October 15, 2025
Melvin Goodman
The history of the Palestinians is a history of betrayal. In the wake of World War I, Britain and France redrew the map of the Middle East to suit their own ends. They created countries with artificial borders, which led to unrest and uprisings. They had concluded a secret agreement during the war—the Sykes-Picot agreement—that dashed Palestinian hopes of independence. The following year, the Balfour Declaration called for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in what was then Palestine.
Melvin Goodman
The history of the Palestinians is a history of betrayal. In the wake of World War I, Britain and France redrew the map of the Middle East to suit their own ends. They created countries with artificial borders, which led to unrest and uprisings. They had concluded a secret agreement during the war—the Sykes-Picot agreement—that dashed Palestinian hopes of independence. The following year, the Balfour Declaration called for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in what was then Palestine.
Israeli independence in 1948 led
to the forced removal of more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. Their
families had lived in Palestine for hundreds of years. Indeed, Palestinians had
lived beside Jews in Palestine since antiquity.
Many of the Palestinians, who were evicted in1948, have lived ever since in refugee camps in Gaza, Lebanon, and Jordan. I visited several of these camps in the 1970s and 1980s; they were horrific in most cases.
In 1956, Israel secretly joined the British and the French invasion of Egypt for control of the Suez Canal. This convinced Arab leaders that Israel was part of the European colonial movement to maintain power and influence in the Middle East.
In 1967, Israel acquired all of Jerusalem and the West Bank in the Six-Day War. Israel falsely described its invasion as a preemptive attack, although there was no evidence that the Arab states were on the verge of using force against Israel. The strongest Arab state at that time was Egypt, which was in no position to attack Israel since its best ground forces were in Yemen where there was a civil war taking place. The fact that Egyptian fighter planes were parked wingtiip-to-wingtip, vulnerable to Israeli attack, was another indicator of Egypt’s lack of readiness for war.
The Oslo Peace Accords of 1993 envisioned a greater role for the Palestinian Authority to govern the occupied territories. However, Jewish settlers in Gaza and the West Bank moved quickly to create illegal settlements in these territories. The sad fact is that Israel illegally settled these lands after its military successes. The Israeli government had no plans to allow the creation of a Palestinian state. and tacitly approved and expanded the settlements. Israeli governments helped the settlers take Palestinian land, and never considered using these territories as leverage to create a genuine peace in the region.
In 2009, the UN released a 575-page analysis of the Gaza conflict that documented the most numerous and most serious violations and war crimes committed in the region were carried out by Israel, and that Israel’s blockade of Gaza amounted to “collective punishment.” The report called Israel’s actions a “deliberate policy of disproportionate force aimed at the civilian population.” It stated that a competent court would find that the crime of persecution, a crime against humanity, had been committed. Sadly, the United States backed Israel’s rejection of the report as it has backed virtually all Israeli policies of aggression.
And now we have a “peace plan” that is treated by the mainstream media as a “visible path to a generational accomplishment.” The leader of the Israeli opposition, Yair Lapid, and others even support giving the Nobel Peace Prize to Donald Trump. But there is still no peace and there should be no prize.
Once again, the Palestinians have been betrayed. It is certain that the plan will not lead to a Palestinian state. Benjamin Netanyahu has made this clear, and the plan itself only refers to Palestinian self-determination as an “aspiration.” The extent of Israeli occupation of Gaza is uncertain, but the continuing loss of territory on the West Bank is certain, Reconstruction of Gaza is also uncertain because Israel will continue to control the reconstruction materials that will be allowed into the region. Who will supply the funds and resources? Who will take part in the operation that will costs tens of billions of dollars.
Neither Palestinians as a whole nor the Palestine Authority were consulted on any of the terms of the agreement, and the Arab mediators from Egypt, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates didn’t press for a serious mediation role and didn’t protect the interests of the Palestinians. The US unwillingness to provide a diplomatic visa to the leader of the Palestine Authority for his annual visit to the United Nations, and its continued denial of funding to the leading Palestinian human rights organizations demonstrates the lack of any objectivity on the part of the Trump administration. As a result, the plan’s reference to “deradicalization” appears to mean nothing more than the continued denial of any real role for the Palestinians in Gaza. The betrayals continue as does the continued persecution of the Palestinians.
Jamal Kanj
Gaza will not forget.
