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Israel is brutally destroying towns in the West Bank

The New York Times has a lengthy report this morning about the monthlong campaign of destruction that Israel has imposed on the towns of Jenin and Tulkarm in the West Bank:

For months, Israeli raids destroyed roads and other infrastructure that local officials said they repeatedly fixed, only to see their work razed again in the next assault.

In Jenin, some 70 percent of roads have been damaged or destroyed by the recent raids, according to the mayor, Nidal Obeidi. Internet, electricity and phone lines were shut down in some areas. Sewage and water lines were also cut, leaving about 80 percent of Jenin without running water, local officials said, including the main hospital.

The main road in Jenin that runs through the heart of the business district.

This is just a snippet, but it's an example of what I meant when I criticized Ta-Nehisi Coates a couple of days ago. This kind of stuff is reported all the time. Maybe not as much as it should be, but plenty nonetheless. So if you don't know about it, either you don't care about the whole subject or else you have remarkably narrow reading habits. It's not an example of the media betraying you, it's just a matter of personal incuriosity.

38 thoughts on “Israel is brutally destroying towns in the West Bank

  1. TheMelancholyDonkey

    The strikingly visual gets some coverage. The daily grind of being a Palestinian in the West Bank does not. How many American outlets have written about the hours it takes to travel a few miles, thanks to all of the blocked roads and checkpoints? Or the twenty plus Palestinian villages that have been abandoned in the last year because of Jewish settlers terrorizing the inhabitants? Or all of the Palestinian olive groves that have been destroyed by settlers? Or all of the grazing land that settlers have taken over and forbidden the Palestinian owners to use with the threat of shooting them?

    Stuff that takes real, on the ground reporting doesn't get covered in American papers. And it's worse in Israel, where Haaretz is the only major outlet, print or TV, that covers the settler violence. They get called traitors for doing so.

    1. brianrw00

      With the exception of the olive groves, I've seen all of that reported. Don't take my word for it - google it. If you don't know, it's not for a lack of reporting.

  2. dilbert dogbert

    When the US Muslim community is as large, wealthy and politically powerful as the "Tribe", ethnic cleansing will cease.

  3. TheMelancholyDonkey

    You want a really heartbreaking story? A 12-year old Arab citizen of Israel expressed in class that children were starving in Gaza. In response, her Jewish classmates surrounded her, shouting, "Your village should be burned," among other delightful things. Her teacher abandoned her to the mob.

    In response, the school suspended the girl.

    https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-09-24/ty-article/.premium/israeli-arab-girl-12-suspended-from-school-after-empathizing-with-gazan-children/00000192-206a-dc44-affb-39fb8a800000

  4. middleoftheroaddem

    It seems many (Hamas, Israeli military, etc) on both sides seem to suffer from the same fundamental fallacy: if we make life miserable enough, the other side will leave the land or, somehow, disappear....

    1. Josef

      Except one side is far more capable of inflicting more misery than the other. I don't think this conflict was ever going to end In a two state solution for numerous reasons. I have no idea how it's going to end, but it won't end well. Human nature is so abhorrent at times.

  5. Lon Becker

    Yeah but it is pretty clear that you, Kevin Drum, don't get it because you are not absolutely furious with Israel. Your point in bringing up the bad things that Israel does is to indicate that we have accepted that Israel does these things so they are no big deal. This is, of course, much easier to do when you don't see the reality of it.

    You describe things that should be inconsistent with our providing support to Israel and then shrug at our providing support for Israel. Even in the story above, what is reported is that they keep rebuilding the roads. That seems to make it no big deal. An annoyance rather than a war crime.

    If the things being done to Palestinians were instead being done to Jews the way these things are reported would be very different.

    In these things tone matters. In 2014 Israel and Hamas reached a cease fire in one of their flareups. The next day Israel reported that Hamas had violated the ceasefire by ambushing Israeli soldiers killing three (it later seems to have turned out that one of them was captured rather than killed). The next day it came out that the "ambush" occurred in Gaza City where Israel was taking advantage of the cease fire to carry out military operations. One of them involved blowing up a tunnel in which Hamas members were hiding. Apparently the Hamas members decided that instead of being blown up they would get the jump on the Israeli soldiers.

