Why the al-Dura Blood Libel Still Matters. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, May 19, 2013.
Tobin:
The
Muslim and Arab world will reject any investigation into it that will not
accept their narrative. But more troubling will be the answer from many in the
West and even in Israel who will ask why anyone should bother with such an old
story. We should, they will assert, care about how to end the conflict, not who
killed al-Dura. For Israel or its friends to spend any time on this issue is a
diversion of effort from the peace process that will only anger Palestinians
who will say that any argument about the incident demonstrates insensitivity,
even if the facts are correct. But anyone who doubts the importance of
debunking what has become a new version of the old Jewish blood libel is the
one who is wrong.
There
have been many good accounts of this affair, including this piece by Nidra Poller published in COMMENTARY in September 2005. I’ve also written about it on
our blog several times, including this piece from last year about the French
court case. Yet even before those were published one of the first Western
accounts of the al-Dura affair got to the heart of this problem. James
Fallows’s June 2003 article in the Atlantic,
“Who Shot Mohammed al-Dura?” pointed out not just the fact that there was good
reason to doubt the initial version of the story but that the facts wouldn’t
change anyone’s mind because of the iconic status of the photo allegedly
depicting the boy and his father. Indeed, he seemed to suggest in a
deconstructionist spirit that objective truth was itself impossible since both
sides sought to create their own facts in order to prove they were right.
Fallows
had a point about the intractable nature of this debate. But the problem here
is that the lie about al-Dura isn’t peripheral to the widespread misperceptions
about the overall conflict. If, as I wrote last month, a mainstream media
figure like CNN and Time magazine’s
Fareed Zakaria can assert that Israel has never offered peace to the Palestinians,
and get away with it, there is something profoundly wrong with the way our
culture has accepted Palestinian lies as either reasonable assertions or even
truths. It’s not just that the Israelis didn’t kill al-Dura; it’s that the
fault for the continuation of the conflict at the moment in history when he was
supposedly slain rests almost completely on the people who have elevated him to
sainthood and used his mythical spilled blood to justify boycotts of Israel.
This
story matters not because the truth can help undermine efforts to isolate
Israel. It’s important because so long as the Arab and Muslim world clings to
its blood libels all talk about peace is futile. The “Pallywood” productions,
of which the al-Dura hoax is the most prominent, haven’t just deceived the
West. They’ve also reinforced the Palestinian myths about themselves. As such,
they’ve done more real damage to the prospects of peace than any Israeli
settlement. Unless and until the Palestinians give up their campaign of
incitement against Israelis and Jews and stop seeking to depict this conflict
as one in which they are only the victims of a violent Zionist plot, there is
no hope for any solution, let alone the two-state solution most in Israel and
the West believe in.
