A Guardian article by Emma Graham-Harrison on the return of the remains of Ran Gvili 842 days after he was killed during Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre (“Remains of last Israeli held in Gaza after 7 October 2023 returned”, Jan. 26) pivoted, after eight paragraphs focusing largely on the reactions of Gvili’s family, to the broader issue of US efforts to move to the ceasefire agreement’s next stage.
This presented Graham-Harrison the opportunity to return to her comfort zone: vilifying Israel and framing Jerusalem as the sole impediment to a lasting peace, while erasing Hamas from the story – a tale in which the terrorists who carried out the most barbaric antisemitic pogrom since the Holocaust, while breezily unconcerned with the impact their war would have on their own population, have no agency.
The following three paragraphs reveal this uniquely Guardian propagandistic narrative [emphasis added]:
Key Trump aides last week laid out an extremely ambitious plan for Gaza, with his son-in-law, Jared Kusher, describing it as a blueprint for “catastrophic success”. It envisages a unified Palestinian-run Gaza, which represents a rebuff to the aims of Israeli extremists, including some in the governing coalition, who have sought the deportation of Gaza’s population and the building of Israeli settlements in its place.
The plan’s success will depend largely on whether Trump and his “board of peace” have the determination to implement the plan, overcoming Israeli objections and obstruction. That includes whether a mechanism can be created inside Gaza to oversee the disarming of Hamas, with potential contributors to a proposed international security force ruling out any direct confrontation with the militant group.
After the return of Gvili’s body was announced, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, told lawmakers that the next step for Gaza would be not the reconstruction promised by Kushner but instead “the disarmament of Hamas and the demilitarisation of the Gaza Strip”, Haaretz reported.
In Graham-Harris’ Guardian-style narrative, only Israelis are the “extremists” and peace “obstructionists,” not Hamas, whose refusal to disarm is intentionally obfuscated by the writer’s use of passive language.
Whereas Israelis are portrayed as moral and political actors who obstruct – or, at least, attempt to obstruct – peace, Hamas, in a manner erasing their power as human actors, “must be disarmed” – the action being assigned to a third party who must disarm the terrorist group – for peace to be achieved.
Contrary to Graham-Harris’ framing, a mechanism cannot be created inside Gaza “to oversee the disarming of Hamas” if the terror group, which reportedly still has around 20,000 active fighters, with thousands of small arms and hundreds of rockets, continues in its refusal to lay down its weaponry – which is an explicit demand of the US 20-point peace plan.
In other words, Palestinian leaders in the territory – who are, by virtue of their terror affiliations, extremists – have agency.
Israel, to be sure, has its own extremists.
However, Hamas’ cruel, destructive, and fanatical decisions, both on Oct. 7, 2023 and over the following 27 months, including their use of human shields, their continuing refusal to surrender despite the horrible toll their unwinnable war has exacted on the civilian population, and the group’s current refusal to disarm, represent the most serious threat to the lives and livelihood of civilians in the Strip.
This post originally appeared at CAMERA UK.