27-Nov-16: What lies behind the conflagration?

Haifa on Friday [Image Source: Bloomberg/AFP/Getty]

The New York Times' assessment of the massive fires that had erupted all over Israel in the previous 48 hours was summed up in these striking opening sentences of Isabel Kershner's report this past Friday:

Parts of the port city of Haifa in northern Israel were ablaze on Thursday as wildfires raged through the country for a third day, devouring forests, damaging homes and prompting the evacuation of tens of thousands of people.
Asked how long Haifa was likely to be battling the blazes, Mayor Yona Yahav told reporters, “This is a question that has to be referred to God.”
Israeli officials said the fires had been fanned by unusually strong winds and made worse by a dry atmosphere, but they also said they suspected that many of them had been caused by arson and negligence. Dozens of people have been slightly affected by smoke inhalation, but no serious injuries or fatalities have been reported.
["As Wildfires Rage, Israel Suggests Arson and Asks for Foreign Help", New York Times, November 24, 2016]

For us, the tone of that piece was set by "Israel Suggests Arson" in the headline and the words we have bolded above: "slightly affected by smoke inhalation, but no serious injuries..." Knowing the scale of the massive blazes and which places were - and which were not - affected makes the wording appear especially shabby. It goes on to make mention of Israeli concerns, articulated by the government minister in charge of public security, Gilad Erdan, that

"the professional assessment was that almost half the fires were the result of arson."

For many, the details of that professional assessment might have been something worth knowing. But even though Erdan is quoted further down, none of his views as to how or why the government's people formed the view that arson has played a serious role are stated.

What is stated, in a style that we have come to expect from news channels that share the New York Times approach to the Arab/Israeli conflict, is a restatement of the familiar Palestinian-Arabs-as-victims refrain:

Arab leaders in Israel protested the widespread allegations that Palestinian nationalists were behind many of the fires, saying their land was burning, too, and they condemned what they viewed as unfair accusations against Israel’s Arab citizens, who make up about a fifth of the population. Ahmad Tibi, a veteran Arab lawmaker in the Israeli Parliament, wrote on Twitter: “I called Yona Yahav. Our homes are open to the evacuees. Sad and painful. Let’s join hands to overcome the fire and let’s also douse the flames of incitement. [NYT]

(Israeli allegations about "Palestinian nationalists"?!)

It's now early Sunday morning, and those fires and the price paid by Israeli society are very much in the news here. Much less reported are the very widespread sounds of celebration from right across the Arab world, particularly via the social media.

Click to view our tweet

On Friday we Tweeted [here] a link to a Twitter search of the Arabic words for "Israel burns", calling the many ugly posts a "glimpse into the hatred at the core of the generations-long confrontation of the Arab world with Israel". We also noted [here] that although the search results were all in a language most of our readers probably don't understand, "No Arabic language skill needed to absorb what's in the air".

Here's a situation update [Sunday November 27, 2016 at 2:30 am], with direct quotes from various sources. Note that the New York Times' choice of descriptor - the word "slightly" - somehow doesn't appear even once in any of these reports:

• As of Saturday night, security forces had arrested more than 35 people suspected of either arson or encouraging others to commit arson since Tuesday... Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan (Likud) said Saturday that most of those arrested in connection with the fires are Palestinian residents of the West Bank. A “small minority” of the suspects are Arab Israelis, he added... He called the cases of arson “a new kind of terror,” and said that whereas in the past there was incitement on social media that “encouraged people to go out and stab and car-ram” Israelis, this new version “now encourages them to go out and burn people alive, burn communities alive.” [Times of Israel]
• The IDF and police captured a suspect that was sighted by a Nature and Parks Authority worker starting a fire in the north-western Etzion region. The suspect was handed over to the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) for investigation. The IDF spokesperson's unit stated that during the night an IDF force near Dir Kaddis in the Ephraim region captured three suspects in a vehicle that had two full bottles of fuel, one empty bottle of fuel, a sack with fabric, gloves and lighters... [Jerusalem Post]
• The wildfires that have raged across Israel over five days have left at least 133 people injured, rendered hundreds of homes unlivable and consumed tens of thousands of dunams of protected parks and nature reserves. The Magen David Adom rescue service reported Saturday that among the 133 people treated by the organization for fire-related injuries, one was seriously hurt and three others were moderately injured. The overall tally is likely higher, officials said, as some people – one estimate suggested as many as 50 – may have gone to hospitals on their own for injuries such as smoke inhalation. [Times of Israel]
• Some 2,000 firefighters battled the fires since Tuesday, many of them working in grueling 24-hour shifts alongside 450 soldiers from the Home Front Command and 69 Cypriot firefighters... The battle to push back the flames marked among the most difficult operations ever undertaken by Israel’s firefighters. [Times of Israel]
• Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Croatia, Russia, and the Palestinian Authority have sent planes, helicopters, trucks, and ground crews to assist the some 250 Israeli firefighters and soldiers who have been working for days to extinguish fires in areas surrounding Beit Shemesh, Modi'in, and Jerusalem, as well as in Haifa, Hadera, Zichron Yaakov, Umm al-Fachm, Lachish, Nesher, the Etzion settlement bloc, and outside the northern town of Kfar Vradim... [i24news]
• Haifa was the worst-hit city from the blazes, with 527 homes completely destroyed, according to a Ynet News tally. Other reports have indicated a lower number, more than 400 homes, that were rendered unlivable in the northern city. Some 1,700 Haifa residents are not able to return home by late Saturday, Channel 2 said, because their homes are unlivable... Haifa city officials said Saturday that the fires ravaged some 28,000 dunams (6,900 acres) of land in the city since Thursday. The evacuation of some 60,000 Haifa residents from about a dozen fire-threatened neighborhoods on Thursday was said by Mayor Yona Yahav to have been the biggest such operation in Israeli history... [Times of Israel]
• In all, as much as 130,000 dunams (32,000 acres) of natural forests and bushes were destroyed, about 30 percent more than the territory affected by the Carmel Forest fire of 2010. A great deal of the Judean Hills National Park and the Kfir Nature Reserve were burned... [Times of Israel]



