From Dreyfus to Netanyahu, Jews have always faced trial by media

Talk about trial by media. Benjamin Netanyahu compared the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court last week as a “modern Dreyfus trial”. He’s not wrong; and at the heart of the affair is the propaganda campaign waged by the international media.

Justice is supposed to be blind, without fear or favour. But judges happen to be people, and people happen to be susceptible to influence, both political and cultural.

Much has been written already about the political agenda behind this emetic ICC decision. The court’s unprecedented move to act outside of its jurisdiction; against a democracy with its own full-functioning legal system; armed with nothing more than malicious gossip as evidence; this tells us everything we need to know.

But none of this would be possible if it were not for the hand-in-glove relationship between journalists and Hamas.

When the history books are written, this misinformation campaign will be seen as the biggest story of our times. It’s not like the facts are hard to discover. As John Spencer, the world’s foremost authority on urban warfare, put it yesterday, Israel is conducting a “legal, moral, ethical campaign against Hamas in Gaza with a historically low civilian-to-combatant ratio compared to any like situation”. That is simply the truth. I have written numerous columns on the subject myself, as have many others. The facts support it indisputably.

Anybody with even a glancing interest in the news should be able to put two and two together. Hamas claims that about 40,000 people have been killed. Israel says that about 20,000 of these were terrorists. Even setting aside the problems with taking the word of jihadis at face value, and the obvious fabrications present in their figures, that means that one combatant has been killed for every civilian. The UN’s global average? One to nine.

What to make of the fact that thousands of international journalists close their eyes and ears to the basic facts of the story every day? That’s just the beginning. One constant source of frustration for me has been the way in which not a single television outlet ever informs viewers that its Gaza footage has been censored by Hamas.

In previous conflicts, when journalists were allowed into the Strip, they were given Hamas minders who restricted their reporting to civilian casualties, giving the false impression to the world that Israel is targeting only the innocent. This time round, Jerusalem has barred reporters from Gaza but this has not stemmed the propaganda. The pictures we see are produced by local “journalists” working under the rule of Hamas.

In a rational world, the BBC (for instance) would precede its reports from Gaza with the message, “this footage has been censored by Hamas”. It would also tell us, when reporting the casualty numbers, that according to Israel, half of the dead were combatants. The fact that these two basic safeguards are ignored means that all the coverage is slanted.

If the conflict was being reported responsibly, the context – if I may reclaim that word – would be clear throughout. Israel withdrew from Gaza unilaterally in 2005; the territory was taken over by jihadis, who butchered 1,200 people on October 7; the Jewish state launched a just and defensive war, incurring a historically low number of civilian casualties by issuing evacuation warnings. This gold standard was achieved in response to a foe that relies upon a strategy of human sacrifice.

The IDF, like any army, contains a small number of criminal elements who commit depraved crimes in the chaos and smoke of war. These people must be prosecuted. But that does not detract from the facts.

Instead, what do we see on our television screens every night? Endless footage of suffering civilians, never combatants. Tragic interviews with doctors from Gaza, whose history of jihadi sympathies are never addressed. Lurid, baseless allegations from the UN and NGOs about war crimes, starvation and genocide. Lies put out by the terror groups – Israel is bombing hospitals full of patients, murdering babies, targeting Palestinian sportsmen and journalists, savaging civilians with dogs – which are quickly taken up by journalists. All of this is allowed to knit with the subterranean suspicion that Jews relish the blood of infants to produce the fabric of Israelophobia that smothers us all today.

This fabric winds the most distinguished experts into its suffocating folds. I recently went to Israel on a factfinding mission with a military delegation including General Sir John McColl, the former deputy supreme commander of Nato in Europe. In the airport, he confided to me that he had a dim view of Israel’s human rights record. By the time we returned, having spent a week seeing the war on the ground and interrogating commanders, he used a column in the Times to insist that “I fought in Iraq — I know Israel’s doing all it can to save civilians”.

Yet the lies continue. Which returns us to the ICC. These people can only get away with it because of the climate of Israelophobia created by the propaganda that swamps us. If there are any truly impartial and well-meaning judges among them, they are only human, as susceptible to the media campaign as Sir John, or anybody else.

The victimisation of Alfred Dreyfus in the 19th century was fuelled by the media. On November 1, 1894, the populist Paris newspaper La Libre Parole broke the story with this headline, “High Treason: Arrest of the Jewish Officer, A Dreyfus,” citing anonymous military sources. The editor, Edouard Drumont, reported that Dreyfus had confessed in the face of “absolute proof that he sold our military secrets to Germany”.

From that moment onwards, a blizzard of press coverage included granular details of fabricated evidence, false accusations, trumped-up incidents and salacious gossip. Two days after breaking the story, Drumont wrote in a column: “What a terrible lesson, this disgraceful reason of the Jew Dreyfus.” As a result of this propaganda, when the court martial took place, the public already believed that the Jew was guilty.

The parallels with the events unfolding in The Hague today are impossible to ignore. In 1906, after five arduous years in a penal colony on Devil’s Island, Dreyfus was finally exonerated. The ICC and the propagandists in the media should consider their future reputations and take heed of how history is repeating itself.