If the IDF identifies an ambulance as an enemy, what will the small fry in the studios say?
In the television news programs, the main issue was not the suspicion that Israeli soldiers had committed a terrible war crime in Rafah, but rather the “reputational damage” caused by the change in the IDF’s versions.
By Yoana Gonen • Translated by Sol Salbe
TV review deals with what appears on the screen. But sometimes, what is missing from the line-up is just as important. For example, the hush surrounding the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians. For the past year and a half, a horrific war has been raging in Gaza, and all this time the local media has almost completely avoided covering the atrocities committed by Israel. Rather than serving as a watchdog, the news programs act as enthusiastic, flushed cheerleaders, thus playing a critical role in the mental suppression mechanism.
The walls of indifference were finally, albeit partially, breached by the case of the 15 first responders who were killed by IDF fire in the Rafah region and were buried in the sands with their emergency vehicles. The IDF Spokesperson claimed that the ambulances drove suspiciously and without flashing lights, and that this story would have been buried, figuratively and literally, had the video that proved that it was a lie not turned up. In the wake of the storm that arose around the world, some of the TV channels in Israel yesterday actually mentioned this on the sidelines of their news programs. The issue was not the suspicion that Israeli soldiers had committed a terrible war crime, of course, but rather the “reputational damage” caused by the IDF’s change of versions.
“On the public relations level, this is a very serious attack,” former diplomat Yaki Dayan explained on Channel 12. The Palestinians’ terrorism is so deeply ingrained that even when Israel slaughters them, they are in fact revealed to be suicide bombers who blow up Israeli Hasbara. “This is the last thing that the State of Israel, and certainly the IDF, needed at this moment,” remarked Foreign Desk correspondent Keren Bezalel sadly. Indeed, we have found the real victims of the incident.
Even when the IDF is caught in a blatant lie, the media frames the distortion as a mishap that stemmed from haste. “Why does the army decide to put out such an unripe account?” asked host Adi Zarfi, as if it were an immature avocado and not a systematic cover-up. “The initial version that is being conveyed is a rushed version,” former IDF Spokesperson Ran Kochav explained to her, “and after in-depth investigation… The facts tend to change.” But the facts have not changed. What has changed is that a video exposing the lie was discovered, and therefore the IDF Spokesperson was forced to invent a new version that would justify shooting the paramedics and burying them in a mass grave.
The truth is that the soldiers were not required to justify themselves at all, as in tens of thousands of other cases of killing of innocents in Gaza. In a report aired on Channel 14 on 3 April, the commander of the Golani reconnaissance unit told his soldiers, before entering the Gaza Strip: Everyone you meet is an enemy. You identify a figure — you shoot up, you annihilate , you move on.” If every figure you identify is an enemy, an ambulance with flashing lights is also an enemy, and even a toddler in their bed is an enemy. You annihilate them and move on. The news programs prefer to bury their heads in the sand and pretend that the shooting and whitewashing are a specific mistake, but no matter how hard they try, this horrific reality cannot be buried.
