She’s wrong of course… I’m sure that’s the line fox news is feeding their audiences. There hasn’t been any evidence of Hamas going after random people trying to get food, rather they have gone after some of the gangs that the Israeli government has been trying to empower, who are the ones going after aid trucks. Hamas are known to go after people they find to be problematic, especially if they are seen as collaborators with the occupation or are aligned with Fateh (the other major Palestinian political party which is more secular, was started by Yasser Arafat).
That does seem to be true. Yes, the IDF is certainly shooting Palestinians as they arrive at food distro spots, but this seems to be the contractors as they are leaving with food.
This sort of thing is part of why I haven’t taken sides in this conflict. It feels extremely hard to know what to believe- everyone reporting any of this seems to have a bias or a vested interest, and it all feels like propaganda. I can deal with more local misinformation using my own experience, knowledge and critical thinking skills, but dealing with news from half a world away in an area I’m unfamiliar with is much harder- I knew virtually nothing about Israel or Palestine before last year, whereas seemingly everyone else on the planet has full, detailed knowledge of every aspect of this feud going back centuries and had already formed a strong opinion from the moment they emerged from the womb.
Based on what I do know, all I can say with surety is that I feel bad for the civilians on both sides and that both governments seem bloodthirsty and monstrous (I know, like an American is one to talk…)
Most of the news I get is from my pro-Israel sister (and no, she doesn’t watch Fox News), who makes some good-sounding points- last night she had an example of The New York Times reporting that an Israeli missile blew up a Palestinian hospital and killed 500 people, when she claimed the truth is that it was a Palestinian missile that ran out of fuel and crashed into the hospital’s parking lot, killing 50 people- but that the correction printed later was ignored, so everyone believes the initial report. This sounds plausible in that that sort of sloppy reporting and very quiet correction happens all the time (and I was shocked that she’s actually beginning to form the opinion that the NYT is full of crap, which I’ve been trying to convince her of for months), but I don’t feel like I can take her word for it. No matter how objective and fact-based she thinks she’s being, she’s pretty clearly Islamophobic (largely because of how the religion treats women) and, at the very least, will always have a bias because she vastly prefers Jewish culture to Muslim culture. She seems to think Israel is completely honest and in the right, which sounds hopelessly naive to me- when has ANY government been that morally superior? It’s absurd and obviously wrong. But I don’t feel I can completely trust information from the other side either, even if it’s sourced, because everyone seems to have an incredibly high emotional stake in this and the closer the reporting is to where things are actually happening, the higher those stakes become and the more likely the reports are being swayed or censored by the governments engaged in the war.
Sorry to drop all that on you, but I guess my question is- where do you get your facts, and how do you feel confident you can trust them?
I’m not non-partisan, because I don’t know if this is an issue that needs to be… Just the death toll in Gaza should be enough to set off alarm bells, not to mention the breakdown of who is being killed. It’s mostly women and children.
I also don’t know that I believe in any such thing as “non-partisan”… There are facts and lies, of course, but as long as an outlet is not posting lies about one side or the other, you can probably get useful information out of it. If I’m partisan, it’s on the side of what is best for the most people…
As for who I trust… Guardian has good, mostly reliable coverage, Al-Jazeera has good coverage, NPR is okay, too. They have a guy in Gaza, who was formerly just a producer, but is now acting as a journalist, since the Israeli government won’t let journalists in… From within Israel, Haaretz is a relatively trust-able source with a bent that is critical of the government. I’m not going to pretend that I don’t pick outlets that tend to lean left, because that’s just how I view the world, because I find it to be generally speaking more accurate with regards to reality.
No one is going to get it 100%, but if you pull from multiple sources that you know seek to be as honest as possible, that’ll give you as accurate as a picture as you’re gonna get. Let’s not forget that this is an ongoing situation, that we’re not going to know the full story until years in the future.
