The Times published an opinion piece by Max Hastings which includes errors and libels, and is based on a premise so unserious that a gutsy editor would have told Hastings, a WW2 historian, that he has no business writing about a conflict that he clearly knows little about.
The piece (“This war will finally kill off Palestinian statehood”, March 9) by Hastings, a former BBC foreign correspondent, begins with a libel – courtesy of the BBC.
In November last year in a refugee camp in the West Bank, a 14-year-old boy named Jad Jadallah allegedly threw a rock at Israeli troops, and was shot. Thereafter, a video shows soldiers standing around him, refusing access to ambulances, until he bleeds to death. To this day, for reasons that are unclear, the Israelis refuse to release Jad’s body.
You may not have seen this story reported, because little that happens in the West Bank makes it into any British media except the BBC.
Yes, the BBC did uncritically report, on Feb. 26, the allegation that, last November, Israeli soldiers allowed a Palestinian boy bleed to death, but, as our co-editor Hadar Sela demonstrated, that report was based on flimsy claims which were refuted prior to the corporation’s coverage of the incident.
On Feb. 8, Times of Israel quoted an IDF spokesperson responding to the allegation, which was first reported by Amira Haas at Haaretz earlier in the day, stating that the allegation “that the force did not provide medical treatment is false.”
The spokesperson stated further that “a terrorist was identified throwing a concrete block at the force, posing an immediate threat. The force fired at the terrorist to neutralize the threat, as a result of which he was wounded. After verifying that the terrorist was not carrying an explosive device on his body, the force provided him with initial medical treatment”.
Additionally, the spokesperson at the Israeli embassy in London responded to the BBC report, reaffirming that medical treatment had been provided.
The X post by Gandler included a short video clip showing the Palestinian teen receiving medical treatment by a soldier.
You’d certainly think that a professional historian would have done enough due diligence to find the IDF denial, and at least noted that the incendiary accusation is disputed.
Hastings’ promotion of the antizionist libel that the IDF intentionally kills children continues, when he writes that, “last year, according to the UN, 55 children were killed there by Israeli forces”. Yet, the vast majority of those Hastings calls “children” were – even according to B’tselem – older teens who were reportedly engaged in violent actions targeting soldiers or civilians before being killed.
Then, Hastings pivots to his main argument.
First, he acknowledges that “especially since October 2023, most Israelis believe they will never be able to live truly at peace if they are obliged to share their neighborhood with people committed to their destruction”.
He then, however, writes:
There are still wise Israelis who recognise that 4.4 million Palestinians are a fact that cannot be wished, or indeed bombed, away. They recoil from institutionalised oppression, and from knowledge that no plausible Israeli government…will concede full civil or political rights to non-Jewish inhabitants of Israel.
Some of us long believed that the best hope of halting terrorism, ending the fanatics’ nihilistic commitment to obliterating Israel, was to give Palestinians something to lose. Instead, however, despair and violence have been for decades the West Bank’s principal industries.
However, following the Oct. 7 massacre, he might wish to lecture Palestinians in Gaza that Israelis can’t be “wished” or “bombed way”.
Additionally, his framing of “4.4 million” [sic] Palestinians as “non-Jewish inhabitants of Israel” is extremely misleading. First, roughly 25% of Israel’s population is non-Jewish – mostly Arab, who enjoy full citizenship. Further, the overwhelming majority of Palestinians in Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”) live in Area A, which is administered by the Palestinian Authority.
Gazans have of course been ruled by Hamas.
When he speaks of the imperative to “give Palestinians something to lose”, he’s presumably referring to a territory or state of their own, which erases Israeli policies and offers over the past three decades intended to do just that: multiple Israeli peace offers, rejected by PA leaders, which would have given Palestinians a sovereign state, as well as Ariel Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005.
The Gaza withdrawal contradicts Hastings’ thesis, as, when given “something to lose”, that is, a sovereign territory ruled by Palestinians, the path of destruction was chosen by electing Hamas – the terror group which continued in the path of violence leading up to their perpetration of the worst antisemitic massacre since the Holocaust.
Finally, if you’re wondering what inspired the Iran-centered headline of Hastings’ piece, it’s these two throw-away sentences:
Netanyahu’s collaboration in America’s war with Iran has armed Israel to impose almost any sentence it chooses upon the Palestinians.
…
“Occupation has made us a cruel people,” said a former head of the Shin Bet in that great 2012 Israeli documentary The Gatekeepers. Victory over Iran, such as today many Israelis anticipate, is unlikely to render their government kinder.
In fact, the opposite is true.
Iran – though its network of proxies, such as Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other terror groups it supports as part of their ‘axis of resistance’, such as Hamas – has been the most destabilising force in the region, and has done more than any other country to make Israelis feel less safe. As an obituary for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei by the Washington Institute’s Holly Dagres plainly observed, the state has been “of the world’s biggest state sponsors of terrorism”.
Jerusalem, and the vast majority of Israelis, would be, to use Hastings’ word, “kinder”, and more amenable to diplomatic solutions to the conflict if Iran was seriously weakened, rendering the imperialist power far less able to support the terror groups on Israel’s borders which have reigned down terror on the state for decades.
It’s extremely dispiriting that, with all Max Hastings’ erudition, he nonetheless succumbed to mind-numbingly banal cliches and ahistorical arguments about the root cause of violence and instability in the Middle East.
