Whom to Believe? Well...

[Resistance]

by Uri Avnery

"Whom do you believe?" asked General Ya'akov Amidror on TV with subdued anger, "the army spokesman or Hamas?"

General (reserves) Amidror is the highest religious officer in our army. In the past he has raised several public storms with some utterances denigrating secular Israelis, saying that they are not real Jews. He has a sharp mind, much above the average in the army command, and his intellect is fully employed in serving his extremist views - both the extremist religious and the extremist nationalist ones.

His question was intended to be rhetorical. After all, the answer is self-evident: on one side there is the IDF, "the most moral and most humane army in the world", as it calls itself, and on the other side there is a bunch of crazy murderers, so what's the problem?

But, according to Amidror himself, the reverse is happening. The world believes Hamas and does not believe the IDF spokesman. The Israeli public believes Hamas. Even cabinet ministers and Knesset members believe Hams and do not believe the army spokesman.

The crisis of confidence was revealed in all its harshness by a series of events last week in the Gaza Strip. According to the Palestinians, the army fired air-to-surface missiles at a car in which there were two Hamas militants. When people from the neighborhood crowded around the smashed car to see if the could help the victims, they were attacked by another missile. All in all 14 Palestinians were killed, among them a doctor who had rushed there to help, and dozens of others, including many women and children, were wounded.

"A big lie!" the Army Spokesman angrily announced. The army did not fire another missile at all. It did not hurt civilians! It's just another vicious Palestinian slander!

[dfong63]

1. if IDF is telling the truth, then how did all those people get injured?

... where did they come from? have they (IDF) released the rest of the video footage yet?

[bluesoul]

2. Liers

Amidror is lying and everyone knows that!

[Resistance]

3. You might have lost your credibility when ...

...people believe Hamas more than you!

[Muddleoftheroad]

4. Or those who so believe

Might have lost their's.

[tinnypriv]

5. Neither Uri or Ze'ev are right

There is no way of "knowing" if a third missile was fired unless the IDF releases the entire tape (Israel as a state actor always has that advantage when dealing with media reports, which is another topic).

I suspect Uri's "version" is fairly close to the truth - something did happen to those people after the second hit, and there has been no explanation from the Israeli side as to what it was.

Despite that, Ze'ev Schiff has been an extremely respectable Israeli commentator for years (though he seems to have gone wingnut in recent months), and his article is also pretty pursuasive.