The suffocating smoke still hangs over her ruins, thick with the acrid stench of explosives powder and dust carrying the scent of betrayal and the mark of courage. Her streets, once filled with children’s laughter, became Israeli fields of slaughter. Now they echo with the names and memories of martyrs.
The mass graves, the broken concrete, and the twisted steel are not just evidence of Zionist hatred. They are witnesses to those who stood with her, and to those who failed her. Today, Gaza’s rubble holds more memories than all the nation’s libraries.
Palestine will remember.
She will remember the selfless sacrifices of doctors and healthcare workers who refused to abandon their sick patients as bombs rained on their hospitals; the journalists who became the news, targeted for daring to expose the truth; the mothers who wrapped their children in the red, black, green, and white flag of a nation Israel is desperate to erase.
These are not tales of despair, but of defiance, insisting on its right to breathe life amid death.
Gaza will not forget.
She will not forget the silence of Western democracies. In a tragic inversion, most European nations, shackled by the ghosts of their past, traded morality for absolution. The self-proclaimed champions of human rights offered Palestinians on the altar of yesterday’s victims to atone for Europe’s sins.
Gaza will not forget the Biden administration, which vetoed every U.N. Security Council resolution calling to end the genocide. Nor Donald Trump, who poured fuel on the fire, then demanded recognition for dousing his own flames.
This week, Arab, Muslim, and world leaders gather like moths around the American arsonist-turned-firefighter, “celebrating” the ashes of Gaza.
Palestine will remember.
She will remember the people who rose for Gaza, from Yemen to Dublin, from Cape Town to London and Madrid, while Arab capitals from Cairo to Riyadh slept. Ireland and Spain led the boycott, while Arab countries from the Gulf to Jordan opened their ports and highways to provide alternative routes for Israeli goods, even as Yemen imposed a sea blockade in the Red Sea.
Gaza will not forget — nor forgive — the Arab governments that opened their ports when shipyard workers in Italy refused, delivering American weapons used to annihilate her children and destroy her hospitals.
Palestine will remember.
She will remember South Africa — not an Arab or Muslim nation — that led her case before the International Court of Justice, charging Israel with genocide. A country once scarred by apartheid became the moral conscience of a world too timid to speak. In that act of solidarity, South Africa rekindled the universal truth that justice knows no borders.
Palestine will remember the Lebanese resistance that gave its leaders for Gaza’s defense; Yemen, poor in wealth but rich in dignity, whose solidarity never wavered; and Iran, steadfast against Israeli hubris. She will remember Ireland and Spain, who did not turn away when Arabs did, proving that true solidarity transcends borders, faith, and kinship, resting only on shared humanity.
She will remember the heroes of the flotillas who braved waves of hatred and siege to carry messages of compassion; the nameless volunteers who left the safety of their countries to heal the wounded and feed the hungry; the American students who turned campuses into encampments of resistance; the artists, actors, and musicians who risked careers for justice; the employees who lost their jobs protesting the complicity of Google, Microsoft, and other tech giants in Israel’s crimes.
Gaza will not forget those who betrayed her.
Palestine will forever be grateful to those who dared to speak the truth when it was dangerous, who marched when it was forbidden, who grieved when it was unfashionable.
Palestine will remember.
History will remember.
Justice will remember.
For nearly two years, Gaza has endured a genocide so relentless it defies descriptive language. Israel’s war machine has turned hospitals into morgues, UN schools into mass graves, and refugee camps into craters. Yet Gaza refuses to die.
Each time she is bombed “back to the Stone Age,” she rises — like the phoenix — to rebuild, not only her structures but her indomitable will. In that defiance lies the occupier’s greatest fear: memory.
Israel can destroy buildings but not erase remembrance. The siege may starve Gaza’s body, but it nourishes Palestine’s collective soul.
Gaza’s children will grow up with memories no child should bear. But they will also inherit something indestructible: dignity. In every demolished home and every shattered family lives a story that refuses burial.
Gaza’s memory will not fade. For the mind, unlike stone, cannot be occupied. It is the eternal archive of a people’s resilience, passed from one generation to the next, weaving the indelible tapestry of Palestine today.
The ruins of Gaza stand not only as testimony to Israel’s genocide but to the moral collapse of those who enabled it.
Gaza will rise again, brick by brick.
But what will never be resurrected is the Israeli lie, which, for eight decades, cloaked the Zionist project in the guise of victimhood, occupying Western narratives and manufacturing consent.
