Robert Fisk / Independent | 13 July 2014
Once, we used to keep clippings, a wad of newspaper cuttings on
whatever we were writing about: Israel, Lebanon, Iran, Gaza.
Occasionally, we even read books. Maybe it’s because of the internet,
but in most of our reports, it seems that history only started
yesterday, or last week.
For snobs, it’s called the loss of institutional memory. We journos
seem to suffer from it more than most. Our readers, I suspect, do not.
So here we go…
“Israel has ignored mounting international calls for a ceasefire and said it will not stop its crippling assault on Gaza until ‘peace and tranquility’ are achieved in southern Israeli towns in the line of Palestinian rocket fire… Arab delegates have met the United Nations Security Council in New York, urging members to adopt a resolution calling for an immediate end to the Israeli attacks and a permanent ceasefire.” This is from a Press Association report.
Now
here’s an editorial from the right-wing Canadian National Post: “We
[sic] have a great deal of sympathy for the ordinary people of Gaza.
Israel’s attacks this week on the terrorist infrastructure within the
tiny, heavily populated area are undoubtedly extremely hard on them… as
Hamas officials and operatives use them as human shields. But remember:
all that was ever required to forestall these attacks was for
Palestinians to stop their violence against Israelis.”
And here’s
The Guardian: “Yesterday, as three of his children were laid out dead on
the hospital floor, Samouni was in a bed upstairs in the Shifa
hospital, recovering from wounds to his legs and shoulder and comforting
his son, Mohamed, five, who had suffered a broken arm… ‘It’s a
massacre,’ Samouni said. ‘We just want to live in peace.’”
And,
just for good measure, here’s Reuters: “Israel expanded yesterday its
fiercest air offensive in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip in decades and
prepared for a possible ground assault, after a three-day bombardment
that has killed 300 Palestinians… The [Israeli] planes also attacked the
homes of two top commanders in Hamas’s’ armed wing. They were not
there, but several family members were among the seven dead.”
And
last but not least, here’s writer Robert Fulford in the Canadian Post:
“Israel has already proven itself the most restrained nation in history.
It has set an all-time record for restraint.”
Now of course you are familiar with everything you’ve just
read above. Since last week, Israel has been bombarding Gaza to prevent
Hamas rockets hitting Israel. Palestinians suffer disproportionately,
but it’s all Hamas’s fault. But there’s a problem.
The Press
Association report was published on 6 January 2009 – five and a half
years ago! The Post editorial was printed on 2 January the same year.
The Guardian dispatch was on 6 January 2009, Reuters on 30 December of
the previous year – 2008. Fulford’s nonsense was published on 5 January
2009.
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Oddly,
however, no one reminds us that today’s carnage is an obscene replay –
by both sides – of what has happened before, and indeed before that. The
leftist Israeli historian Illan Pappe has recorded how on 28 December
2006, the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem reported that 660
Palestinians had been killed in that year alone, most in Gaza, including
141 children; and that since 2000, Israeli forces had killed almost
4,000 Palestinians with 20,000 wounded. But scarcely has there been a
single mention of all of this in a single report on the latest slaughter
in the Gaza war.
Why? Why do we as readers – let alone us
journalists – allow ourselves to participate in what I can only call a
collective memory-wipe? Because we are lazy? Because we don’t care? Or
because we fear that explanations for the recurring bloodletting in
Israel might lead readers to search for deeper reasons and that Israel’s
“friends” abroad might accuse us poor harmless journos of suggesting
that Israel – let alone the corrupt Hamas – is engaged in a far more
pitiless, infinitely more wicked and obscene war than our bland
agency-style reportage suggests?
There’s nothing new about
memory-wipe. Take this warning of civil war in Lebanon, published in The
Independent, no less: “For Lebanon, these are tense times… Since the
Alawite community which dominates political power in Syria is in effect
Shia and the majority of Syrians are Sunni, it is not difficult to
understand the darker nightmares which afflict the people of this
region. If the civil conflict in Iraq were to move west, it could open
up religious fault lines from Baghdad to Lebanon… an awesome prospect
for the entire Arab world.” Alas, this was written by one R Fisk,
published on 7 July 2006 – almost exactly eight years ago – and printed
on page 29.
But just to finish off, here’s a Reuters report from
Mosul that will sound all too familiar to readers these past few weeks:
“Insurgents have set police stations ablaze, stolen weapons and brazenly
roamed the streets of Mosul as Iraq’s third largest city appeared to be
sliding out of control...” A little problem, of course. This Reuters
dispatch was filed in 2004 – 10 years ago! On that occasion, it was the
US military, not the Iraqi army, which had to recapture Mosul from the
rebels (for the second time, by the way).
I’m afraid it’s about
context, this memory-wipe. It’s about the way that armies and
governments want us to believe – or forget – what they are doing, it’s
about ahistorical coverage, and it’s about – and here I quote the
wonderful Israeli journalist Amira Haas – “monitoring the centres of
power”.
The question we should ask – a question many readers and
televison viewers have been asking – is: haven’t we been here before?
And if so, why the repeat performance?
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