    In reading an article on this event from that time I noticed that deep in the story after it became clear that it was Israel, not Hamas, that initiated military operations during a cease fire, it is mentioned that a couple of days later Israel bombed the area killing hundreds of Palestinians. By then the Hamas agents would have found new tunnels to hide in. So what was mentioned in passing, and as no big deal, was that Israel slaughtered hundred of Palestinian civilians as revenge for Israel's violation of a cease fire blowing up in its face.

    This is a good way to make the slaughter of civilians seem like no big deal. I am guessing that is much harder to do if you actually see the slaughtered civilians.

    Coates reaction to actually seeing the checkpoints is a natural human reaction to seeing evil. Unfortunately Drum's reaction is also a natural human one, but it is the human ability to rationalize evil. I don't think Coates is the one who deserves criticism in this case.

  6. SeanT

    Weird criticism
    Many of us have jobs and lives and things that take up our time, and have to choose what news we ingest each day. I don't have the luxury to read the Times and Post from cover to cover every day.
    So no, not " just a matter of personal incuriosity."

    1. skeptonomist

      Do you publish your views about these things, like Coates? If you are a journalist or a writer on the subject, isn't it your job to get the information?

      1. Lon Becker

        I read the piece on Coates' blog about how he prepared for this work and it was a lot of research. That the research did not prepare him for the reality on the ground is likely a factor of how awful the reality on the ground is and how hard it is to capture it in dry academic writing.

        But for whatever reason Drum seems to be taking a comment from Coates giving an uncharitable reading of it and then attacking the straw man that results. It is not Drum's proudest moment.

          1. Lon Becker

            Has it increased on any subject other than Israel? I would think that if you ignore the Israel post he has had his usual, mostly positive, year.

  7. Srho

    Bibi brushed aside collateral damage in Lebanon this week by invoking the "human shields" defense.

    Seems to me if I'm willing to kill human shields to get at my enemy, then the human shields are my enemy. Or at least they might rightly view me as their enemy.

  8. Goosedat

    Some have observed the brutality Israel inflicts on Palestinians for over forty years. Much of this trauma is the result of US subsidy of Israel, the West's colonial fortress in West Asia. A trauma endured and exacerbated by the material support of the power elites and the deliberate indifference of their subjects.

  9. cephalopod

    We all know that all reporting is not the same. What happens in the West Bank is reported in much the same way as reporting on violence in Eastern Congo, economic issues in Chile, corruption in South Africa, etc. There are articles, but they are few enough and far enough between that only those with a deep pre-existing interest will have any clue what is going on. Even if you read the articles when they are published, the infrequency makes it hard to scaffold all the information into a coherent understanding.

    The media also struggles with writing stories in a way that increases understanding. I read several articles about investigations of the Adams administration in NYC and had no clue what they were about - all the articles went into detail about who was being investigated and how, but almost nothing about why. I have to do some searching myself to get answers to "why." That seems to me to be pretty indicative of reporting today. The media loves to count up the dead or announce investigations, and they always love he-said/she-said quotes, but never within a context.

  10. jdubs

    Wait a minute. Did Coates actually say that this was literally never in the published news? Did he say that he had literally never read anything about the subject before?

    Kevins last post on this subject certainly makes this feel like a comical, transparent mischaracterization of what Coates said....but maybe Coates did actually say what Kevin is implying.

    1. Lon Becker

      No, actually if you go to his website he talks about the importance of research for a project like this and provides the sources that he found helpful. That is quite the opposite of what Drum suggests, although it is unlikely that Drum bothered to read anything written by Coates in preparation of this post. He seems to have taken a quote from an article about Coates and given an implausible reading of it.

  11. Justin

    Read that article earlier today and thought it was terrible. Then I realized I was just watching rival criminal gangs (drug cartels etc) go at each other. And then I stopped giving a crap.

