Worst and Best Takes on the Israel-Gaza Crisis
It has been a decade since the last major flare-up between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza. In that time, millions of Britons have come of age and many more millions, lacking the excuse of youth, seem not to have paid any attention to the facts of a complicated conflict and prefer easy, soundbite answers.
In 2023, there was not a mere escalation in tensions but a horrific upsurge of violence, triggered by a single day of massacre of civilians on the 7th of October. We struggle for comparisons, but a simple way think of it is as the Israeli 9/11; a day when a terrorist organisation opted to cut the lives short of innocents, in this case many tortured and raped before their eventual slaughter. How anyone could expect Israel not to retaliate against an organisation not only carrying this out, but which had restarted a daily barrage of rocket attacks into the bargain, defies understanding.
It is unfortunate to have to note that our national media has not exactly covered itself in glory on the subject. The Guardian we have, in the main, long expected to show ugly partisanship with any country which opposes Israel, no matter how awful the regime. But we might have expected better of BBC News and even Sky News, which seemed to demand ridiculous levels of proof of the rape and torture aspects of the attacks which most of us realised were real on Day Two, as well as adopting unabridged casualty figures from a terrorist organisation well known for its shameless misinformation.
For balance, there were some poor journalistic takes on the pro-Israeli side too, however; in the Telegraph, Jake Wallis Simons decided that the two-state solution was part of the problem and not the solution. And there were the usual braying voices on the Israeli right.
