Israel's Catch-22s

Israel faces more Catch-22s in its conflict with the Palestinians than any other nation has faced in modern history.

Joseph Heller’s excellent satirical novel Catch-22 was first published in 1961, central to which was a situation where one action would then immediately corner or trap you with a conflicting action. The phrase has since entered the English language to depict ‘a paradoxical predicament where an individual is trapped by contradictory rules or conditions, making it impossible to escape.’ Here are the many Catch-22s and contradictory/paradoxical situations or false claims that Israel faces.

- When Israel builds fences and barriers to prevent their civilians being slaughtered in waves of terrorist attacks, they get accused of being ‘divisive’. These are then labelled ‘apartheid’ barriers rather than their obvious security aims and intentions.

- Israelis are regularly labelled ‘Nazis’ by Palestinians, yet it is Palestinians who term Jews ‘sons of dogs and monkeys’ and have an open and admitted agenda of killing Jews. Martyrdom while killing Jews is sanctified, with the Palestinian Authority having an open reward programme – ‘Pay for Slay’ – for terrorists who kill Jews and their families.

- Israelis are often labelled ‘apartheid’, yet they have 1.8 million Arab/Palestinians within Israel, 20% of their population, living freely and without hindrance or prejudice. Conversely, there are 530,000 Israeli citizens living within the West Bank-Judea-Samaria who face extreme prejudice, are labelled ‘settlers’ and require constant protection from terrorist attacks, with Abbas of Fatah proclaiming that the final divide between Israel and a future Palestinian State will ‘not be drawn until every Jew is the other side of it.’ A kindergarten child could work out which party is in fact guilty of ‘apartheid’.

- In the current Gaza War, Israel has dropped 18 million leaflets and sent 42 million text messages warning civilians away from danger areas – lengths that no other fighting force in the last fifty years has gone to in order to avoid civilian casualties – yet still they are falsely accused of ‘genocide’.

- While Israel has gone to great lengths to reduce civilian casualties in the current Gaza War, Hamas have made every effort to maximize those casualties through: a: Not building any bomb shelters in the 20 years of its regime; in contrast, neighbouring Sderot, the closest Israeli town to the Gaza border, has more bomb shelters than any other region on earth. b: Constructing their terrorist tunnels under vulnerable civilian areas such as schools, hospitals, UN Centres and refugee camps. c: By not allowing any civilians to shield in their terror tunnels, these are exclusively for Hamas terrorists and weapons/munitions. In contrast, in the WW2 Blitz, London’s underground stations became one of the main points of refuge from bombing raids. In addition, in digging and building the terrorist tunnels, hundreds of Gazan children have lost their lives, some as young as 8 years old. If ‘genocide’ is at all to be considered a factor, then why have there been no accusations of Hamas causing/enacting genocide against their own people?

- Israel is regularly accused by Hamas of killing ‘mainly women and children’, but final statistics show that 68-72% of those killed have been 15+ males, 87% of them involved in combat and hostilities. It has further been revealed in the Arab Press (Saudi newspaper) that Hamas have recruited child soldiers as young as 12 years old.

- Israel has been accused of killing more journalists than in any war of the past 30 years. A crucial detail left out of this statistic is that 80% of those killed have in fact been Hamas militants and terrorists posing as journalists. The main news-grabbing headline should therefore read: ‘More militants and terrorists have been found posing as journalists in the Gaza War than in any other war of the past 30 years.’ A similar headline could indeed be carried for medics.

- A number of Israel’s critics propound that much of the current situation and Gaza war has come about through Israel not allowing Palestinians their own State. Yet when Israel came closest to that with completely vacating Gaza in 2005 and leaving Palestinians to their own devices, within no time Hamas had taken complete control and turned it into a terrorist enclave, constructing hundreds of miles of terrorist tunnels to store weapons and rockets and constantly firing rockets at Israel - finally culminating in the massacre of October 7^th.

- In turn, many of Israel’s critics claim that the current situation has derived from Israel’s ‘occupation’ of Palestinian territory. But in the case of Gaza, there was no ‘occupation’, not a single Israeli soldier was stationed on Gazan soil after 2005. Yet it led to a far more hostile and belligerent situation than the West Bank-Judea-Samaria, where there is a regular presence of Israeli soldiers and security. It could therefore be argued that a ‘lack of occupation’ led to the situation in Gaza, as clearly if Israel had maintained an armed soldier and security presence, Hamas would have been unable to rise up and take control, let alone build an extensive network of terror tunnels and stockpile of rockets.