  12. different_name

    My impression here is that Kevin is reacting to the performative aspects of Coate's identity. Part what he does is personalizing the process of learning about his current topic. In lingo, he's modeling the behavior of a politically engaged agent of change.

    In a way, it appeals to people on a different level than the content. If you're the sort of person he writes for, he offers a view of someone doing what you might hope to do - absorb enough "unbiased" info to come to a moral position on one's own. Call it a form of self-help for the politically overloaded.

    I also suspect that's exactly the part that rub Kevin the wrong way. He'll bitch about superficiality and feigned-cluelessness, but I think he's reacting to the confessional-ish call to action implied by the way Coates sort of makes himself a protagonist.

    1. jeffreycmcmahon

      Agreed, it's interesting to see that Mr. Drum is so riled up to continue to attack Coates that it overrides his other recent interest in minimizing Israel's bad actions in this conflict. Who cares about consistency when some hot hip youngish guy is Wrong On The Internet.

  13. emh1969

    Two points:

    1) In his original post. Kevin seemed to argue thar Coates didn't care about the context of what he saw in the West Bank. That it's important to understand the Isreali point of view to undersand why they act the way they do (of course, Kevin never seems to care about the Palestinian point of view and why they might act the way they do).

    Coates, I assume, would counter by saying not everything needs context, that some things transcend context, that some situations are sufficietnly evil that we can identify them as such without context.

    2) Kevin criticized Coates for not knowing much about the West Bank before going there and being surprised by what he saw (note that Lon Becker disputes this above).

    Honeslty, I'm not sure that matters. Coates' book is a memoir, He's talking about his lived expereince of being in the West Bank, of talking to people. of seeing how they're treated, of seeing their facial reactions. And then relating that to lis lived experience as a Black man in the US:

    I think this is one of Kevin's biggest failings - his tendency to overintellecutualize everything. Yes, reading about things can have value, it can give us an idea about things. But it's not the same as experiencing those things firsthand. Does Kevin really not understand this?

  14. DarkBrandon

    I have been disgusted with Israel's behavior for 35 years, but now I, like nearly everyone else, can never be pure enough in my condemnation, particularly if I believe that raping your way through a music festival is not a basic human right, the denial of which constitutes genocide.

    The feeling of superiority to anyone who does not sufficiently embrace Hamas and condemn Israel must generate some sweet, sweet endorphins.

    1. Lon Becker

      Wow do you really live in the imaginary world in which criticism of Hamas is forbidden. Did you see the embarrassing racism of Senator Kennedy from Louisiana asking a Muslim speaker whether she supports Hamas. The woman answered no. He then asked if she also supports Hezbollah (note he simply ignored her answer to the first question) and she said no.

      In the real world criticism of Israel almost always starts with a necessary statement that one is not supporting Hamas. This is not something critics of other countries are required to do.

      1. DarkBrandon

        I like the "Wow do you really believe" opening, but you might go with "Imagine thinking" - more biting and pithy in its condescension.

        I particularly enjoyed the part where you are determined to be offended. Put another way: I enjoyed the whole thing.

        Glad to be of offense, and beneath contempt, like everyone else. Happy straw-mannin' to ya!

        1. ScentOfViolets

          He has every right to be condescending. Me, I'm the one looking at you with a certain measure of contempt, refusing as you did to quote the rest of that sentence " ... live in the imaginary world in which criticism of Hamas is forbidden. " I note also that you can't even quote correctly; 'believe' is not a synonym for 'live.

          Do you want to accuse me of believing I'm your intellectual superior? Why yes, yes I do believe I'm your intellectual superior. And by a substantial margin at that 😉

        2. Lon Becker

          You claimed that people who disagree with you from the left must be on an endorphin high and now are whining that the response to you was condescending? What a clown. The way to stop getting condescending responses is to be less of a clown. Is that terse enough for you?

  15. Coby Beck

    Replying to emh1969 above:

    I think this is one of Kevin's biggest failings - his tendency to overintellecutualize everything. Yes, reading about things can have value, it can give us an idea about things. But it's not the same as experiencing those things firsthand. Does Kevin really not understand this?

