Tag Archives: Palestinian

Oscar Nominations for Hamas & ICJ Short Films

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I know it’s early to talk about the 2025 Oscars, but two new films deserve to start the ball rolling, for the category of Best Live Action Short Film—not documentary of course, which is separate. Best Live Action Short Film rewards fictional films, although docudrama-like simulations are eligible.

Both films appeared this past week, but I’ll start with the simpler and more dramatic one, aired today. Hamas, in it’s time-honored style, effectively used a static shot of a masked, uniformed fighter talking directly to the camera in his inimitable stern, you-can-trust-me fashion. Timed perfectly with its midnight release, it gives us a static photo of a man in camo with a keffiyeh-wrapped face holding up a stiff instructional finger that takes us right back to first grade, and is all the more compelling for that scary memory. Also, the only moving part of the picture at first—a rippling light-green audio wave sound tracing against a dark-green background—draws our eyes like a line of dancers.

The captioned translation says, “Our fighters carried out a complex operation on Saturday afternoon in the northern Gaza Strip.” Soon we see a video of a bloody person in military clothing being dragged limp up across a tunnel floor; next, three photos of weapons “seized” in this “complex operation.” Since the weapons shown are not Israeli, the filmmakers can be faulted for not getting better advice on how to achieve verisimilitude with their props. But film fans around the world want entertainment, not petty accuracy.

Our teacherly instructor goes on, “Our fighters lured a Zionist force into an ambush inside one of the tunnels…and clashed with them from close range. Our fighters withdrew after blowing up the tunnel and leaving all members of the force dead, wounded, or captured…”

Now, Israel claims no such event occurred, and it is almost never possible to conceal the death of a single soldier for more than a few hours while the family is notified. Killing “all members of” a “Zionist force” without Israeli news media finding out would take some added ingenuity on the part of Hamas, but they can do a lot now with fictional film. Adding an ad campaign with an Israeli soldier-doll in a Hamas fist and a bare arm stuck out of a tunnel grasping at a Hamas boot gives the film true artistic flavor.

Nevertheless, and I am sure this will be controversial, I think the best short-film fiction of the year so far comes from the International Court of Justice, in its filmed reading of it’s latest judgment against Israel in yet another case brought by South Africa. The Court’s cinematic achievement extends also to shielding South Africa from allegations that it is both authoritarian and corrupt, but that is not its main Oscar-worthy accomplishment here.

That is of course its magnificently devious account of its own conclusions. It didn’t really misstate them, it just put them in such a way that gullible news outlets like the New York Times could publish completely misleading headlines. Brilliant work on the part of the screenwriters here! And the head of the ICJ read his lines with such seriousness!

Here is the New York Times headline: “U.N. Court Orders Israel to Halt Rafah Offensive.” Perhaps they thought their subtitle would be a helpful clarification: “The International Court of Justice ruling deepens Israel’s international isolation, but the court has no enforcement powers.” Ah, pity. The court can’t enforce what the Times falsely claims it ruled.

To find out what it did rule, we have to actually read the script of the film as performed by the Chief Judge of the ICJ. The operative passage is #57 in the 18-page ruling:

“THE COURT… Indicates the following provisional measures: The State of Israel shall, in conformity with its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, and in view of the worsening conditions of life faced by civilians in the Rafah Governorate: (a) By thirteen votes to two, Immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah Governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part…” (italics mine)

Now let’s see… does the New York Times reporting capture the meaning of this ruling, including the words I italicized? Hmm. Now, what about the Wall Street Journal headline? “U.N. Court Orders Israel to Halt Some Military Operations in Rafah.” Okay… Court Orders Israel to Halt Rafah Offensive… or Court Orders Israel to Halt Some Military Operations in Rafah…

I’m thinking about my first-grade teacher again, the one who taught me how to read. I don’t think she would be proud of me if I chose the Times headline as the better description of what the ICJ ordered. I’ve written many articles for both the Times and the Journal, and I promise you I know the limitations of both, but in this case only the Journal’s headline writer clearly knew how to read.

The court’s conclusions do mandate two and only two actions: That Israel re-open the Rafah Crossing for humanitarian aid, and that Israel give access to a fact-finding committee to inspect conditions throughout Gaza.

The first is based on a misconception; the Rafah Crossing was closed from the Egyptian side, not the Israeli side. This is proven by a phone call from President Biden to President el-Sisi this weekend resulting in Egypt’s agreeing to send aid through the Karem Abu Salem (Kerem Shalom) crossing at the junction of the Egypt-Israel-Gaza borders. This crossing was closed on May 5 after Hamas bombed it to stop the aid flow. Anyway, aid is flowing, never enough to overcome what Hamas steals after entry, but flowing nevertheless.