Gaza will rise — and the Israeli myth will remain buried beneath her rubble, forever
Ralph Nader
Ben Hubbard, the long-time Middle East correspondent for the New York Times, is known for his high standards. So too is Karen DeYoung, the long-time reporter and foreign affairs editor for the Washington Post.
Yet they, and their editors, share a common, recurring failure by misleading their readers about the serious undercount of Palestinian deaths during the Israeli regime’s genocidal destruction of Gaza.
How so? By repeating in article after article the Hamas claim of 67,000 deaths since October 2023. The real death toll estimate is probably around 600,000. Unlike Israeli and American cultures, which do not under-estimate their fatalities in conflicts, Hamas sees the awful death toll as a reflection of their not protecting their people and a measure of Israeli military might against Hamas’ limited small arms and weapons. Both Hubbard and DeYoung, of course, know better. They know the daily bombardment of tiny Gaza, the geographical size of Philadelphia, with 2.3 million humans, is without precedent in Israel’s targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure. The blockade of “food, water, medicine, fuel, and electricity,” along with the concentrated destruction of health care facilities have been condemned by human rights groups in Israel and International humanitarian organizations.
Reporters and editors are quite aware of more accurate casualty estimates appearing in The Lancet, the prestigious British medical journal, and estimates provided by other academic and prominent international relief organizations like Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children, UN World Food Programme and others experienced in assessing the human toll of military devastations.
Journalists know the estimate last April by Professor Emeritus Paul Rogers of the University of Bradford in the UK, an expert in the power of aerial bombs and missiles, who wrote that the TNT equivalent of six Hiroshima atomic bombs has been delivered to these totally defenseless Palestinians, almost all of whom are without housing or air raid shelters.
Netanyahu’s American-made missiles and bombs continue to produce deadly bloodshed. The waves of death from starvation, untreated, weaponry-caused infectious diseases, the cutoff of medicines treating cancer, respiratory ailments, and diabetes are still mounting.
What readers do not know is how much of the use of Hamas’s undercount is mandated by news editors, and why. Because intense Netanyahu propaganda has declared the estimates of Hamas, based on real names (excluding many thousands under the rubble and the collateral damage to civilians that in such conflicts exceed direct fatalities from the bombing by 3 to 13-fold), are an exaggeration, the mainstream media is wary of being accused of even worse fabrications than those of Hamas.
Speaking to many reporters and editors about this huge undercount phenomenon, not prevalent in other violent arenas of war, they all agree that the real count is much higher, but they do not have a number to use that is deemed credible. But they do have casualty experts who can be interviewed, such as the chair of the Global Health Department at Edinburgh University or a foremost missile technology specialist, MIT Professor Emeritus Theodore Postol, who said on our radio/podcast recently, “I would say that 200, 300, or 400,000 people [Palestinian] are dead easily.”
The least the journalists could do is say “the real count may be much higher.” The other alternative is to do their own investigation, piecing together the empirical and clinical evidence (See, Gaza Healthcare Letter to President Trump, October 1, 2025) and citing prominent Israelis who have said that the IDF has always targeted Palestinian civilians from 1948 on. (See my column March 28, 2025 – The Vast Gaza Death Undercount – Undermines Civic, Diplomatic and Political Pressures.)
The other alternative is to do a “news analysis,” which allows for evaluations, short of editorializing. For instance, a “news analysis” could point out that conveying the impression that the Hamas figures are the true count means that 97 out of 100 Palestinians in Gaza are still living. This is not remotely credible. Yet that is essentially what Ben Hubbard’s October 7th Times article stated, “with more than 67,000 killed, or one in every 34 Gazans, according to local health officials.” It is more like one in every four Gazans killed.
Nor is it true that the “local health officials” are confirming this, because on further inquiry, they admit their definition of the fatality toll excludes those under the rubble and those who die from the massive collateral casualty toll. This reality is well known to scores of American physicians back from Gaza who say that a majority of those killed are children and women and that the survivors are almost all injured, sick, or dying.
There are esteemed reporters like Gideon Levy of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, who claim that the Hamas figures are horrible enough that they meet the test of genocide, implying that a higher count would not make any more of a moral or political difference.
I disagree. “Horror” does not have finite limits. It makes a difference in driving the greater intensity of political, diplomatic, and civic pressures to have a count of 600,000 rather than 67,000 or 200,000 children rather than 20,000 children murdered. Do we need to refer to other genocides in the 20th century to show how much a difference it would have made if the official count were one tenth of the real count?
