In October 2000, doctored footage aired on French television purporting to show the twelve-year-old Mohammad al-Dura cowering behind his father as he is shot by Israeli soldiers. While a preponderance of evidence subsequently showed that the video is little more than a hoax, Western media largely ignored that evidence. This incident serves as the touchstone of Richard Landes’s Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong?: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad, which investigates such distortions and their effects. In his review, Jeffrey Herf criticizes the book’s “overwrought” language and polemical digressions, while praising its argument and the research that backs it up:

At its core, this is a compelling critique of the various journalists and public figures—especially in France, Britain, and the United States—who managed to be consistently wrong about the facts and their causes. Their errors were not random, however. Landes argues that they resulted from a combination of political biases and threats issued by Palestinian organizations. The failure of journalists, in particular, to grasp the ideological causes of the attacks on the Jewish state in 2000 helped to prevent a coherent understanding of the Islamist attacks on the United States and Europe that followed.

Since the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran after the revolution of 1979, the publication of the Hamas covenant in 1988, and al-Qaeda’s declaration of jihad against “Jews and Crusaders” in 1998, the governments of the West’s liberal democracies have, with only a few exceptions, been reluctant to speak clearly about the causal connection between Islamist ideology and violence. This reluctance persisted through the second Palestinian intifada, the terrorist atrocities of September 11th, 2001, and those that followed in London, Paris, Madrid, Berlin, and Amsterdam.

The popularization of a new term, “Islamophobia,” became a rhetorical cudgel with which to beat anyone who noticed references to Islamic texts in the Islamist literature celebrating terrorism. . . . At least some historians in years to come will note that this refusal to speak frankly about the nature and impact of Islamist ideology was one of the most peculiar yet defining aspects of intellectual and political life in the democracies forced to cope with Islamist terrorism.

The result, Landes argues, was a deficiency of empathy for Israelis as they endured the terrorist campaigns in the first years of the new century. In Terror and Liberalism, Paul Berman observed that the more the Palestinian Arabs engaged in terror attacks on Israeli civilians, the more parts of the Western left concluded that only Israeli oppression could account for such desperate violence.

Two of the most important questions about the recent agreement with Hamas are “Why now?” and “What is the relationship between the deal and the military campaign?” To Ron Ben-Yishai, the answer to the two questions is related, and flies in the face of the widespread (and incorrect) claim that the same agreement could have been reached in May:

Contrary to certain public perceptions, the military pressure exerted on northern Gaza in recent months was the main leverage that led to flexibility on the part of Hamas and made clear to the terror group that it would do well to agree to a deal now, before thousands more of its fighters are killed, and before the IDF advances further and destroys Gaza entirely.

Andrew Fox, meanwhile, presents a more comprehensive strategic analysis of the cease-fire:

Tactically, Hamas has taken a severe beating in Gaza since October 2023. It is assessed that it has lost as much as 90 percent of military capability and 80 percent of manpower, although it has recruited well and boosted its numbers from below 10,000 to the 20–30,000 range. However, these are untrained recruits, often under-age, and the IDF has been striking their training camps in northern Gaza so they have been unable to form any kind of meaningful capability. This is not a fighting force that retains any ability to harm the IDF in real numbers, although, as seen this past week with a fatal IED attack, they are able to score the odd hit.

However, this has not affected Hamas’s ability to retain administrative control of Gaza.

Internationally, Hamas sits alone in glory on the information battlefield. It has won the most resounding victory imaginable in the world’s media, in Western states, and on the Internet. . . . The stock of the Palestinian cause rides high internationally and will only get higher as Hamas proclaims a victory following this cease-fire deal. By means of political pressure on Israel, the international information campaign has kept Hamas in the fight, extended the war, prolonged the suffering of Gazan civilians, and has ultimately handed Hamas a win through the fact of their continued survival and eventual rebuild.

Indeed, writes Fox in a separate post, the “images coming out of Gaza over the last few days show us that too many in the wider world have been played for fools.”

Hamas fighters have been seen emerging from hospitals and the humanitarian zone. Well-fed Palestinians, with fresh haircuts and Adidas tracksuits, or in just vests, cheer for the camera. . . . There was no starvation. There was no freezing. There was no genocide.