As for the second mandate, if the committee expects to be protected by the IDF, it had better follow their advice about where and when.

Meanwhile, as to the ICJ’s main “provisional measure,” Israel continues to refrain from any action in Rafah “which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Still, the court’s ability to trick the New York Times and some other news outlets into misreading its conclusions—or allow them deliberately to spin them against Israel with all their power—is Oscar-worthy. Unfortunately it seems a bit of a stretch to give the Wall Street Journal headline writers a Pulitzer for knowing how to read.

War Crimes? Really?

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This has been an intriguing week. President Biden announced that he was putting a hold on shipments of certain American arms, notably hundreds of 2,000 pound and 500 pound bombs, because Israel had begun limited operations in Rafah without waiting for a hostage deal. A week or so earlier, Antony Blinken said that Israel had made an extremely generous offer and “the ball” was in Hamas’s court. Hamas eventually came back with a “counter-offer” of many detailed pages that amounted to, You stop the war, we win, you lose, you release thousands of terrorists, we give you back some hostages, dead and alive, and we once again rule Gaza as we did on October 6.

All concerned knew that this was not something Israel could have taken remotely seriously, and it amounted to no change in Hamas’s months of stonewalling. Yet most Western media, before they had time to read the document, took Hamas’s word that it was a real counter-offer, and proceeded to castigate Israel for going in a limited way into Rafah—beginning, of course, with the orderly evacuation of 100,000 civilians.

This arms shipment holdup was largely political posturing. There is little likelihood that Israel would use those kinds of bombs again (although it did early in the war), and all indications are that Israel’s plan for its Rafah operation, preceded by systematic civilian evacuations, was approved behind the scenes by the Americans. Netanyahu has treated Biden shabbily, and he finally got his wrist slapped, along with a clear warning that Biden could hit him harder in the future.

Biden is not betraying Israel nor is he flip-flopping, he is threading a very narrow needle. Neither he nor we nor the world can afford to have him lose the coming election, and so he tried to show that he would make it impossible for Israel to use those big bombs in crowded Rafah. This point is moot, because Israel was not planning to use them, and even if it was, it has enough of a stockpile to do it anyway.

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The Time of Our Freedom?

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Today is the thirtieth Sabbath of the Gaza War. It is also the Sabbath of Passover, the holiday called z’man cherutenu—the time of our freedom—since it celebrates the exodus of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt. This comes from the Haggadah, the service read at the Passover seder, or sacred—and ordered—meal.

The service also contains the words, “In each generation they have stood against us to destroy us.” So many generations. So many different they’s. The Haggadah in some form has existed for at least two thousand years, and I don’t know when these exact words first appeared, but they are the same in my facsimile edition of The Copenhagen Haggadah of 1739, exactly two centuries before the Holocaust. And my friend Dr. Shlomit Finkelstein found the same words in a Haggadah dated to the late 1330s in Catalonia.

Thus, centuries before the Holocaust, before even the Cossack attempted genocide against Jews in 1648, Jews said every Passover, “In each generation they have stood against us to destroy us.” In this generation, the grotesque mass atrocities committed against Jews by Hamas—who soon promised to do the same a thousand times, as their charter pledges them to do—easily serve to confirm the Haggadah’s grim words. (For details of what Hamas did, see my description and this moving film starring Sheryl Sandberg.)

In the past week or two, US college campuses have imploded with demonstrations and encampments in favor of Palestinians and often Hamas, and virulently anti-Israel and often antisemitic. I say imploded rather than exploded because although they have spread throughout the country, they are implosive because they have mainly damaged themselves. Many have crossed the line from free speech to illegal action, inviting local and state police suppression. Ironically, they have risen up just as deaths in Gaza have reached their lowest levels ever. (See chart.)

Deaths in Gaza as counted by Hamas’s Health Ministry and reported by the UN (OCHA).

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Gaza: The Goebsie Big Lie-Blood Libel Awards

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Today, I will reveal the honorees for First Annual—okay, they might have to be more frequent—Big Lie-Blood Libel Awards, for the individuals or collectives who have done the most recently to promote the Big Lie and the Blood Libel against the Jewish people (see chart for hints).