The editors of the Post, especially, and of the Times are not keeping up with the reporting of DeYoung and Hubbard et al., about the scenes of death, dying, and horrendous agony in Gaza. The editorial management of reporters and the editorials fail to hold Netanyahu and his terroristic mass-slaughtering cabinet accountable. They allow the publication of realistic reports, features, and sometimes even give voice to Palestinians, as the Times did with several pages and pictures recently. But the long-time omnipresent shadow of AIPAC et al. darkens the editorial and opinion pages more than do the illuminations of their own reporters.
Many of the Palestinians, who were evicted in1948, have lived ever since in refugee camps in Gaza, Lebanon, and Jordan. I visited several of these camps in the 1970s and 1980s; they were horrific in most cases.
In 1956, Israel secretly joined the British and the French invasion of Egypt for control of the Suez Canal. This convinced Arab leaders that Israel was part of the European colonial movement to maintain power and influence in the Middle East.
In 1967, Israel acquired all of Jerusalem and the West Bank in the Six-Day War. Israel falsely described its invasion as a preemptive attack, although there was no evidence that the Arab states were on the verge of using force against Israel. The strongest Arab state at that time was Egypt, which was in no position to attack Israel since its best ground forces were in Yemen where there was a civil war taking place. The fact that Egyptian fighter planes were parked wingtiip-to-wingtip, vulnerable to Israeli attack, was another indicator of Egypt’s lack of readiness for war.
The Oslo Peace Accords of 1993 envisioned a greater role for the Palestinian Authority to govern the occupied territories. However, Jewish settlers in Gaza and the West Bank moved quickly to create illegal settlements in these territories. The sad fact is that Israel illegally settled these lands after its military successes. The Israeli government had no plans to allow the creation of a Palestinian state. and tacitly approved and expanded the settlements. Israeli governments helped the settlers take Palestinian land, and never considered using these territories as leverage to create a genuine peace in the region.
In 2009, the UN released a 575-page analysis of the Gaza conflict that documented the most numerous and most serious violations and war crimes committed in the region were carried out by Israel, and that Israel’s blockade of Gaza amounted to “collective punishment.” The report called Israel’s actions a “deliberate policy of disproportionate force aimed at the civilian population.” It stated that a competent court would find that the crime of persecution, a crime against humanity, had been committed. Sadly, the United States backed Israel’s rejection of the report as it has backed virtually all Israeli policies of aggression.
And now we have a “peace plan” that is treated by the mainstream media as a “visible path to a generational accomplishment.” The leader of the Israeli opposition, Yair Lapid, and others even support giving the Nobel Peace Prize to Donald Trump. But there is still no peace and there should be no prize.
Once again, the Palestinians have been betrayed. It is certain that the plan will not lead to a Palestinian state. Benjamin Netanyahu has made this clear, and the plan itself only refers to Palestinian self-determination as an “aspiration.” The extent of Israeli occupation of Gaza is uncertain, but the continuing loss of territory on the West Bank is certain, Reconstruction of Gaza is also uncertain because Israel will continue to control the reconstruction materials that will be allowed into the region. Who will supply the funds and resources? Who will take part in the operation that will costs tens of billions of dollars.
Neither Palestinians as a whole nor the Palestine Authority were consulted on any of the terms of the agreement, and the Arab mediators from Egypt, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates didn’t press for a serious mediation role and didn’t protect the interests of the Palestinians. The US unwillingness to provide a diplomatic visa to the leader of the Palestine Authority for his annual visit to the United Nations, and its continued denial of funding to the leading Palestinian human rights organizations demonstrates the lack of any objectivity on the part of the Trump administration. As a result, the plan’s reference to “deradicalization” appears to mean nothing more than the continued denial of any real role for the Palestinians in Gaza. The betrayals continue as does the continued persecution of the Palestinians.
Gaza will not forget.
The suffocating smoke still hangs over her ruins, thick with the acrid stench of explosives powder and dust carrying the scent of betrayal and the mark of courage. Her streets, once filled with children’s laughter, became Israeli fields of slaughter. Now they echo with the names and memories of martyrs.
The mass graves, the broken concrete, and the twisted steel are not just evidence of Zionist hatred. They are witnesses to those who stood with her, and to those who failed her. Today, Gaza’s rubble holds more memories than all the nation’s libraries.
Palestine will remember.
