OPINION: For Owen Jones to complain he didn’t see Israeli children being killed is chilling
When the Guardian columnist watched a screening of Hamas' 7 October atrocities he equivocated and nitpicked the evidence, and seemed to ignore Hamas’ role in prolonging this war
I watched the video the Guardian columnist Owen Jones recorded and published to his Twitter feed, entitled ‘I Watched The Hamas Massacre Film. Here Are My Thoughts’, and, like others, found a great deal to criticise.
There is his unqualified assertion that a reference to “Judea and Samaria”, in a handout given to attendees at the screening, “in practice means the annexation of the West Bank”; his decision to wear a T-shirt depicting a watermelon-slice emoji, a fashionable stand-in for the Palestinian national flag; his repeating if-ing: “if there was torture”, “if there was rape and sexual violence”, “if living people were beheaded”, combined with his uncritical parroting, and even inflation, of Gazan casualty figures for which the only source is Hamas, and which make no distinction between civilians and combatants.
My chief criticisms, however, are his detached naivety about human conflict, his moral condescension and his crass equivocating. This is exemplified most clearly with regard to the murder of Israeli children.
Jones describes a scene in which a Hamas terrorist throws a hand grenade into a shelter after two young boys and their father run inside it. The two boys survive the explosion because their father jumps on the grenade to shield them and is killed. The children are then dragged from the shelter, crying and injured, by the armed terrorist. Separately, Jones describes being shown what he refers to as “photos of bodies of children”, but feels compelled to point out in his monologue that “if they had been intentionally targeted by Hamas that’s not filmed”.
To see the corpses of children who have been killed, and to witness the attempted killing of children, but to conclude ultimately that “we don’t see children being killed” is chilling, and seems disingenuous to say the least.
Jones alleges that the purpose of the screenings is to induce people to “remember those poor, injured, little boys crying for their dead father, and then to wipe away the horror and anguish we feel about Gaza’s innocents”, that the whole thing is an Israeli PR exercise to “justify the mass slaughter of many more innocent people”. The implication here, whether deliberate or not, is that Israel’s objective in this war is the wholesale murder of Palestinian civilians, presumably as retribution for 7 October.
While in his video Jones repeatedly condemns Hamas’ actions on 7 October, he doesn’t once express support for the total defeat of the organisation itself
Notwithstanding some wholly indefensible statements from a handful of Israeli military spokespeople and politicians, not least the disgraceful finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, the official, stated goal of this war is clear: the destruction of Hamas.
I would suggest the purpose of these screenings is to help to articulate why Israel considers the total eradication of Hamas not only necessary but also just, by demonstrating to the world the depth of Hamas’ evil and barbarism. While in his video Jones repeatedly condemns Hamas’ actions on 7 October, he doesn’t once express support for the total defeat of the organisation itself.
Tidy formulations about collateral damage, the ends justifying the means, and war being hell, are disrespectful and reductive. They are too abstract and impersonal, and entirely fail to appreciate the individual humanity of those people killed in this conflict. Equally reductive is the practice of tallying each side’s dead and wounded and crediting the moral high ground to the side with greater losses.
This is a just war, which Israel must prosecute for the defence of its people. While I have nothing but disdain for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government, I trust Israel to continue to do whatever it can to protect all its citizens, regardless of their ethnicity or religion; namely to use its early warning systems, alarms, public bomb shelters and state-of-the-art missile interceptors. I also trust that the IDF is doing all that it reasonably can to minimise civilian casualties, and I appreciate the extraordinary difficulty of this task given the nature of this war.
Given the preponderance of antisemitic characterisations of Jews as innately bloodthirsty child killers, is it too much to ask Jones to pause before ascribing to the Jewish state a similar nature?
Hamas terrorists are embedded among non-combatants, and don’t always wear uniforms. They do not hesitate to use schools, mosques and hospitals for military purposes, and they have a vast underground tunnel network beneath Gaza. They have also publicly stated that they take no responsibility whatsoever for the welfare and protection of Gaza’s civilian population. The devastation and the enormous and utterly tragic loss of life in Gaza must be understood in this context.
Given the preponderance of antisemitic characterisations of Jews as innately bloodthirsty child killers, is it too much to ask Jones to pause before ascribing to the Jewish state a similar nature?
Jones states that the root of his politics is “revulsion at human suffering”. Does he suppose that we Jews are not motivated by that same revulsion?
I am horrified and have frequently been moved to tears by the scenes emerging from Gaza and dearly want this war to end. But, like the Second World War, in which many hundreds of thousands more German civilians were killed than British, it will end only with the unconditional surrender of the irredeemably evil aggressor who started it.
To quote the great Israeli author and intellectual Amos Oz: “I am a peacenik, not a pacifist. The pacifist will turn the other cheek, thinking that war is the ultimate evil in the world. I will not turn the other cheek because I think the ultimate evil in the world is not war, but aggression. And where we confront aggression, we sometimes have to confront it by force.”
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