Reuters, Vice and LA Times write about Israeli “retaliation.”
Israel claimed that it intercepted an Iranian drone in Israeli airspace on Saturday, February 10; Iran denied that it had a drone there. Israel then bombed a Syrian airbase, saying it was the command-and-control center from which Iran had launched the drone. The Syrian government shot down an Israeli jet that had bombed the base, and Israel subsequently launched more airstrikes against Syria.
Reuters (2/13/18) described the latter airstrikes as Israel having “retaliated” for the downing of its aircraft. Vice (2/13/18) too characterized them as “retaliatory”; the Los Angeles Times (2/11/18) did the same three times. These word choices wrongly imply that Israel was acting defensively, when it was Israel who fired the first shots in the weekend’s exchanges: These outlets were saying that Israel was “retaliating” against Syria for defending itself against an ongoing Israeli attack.
“Retaliation” is an exculpatory term. To say that a party is “retaliating” is to say that their actions are an understandable response to another party’s provocation. As FAIR’s Rachel Coen and Peter Hart (Extra!, 5–6/02) wrote more than a decade and a half ago, the term “lays responsibility for the cycle of violence at the doorstep of the party being ‘retaliated’ against, since they presumably initiated the conflict.” In this case, casting Syria and Iran as the aggressors rests on the dubious assumption that flying a drone over Israel—if Israel’s charge is accurate—is more aggressive than Israel dropping bombs on Syria.
Painting warplanes carrying out an aggressive bombing raid as victims.
It also rests on the flawed assumption that the timeline of hostilities between Israel and the Syrian government began on Friday, February 9. However, despite the Associated Press’s untenable claim (2/10/18) that “Israel has mostly stayed out of the prolonged fighting in Syria,” Israel admits to having bombed the Syrian government and its ally Hezbollah nearly 100 times since the war in Syria began in 2011 (Reuters, 2/6/18). If Brigadier General Amnon Ein Dar, the head of the Israeli Air Force’s Air Division, is to be believed (Ynet, 2/11/18), the Israeli military has “carried out thousands of missions in Syria in the last year alone.”
A Washington Post article (2/10/18) made the similarly dubious assertion that “Israel has largely stood on the sidelines of the Syrian conflict over the past seven years.” In the next paragraph, though, the author acknowledges that “Israel has conducted dozens of covert airstrikes against [the Syrian government-aligned] Hezbollah weapons convoys in Syria,” and the piece goes on, in a spectacular display of self-contradiction, to note that “Israel has carried out a number of significant attacks in Syria in recent months.”
Israel has also supported the Syrian armed opposition for years, the Wall Street Journal (6/18/17) reported, supplying fighters with food, fuel, medical supplies “and money payments to commanders that help pay salaries of fighters and buy ammunition and weapons.” According to the Journal, the Israeli army “is in regular communication with rebel groups,” and Israel “has established a military unit that oversees the support in Syria—a country that it has been in a state of war with for decades—and set aside a specific budget for the aid, said one person familiar with Israeli operation.” There is even reason to believe that Israel has had an alliance with the Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria (Middle East Monitor, 5/26/15; Electronic Intifada, 6/16/15). None of the articles cited here on the February 10 clashes mentioned this important backdrop.
Turning an Occupation Into a ‘Border’
The Golan Heights, an Israeli-occupied part of Syria. (cc photo: Kyle Taylor)
Coverage of these events also failed to correctly describe the status of the Golan Heights, a piece of land that is central to the Israeli/Syrian conflict. Israel occupied the territory in the 1967 war, fought off a Syrian effort to reclaim it in 1973, and illegally annexed it in 1981. Israel has sought to take advantage of the war that has devastated Syria for nearly seven years by, as Matt Broomfield writes in the Electronic Intifada (11/11/16), planning a fivefold increase in the number of Israeli settlers in the Golan, allocating $108 million for 750 new Israeli agricultural projects in the territory, and significantly expanding military forces along the boundary between Syria and the area under Israeli control.
The New York Times (2/10/18) made two references to “the Israeli-held portion of the Golan Heights,” a rather anodyne depiction of territory that is internationally recognized as Syrian, but which Israel seized by force of arms and claimed for itself.
The Washington Post (2/10/18) said that “Israel shares a contentious border with Syria—the Golan Heights.” But the Golan isn’t “a contentious border”; it’s a territory that, despite Israeli claims to the contrary, unambiguously belongs to Syria under international law.
A CNN report (2/11/18) closed by saying that “authorities also accused Syria in November of violating the 1974 ceasefire agreement [with Israel] by “conducting construction work” in the northern part of the Golan Demilitarized Zone.” While it’s unclear which authorities are being referenced, this passage neglects to mention that by late 2015, Israel had built 30 settlements, housing 20,000 settlers, in the Golan, or that a year later it announced plans for 1,600 new homes in the territory, “construction work” that has been roundly condemned by “authorities” like the United Nations.
