Hating Netanyahu

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyhau.

Melanie Phillips is someone whose views resonate with me. Her unabashedly pro-Israel position is based on reality rather than politics—a reality she exposes with facts rather than the predisposed anti-Israel version of reality that much of the mainstream media presents to the world. Her views on the State of Israel and antisemitism are virtually identical to mine. The only difference is that she is a far better communicator.

And she did it again - writing about a Jewish leader who has become very popular to hate—from either side of the political aisle, especially as it pertains to how the media views him. There is no love lost for Israel’s longest-serving and arguably most consequential prime minister in its nearly 80-year history.

Benjamin Netanyahu has become the fall guy for anything that goes wrong in Israel or affects the Jewish people. The mere mention of his name in almost any context often brings out derision from many well-intentioned Jews. That reaction is frequently based not on the actual facts, but on the way those facts are reported by the mainstream media.

To take one prominent example of this phenomenon, consider the accusations made against Netanyahu regarding the war in Gaza. The BBC and The New York Times—two of the world’s most widely respected news organizations—consistently paint Netanyahu’s Israel in Nazi-like terms. The rest of the mainstream media often treats that characterization as undisputed fact. That, of course, has an outsized impact on public opinion.

Netanyahu has been accused of ordering the IDF to disregard Palestinian casualties in pursuit of Hamas terrorists. Media reliance on Hamas casualty figures—emphasizing large numbers of women and children without independent verification—becomes the only “truth” that is reported. It is a “truth” that does not differentiate between terrorists and innocent civilians. It is a “truth” that often ignores Hamas’s deliberate strategy of embedding itself among the most vulnerable civilian populations in order to maximize civilian casualties.

That “truth,” repeated on the nightly news for months at a time, makes accusations of genocide against Netanyahu easy to believe. Absent from much of that reporting is the fact that Netanyahu’s Israel is the only country in the history of warfare that routinely warned civilians of impending attacks and gave them time to evacuate. Yet images of destruction, coupled with a relentlessly negative narrative, made the accusations seem legitimate.

This kind of hostility extends far beyond the prejudiced narratives promoted by much of the media and influences many well-intentioned Jews.

Ms. Phillips puts it all into proper perspective, asking in the subtitle of her Jewish Chronicle article:

“Are the ‘If Only Netanyahu’ crowd really so blinded by hatred?”

I am sorry to say that I think the answer is yes…

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