Unholy War
DRAGUIGNAN, France — News from Israel echoes darkly here along the winding narrow rue de la Juiverie — Jewry Street — where rich medieval families built a stately synagogue, razed long ago, near what is now a fast-food joint called French Taco.
Jews in France thrived by providing financial services the New Testament scorned. They clustered in apartheid ghettos within cities, forced to wear yellow badges reading "Juif" and forbidden to venture out at night.
King Louis IX, France's devout Saint Louis, expelled Jews in 1236, partly to welch on loans so he could fund Crusades against Muslims in a land three major faiths called holy. Pogroms and persecution followed across Europe for the next eight centuries.
My father escaped Belarus as a kid. My mother's family fled Ukraine. Happily, they settled in America and not here. When I was born, Jews were being sent in boxcars to German death camps.
Today, 15 million Jews are all over the map, physically and spiritually. But their shared watchword is a prayer beginning, "Sh'ma Yisrael." Hear, O Israel. It refers to an ancient concept, not a small country run by a heartless politician desperate to avoid prison.
As a reporter named Rosenblum based in France since 1977, traveling often throughout the Islamic world, I have seen sharp shifts in antisemitism since 2017. That is when an ignorant, transactional U.S. president began wreaking havoc across the Middle East.
This is an analysis by a mostly non-practicing American Jew, a lifelong reporter committed to the elusive goal of "objectivity."
In 1948, a year before I started school in Tucson, classroom world maps added an odd-shaped new nation labeled Israel. They removed "British mandate" from a patchwork Palestine. Both shared Jerusalem. Each included parts of that ancient Holy Land.
By third grade, with a rubber-type printing press in my bedroom, I had anointed myself a journalist. It was silly kid stuff. But I was infused with curiosity about a story at the crux of a fast-evolving world that I have watched closely ever since.
When I went abroad for the Associated Press in 1967, the story seemed biblical: an Old-Testament David defending a Jewish homeland against neighboring Goliaths from Egypt and across a Jordan River still muddy and wide.
Before long, those roles blurred. Working for AP, I could not have taken sides even if I had wanted to. In any case, wrongs and rights by factions from all sides over the years prevented any facile simplicities.
Today, a basic truth stands out. The world faces head-on what Samantha Power titled her timeless book on genocide: A Problem From Hell.
Genocide is a loaded word, but it has near synonyms. Benjamin Netanyahu's Israel is committing collective mass murder. It causes human suffering that now includes famine, outlawed under Geneva Conventions pushed by America after World War II.
He intends to colonize Gaza despite his military chief's stark warning that would lead to wasting, unwinnable war. A tough letter from nearly 600 top officers retired from Israel's army, police and intelligence services urges ceasefire with negotiations.
Only Donald Trump has the means to stop him by cutting U.S. military support and annual billions in financial aid. But, obsessed only with himself, Trump envisions a gleaming Gaza seafront with his name atop gaudy resorts for a wealthy few.
Public outrage could force Trump's hand. But Netanyahu controls the message. Israel bans all foreign and local journalists from Gaza except for a chosen few on escorted brief forays. And few Americans realize that.
After the monstrous Oct. 7, 2023, raid into Israel, a grief-stricken nation gave free rein to military commanders for a justified response to cripple Hamas. That was achieved a year ago, and a righteous invasion has shifted into cruel, needless onslaught.
The Biden administration brokered a plan to free hostages, avert wider regional war and begin negotiations for a peaceable aftermath with an autonomous Palestine.
More conflict was futile. Hamas routinely killed hostages as troops approached. Only eight were freed by the military. All other releases came during brief ceasefires. But war continues with a vengeance, mostly shielded from outside scrutiny.
This week Israelis summarily executed Anas al-Sharif, a prominent Al Jazeera reporter accused without evidence of collaborating with Hamas. An airstrike hit his tent, marked "PRESS," near Al-Shifa hospital. "Collateral damage" killed five other journalists.
Al-Sharif was the Arab world's best-known face of the war. His crew provided searing video coverage to international networks unable to produce their own.
