Phony Handwringing

In his incisive commentary on journalists who have indiscriminately targeted the IDF's 2000-pound bombs …

The Media Bombs Again

… Thomas Gregg cites a well-researched article in Commentary magazine - https://www.commentary.org/articles/david-adesnik/media-lies-about-israeli-bombs/

The article makes three criticisms of CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, that [1] "Investigations ... ALL make the case that employing such large bombs in dense urban environments is inherently reckless, even criminal” (my emphasis); [2] "Another flaw of the broadsides against Israel’s use of large bombs is that their conclusions rest heavily on analysis provided by experts drawn from PROGRESSIVE ranks ... MILITARY EXPERTS are CONSPICUOUSLY ABSENT” (again, my emphasis); and [3] "Finally, the critics shy away from observing that Hamas has embedded its military infrastructure directly under homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques. This is a war crime, plain and simple, yet the media’s emphasis remains on Israel’s alleged culpability, with no reference to the original sin of locating military infrastructure in prohibited spaces".

The article quoted from two CNN pieces only, but when I searched "site:cnn.com (military analyst) and gaza" and there were many more pieces than two, and many military experts quoted and interviewed. That they all conclude that employing such large bombs in dense urban environments is inherently reckless might be suggestive that, maybe, uh, employing such large bombs in dense urban environments IS inherently reckless?!

In the second CNN piece, it named two "progressives", the first being "Brian Castner of Amnesty International", omitting that he graduated Naval School Explosive Ordnance Disposal at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, in 2003, served multiple tours of duty in the Middle East and Southwest Asia including Iraq, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, led bomb disposal companies in Balad Air Base, Iraq in 2005 and Kirkuk Air Base, Iraq in 2006. The second "progressive" named was "Marc Garlasco of PAX", again omitting that he was Chief of High-Value Targeting in The Pentagon during the Second Gulf War. We all know who Mark Garlasco is and of his sad story, and it is very pertinent to this discussion.

In 2003, he dropped two laser-guided 2000-pound bombs on a house in Basra, believing it contained Chemical Ali. Instead of killing Ali, 17 civilians died in the strike.

Commentary correctly and unconditionally declared Hamas has committed a war crime. Hamas has committed more than one, and is rightly proscribed by all decent states as a terrorist organisation. Many of us are frustrated that the International Criminal Court moves glacially to prosecute these criminals, so Germany has called time and has started arresting and prosecuting them itself. So why does Commentary excuse all Israeli action because of Hamas' "original sin" of human shielding? Since it agrees there is the international humanitarian law of war crimes, why can it not concur with the ICJ's 15-2 majority that Israel has plausibly committed a war crime too?

Commentary is right to hold all three media outlets to their visions to be "truth-seekers" (CNN), "tell ALL the truth" (Washington Post), and "seek the truth" (NYT). Such a pity, then, that Commentary's article exhibits clear biases, distortions, and omissions that undermine its credibility. It fails to critically examine Israel's military tactics and policies, instead serving as a platform for apologetics.

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The other important aspect of Thomas' commentary and the Commentary article is that they both are at pains to explain that the weaponry and how to use them has been honed by experts to achieve military objectives. So a 2000-pound bomb need not be indiscriminate, and in the right hands can be a precision munition. For example, it is perfectly feasible that if it goes through the core of Hamas HQ and is detonated underground, only Hamas terrorists will be killed, which is the military objective. This makes even powerful weapons not just discriminatory, but also proportional to the military objective.

Thomas’ commentary and Commentary also point out, correctly, that Hamas use human shields, which is also a war crime.

The point here is that both use arguments of Just War Theory and the laws of war not only to defend IDF but also to criticise Hamas. Neither argues that there are no laws of war; neither advocates the Sherman Simplifier that because war is hell then whoever started it has no moral defence and whoever did not start it has no moral obligations: "War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our Country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I had no hand in making this war" (Letter of General Sherman to Atlanta's mayor Calhoun, September 12, 1864 https://cwnc.omeka.chass.ncsu.edu/items/show/23).

They didn't make that argument. Until they did:

Commentary "But war is destructive by nature, and Hamas has adopted a strategy ... Israel had to fight with the weapons", and Thomas’ commentary "the responsibility for it rests with Hamas, which started the war"!

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The third aspect of Thomas' commentary and the Commentary article concerns the variables of burst radius, terrain, and method of delivery: there's no getting over the science of it. The journalists were rightly lambasted.

When the war is over, the forensic scientists will move in, and further clarity will be provided, if the evidence hasn't been destroyed, whether wilfully by Hamas, or by the sheer destructiveness of this war.

By the end of January 2024, a large minority of buildings in the Strip had been destroyed, that is, they were rendered permanently uninhabitable, and a large majority damaged. When my wife looked at pictures of merely "damaged" buildings, she exclaimed that she couldn't inhabit any of them. But maybe Corey Scher of City University of New York and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University (who studied the satellite images - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-68006607) and Gazans have lower standards than my wife, because a report using 2021 data from Germany's Friedrich Ebert Stiftung noting that there were 334,710 housing units, also stated that about 8% of inhabited housing units in the Gaza Strip need to be urgently rebuilt to become habitable.

If, therefore, we take the science from Thomas' commentary and the Commentary article and apply it to the 144,000 and 175,000 buildings across the whole Gaza Strip that have been damaged or destroyed, then if you assume an efficiency of 1 munition to 1 building, (because of course the IDF has caused no collateral damage) then a logical and scientific estimate would confidently estimate that 144,000 - 175,000 munitions have been dropped on Gaza.

Understandably, Hamas terrorists move from home to home, necessitating the targeting of so many military targets. And Hamas “has spent more than a decade building hundreds of kilometers of tunnels underneath densely populated areas, turning whole neighborhoods into human shields”. With 2 million Palestinians on 140 square miles of land, Gaza has one of the world's highest population densities. So there isn’t much of the Strip that isn’t a legitimate military target. Yesterday it was proven that Hamas hide in hospitals as the IDF killed 20 terrorists in al Shifa. “Hamas has embedded its military infrastructure directly under homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques … The law of armed conflict dictates that a medical facility can lose its protected status if a belligerent employs it for military purposes”. Quite right.

“But war is destructive by nature, and Hamas has adopted a strategy premised on maximizing the suffering of Gaza’s population”, so Netanyahu, his Cabinet and the IDF decision-makers had no choice, Commentary concludes justifiably.

But wait, it goes on to suggest “there might have been ways to limit the harm despite Hamas’s embedding itself in the civilian population”. No, don’t talk nonsense.