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May 16th, 2021 
Awake Goy Today’s New York Times includes a remarkable article, in which the paper admits that Israel’s military duped it (and the rest of the mainstream U.S. media) yesterday. The Times report, although revealing, falls short in two areas: It nowhere explains that the Times has been tricked many times before, and it misses the much larger story: why Israel may be afraid to invade Gaza on the ground.
Israel’s English-language military mouthpiece, Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, told U.S. and other international reporters just after midnight Friday that Israel’s ground forces had started “attacking in the Gaza Strip.” The organizations immediately published bulletins reporting his statement. Hours later, the invasion claim was withdrawn. Israeli news outlets, who the military did not try to mislead, said the fake news was an effort to trick Hamas fighters into hiding in their underground bunkers, where Israeli warplanes could supposedly strike them.
Today’s Times article, by former Jerusalem bureau chief David Halbfinger, has a tone of injured betrayal. But Israel’s military has long suckered the Times and other foreign media outlets. Here’s just one example, a 2015 Times report that Israel had killed 6 Palestinians just inside the Israel/Gaza border. Reporter Jodi Rudoren justified the killings by taking stenography from Israel’s then-spokesman, Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, who alleged that “there were more than 1000 [Palestinian] men ‘attempting multiple times and at multiple locations to storm the border fence throughout the day,’ hurling projectiles including a grenade.”
Rudoren made no effort to verify Lerner’s assertion. Luckily, a veteran, genuine journalist named Joel Greenberg covered the same story in the Financial Times. Here’s what Greenberg said:
Officials in Gaza said six Palestinians were killed and dozens wounded. Witnesses said the shots were fired by snipers at Israeli guard posts along the fence. . . The [Israeli military] spokesman could not explain why troops had not instead used non-lethal crowd control weapons, such as tear gas and rubber bullets, routinely used by Israeli forces against violent protests in the West Bank.
Meanwhile, Times and other mainstream reporters have completely missed the larger story: Israel may not invade Gaza on the ground because it no longer can. Hard-headed military experts have said that the Hamas resistance movement has prepared strong defenses inside Gaza that have raised the costs of an invasion above an acceptable level to Israel.
Back in 2018, a retired Israel colonel named Shimon Arad wrote, a bit ruefully, that Hamas has built an effective tunnel system inside Gaza that could thwart an Israeli invasion. He explained:
. . . Israeli would now have to maneuver into the densely populated Palestinian cities and refugee camps, saturated with tunnels under houses and fighting positions, in order to destroy Hamas’s military capabilities. This is designed to make an Israeli maneuver costly, thereby deterring the operation entirely or cutting it short because of pressure from the Israeli public and regional and international actors to stop the fighting.
In other words, Israel may continue its indiscriminate air war against Gaza, killing scores of civilians, including children, because it won’t jeopardize the safety of its own soldiers.
Follow the battle over Palestine in U.S. politics.
The movement to end Israeli apartheid is making considerable gains in the United States. However, the Israeli occupation persists, billions in U.S. military aid continues to flow, and states continue to pass unconstitutional anti-BDS laws that target supporters of the boycott. Every Thursday, Michael Arria, takes you to the front lines in the battle over Palestine in U.S. politics.
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