The U.S.-based Committee to Protect Journalists lists 186 media deaths in Gaza since Oct 7, 2023. Other counts are higher. Most were Palestinians recruited as stringers by foreign news organizations.
CPJ director Jodie Ginsberg cited findings that no one has been held to account for 20 journalist killings in conflicts involving Israeli forces over recent decades. Impunity, she said, signals to governments elsewhere they can get away with murder.
Israel's crackdown on the press damages its credibility. As a rule, reporters assume the worst when they are forbidden access to a story, and they intensify scrutiny in any way they can. Clearly, authorities have something to hide.
But the media ban also gives Israel plausible deniability if mainstream news organizations do not dig down to truth or if they back away when smear campaigns cast doubt on damning reality.
CNN's Ben Wedeman, a gifted linguist steeped in Middle East reality, is as good as reporters get. But for reasons known only to budget-conscious, politically cautious managers, his standups over the past crucial weeks were from his base in Rome.
Wolf Blitzer worked at Reuters in Israel during the early 70s, then the Jerusalem Post until 1990. In his CNN interview with Danny Danon, Israel's U.N. ambassador, he tossed softball sympathetic questions.
Danon blamed all humanitarian problems on Hamas, focusing almost entirely on Oct. 7. He said Israel provided ample aid to Gaza, and its troops, among the world's most humane, took great pains to avoid civilian casualties. Blitzer simply nodded.
War crimes are beyond dispute: bombed hospitals and homes; blocked food, fuel, water, and the most basic medical needs; constant shifts of families to yet more dangerous places. And now starvation kills infants and adults alike.
Israel says Hamas health officials inflate a reported death toll of 61,000, including about 18,000 children. U.N. and reliable NGO experts say it is likely higher. Uncounted victims lie under rubble.
BBC's World Service, available only online in America, mentions the ban at nearly every turn. Palestinian stringers inform experienced correspondents and ex-military analysts. In London, seasoned anchors demand answers to their pertinent questions.
Jeremy Bowen stands out among old BBC hands whose lifetimes on the road are etched on weathered faces. From a hilltop overlooking Gaza, his cameraman captured deadly mayhem at one of three functioning U.S.-backed food relief sites.
He interviewed Lt. Col. Anthony Aguilar, an ex-Green Beret with 25 years of decorated combat duty on 12 deployments. He said untrained Israelis and hired mercenaries fired automatic weapons toward densely packed crowds.
“In my entire career," he told Bowen, "I have never witnessed the level of brutality and use of indiscriminate and unnecessary force against a civilian population, an unarmed, starving population.”
Aguilar commanded a security force contracted by the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which runs those distribution sites where U.N. human rights monitors say close to 1,500 Palestinians have been killed seeking food since late May.
When he quit and spoke out, a GHF smear campaign dissuaded major U.S. news organizations from covering him. Reporters on the spot would have reflected reality with telling detail, close-focus images and authoritative direct quotes.
Instead, I spent an afternoon at the keys to determine whether the classic "disgruntled fired employee" charge stood up. I soon saw that U.S. taxpayers have squandered millions on overpaid, inept managers of a drop-in-the-bucket operation.
Video is irrefutable. People most in need are too weak or fearful to run the gauntlet. Tough young men, some with knives, haul off gunny sacks they sell at exorbitant prices. Unlike direct U.N. and NGO aid, it is vulnerable to Hamas hijacking.
But it is far worse than that. An intelligent, low-key 90-minute online interview made plain that Tony Aguilar is the real deal. It is too rich with documented evidence, signed letters, video sequences, precise dates and professional assessment to summarize.
A YouTube link, which includes a transcript, is attached below. Just a warning so no one falls off a chair. The interview was by Tucker Carlson on his independent post-Fox Show. No bowtie, signature smarm or dramatic flourishes.
Aguilar, honorably discharged with commendations for valor, settled down with his family. He advised home gardeners at Lowe's and supervised his son's Cub Scout den. At his wife's urging, he accepted an offer to help aid distribution in Gaza.