Timeline of deaths with blood libelers

But first: Just as the holy, peaceful, month of Ramadan—including four sacred Fridays and the feast of Eid-al-Fitr—blessedly passed with none of the predicted Islamic violence on the Temple Mount (the Noble Sanctuary), in the Middle East, and throughout the world, so the martial, belligerent, massive, unprecedented attack on Israel last night passed with virtually no damage. The coalition that completely blocked the attack included the US, the UK, France, and Jordan shooting down Iranian missiles and drones and Saudi Arabia providing logistic support. Imagine the degree of cooperation that such coordinated response must have involved. Now imagine the formidable coalition that will follow the war, annealed by alliance against this attack. My brother likens the attack to an amateur boxer throwing a hundred punches none of which lands, then waiting with tired arms for the professional blow that will pop his lights out. Now we’ll see what punch Israel uses. Its stock market finished higher today.

But back to our Big Lie-Blood Libel Awards, known colloquially as Goebbsies in honor of Joseph Goebbels, the master propagandist who put it to history’s most effective use.

The chart above shows today’s Goebbsie honorees against the timeline of the dramatically declining deaths in Gaza since the war started. These are total deaths in successive two-week periods (the blue line) as provided by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry and reported by the United Nations. There are many reasons to doubt these numbers, which are almost certainly over-estimates, but I am accepting them for present purposes because I want to focus on the steep decline—by Hamas’s numbers—and the remarkable fact that the lower the number of deaths got, the bigger the Big Lie got and the Bloodier the Blood Libel got as well. Five of the six Big Lies and Blood Libels shown here were smeared on Israel and the Jews when the number of deaths was about one quarter of what it was in the first month of the war—and declining. Continue reading →

Gaza War: A Visual Aid

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(Blogging on the Gaza War since January 14th. Please link them on to others.)

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then I shouldn’t have much more work to do this week. I started with the very good public website of Kevin Drum, who presented the first graph in the top half of the picture (panel a). Based on data from the (Hamas-run) Gaza Health Ministry via the UN, it displays the daily deaths (red dots) of Gazans from October 7 to February 19, with a linear function (dotted black line) fitted to the daily data. This function declines from between 300-400 in October to 100 in February.

The lower part of the figure (panel b, my responsibility alone) is my attempt to extend Drum’s excellent graph from February to today. The daily deaths (also from the Gaza Health Ministry via the UN) are shown as blue dots, with the red line representing the 7-day moving average. Please note that the two graphs are on very different scales. Continue reading →

Gaza War: Silly Sauce

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(Scroll down to see earlier posts starting January 14th.)

Given certain remarks in the news lately, I thought it might be silly season, but not everybody is silly. Upon careful investigation I learned about Silly Sauce. Like beluga caviar, it is only for a select few—but not the rich. Only political leaders who can’t resist sipping it and don’t mind brain fog.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) first alerted me. He must have sipped some from his hip flask before going down to the Senate floor on March 14th. It was an interesting speech, touching to me in many ways. He said he was speaking for “a silent majority” of “mainstream Jewish Americans” in his “nuanced” view of the Gaza War. He’s a landsman of mine; I went to the next high school over from his a few years earlier. We grew up in the same culture of Brooklyn-Jewish love for Israel in the time when its survival was unlikely. “We love Israel in our bones.”

But, “What horrifies so many Jews especially…is that Israel is falling short” of “distinctive Jewish values.” What exactly are those? He recounts the history of the conflict and the “perfidy” of Hamas in a way that most Jews, including Israelis, can accept. He blasts the right-wing thugs in the Israeli cabinet and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas as “obstacles to peace.”

Fine. But he gives Bibi Netanyahu special attention. Almost all he says about Bibi would be endorsed by the great majority of Israelis. Eighty-five percent disapprove of Bibi, and a growing number support early elections—which Schumer crossed a line to call for.

But here’s the silly part: Schumer calls Bibi too an obstacle to peace, which implies that without him the war would be different. It would not. If 85 percent of Israelis dislike Bibi, about the same percentage approve of how the war is being conducted. Replace Bibi with Gantz or Gallant, and you will get the same war, the same operation in Rafa, the same checking of aid trucks for weapons. The vast majority of Israelis want the war to continue until Hamas is completely disabled.

Apparently Chuck then passed the Silly Sauce on to Vice President Kamala Harris, Continue reading →

Gaza War: Academic Fairy Tales

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(Scroll down to see earlier posts in this series, beginning January 14th.)

Fair Harvard, thy sons to thy jubilee throng,

And in faith with thy glorious past,

By these odious rites now surrender thee o’er

To the murders and rapes of Hamas.*

This rewrite of the first stanza of Harvard’s alma mater—find the original wording and the history here—is impolite but not unfair, given the recent outpouring of hatred of Israel and, to a lesser extent, of Jews, on this nearly 400-year-old American campus. Most pointedly, Harvard’s students and faculty have supported a terror group whose grotesque atrocities against Jews and others in Israel are unprecedented in modern times. Can Harvard students and faculty be useful idiots, shills for Hamas mass murderers?