- When Israel built security fences and divides with Gaza, they were suddenly accused of creating an ‘open prison’. However, this worked both ways. Israeli citizens were similarly hemmed in and unable to visit Gaza markets or buy fish direct from Gazan fisherman – as they used to prior to 2005. If they did venture across, they would be summarily kidnapped or killed. Conversely, up to 40,000 Gazans regularly crossed into Israel for work, or to shop in Israel, without any threat or hindrance.

- In talking about borders and barriers, the focus is always on Israel. Yet Gaza also has an extensive border with Egypt, whose security barrier is indeed far higher and more robust. If Gaza is indeed an ‘open prison’, then it seems a paradox that no blame is ever levied at Egypt for this situation.

- Due to Hamas skimming anything from 30-40% of the aid and food entering Gaza to fund its own terrorist operations, Israel in league with the USA set up an independent operation – GHF (Gaza Humanitarian Fund) - in order to get food and aid direct to the people of Gaza. However, because of the threat this posed to Hamas’s skimming and terrorist funding operation, they quickly flooded the media with false stories of Israel firing at and killing numerous Gazans trying to get aid and food, followed up by false images of starving infants in their mother’s arms – when in fact the children depicted all had serious underlying medical conditions totally unrelated to lack of food. In contrast, their mothers in the pictures were perfectly healthy and well-fed, some even rotund and noticeably fat. To date, the GHF have provided almost 8 million food packages directly to Gazan civilians. This is probably one of the first times in history that a nation making a concerted effort to get food and aid directly to a population has been accused of ‘starving them’.

- Israel is often accused of ‘stealing’ Palestinian land. However, from as early as 1860, returning Jews/Zionists started rebuying land in the Levant/Palestine, often paying double or triple the price from local Arabs. The only land transferred without payment were ‘public land’ areas previously owned by the British and Ottomans: parks, roads, public buildings, desert areas. Notwithstanding, a ‘land compensation board’ was established in 1950 to recompense any private Palestinian landowners who had lost their land, at a rate of ‘current going value + 20%’. This is therefore one of the first times in history where a people who have paid on average double the price for land have been accused of ‘stealing it’.

- Much is made of the ‘Nakba’ in which in 1948, 650,000 local Arabs/Palestinians became displaced in the wake of the 1947-48 war and became refugees. However, little mention is made of the 1 million Jewish refugees who between 1948-1950 became displaced or were expelled from Arab lands in Iraq, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Iran and Sudan. Main reason being that the Jews expelled/fleeing Arab lands were immediately absorbed within Israel, so were no longer refugees. In contrast, the 650,000 Palestinians who fled or were expelled, the surrounding Arab nations to the large extent refused to absorb them, keeping them as stateless refugees. The paradox of this refusal is that those Arab lands have a combined area of over 5 million square miles in which to absorb Palestinian refugees compared to Israel’s 8,630 square miles into which to absorb Jewish refugees. Also, in contrast to the Israel board set up to financially compensate Palestinian private landowners, no similar board was set up in Arab lands to compensate the 1 million Jews fleeing/expelled.

- While the Western media portrays itself as open and fair-handed, in many cases they have accepted information from Hamas – a brutal, autocratic terrorist regime with no free press and with a long history of providing false information – or from Hamas-fed sources and journalists, without question, often repeating it verbatim. However, they have in turn often discounted, questioned or ignored information from Israeli sources – a nation with an open democracy and a free press. The paradox is extreme.

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John Matthews is an experienced writer and journalist. The author of 24 books, including two centred around WW2 and the holocaust in the name of J.C. Maetis (his father’s original Jewish name) his first experience of writing about the Middle East came as a war correspondent covering the last years of the Lebanese Civil War, which led to his second book, ‘The Crescents of the Moon’. He has since written on the subject for a number of journals, including The Times, Sunday Times, Newsweek, The Independent and The Spectator. He was also in the run-up to the millennium editor of European Brief, the main magazine for the European Parliament, editing the likes of Tony Blair, Al Gore and Henry Kissinger on subjects ranging from the fall of the Berlin Wall and European unity, climate change and nuclear fusion to, once again, the Middle East. He lives in London with his wife and family.

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