Hardly a week goes by without an article in either the Mail & Guardian or some other newspaper assailing Israel in the most extreme terms.
There is little evident inhibition regarding the expression of moral outrage. Israelis are depicted as Nazis, colonialists, ”apartheidists”, brutal oppressors and, recently, child murderers. Sparks, Fisk, Kasrils, Calland and many others are offered the freedom in our media to write long, prominently displayed and violently accusatory articles directed at Israel.
Those of us trying to respond to this incessant barrage of truths, decontextualised half-truths and outright lies, often have to struggle to get published. Since the onslaught is so outrageously and maliciously one-sided, we too are compelled to be simplistic in our analysis.
The consequence is a kind of moralistic theatre of hysterical outrage, devoid of any sense of reality and often serving simply to camouflage prejudice and hatred. Another outcome is that the wider public has no real idea of any of the historical context to this war of words.
Why is there no outrage over the 4 000 rockets, armed with anti-personnel warheads, fired into Israel by Hizbullah, which had been stockpiling them for years with the active complicity of a portion of the Lebanese population? Why is it not pointed out that the relatively low death rates in Israel were due to the mass evacuation of hundreds of thousands to the south and the wide use of bomb shelters?
Why are some of the basic strategic facts not made known? That Israel is the size of Gauteng, with half its population and half its territory desert. Or that it faces the enmity of 300-million Arabs and 1,3-billion Muslims, occupying territories a thousand times larger than Israel and possessing the richest oil reserves in the world.
Why is the pretence that the problem in the Middle East is solely Israel’s refusal to accede to a national home for the Palestinians repeated ad nauseum without contradiction or qualification?
Extreme anti-Semitism is regularly disseminated in Muslim countries and communities, accompanied by a deathly silence or expressions of support and ”understanding” from Western self-styled ”progressives”, whose moral blindness is exceeded only by their self-righteousness.
It is legitimate to strenuously oppose certain Israeli actions, or, arguably, even the existence of Israel, but to do so while ignoring the above realities is despicable and dishonest. But it is precisely this yawning hiatus that poisons the debate in our media.
Mike Berger is an honorary research associate in the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies and Research