In Fog Of War, Facts Don't Matter

Why it doesn't really matter who bombed the Gaza hospital

Who bombed the Baptist hospital in Gaza? I see no reason for the Israelis to have done so, and every reason for them to avoid striking a hospital. And it is entirely plausible that an errant Hamas or Islamic Jihad missile could have done so. This Twitter account, which has a solid record of tracking missiles, explains why it concludes it was a failed Gazan missile, not an Israeli one. Additionally, look at this thread, with video, by an analyst who points out that the explosion at the hospital happened amid a barrage of Hamas rockets that flew right over the hospital — and shows the rocket exploding in the air over the hospital; it’s likely the warhead fell on the hospital.

Still, as of this writing, I don’t know. But many in the Western news media immediately ran with the Palestinian accusation that it was the Israelis. So it goes for Israel, which is damned no matter what.

Yet this is the truest thing anybody said on Twitter last night:

To many on Israel’s side, Israel could not have done this, no matter what evidence emerges that they did. As for the Arab side, I saw information tonight in which Arab journalists were saying that Israel did it, and if it was an errant Hamas rocket, well, that’s still Israel’s fault because the evil of the Jews made Hamas fire the rocket. More John Robb (he’s a former military counterterrorism officer):

What really happened to that hospital — meaning, the origin of the missile — is now beside the point. People have “their” truth. The war cry has gone out. As I write this at nearly six in the morning Central European time, US embassies and consulates throughout the Arab world and in Turkey are under siege. By the time American readers see it, it might be obsolete — that’s how fast this story is moving. Here’s what it looked like overnight in many places. We are likely to be in the first act of a replay of the Asiatic Vespers:

The Asiatic Vespers (also known as the Asian Vespers, Ephesian Vespers, or the Vespers of 88 BC) refers to the massacres of Roman and other Latin-speaking peoples living in parts of western Anatolia c. early 88 BC by forces loyal to Mithridates VI Eupator, ruler of the Kingdom of Pontus, who orchestrated the massacre in an attempt to rid Asia Minor of Roman influence. An estimated 80,000 people were killed during the episode. The incident served as the casus belli or immediate cause of the First Mithridatic War between the Roman Republic and the Kingdom of Pontus.

I have written before about an American Catholic priest I met on the road to Bethlehem in 2000. He was in civvies, and headed to Bethlehem to help prepare for John Paul II’s arrival the next day. He ministered to an Arab Catholic congregation locally. He told me that it was a serious trial, being an American and dealing with Arab epistemology. He said his parishioners were all moved heavily by emotion, facts be damned.

Just the previous week, after mass, the men were saying that Arafat is secretly a Jew. He challenged them on it, and they told him he was naive. "Next week, they'll be saying the complete opposite,” he said, “and when I point out that this is the exact opposite thing they said they believed last week, they'll just look at me like I've lost my mind," he said. Then the priest said that this is how Arafat and his cronies robbed the suffering Palestinian people blind: by manipulating their emotions and susceptibility to conspiracy theory.

A great book to read to understand all this is a 1989 volume by David Pryce-Jones, titled The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs. It’s a complex and insightful work of cultural analysis, written by a British journalist who spent years living among Arabs, and who seems to like them and respect them. He respects them enough to speak uncomfortable truths about how shame/honor culture, tribalism, and conspiratorial thinking have undermined their chances to create better lives for themselves, and saddled them with injustice and oppression. I’ll write more about this book later, but this bit from the introduction is helpful:

Khomeini had hit upon an all-embracing alibi for the political and social failure from which Muslims were suffering. None of it was their fault. People can do nothing for themselves if a Great Satan is in charge of their destinies. Self-pity at that point converts into the blind but absolving rage of the helpless.