An arsonist evidently caught in the act on Saturday [Image Source]

• On Friday night, all the residents - 350 families - of the town of Neve Tzuf (Halamish) in Samaria were forced to leave their homes after arsonists set fire to 3 different locations throughout the town. Fifteen houses were completely destroyed and collapsed, while 25 other houses were seriously damaged from the flames. Four civilians were lightly injured, including two firefighters... [Israel National News]
• The fires that devastated Halamish were “apparently the result of arson by a gang of Palestinians,” Channel 10 reported on Saturday night. Security officials were quoted as saying that petrol bombs had been found at the scene... [Times of Israel] [NOTE: Halamish, known also as Neve Tzuf, is the Israeli community located immediately adjacent to the notorious Arab village of Nabi Saleh, about which we refer readers to "17-Mar-13: A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns"]

And entirely as expected

• Israeli-Arab politicians said that the government was taking advantage of situation to incite against Arabs and the Palestinians... [National Post quoting the Washington Post]

Those "Israeli-Arab politicians" don't refer to a past history of arson as a tool of Palestinian Arab terror. But Elder of Ziyon does: see his excellent commentary along with newspaper clippings in a Friday post [here]. 

06-Jan-16: Perceptions and realities at the BBC

Inside the BBC newsroom in Broadcasting House, London
[Image Source: BBC]

The BBC ("the largest broadcaster in the world"; "the World's Radio Station"; home to a close-to-incredible 22,000 employees) has much for which to answer in relation to how it systematically fails to call terror "terror". 

It's a painful subject not only because of the damage the BBC's resort to aggressive euphemisms does to people's understanding of terror, but also because of the blatant hypocrisy inherent in the way it adheres to the policy sometimes and ignores it other times. To deeply concerned observers like us, it's plain that the BBC's rule book [BBC Editorial Guideline: Language when Reporting Terrorism] provides a fig-leaf for journalistic values that do no credit to BBC management.

The estimable BBC Watch today posted the kind of well-written and penetrating article that makes its work so valuable. We're referring to "More evidence of BBC News double standards on use of the word terror". There, the writers remind us of what the BBC itself and the laws under which it operates say it's supposed to do, and then expands on

the BBC's inconsistent application of those editorial guidelines and the resulting two-tier system of reporting is evidence of precisely the type of “value judgement” it supposedly seeks to avoid and indicates that the choice of language when reporting acts of terror is subject to political considerations which undermine the BBC’s claim of impartiality. If further evidence of those double standards were needed, it could be found in an article published on the BBC News website on January 3rd under the title “Israelis charged over fatal West Bankfamily arson attack”.

Those are obviously serious allegations. The chronic, systemic issues to which they relate are among the most weighty and consequential that an organization with the mission

to ensure that the BBC gives information about, and increases understanding of, the world through accurate and impartial news, other information, and analysis of current events and ideas.

ever faces.

In its reporting of arrests made this past week following the deaths of three members of a single family in a house fire in Duma, a Palestinian Arab village, the BBC's news reporters and editors used

the words “Jewish terrorists” not in quotation marks and not as quoted text. This was the BBC speaking in its own voice.

Calling the Jewish Israelis who were taken into custody over the Duma deaths “suspected terrorists” is unexceptionable. Israel's government has referred to the lethal fire at the Duma home as terror from the outset. See, as an illustration, "PM condemns ‘horrific, heinous terror attack’ on Palestinians" in Times of Israel on July 31, 2015.

