The Israeli Quotes That the Press Got Wrong [View all]

[Sympthsical]

I highly, highly recommend reading this entire article. (Just put it in "reader view" in your browser). Why? Because every single quote highlighted by the author - who is no friend of Netanyahu or Likud - will be very, very familiar. You will have seen all of them spread breathlessly, incorrectly, and triumphantly by anti-Israel activists.

You will have seen them here, multiple times, brought up repeatedly - and continuing to this day - without correction.

Something to keep in mind, that primary sources are best. The media, social media, and a very strong anti-Israel operation make very sure the narrative is distorted to their liking, and they will not be doing the correcting for you. By the time you figure out what you're being told is wrong, they are long gone onto the next outrage that maybe isn't as outrageous as is being presented dishonestly to you.

Since I can do only four paragraphs. But seriously. Read the whole damn thing and admire just how much fuckery is spread around willfully.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2024/01/israel-south-africa-genocide-case-fake-quotes/677198/

(Non-paywall link, thanks Scipan) https://web.archive.org/web/20240122012035/https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2024/01/israel-south-africa-genocide-case-fake-quotes/677198/

And yet, the misleadingly truncated version of Gallant’s quote has not just been circulated on NPR and the BBC. The New York Times has made the same elision twice, and it appeared in The Guardian, in a piece by Kenneth Roth, the former head of Human Rights Watch. It was also quoted in The Washington Post, where a writer ironically claimed that Gallant had said “the quiet part out loud,” while quietly omitting whom Gallant was actually talking about. Most consequentially, this mistaken rendering of Gallant’s words was publicly invoked last week by South Africa’s legal team in the International Court of Justice as evidence of Israel’s genocidal intent; it served as one of their only citations sourced to someone in Israel’s war cabinet. The line was then reiterated on the floor of Congress by Representative Rashida Tlaib.

Politicians and lawyers are not always known for their probity, but journalists have fact-checkers. How did an error this substantial get missed so many times in so many places? One New York Times article that cited Gallant’s mangled misquote sourced the words to an op-ed in another outlet, which sourced them to an X post that featured an embedded TikTok video. But the cascade of media failures appears to have begun with a 42-second video excerpt of Gallant’s talk that was uploaded by Bloomberg with incomplete English subtitles. The clip, since viewed more than half a million times, simply skips over “There will be no Hamas” in its translation. (Bloomberg did not return a request for comment at press time.)

Unfortunately, this concatenation of errors is part of a pattern. As someone who has covered Israeli extremism for years and written about the hard right’s push to ethnically cleanse Gaza and resettle it, I have been carefully tracking the rise of such dangerous ideas for more than a decade. In this perilous wartime environment, it is essential to know who is saying what, and whether they have the authority to act on it. But while far too many right-wing members of Israel’s Parliament have expressed borderline or straightforwardly genocidal sentiments during the Gaza conflict, such statements attributed to the three people making Israel’s actual military decisions, the voting members of its war cabinet—Gallant, Netanyahu, and the former opposition lawmaker Benny Gantz—repeatedly turn out to be mistaken or misrepresented.

Take the claim, also cited by NPR’s Fadel among others, that Gallant referred to Gazans as “human animals.” The defense minister has used this harsh language several times, and it’s reasonable to wonder whom he’s referring to. But as can be seen from the same Bloomberg video, Gallant uses this phrase to talk about Hamas, telling soldiers who fought off Hamas on the devastated Gaza border: “You have seen what we are fighting against. We are fighting against human animals. This is the ISIS of Gaza.” (Hamas’s atrocities on October 7 have been likened to acts of the Islamic State by both Israeli and American officials, including President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken.) One can certainly take issue with Gallant’s language—for one thing, a nonhuman animal never executed a grandmother in her home and then uploaded the snuff film to her Facebook page—but not with the fact that the defense minister’s words referred specifically to Hamas.