Some good works on the background/history? I’d recommend Joe Sacco’s graphic novels, Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza:
And I have yet to read it, but I’m sure it’s solid, there is Rashid Khalidi’s The 100 years War on Palestine:
I guess I feel like I can trust these sources, because they are sources that are known to fact check and tend to deal in facts, not ideology. We know, for example, that Fox does not do that. They are a fully partisan source. I’m lucky in that I have a phd in history, so I’m trained to vet information from various sources and to try to be skeptical of whatever I come across. If something does come up to make me question something, then I’ll try and look into that and adjust my views accordingly. But I also realize that all of us are flawed people who biases, and I think as long as those biases are “what is the most maximum good for the most people” that should be fine. The reality is that the occupation of Palestinian lands and the position of the current Israeli government of rejecting the entire idea that Palestinians are a people who deserve the same protection and well-being as Israelis is… just bad. It’s bad for Palestinians, obviously, but it’s just as bad for Israelis. It was years of occupation, the ongoing Gaza embargo, and the expansion of illegal settlements that drove the events of october 7th. The Martinique writer and activist, Franz Fanon discussed that people who are oppressed will eventually rise up against their oppressors. It’s inevitable, because endless dehumanization is pretty much intolerable. The Israeli government under Netanyahu has abandoned any pretense of a two-state solution or even of a one-state solution. They are actively pursuing ethnic cleansing as state policy. That conclusion fits the facts we know to be true (expansion of settlements in the West Bank, the genocidal war in Gaza, the refusal to call Palestinians Palestinians and instead call them “the Arab population”… I believe that to be true, because it fits with what I’ve seen coming out of the region in recent years. From Netanyahu’s own mouth, he’s time and again rejected any sort of peaceful settlement with Palestinians. His own word and actions led to the assasination of PM Yitzhak Rabin, who did not create Palestinian state, but merely promised to pursue peace. Netanyahu called for his death, and one of his followers delivered…
I guess, just in general, my alignment is going to be with the people most oppressed and disempowered, because the ones hurt the most in these situations. We DO still live in a world torn apart by colonialism, in part because former colonial (and still current colonial) powers refuse to admit what they’ve done to this world. That’s hurting every single human on this planet, even themselves. But it’s not really something you can “both sides”… Christian Europeans kind of wanted a solution to the “Jewish question” after the holocaust, and they wanted some sort of check on rising arab power, so support for a Jewish state became an easy solution. It cause more problems than they ever could have imagined.
Sorry… I hope this makes some sense. I’ll post more if I think of something.
It’s a big question and a lot to discuss, I really appreciate the response. I tend to lean towards being pro-Palestine because of more simplistic reasons (Trump isn’t, people on the left generally seem to be), but I don’t feel confident and knowledgeable enough to go all-in, and am so preoccupied with concerns closer to home that I have trouble finding time and energy attempting to sift through conflicting information. I may also have motivation NOT to learn all I can, because I literally have to get along peacefully with my sister as long as we’re caretakers for my father and we’re already at odds about trans issues. That said, I’m still trying to at least be more informed than I currently am and I’ll make use of your advice. Thank you.
At a deeper level, this is what being a historian is. You are trying to do history in real time.
A historian uses what facts they can get. And they know that these facts may or may not be reliable. Which means they have to take into account the source of those facts. But they don’t have any direct knowledge of those sources either. So they have to take indirect sources into account: what do other people think of those sources? Are there things that this source says which other sources agree with; is that source typically reliable? Are there topics that this source is more or less reliable about? Does this source have a bias for or against the topic? If they do, are the facts basically reliable anyway? Is Bayes theorem at play: does the fact that this source is so biased for that subject mean that this bad thing is more likely to be true, or vice versa? Have other people already studied this source, so you can use their opinion to guide how you treat them?
More than that, sometimes your sources are so limited that if you throw away a given source as unreliable, then you don’t have anything. So given that, how can you untangle the bias and misinformation, and how much usable fact is left when you do?
