{"id":516,"date":"2014-12-08T13:29:16","date_gmt":"2014-12-08T13:29:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/?p=516"},"modified":"2016-01-21T22:34:21","modified_gmt":"2016-01-21T22:34:21","slug":"an-insiders-guide-to-the-most-important-story-on-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/2014\/12\/08\/an-insiders-guide-to-the-most-important-story-on-earth\/","title":{"rendered":"An Insider&#8217;s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth (Tablet Magazine)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/tabletmag.com\/jewish-news-and-politics\/183033\/israel-insider-guide\" target=\"_blank\">Tablet Magazine, August 26, 2014<\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>The Israel Story<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Is there anything left to say about Israel and Gaza? Newspapers this summer have been full of little else. Television viewers see heaps of rubble and plumes of smoke in their sleep. A representative\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2014\/08\/04\/aflame-2\">article<\/a>\u00a0from a recent issue of\u00a0<em>The<\/em>\u00a0<em>New Yorker<\/em>\u00a0described the summer\u2019s events by dedicating one sentence each to the horrors in Nigeria and Ukraine, four sentences to the crazed<em>g\u00e9nocidaires<\/em>\u00a0of ISIS, and the rest of the article\u201430 sentences\u2014to Israel and Gaza.<\/p>\n<p>When the hysteria abates, I believe the events in Gaza will not be remembered by the world as particularly important. People were killed, most of them Palestinians, including many unarmed innocents. I wish I could say the tragedy of their deaths, or the deaths of Israel\u2019s soldiers, will change something, that they mark a turning point. But they don\u2019t. This round was not the first in the Arab wars with Israel and will not be the last. The Israeli campaign was little different in its execution from any other waged by a Western army against a similar enemy in recent years, except for the more immediate nature of the threat to a country\u2019s own population, and the greater exertions, however futile, to avoid civilian deaths.<\/p>\n<p>The lasting importance of this summer\u2019s war, I believe, doesn\u2019t lie in the war itself. It lies instead in the way the war has been described and responded to abroad, and the way this has laid bare the resurgence of an old, twisted pattern of thought and its migration from the margins to the mainstream of Western discourse\u2014namely, a hostile obsession with Jews. The key to understanding this resurgence is not to be found among jihadi webmasters, basement conspiracy theorists, or radical activists. It is instead to be found first among the educated and respectable people who populate the international news industry; decent people, many of them, and some of them my former colleagues.<\/p>\n<p>(For full story click <a href=\"https:\/\/tabletmag.com\/jewish-news-and-politics\/183033\/israel-insider-guide\" target=\"_blank\">here.<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tablet Magazine, August 26, 2014 The Israel Story Is there anything left to say about Israel and Gaza? Newspapers this summer have been full of little else. Television viewers see heaps of rubble and plumes of smoke in their sleep. A representative\u00a0article\u00a0from a recent issue of\u00a0The\u00a0New Yorker\u00a0described the summer\u2019s events by dedicating one sentence each to the horrors in Nigeria &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=516"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":686,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516\/revisions\/686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}