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The blame game has gone into high gear.
It started with the massacre perpetrated in Israel more than two weeks ago by the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, which has ruled the Gaza Strip for the past 17 years. President Joe Biden called it “sheer evil,” and a chorus of other voices said the same.
Another chorus of familiar voices replied: the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip are descended from Arab Palestinians who were victims of the Nakba (the Disaster), the expulsion of the Palestinians from their lands in what is now Israel in 1948.
Those refugees and their children and grandchildren have lived ever since in what amounts to an open-air prison, the counter-chorus said. So the attack was understandable, even if the slaughter of civilians was hard to defend.
As usual, there is some truth in both the narratives, and which one people believe largely depends on their existing loyalties. The same mechanism is at work in every subsequent turn of events, including the explosion at Al-Ahli Al-Arabi hospital in Gaza City that purportedly killed 500 people on Wednesday morning.
Hamas immediately said it was a deliberate Israeli attack and called the Israelis war criminals. (A bit rich, coming from an organization whose fighters have just slaughtered about 1,300 Israeli civilians, many in their beds.) Popular opinion in Arab countries agreed, as you would expect, and started demonstrating against the Israelis.
Whereas Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli Defence Forces both denied responsibility for the blast. It was caused, they said, by a rocket launched at Israel by Islamic Jihad, Hamas’s rival and sidekick, that came down short and exploded in the hospital parking lot. President Joe Biden, on a brief visit to Israel, agreed.
Islamic Jihad denied that accusation, of course. And the leaders of Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority, who were also scheduled to meet Biden in a summit during his whirlwind visit to the region, abruptly canceled the event. They didn’t say why, but they are obviously afraid of the rage of the “Arab street.”
So can we figure out where the truth lies in all this — and does it even matter? Physical evidence would be best, but only one side has access to the site.
What we’re left with is the old Latin legal strategy deployed by the statesman and lawyer Cicero in a famous case in the late Roman Republic: “Cui bono?” Who benefits from this [crime]?
If it really is a deliberate crime, it’s unlikely to have been committed by the Israelis. The consequence was to stir anger in the Arab Street, influence world opinion against the Israelis, and force the cancellation of the meeting between the U.S. president and Arab leaders. All those things benefit Hamas’s cause, not Israel’s.
Aha, say the proponents of the Israeli plot theory, but Israel wants to drive all the Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip so it’s using terror tactics (a second Nakba). But the only place those Palestinians could go is Egypt, which borders the Gaza Strip.
However, the peace treaty with Egypt in 1978 is the foundation of Israel’s relative security from Arab attack, and the Egyptian regime definitely does not want a couple million Palestinian refugees on its hands.
The Palestinians would not only be an economic burden for Egypt, but a political threat to Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s regime, because they would work to replace him with an Egyptian leader more supportive of the Palestinian cause. Neither Sisi nor the Israelis wants that, so no second Nakba.
What are we left with, then? Not a definite culprit but at least a list of probable causes for those 500-odd deaths at the hospital. In declining order of probability, they are: An off-course Palestinian rocket fired by Islamic Jihad. (They are almost all homemade and at least 3,000 have been launched in this round of fighting.)
An off-course Israeli missile.
A deliberate Hamas false-flag explosion timed to coincide with Biden’s meeting with Arab leaders.
A deliberate strike ordered by the Israel government for inexplicable reasons (Cui bono?) or freelance revenge by some grief-stricken Israeli pilot.
And does it actually matter much who did it? Not really. Everybody will believe what they are used to believing, and act as they usually act.