She will remember the selfless sacrifices of doctors and healthcare workers who refused to abandon their sick patients as bombs rained on their hospitals; the journalists who became the news, targeted for daring to expose the truth; the mothers who wrapped their children in the red, black, green, and white flag of a nation Israel is desperate to erase.
These are not tales of despair, but of defiance, insisting on its right to breathe life amid death.
Gaza will not forget.
She will not forget the silence of Western democracies. In a tragic inversion, most European nations, shackled by the ghosts of their past, traded morality for absolution. The self-proclaimed champions of human rights offered Palestinians on the altar of yesterday’s victims to atone for Europe’s sins.
Gaza will not forget the Biden administration, which vetoed every U.N. Security Council resolution calling to end the genocide. Nor Donald Trump, who poured fuel on the fire, then demanded recognition for dousing his own flames.
This week, Arab, Muslim, and world leaders gather like moths around the American arsonist-turned-firefighter, “celebrating” the ashes of Gaza.
Palestine will remember.
She will remember the people who rose for Gaza, from Yemen to Dublin, from Cape Town to London and Madrid, while Arab capitals from Cairo to Riyadh slept. Ireland and Spain led the boycott, while Arab countries from the Gulf to Jordan opened their ports and highways to provide alternative routes for Israeli goods, even as Yemen imposed a sea blockade in the Red Sea.
Gaza will not forget — nor forgive — the Arab governments that opened their ports when shipyard workers in Italy refused, delivering American weapons used to annihilate her children and destroy her hospitals.
Palestine will remember.
She will remember South Africa — not an Arab or Muslim nation — that led her case before the International Court of Justice, charging Israel with genocide. A country once scarred by apartheid became the moral conscience of a world too timid to speak. In that act of solidarity, South Africa rekindled the universal truth that justice knows no borders.
Palestine will remember the Lebanese resistance that gave its leaders for Gaza’s defense; Yemen, poor in wealth but rich in dignity, whose solidarity never wavered; and Iran, steadfast against Israeli hubris. She will remember Ireland and Spain, who did not turn away when Arabs did, proving that true solidarity transcends borders, faith, and kinship, resting only on shared humanity.
She will remember the heroes of the flotillas who braved waves of hatred and siege to carry messages of compassion; the nameless volunteers who left the safety of their countries to heal the wounded and feed the hungry; the American students who turned campuses into encampments of resistance; the artists, actors, and musicians who risked careers for justice; the employees who lost their jobs protesting the complicity of Google, Microsoft, and other tech giants in Israel’s crimes.
Gaza will not forget those who betrayed her.
Palestine will forever be grateful to those who dared to speak the truth when it was dangerous, who marched when it was forbidden, who grieved when it was unfashionable.
Palestine will remember.
History will remember.
Justice will remember.
For nearly two years, Gaza has endured a genocide so relentless it defies descriptive language. Israel’s war machine has turned hospitals into morgues, UN schools into mass graves, and refugee camps into craters. Yet Gaza refuses to die.
Each time she is bombed “back to the Stone Age,” she rises — like the phoenix — to rebuild, not only her structures but her indomitable will. In that defiance lies the occupier’s greatest fear: memory.
Israel can destroy buildings but not erase remembrance. The siege may starve Gaza’s body, but it nourishes Palestine’s collective soul.
Gaza’s children will grow up with memories no child should bear. But they will also inherit something indestructible: dignity. In every demolished home and every shattered family lives a story that refuses burial.
Gaza’s memory will not fade. For the mind, unlike stone, cannot be occupied. It is the eternal archive of a people’s resilience, passed from one generation to the next, weaving the indelible tapestry of Palestine today.
The ruins of Gaza stand not only as testimony to Israel’s genocide but to the moral collapse of those who enabled it.
Gaza will rise again, brick by brick.
But what will never be resurrected is the Israeli lie, which, for eight decades, cloaked the Zionist project in the guise of victimhood, occupying Western narratives and manufacturing consent.
Gaza will rise — and the Israeli myth will remain buried beneath her rubble, forever
Ben Hubbard, the long-time Middle East correspondent for the New York Times, is known for his high standards. So too is Karen DeYoung, the long-time reporter and foreign affairs editor for the Washington Post.
Yet they, and their editors, share a common, recurring failure by misleading their readers about the serious undercount of Palestinian deaths during the Israeli regime’s genocidal destruction of Gaza.