And more than that, what does the bias itself tell you? What can you tell about the subject from the sources’ biases? This is the sort of thing which is hated by the sort of people who hate this sort of thing. So, what else do they hate?
Just like a historian can’t go and ask a member of the English court of 1324, or a tenant farmer in France in 1640, or a member of the Golden Horde, or whatever, you can’t go to the ruins of Gaza city yourself and see for yourself. So you have to decide who you can trust, and what you can trust them about, and what you can trust them about by decoding their attempts to lie to you.
From what I’ve seen: Yes, Hamas have been killing people. It’s their thing. Hamas is, by most reports of people who aren’t Hamas, deeply unpopular in Gaza, but they maintain power because they’re the sort of people who go around killing people. And because there’s nobody else who’s able to take over from them. (Some of those who might have died under Hamas gunfire. Some died in Israeli prisons. Some died under a building that had a rocket fired at it by one side or the other.
But also: yes, the IDF have been killing people, and on a much more industrial scale. How do we know? Because they’ve levelled Gaza. Hamas couldn’t have done that, even if they wanted to, which they don’t. And they’ve done it malevolently, deliberately destroying civilian infrastructure, homes, hospitals, aide centers, schools. And we know that because they’ve been boasting about it. The soldiers on Insta have been singing songs while destroying neighborhoods. They’ve posted themselves singing happy genocidal chants. The generals and politicians have been declaring proudly on the news that that’s what they were doing. They lied about why they were doing it (“we had credible reports of a senior Hamas leader in that hospital”), but then they talk about Amalek, and the obvious lies are obvious. The most recent reports coming out have been in Ha’aretz, not the Palestine Chronicle. Bayes’ Law: Ha’aretz wouldn’t be saying this sort of thing if they had any doubt that it was plausible.
And the US contractors shooting the Palestinians? There’s video of them doing it.
There’s horror on all sides, but there’s also the question of sheer scale.
Also, be very clear that this is Hamas, not “Palestinians”. Most Gazans just want to live. And “Netanyahu and Ben Gvir and Smotrich and all the others like them”, not “Israelis”, and very, very much not “Jews”. Because anti-semitism is real, and never needed an excuse, and now it has something it’s been using as an excuse. Last night here in Melbourne someone tried to burn down the oldest synagogue in the city, just like they successfully burnt down a synagogue a short walk away from where I live, at the same time as some people broke off from an anti Gaza-war protest, and went to have a little riot at a restaurant in an alley which happens to be owned by Israelis. That’s got nothing to do with Gaza, that’s people who just hate Jews. And that’s different.
On that last point, at least, I’m very clear. A few weeks ago someone firebombed a pro-Israel group just a block away from me, burning several elderly victims, one of whom recently died from her injuries. He screamed “Free Palestine!” while he did it, but this wasn’t a violent protest in favor of a worthy cause, this was just an evil man murdering harmless strangers for no other reason than because they were Jewish. Israel committing genocide doesn’t justify or erase plain old antisemitism, and a murderer shouting “Free Palestine” doesn’t turn the protestors holding signs that say the same thing into monsters or invalidate their cause. Even my 100% pro-Israel sister is clearly able to make that distinction, to her credit.
Tony Blair’s staff took part in ‘Gaza Riviera’ project with BCG
Former UK prime minister’s institute participated in meetings on plan to turn shattered enclave into trading hub
They also did the bombing during visitation hours, ensuring that even more people would be killed. And the various explanations for why they bombed the prison at all are totally contradictory and make so sense, whether or not you care about “collateral damage.”
Netanyahu supports a plan to concentrate residents of Gaza in a “humanitarian city” to be established in the southern part of the enclave. […] residents would not be allowed to leave once they enter the city.
I feel like there was a word – maybe Italian? – for walling an ethnic minority into an enclave within a city. Used a lot in the early-mid 20th century I think…
(the coyness is /s, everything else is just sadness.)