BBC newsroom [Image Source: BBC]

BBC Watch reminds us that other terror attacks, some of them among the most horrifying this country has ever known, stunningly failed to reach the BBC's call-it-terror threshold:

• The almost-unimaginably horrific throat-slitting murders of five members of the Fogel family from Itamar. Three little children, the youngest only 3 months old, along with their parents, killed in their beds as they slept at home in March 2011 (BBC report);
• The murder by shooting of Na'ama and Eitam Henkin of Neria in front of their four little children (the youngest 4 months old) in October 2015 (BBC report)
• The early-morning slaughter - by men using knives, axes and meat-cleavers - in a quiet Har Nof, Jerusalem, synagogue of four worshipers and a police officer in November 2014 (BBC report)
• The shooting death of Malachi Rosenfeld in June 2015 - three other Israelis were wounded in the terrorist gunfire. That attack in fact was never reported at all by the BBC.

BBC Watch says, and we certainly agree, that in deciding not to call these acts of murder "terror", while using "terrorist" to describe the unconvicted Israeli Jews arrested in the Duma case, the BBC ought to be required to tell its funding public why. 

Its management should also be called on to justify their engaging (as we say they are) in highly-politicized decision-making whose contours are influenced more by unspoken policy considerations than by the obligations imposed on the BBC by the laws under which it operates.

Here's some further reading from past posts of ours dealing with the BBC and its terror strategy:

• 08-Aug-15: Another BBC moment
• 01-Apr-15: A question for Jeremy Bowen and his morally-challenged BBC handlers
• 20-Dec-14: BBC, unable to call him "terrorist", says French police killed an "Allahu Akbar attacker"
• 01-Sep-14: Gaza, Israel, the BBC: What children - and their parents - ought to know
• 15-Aug-13: To promote something truly hideous, can't do better than adopt the BBC's approach
• 24-Mar-13: Seed of evil: Whitewashing terror at the BBC
• 10-Jan-13: When terror is ignored by news reporting agencies, the BBC for instance, what can we learn?
• 17-Feb-12: It's final: the BBC is relieved from having to reveal the results of in-house inquiry into whether it is biased against Israel
• 16-Aug-11: When the powers at the BBC put this much effort into something, they must really care
• 15-Jun-07: Journalistic Objectivity from BBC and Other Oxymorons
• 18-Jul-06: What Is It About the BBC?
• 14-Jul-06: A word about the BBC

Finally, on a more generous note, let's a take a moment to offer congratulations to BBC management for having just won a well-deserved major award from Honest Reporting. The prize and the attainments that earned it for them are detailed here.

24-Sep-15: A day of violence - perhaps not as violent as feared

Hebron, moments before the shooting by an IDF soldier of
a woman whose knife was detected by a security machine and
who evidently pulled it to launch a stabbing attack [Image Source: Reuters] 

There's nothing quite as potent as holidays to expose our neighbours' passion for the sort of lethal violence we described yesterday ["22-Sep-15: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?"]

Tonight is the night after Yom Kippur, the 25 hour day of fasting, introspection and prayer that ended here in Jerusalem about 6 hours ago, and is drawing to a close right now in North and South America. It's also the start of the Muslim festival of Eid el-Adha.

Here's a selective, non-chronological summary of how the day (and the evening before it) passed for those charged with keeping Israelis (of every sort) safe.