How so? By repeating in article after article the Hamas claim of 67,000 deaths since October 2023. The real death toll estimate is probably around 600,000. Unlike Israeli and American cultures, which do not under-estimate their fatalities in conflicts, Hamas sees the awful death toll as a reflection of their not protecting their people and a measure of Israeli military might against Hamas’ limited small arms and weapons. Both Hubbard and DeYoung, of course, know better. They know the daily bombardment of tiny Gaza, the geographical size of Philadelphia, with 2.3 million humans, is without precedent in Israel’s targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure. The blockade of “food, water, medicine, fuel, and electricity,” along with the concentrated destruction of health care facilities have been condemned by human rights groups in Israel and International humanitarian organizations.
Reporters and editors are quite aware of more accurate casualty estimates appearing in The Lancet, the prestigious British medical journal, and estimates provided by other academic and prominent international relief organizations like Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children, UN World Food Programme and others experienced in assessing the human toll of military devastations.
Journalists know the estimate last April by Professor Emeritus Paul Rogers of the University of Bradford in the UK, an expert in the power of aerial bombs and missiles, who wrote that the TNT equivalent of six Hiroshima atomic bombs has been delivered to these totally defenseless Palestinians, almost all of whom are without housing or air raid shelters.
Netanyahu’s American-made missiles and bombs continue to produce deadly bloodshed. The waves of death from starvation, untreated, weaponry-caused infectious diseases, the cutoff of medicines treating cancer, respiratory ailments, and diabetes are still mounting.
What readers do not know is how much of the use of Hamas’s undercount is mandated by news editors, and why. Because intense Netanyahu propaganda has declared the estimates of Hamas, based on real names (excluding many thousands under the rubble and the collateral damage to civilians that in such conflicts exceed direct fatalities from the bombing by 3 to 13-fold), are an exaggeration, the mainstream media is wary of being accused of even worse fabrications than those of Hamas.
Speaking to many reporters and editors about this huge undercount phenomenon, not prevalent in other violent arenas of war, they all agree that the real count is much higher, but they do not have a number to use that is deemed credible. But they do have casualty experts who can be interviewed, such as the chair of the Global Health Department at Edinburgh University or a foremost missile technology specialist, MIT Professor Emeritus Theodore Postol, who said on our radio/podcast recently, “I would say that 200, 300, or 400,000 people [Palestinian] are dead easily.”
The least the journalists could do is say “the real count may be much higher.” The other alternative is to do their own investigation, piecing together the empirical and clinical evidence (See, Gaza Healthcare Letter to President Trump, October 1, 2025) and citing prominent Israelis who have said that the IDF has always targeted Palestinian civilians from 1948 on. (See my column March 28, 2025 – The Vast Gaza Death Undercount – Undermines Civic, Diplomatic and Political Pressures.)
The other alternative is to do a “news analysis,” which allows for evaluations, short of editorializing. For instance, a “news analysis” could point out that conveying the impression that the Hamas figures are the true count means that 97 out of 100 Palestinians in Gaza are still living. This is not remotely credible. Yet that is essentially what Ben Hubbard’s October 7th Times article stated, “with more than 67,000 killed, or one in every 34 Gazans, according to local health officials.” It is more like one in every four Gazans killed.
Nor is it true that the “local health officials” are confirming this, because on further inquiry, they admit their definition of the fatality toll excludes those under the rubble and those who die from the massive collateral casualty toll. This reality is well known to scores of American physicians back from Gaza who say that a majority of those killed are children and women and that the survivors are almost all injured, sick, or dying.
There are esteemed reporters like Gideon Levy of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, who claim that the Hamas figures are horrible enough that they meet the test of genocide, implying that a higher count would not make any more of a moral or political difference.
I disagree. “Horror” does not have finite limits. It makes a difference in driving the greater intensity of political, diplomatic, and civic pressures to have a count of 600,000 rather than 67,000 or 200,000 children rather than 20,000 children murdered. Do we need to refer to other genocides in the 20th century to show how much a difference it would have made if the official count were one tenth of the real count?
The editors of the Post, especially, and of the Times are not keeping up with the reporting of DeYoung and Hubbard et al., about the scenes of death, dying, and horrendous agony in Gaza. The editorial management of reporters and the editorials fail to hold Netanyahu and his terroristic mass-slaughtering cabinet accountable. They allow the publication of realistic reports, features, and sometimes even give voice to Palestinians, as the Times did with several pages and pictures recently. But the long-time omnipresent shadow of AIPAC et al. darkens the editorial and opinion pages more than do the illuminations of their own reporters.
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