genocide as made up of “experts”, which is a supremely dishonest characterisation of the three entirely discredited commissioners, Navi Pillay, Miloon Kothari and Chris Sidoti, with little if any “expertise”, and whose one-sided report, as CAMERA has documented, wouldn’t pass muster as an undergraduate term paper.
Evidently not content with merely Oct. 7th revisions, Stephens then re-writes 1948:
The past will not easily be left behind. In the assessment of Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, the Gaza horror was not an aberration. Instead its seeds had been long embedded in the historic enmity born of the creation of the State of Israel on Palestinian land.
The “enmity” of Palestinian Arabs, which often included deadly attacks on Jews, far pre-dates 1948 – with the first wave of such organised Arab terror occurring in 1920. Moreover, describing the land in question, which was controlled, until 1917, by the Ottoman Turkish Empire, and then, until 1948, by the British, as “Palestinian land” is completely ahistorical.
The fact that, further into Stephens’ review, he describes the war launched by five Arab armies on the nascent Jewish state as “the violent land seizures and dispossession accompanying Israel’s creation in 1948” again represents how so many Western journalists insist on framing the antisemitic pathos of the Arab (and Palestinian) world as a legitimate grievance.
It’s beyond dispiriting, and an indictment of much of the British media, that, when confronted with a modern-day pogrom where Jewish babies were murdered in their cribs, women raped, children tortured and killed in front of their parents, the young and old burned alive by Palestinian death squads, some boasting of how many Jews they killed, and who then decapitated and mutilated corpses, many journalists persist in disappearing the perpetrators, while doubling down on their hostility towards the Jewish state.
One cannot expect any better from the FT under its current editor, Roula Khalaf who is a British-Lebanese with an axe to grind about Israel.
She does everything in her power to denigrate Israel on every occasion and the articles regarding Israel are totally biased promoting the Arab/islam/Muslim case- of course no comments are allowed!