Don’t get me wrong. I have no desire to limit the free speech of deluded or even malicious faculty and students. Only a few have gone so far as to merit a legal crackdown against them. I’m not saying it’s fine to spew hatred of Israel, Zionism, and Jews, merely that I have to weigh these wrongs against the wrong of muzzling them, and given the first amendment’s protections, letting them puke up their lies is the lesser of two evils. But that doesn’t mean there are no remedies.

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wisely said that the remedy for noxious speech is more speech, and Jewish students on these campuses can avail themselves of that opportunity—although at a risk of harm if they do or even if they let it be known that they are Jewish. They of course cannot have anything like the kind of college experience they signed up and paid for, just to stay in their rooms and go warily to class in groups and in daylight hours. That is the price they must pay for the first amendment protections of others, and ultimately their own, if they go to those schools.

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Gaza, Israel, and the United Notions

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I was born in August 1946; the first UN meetings were held in London in January that year. So the UN and I are the same age—you might say, nonidentical twins. I have followed it from an early age, and I am glad to report that—despite the small scale and limitations of my lifetime efforts—I have done better with my challenges than my twin has in its equal lifetime.

Per the UN itself, the genocides in Rwanda and the Balkans in the 1990s proved “in the worst possible way” that the UN repeatedly failed to prevent this horror, despite being able to do so. It failed to stop and even to recognize earlier genocides in Indonesia (1960s) and Cambodia (1970s) and much more recent ones in Darfur, Iraq and Syria (against the Yazidis), and Myanmar (the Rohingya). The UN rights council refused to discuss China’s ongoing genocide of Uighur Muslims.

The UN’s failure to prevent small wars—more than 200 in its lifetime and mine—speaks for itself; advocates argue that it has prevented World War III, but that is conjectural. Russia vetoed a Security Council resolution condemning its Ukraine invasion, although the General Assembly passed it overwhelmingly. The UN has done good work against hunger and slavery and promoting sustainable development, but has consistently fallen short of its own stated goals. More than 780 million people (and rising) face hunger, and there are more slaves in the world today than ever before in human history.

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Gaza Plus

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From the moment it moved its first aircraft carrier into the eastern Mediterranean, the US has adamantly said and said again that it wants to avoid a regional war. Despite that reluctance, regional war is here.

In a sense it has been from the start, since Iran (a non-Arab, often anti-Arab country) is on the east of the region, but its empire of vassals and proxies control Lebanon, Gaza, and Yemen as well as infiltrating Iraq and Syria with its own soldiers (the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, IRGC) and arming Hamas in the occupied West Bank.

After the US accepted more than 160 attacks on its limited forces and facilities in Iraq and Syria, three US soldiers (two women and a man) were killed about two weeks ago, and the US vowed retaliation. Heavy strikes directed at key targets in Syria and Iraq occurred last Friday night, with more to come.

The Houthis, the terrorist group controlling Yemen, has for months attacked merchant ships in the Red Sea, impeding twenty percent of world commerce and decimating Suez Canal traffic. The group also attacks US naval vessels. Continue reading →

Gaza: Hamas Declares War

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Last Tuesday I was privileged—or voluntarily burdened, by invitation of the Israel Consul—with the chance to view one of the restricted IDF videos documenting the atrocities of October 7th. This is a compilation of video recordings from bodycams, phone, and dashboard cameras belonging to attackers, victims, and rescuers as well as CCTV from the locations attacked.

As hard as this was to watch, it did not go as far as I expected based on reports by people who saw even worse video, surviving witnesses, and the unfortunately limited postmortem evidence. I will return to some of those. But first I want to describe this video. If you are squeamish, read no further than the next paragraph; even if you are not, you will probably be disturbed.

This is the paragraph anyone can read. What made the greatest impression on me in the video was the joy on the faces of the Hamas attackers as and after they did their atrocities. Because of the way the human brain is wired, the difference between video and verbal description is not as great for atrocities as it is for facial expressions. I had heard many descriptions of atrocities, and seeing them was important, but those facial expressions are seared into my mind—when these young men turned back toward their colleagues’ phones with faces bursting with smiles. Nothing diabolical here. The smiles were big, warm, and bright, conveying the  most spontaneous joy—pride, satisfaction, and triumph, yes—but most vividly, joy. Continue reading →