Swiftly promoted, he moved constantly among GHF sites, videoing operations and liaising with Israeli Defense Forces. He said some officers and regular troops were among the best he has seen. Others, short-term recruits, were the worst.
At one point, he played video of rag-tag private contractors fending off a surging crowd. Audio captures one exchange. "Yee-ha, I think you got one," a voice said. "Hell yeah, boy!" another replied.
In one GHF rebuttal to Aguilar, a lawyer said its security guards only fired warning shots at the feet or over the heads of surging crowds. That, Aguilar said, is an admission of war crimes. In the interview, he explains why.
Warning shots, he said, are a civilian myth. Military rules of engagement forbid firing toward noncombatants. Troops shoot when necessary and only to kill.
He said men were given fully automatic Israeli assault rifles none had used before. They skipped the essential steps of zeroing in on targets to adjust to each man's style. Their armor-piercing rounds can kill an unseen victim more than half a mile away.
In the end, Carlson said his own careful search found no truth in GHF's accusations against Aguilar. He was not fired. On the contrary, the director of UG Solutions, which recruited him, wrote a glowing letter inviting him to return whenever he wanted.
When I went to Africa in 1967, Israel was courting friends in fledgling ex-colonies. One project attempted to soften Congolese military machismo by training women paratroopers. My story's headline explained why it failed: Pregnant Dropouts.
Then in 1977, Israel stunned the world with an audacious raid into Idi Amin's Uganda to rescue all but four of 106 hostages aboard an Air France plane hijacked in Paris by a Palestinian extremist group.
The only Israeli killed was Yonatan Netanyahu, Benjamin's older brother, who commanded an elite special ops unit. People like me who saw Judaism as a heritage, not a religion, felt a tinge of pride. The tribe had extended itself to do the right thing.
In 1981, AP gave me the coveted job of special correspondent. Based in Paris with a generous travel budget and an indulgent boss, I bounced around the world covering major breaking news and important stories still gurgling under the surface.
At Khan Younis in Gaza, a Palestinian father told me he dreamed of peaceful co-existence with Israel if extremists on both sides could somehow find common ground.
His son, about 8, spoke no English, but his eyes said it all: If you think I'm going to put up with what my old man has suffered, you're out of your mind.
A year later, I was at the Lebanese border as Ariel Sharon planned his drive up to Beirut, the heart of Yasir Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization and other more radical groups.
Because AP went to newspapers and broadcasters everywhere, I convinced the military to let me tag along. And at Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp, I saw a dark side of Israel that has grown darker by the decade.
Terrorists had dug in under the sprawling compound, knowing what to expect and heedless of the danger they posed to blameless families above ground. Israel obliged with repeated airstrikes.
I got through to AP to file the story. Censors said I was mistaken. After covering Vietnam, I replied, I know 500-pound bombs when I see them. They said it was a security matter. I said refugees don't need to read AP to realize they are under attack.
They won. And indiscriminate bombing without heed to that "collateral damage" is fast turning the world against Israel. Of course, the Nazis' use of collective punishment is hardly comparable. But the principle is the same.
Overall, the upshot is clear. In the distant past, Jews were persecuted for their religion. During the 1930s, they were a convenient scapegoat for Hitler. He blamed what he called inferior races for Germany's societal ills. Today, "antisemitism" is political.
Arabs are Semites. Until recent years, Jews, Muslims and Christians mostly saw one another as people of same book, which taught kindness to strangers. But a fresh generation — along with older diehard bigots — seldom thinks that though.
Young people who faulted Biden and Kamala Harris for not doing enough to thwart Netanyahu overlooked his wide support among American Jews and Christian evangelicals. Their uncast ballots amounted to yet more votes for Trump.
The danger today is beyond description. No Arab states or outsiders are prepared to impose peace in Gaza. If Israel settles into post-war occupation, Hamas fighters now in hiding can surface for sabotage attacks, from sniper fire and bombs to blown-up tanks.
One obvious result would be worldwide violence against Jews, including those who revile crimes against humanity committed in their name. The rest is speculation. Solutions are possible. But here among the ghosts on Jewry Street, I am deeply troubled.
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