Matti Friedman: The Real War in the Middle East Comes into Focus

[Valin]

The Free Press

Like a flash going off in a dark room, Iran’s attack on Israel has finally given the world something valuable: a glimpse into Tehran’s true intentions.

Matti Friedman

April 14, 2024

JERUSALEM — After a night of tension and aerial booms here in Jerusalem—including family time spent in the safe room as the air-raid siren blared in the street and the Iron Dome worked overhead—the direct consequences of the unprecedented Iranian attack on Israel aren’t clear yet. But like a flash going off in a dark room, the attack has finally given the world something valuable: a glimpse of the real war in the Middle East. 

For the past six months, since the Hamas massacres of October 7, the ideological forces arrayed against Israel have done their best to make this seem like a war in which there are two sides, and that these sides are Israeli soldiers and Palestinian civilians. This information campaign is as critical to Israel’s enemies as the physical war, because it erodes the Western support that Israel needs to win and survive. Its successful execution has turned a jihadi war against the Jewish minority enclave in the Middle East into a story about Jewish oppression and even “genocide” of Palestinians, a story that has become the focus of the increasingly deranged discourse in the liberal West.

Israel’s ideological antagonists these days, unfortunately, aren’t only Hamas and Iran, but now include swaths of the Western press and academia as well as the NGO world that provides much of the fodder for Western storytelling. (Look no further than Olivia Reingold’s report from a conference of anti-war activists in Chicago as news of the attack broke.) This is the main reason so many observers struggle to understand what’s going on. As in previous rounds of fighting in Gaza, the Hamas tactic of hiding fighters and weapons behind civilians, and of feeding false casualty numbers and selective images to a credulous press, generated an overpowering impression of needless civilian tragedy—and thus outrage designed to tie Israel’s hands as well as generate animosity toward Jews around the world. 

This largely fictional narrative is a continuation of many years of press coverage insisting that the story here is an “Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” a framing that sets up the region’s six million Jews as a powerful majority and the region’s hundreds of millions of Arabs and Muslims, the vast majority of whom are not Palestinian, as a beleaguered minority.

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(Look no further than Olivia Reingold’s report from a conference of anti-war activists in Chicago as news of the attack broke.)

 

 

[Valin]

This is why we invented the term "no-brainer."
William Otis
Apr 14, 2024

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This brings me to today’s topic, the latest attack on Israel by Iran and the jihadists in league with it. The question — at least it’s being called a question — is whether Israel should retaliate. As soon as the attack began, I started listening for the tip-off vocabulary of anti-Semitic Left (that being most of it): de-escalation, restraint (restraint on Israel, that is), “diplomatic solution,” anything about Gaza, particularly if jammed in the same sentence as “humanitarian crisis,” and the old stand-by, Palestinian oppression.

I missed the term that’s jumped to the head of the line, “wider war.” We have to avoid a “wider war.” This pretends that, if you’re a Jew in that part of the world and behave with suitable (to wit infinite) submissiveness, you can avoid the “wider war”that’s been going on against you since forever. As Matti Friedman explains:

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I briefly heard Alan Dershowitz sum up the “question” about retaliation with a pithiness we could use to keep in mind. Why should Iran stop its behavior when it’s never been given a reason to stop?

For 45 years, our country, the world, and Israel in particular, have seen the rewards of the Democratic Party’s grotesque incompetence, to use a polite word. In 1979, Carter handed Iran, formerly an ally of the United States, to the mullahs and their endless chants of death to America. He furrowed his brow while our hostages were paraded. Still, with him, it was probably cowardice more than affirmative anti-Americanism. Things changed by the time Obama became President — the pallets of cash while Iran continued to sponsor Islamic terror (which you still can’t call by its name lest you be labeled an “Islamophobe”). How much of that cash was and is being used to build The Bomb and, for one other example, fund murderous expeditions like October 7, remains a subject about which the MSM’s “investigative journalism” continues to be conspicuously incurious. Now it’s Biden, in the 190th day of his own hostage crisis — which of course is seldom referred to as a crisis, or referred to at all now that I think of it, the better to divert our attention to — well, to whatever, last week the Perils of Being a Gazan and today the need to avoid a “wider war.” Next week it will be something else, the one constant being that Jews will be at fault.

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