Last month, Robert Satloff analyzed a Washington Post article that took “a fundamentally good-news story about premature babies from Gaza cared for by compassionate people across enemy lines and turned it into a horror story” of Israel maliciously separating babies from their mothers. Satloff noted the poor sourcing of its claims and misleading framing. After looking into the report more closely, he realized it was even worse than he thought, and its allegations rely heavily on an unchecked report by an NGO. He presents a forensic dissection: 

What’s the bottom line? All the key elements of the story that appeared in print on November 17, occupying most of the front page above the fold, were either false, unsubstantiated or, at a bare minimum, rejected by statements by Israeli government officials who painted a very different picture from the one presented by the Post. The reporters appear to have taken on face-value claims and assertions made by the Palestinian mothers and the hospital administrators, without any independent verification. Their failure to seek comment from the relevant Israeli authorities violated the most fundamental rules of journalism.

At the very least, the Post would then have had a “he-said/she-said” story, presenting two contradictory views of the same situation. Why the Post’s editors did not insist that the reporters follow these rules may be the most inexplicable part of this tale.

As the war in Gaza appears to be coming to close, writes Michael Milshtein, Israelis are left with “a sense of failure and bitterness” despite the IDF’s “military successes and strategic achievements.” Meanwhile, he writes, Gazans are likely to see the war as a “historic achievement,” and thus once more fall into the cycle of ecstasy and amnesia that Shany Mor identified as the key pattern in Palestinian understanding of the conflict.

Milshtein too acknowledges how much the present results resemble what preceded them, reminding us that Arabs and Israelis felt similarly after

the 1956 Sinai Campaign when, like in the current war, Israel was pressured by the United States to withdraw from conquered territories and bring the conflict to an end. The same applies to the Yom Kippur War, the second intifada, the Second Lebanon War, and the 2014 Operation Protective Edge [against Hamas]. Arab collective memory regards these events as achievements resulting from sacrifice and the ability to absorb severe blows, exhibit steadfastness (sumud), and make it impossible for Israel to declare decisive victory.

This phenomenon shouldn’t lead Israel to conclude it has been defeated but must be understood so as to formulate sober goals and courses of action in dealing with enemies in the region.

For now, there are no signs of soul-searching [among Palestinians] concerning the price of the war. Responsibility for the carnage and destruction, described as a nakba greater than that of 1948, is laid at Israel’s doorstep. This reflects a long-standing fundamental Palestinian flaw: a “bipolarity” with, on the one hand, fighting spirit and praise for the ability to harm Israel and, on the other, victimhood from the results of the war the Palestinians themselves started.