    I think your last point is very relevant to what we are seeing with Kevin, best illustrated by his finding it more important to be outraged about Coates' writings on this inhumanity than the inhumanity itself.

    All of us shrug off loads of horrifying news everyday, it is a survival mechanism that any feeling, ethical human needs while trying to stay informed. But it really saddens me to see one person looking down on another because they chose not to shrug off something specific, for whatever personal reason.

    I haven't read Cotes' latest stuff, but I did listen to a speech he gave to a small group recently about his experience visiting Palestine and it fits closely with the descriptions of his essay. I found it compeling, moving, and informative. Nothing like the ciriticisms that struck Kevin struck me, though hearing them I can see a point worth thinking about. But having thought about it, I don't think it is fair at all.

    There are many unique things about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One of them is the vast gulf between the reality and the presentation of that reality in the mainstream media. Yes, most of the crimes Israel commits can be found mentioned in the depths of some mainstream back page article somewhere, but the consitent overarching narrative is that Israel is perhaps flawed, a little bit, but trying to do what is necessary and right and that Palestinians are perhaps suffering, a little bit, but it is unavoidable and their own fault.

    This narrative flies hard in the face of reality.

    The fact that Coates had internalized that narrative is not some kind of damning evidence of intellectual incapacity or incuriousity. Kevin is maybe projecting his own shortcomings here? The fact that coming face to face with the harsh reality of what sanitized statistics and dispassionate "objective" reporting presents was a profound revelation and a shock shows nothing more than Coates' humanity and willingness to learn.

    We could all take a lesson from that.

  16. another_anonymous_coward

    Why is Kevin's only comment on this (war crime? genocidal act?) disgusting humans rights violation to talk about Coates?

  17. Toofbew

    +1 for Dark Brandon’s mild comment, which nevertheless drew harsh criticism for being insufficiently pro-Palestinian. Hamas is evil. They were expelled from Egypt (!) for terrorism. Arafat rejected the two-state plan in 2000. Palestine has been ruled by murderous Islamic thugs ever since. Yet Amazon.com is doing a brisk business in the US selling keffiyehs to college students, their graduate supporters, and other useful idiots. Looks like a bunch of their votes will go to Jill Stein. Then they’ll decry Biden/Harris for what Netanyahu and the Israeli Right are doing.

    1. ScentOfViolets

      Care to tell us the terms of that two-state plan that Arafat rejected? No? I thought not. You know _exactly_ what you're doing.

    2. Lon Becker

      The only comment I see from Dark Brandon was criticized for being dishonest not for not being sufficiently pro-Palestinian. Did you put your comment here rather than there so that people wouldn't notice you misrepresenting the response to his comment?

      As Scent of Violets notes, the "two-state plan" that Israel offered in 2000 can only be called that by not explaining what the plan was. One of the US negotiators has been pretty clear recently that accepting that deal was a non-starter because it didn't actually offer the Palestinians a state, which for most people is a prerequisite for a two state solution, that there be two states. The Israeli proposal had a Jewish state controlled by the Israeli army, and a disjointed set of cantons in the West Bank controlled by the Israeli army.

      Palestine has been ruled by Jewish thugs since long before 2000. The PA, which administers the West Bank under the limitation that Israel allows has followed full security cooperation with Israel since the end of he second intifada close to 20 years ago. Israel has taken advantage of that fact to put a spike through the heart of the two state solution. Hamas has controlled Gaza since 2007. Israel tricked itself into thinking it had Hamas in hand by killing a few thousand Gazans every few years. The attack on 10/7 was good evidence that the relatively low toll Israel paid for a decade and a half was a tactical decision by Hamas, and not actually a sign that Israel's mass slaughter served a purpose. But Israel's takeaway is that they just didn't slaughter enough people.

      Note that Drum is arguing above that everybody should understand how brutal Israel has been to the Palestinians and you come along to help prove him wrong.

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