• A young woman of about 18 attempted Tuesday to stab a Border Police officer at the Kikar Hashoter security checkpoint in Hevron. She was promptly shot and seriously wounded, and eventually succumbed to her injuries later in the day. No Israelis were harmed. [Israel National News, September 23, 2015]. Haaretz reports that the woman, Hadeel al-Hashlamun (in some places, written as Hadeel al-Hashlamon, was shot after launching a stabbing attack on a soldier. It quotes a preliminary investigation into the incident conducted by the IDF's Judea Regional Brigade commander: he found that a metal detector went off when the Palestinian Arab women walked through the security checkpoint; the soldiers manning the post called on her to stop. She failed to do so, and they then fired warning rounds into the ground in front of her. Then "the soldiers claim she pulled out a knife, and that's when they fired shots at her legs. The soldiers said they opened fire for a second time after the woman tried again to raise the knife."
• Just after midnight on Tuesday, the body of an Arab was found near Beit Haggai, south of Hevron. An initial investigation shows that he was killed while attempting to throw a bomb at a military vehicle. Security forces had been alerted to the scene when local residents spotted an improvised roadblock on the highway. As they combed the area, they heard an explosion and later found the body of the terrorist. He was apparently killed while trying to deploy the bomb against the soldiers. [Israel National News, September 23, 2015] The Reuters version: A Palestinian militant died when a bomb he was trying to throw at Israeli forces blew up near the West Bank city of Hebron overnight, officials from both sides said on Tuesday" [Reuters]
• Rocks were thrown Monday evening at Egged's Line 140 bus to the Samarian community of Beit El. The vehicle's windshield was smashed. Thankfully, no injuries. [Israel National News, September 23, 2015]
• Israel Defense Forces troops manning a post in the Jordan Valley arrested a Palestinian man who approached their position carrying an explosive device, the military said Wednesday. The incident occurred hours after the Yom Kippur holiday ended. The suspect was taken in for interrogation, the army said. [Times of Israel, September 23, 2015]
• Two firebombs were hurled at the at the fence of the Samaria community of Psagot, near Ramallah. Palestinian Arabs were suspected, Israel Radio reported. The explosives failed to ignite and no injuries are reported. [Times of Israel, September 23, 2015]
• Rocks were hurled yet again at a Jerusalem Light Rail tram by Arabs in the North Jerusalem neighborhood of Shuafat. Damage was caused to the vehicle but no injuries. Police are searching for suspects. [Times of Israel, September 23, 2015]
• A car was struck by rocks and damaged on Highway 75. [Israel National News, September 23, 2015]
• Several fires were reported to have been set in Jerusalem during Yom Kippur. Arson is suspected. [Times of Israel, September 23, 2015]
• A firebomb caused damage to the balcony and garden of a home in the Jerusalem mixed (Jewish and Arab) neighborhood of Abu Tor after midnight on Wednesday morning (Yom Kippur). [Times of Israel, September 23, 2015]
• A brush fire in the northern Jerusalem neighborhood of Pisgat Ze’ev, close to Moshe Dayan Boulevard, a major thoroughfare - but almost empty on Yom Kippur - is believed to have been deliberately set. [Times of Israel, September 23, 2015]
• A fire in scrubland near Jerusalem’s Biblical Zoo is also believed to have been caused by an act of arson. [Times of Israel, September 23, 2015]
• A fire was set on Cassuto Street, in the intensely-populated Jerusalem neighborhood of Bayit Vagan, close to a synagogue. Fortunately, no injuries were reported [Times of Israel, September 23, 2015]
• Multiple reports of Arab rock-throwers targeting Israeli Jews in their vehicles during the past 36 hours, including Yom Kippur, in parts of northern Israel ["Arab Violence Erupts in Northern Israel During Yom Kippur", Israel National News, September 23, 2015]: Arabs youths placing boulders in the road to block the entrance to the northern community of Dovav on Monday night after Yom Kippur began. Police detained them for questioning. [Israel National News, September 23, 2015]
• Also: Arab youths threw rocks at a passing car near Hosen Junction on Route 89. No one was injured and there was no damage to the vehicle, though police have still opened an investigation. [Israel National News, September 23, 2015]
• Also: An Israeli vehicle traveling near Golani Junction, a major northern intersection, was hit by rocks. Tiberias police are investigating. [Israel National News, September 23, 2015]

Overall, the enlarged police presence in Jerusalem, along with the closing of security checkpoints between Judea-Samaria and Jerusalem to mark Yom Kippur, have had a positive effect on keeping the violence level relatively subdued.

31-Jul-15: In the wake of a lethal arson attack

In an IDF operation, the injured were evacuated to hospital
early today from Duma, the village where the destroyed
home is. [Image Source: Ynet] 

Awful news. Reports of a dead baby, a devastated family, indications of a gloating attacker and first signs of self-justification. It's a scenario we have witnessed from within.

Though it's too early for anyone to be certain of what has happened, two points immediately stand out:

• In all the years (and this week it's exactly 14 years) since our daughter was murdered, we have not found a single Arabic-language post, article, tweet or speech condemning that attack in the center of Jerusalem or the killings. We don't say there have been none, and don't claim perfect knowledge. But we look for them all the time (as we noted here, here and elsewhere) and have not found them - and we very much do want to be wrong on this. On the other hand, there is an endless supply (easily found - no need for us to republish them here) of the opposite in the opinion columns, on Twitter and Facebook and YouTube.
• No society has been free of people with murder on their minds, ever, anywhere. What distinguishes one from another is how that society deals with it. Does anyone doubt that there is going to now be a manhunt, a trial, an incarceration, and revulsion among the people on our side?

And some speculation. It's unlikely (to say the least) that whoever did this terrible deed and eventually gets brought to justice is going to be described as a "detainee" who is "kidnapped" by the police because of his/her "resistance activity". Or that posters are going to be held aloft by protesters demanding his/her release now, and declaring him/her an honored celebrity. Instead, whatever self-justifying argument gets expressed by the perpetrator/s now or later will be pushed aside with disdain by Israel's mainstream.

On the whole, of the two societies, of the two value systems living side by side, we know which we want to be counted among.