Moreover, 20,000 Syrians live in the Golan, and many are directly harmed by Israeli policies. According to the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), Israel’s discriminatory land, housing and development policies in the territory have made it hard for Syrians to get building permits, leading to increasingly overcrowded Syrian towns and villages. The UNHRC also points out that Israel has demolished a Syrian home, and that a number of Syrian homeowners have reportedly received demolition notices.
This larger context of Israel’s Syria policies would have helped news readers make sense of what occurred on February 10, but it was absent. Given that Israel had just launched an airstrike on a Syrian base, has apparently bombed Syria close to 100 times in the past six years, has carried out perhaps 1,000 attacks against it in the last year, has backed an armed insurgency against the Syrian government, and has stolen and illegally colonized Syrian land while oppressing and dispossessing Syrian civilians, it is far more accurate to say that Syria retaliated against Israel on February 10.
It only started when Israel shot down an Iranian drone over Israeli territory
Also your bias is so obvious already in your opening paragraph. Israeli “claims” any assault by Iran/Syria, but you state as a fact without any “claim” any response by Israel!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 THAT’S NOT “FAIR” THAT IS CALLED BBBBBBBBBBBBBBIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS while you accuse everyone else of bias!
Of all the statements and facts in the articles that you could have questioned, your response is to simply assert ‘it’ started with Israel shooting down a drone and then accuse the FAIR writer of bias?
And what is ‘it’? If ‘it’ was started by Iranians flying a drone, which was followed by Israel shooting justifiably down that drone, why didn’t ‘it’ just end there? Why was it then justified, for instance, for the Israelis to fly into Syria to attack it? Answer, whatever else one says about the rights and wrongs of them, these hostilities occur inside the wider situation/scenario.
That being the case – or in any case – do Israel or its supporters expect that Syrians or Iranians or Lebanese or whomever they choose to bomb next will look to the sky and cheer the arrival of Israeli jets, welcoming their deaths with open arms?
“Sorry guy, the only legitimate thing we’ve got to do today is die. The Israelis are ‘right’ you see. So we just got to let them kill us.”
“Oh, right you are Ahmed. So see in you the afterlife.”
“Righto.”
One internet wide phenomenon I have witnessed is how “personalities” will “appear” and accuse those that criticize Israel of being anti-Semitic.
To those that hire these sockpuppets I have message for you. You are not convincing anyone. If anything you are undermining legitimate arguments in Israel’s favor.
Well this is much ado about nothing. Israel and Syria have been at war since 1948 and the same applies for Lebanon. There have been armistices. There is no such thing as “International law” because there is no international sovereign. There are international agreements which are sometimes imposed by force on the weaker party and sometimes negotiated freely by the parties. Israel annexed the Golan because it was used to launch attacks on Israel between 1948 and 1967. Syria has forfeited the territory by the law of self-defense.
Every country in the world includes land “taken” from some other country or some other people. There was no magic rule created that suddenly prohibits such conduct. Today, we try to settle disputes peacefully but that is not possible when one side wants to destroy the other side and cannot be trusted. Maybe one day Israel will feel it can trust Syria and might consider returning the land but I don’t really see that happening. Rather Syria should accept it lost the land just like Germany and Japan lost land after WW2.
Yes, it is an endless list of X retaliating against Y so it is pointless to make a moral judgment based on that. Instead, the sound moral judgment is that Israel is the only homeland of the long-persecuted Jewish people and the Israelis are entitled to defend themselves against their self-proclaimed enemies. The Arabs and Muslims have many countries, almost all of which are badly mishandled by them. The problem is clearly on the Arab Muslim side.
Any Syrians in Golan are free to leave, but they don’t want to. The Druse also very much prefer living under Israeli sovereignty rather than Syrian and wish the Israelis would do more to protect Druse in Syria proper.
Just one thing. You write that “every country in the world includes land taken from some other country or some other people”. OK then, should Canada or Mexico take land from the USA, that would go by your rule-making philosophy and be OK. But then, there is much more chance that the opposite could happen. Your imperialistic apron shows…
Thanks to Shupak for exposing the Big Lies with which the totally Zionist controlled U.S. mainstream media have brainwashed the TV-watching masses, proving that, as Voltaire said, “Those who can make people accept absurdities can make them commit atrocities.” Shupak’s is a voice in the wilderness, but refreshingly cogent and truthful.
Unfortunately, media coverage of the israeli-palestinian conflict is always biased, always for Israel. Furthermore, whoever critizes that rogue state’s doings will fast be accused of being anti-semitic. But then, that is not the least surprising in the USA because the jewish lobby there controls politics, the media and even the culture, through their stronghold on all the crap that comes out of Hollywood. The USA should go before a war crime tribunal, for shouldering and altogether defending the ongoing atrocities against the palestinian people.
Excellent review, Gregory, thank you.
Good work Gregory
great mythbusting piece! does the person who wrote this article, does he book cover the Canadian press’s coverage of Israel or the Western press in general?
Gregory is a lefty moron, get lost you loser freak.