Destruction in Gaza, a place Palestinians cannot enjoy and cannot escape. (Reuters)
I occasionally devote a blog to cities devastated by war or natural disaster, showing how beautiful the place used to be (and to some extent may still be) as disaster consumes its ancient buildings. In most cases, the allure of places such as Beirut and Lviv, in Ukraine, is often well known by Western publics. Not so with Gaza, controlled by the terror group Hamas. Our mind’s eye – myself included – is taught to believe that Gaza is a hellhole and has been since the Israelis pulled out in 2005 (which is conveniently forgotten) – and of course now it is a hellhole, since bombing by the Israeli IDF has reduced much of it to rubble.
The video linked below is produced by the invaluable Middle East Media Research Institute. It will be an eye opener for most who have the courage to view it. MEMRI is devoted to exposing the lies that appear in most of the Middle Eastern media, which, alas, often includes mainstream Western media outlets, which have drunk the Kool Aid of Palestinian propaganda to the dregs. The propaganda asserts that Gaza is “occupied” by Israel, or that it is some sort of “concentration camp” from which Palestinians cannot escape. None of it is true. Here is the evidence:
I cannot vouch for the architecture on display in pre-war Gaza. But I do believe that there is some sort of mental convergence between those who support modern architecture and those who support Hamas.
Architecture Here and There 
It’s an obvious atrocity that so many Palestinian non-combatants are being prevented from accessing safety/sanctuary, not to mention starved of food. Yet, Western politicians, especially U.S. Republicans, have gone into their ‘Christian’ mode by withholding humanitarian aid for literally starving Palestinians. Jesus must be spinning!
… But who’s plausibly going to stop the IDF and PM Netanyahoo, especially with their state-of-the-art mostly-American weaponry?
There have been tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian non-combatants killed by Israeli assaults, largely the result of the decades-long Israeli occupation. This time, however, there not only were casualties in Israel but a significant number, even though they’re still far fewer than the Palestinian death toll.
Normally, there are rockets fired from Palestinian territory, intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile defenses, and Israel retaliates in their usual many-fold-measures way with smart bombs [etcetera] supplied by U.S. taxpayers, typically killing civilians or school children. The IDF’s frequent ‘defense’ is a claimed belief that their targets were using Palestinian non-combatants basically as human shields.
It’s Israel’s, and too much of the West’s, business-as-usual perception thus inevitable non-intervention. Palestinians are considered disposable. Generally, Israel and Westerners, including our legacy news-media, have been getting accustomed to so many Palestinian deaths over many decades of struggle with Israel.
For quite some time, maybe even decades, they have been perceived thus treated as not being of equal value to those within Israel. This may help explain the relative poverty, with Palestinian children picking through the mountains of Israeli waste basically dumped on territory annexed or on the way to being annexed.
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Just checking your source I found this
“The Middle East Media Research Institute is a pro-Israel website monitoring Islamic media in the Middle East. MEMRI’s stated aim is to “bridge the linguistic gap between the Middle East and the West”
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According to Norman Finkelstein “MEMRI is a main arm of Israeli propaganda. Although widely used in the mainstream media as a source of information on the Arab world, it is as trustworthy as Julius Streicher’s Der Sturmer was on the Jewish world.”
The strange thing is that the Palestinians are normally depicted by pro-Israel propagandists as being backward, not being able to engage in modern development, while in the video we suddenly are seeing the opposite…
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MEMRI as Der Sturmer? Stand upright, John, you are seeing everything upside down. –db
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You embarass yourself David. See Wikipedia’s coverage of this organisation.”The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), officially the Middle East Media and Research Institute,[1] is a Washington-based non-profit press monitoring and analysis organization that was co-founded by Israeli ex-intelligence officer Yigal Carmon and Israeli-American political scientist Meyrav Wurmser in 1997. It publishes and distributes free copies of media reports that have been translated into English—primarily from Arabic and Persian, but also from Urdu, Turkish, Pashto, and Russian.[5]
“Critics describe MEMRI as a strongly pro-Israel advocacy group that, in spite of describing itself as being “independent” and “non-partisan” in nature,[6][7][8] aims to portray the Arab world and the Muslim world in a negative light by producing and disseminating incomplete or inaccurate translations of the original versions of the media reports that it re-publishes.[9][10] It has also been accused of selectively focusing on the views of Islamic extremists while de-emphasizing or ignoring mainstream opinions.”
Matthew Montagu-Pollock
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Matthew, perhaps you cite an objective Wikipedia report, or perhaps not. In any event, the video does not lie. It portrays Gaza as almost a (prewar) Beirut-style Mediterranean paradise, with people living normal lives and enjoying an environment that has been destroyed not by the IDF but by their own leaders, by Hamas. The status quo would continue if Hamas had not attacked Israel and raped, tortured, desecrated, kidnapped and murdered 1,200 of its citizens. Hamas bears 100 percent of the responsibility for each ounce of blood shed since, and every ton of rubble in Gaza today. 100 percent. That is true even if MEMRI is a propaganda organization on a par with those of the Arabic left, which I doubt.
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If you can find “Born in Gaza“ on Netflix (before it’s taken down) you’ll get a glimps of the real Gaza. The video could be anywhere.
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“The status quo would continue if Hamas had not attacked Israel and raped, tortured, desecrated, kidnapped and murdered 1,200 of its citizens.”
The above line is obviously propaganda to create indignation, the way it is formulated. To get things straight:
If the Zionist aggressor throughout its whole history would not have ‘raped, tortured, desecrated, kidnapped and murdered’ and imprisoned and dislocated hundreds of thousands of Palestinians…
If the Zionist aggressor would not have regularly ‘mowed the lawn’, sometimes even unprovoked, killing a comparable amount of people as listed above, including ten times as much children…
What this 1200 number means is simply that Israeli lives are worth more than that of the Palestinians.
The status quo means ‘looking the other way’.
Really, only the blind, the corrupt and the hypocrite cannot see that Israel is the most racist country in the world, and the Zionist (formerly friends of the Nazi’s) have been the main aggressors al throughout history.
It is over and done with the dominance of the Zionist propaganda machine. Israel is by far not the modern country with modern values it claims to be (to stick Westerners a feather in the ass). Read the books ‘Jewish History Jewish Religion -The Weight Of Threethousand Years’ and ‘Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel’ by Israel Shahak. They can be freely downloaded on the internet.
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David, you’ve done a service making these videos available which helps us understand Gaza before Oct 7.
I for one can understand why so many are appalled by the suffering in Gaza now, but I am also appalled how so many put blame only Israel and none on Hamas despite their openly declared intention of eliminating the Jewish population in the region, despite their breaking the cease-fire on October 7 with an unusually sadistic attack that they knew would bring many Gazan deaths as their fighters were deeply enmeshed within civilian infrastructure, despite Hamas repression of the press, of political dissidents, of rights for women, gays, no elections…. It is clear Gazans cannot live in peace until Hamas and their allies are out of power.
But saying support for Hamas is linked to supporting modern architecture is a reach – it seems Israeli bombing will result in a lot of modern architecture in Gaza
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Thank you, whoever you are. As for equating Hamas supporters with supporters of modernist architecture, maybe it is a reach. I have no evidence for it, except for the evidence of my eyes. To me, it seems obvious.
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Anonymous… ‘Thank you, whoever you are.’…
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