CBS ran a special report on the Israel-Hamas War on Friday night and had the common decency to acknowledge that history did not begin on October 7 or even in 1967. Unfortunately, however, they also decided to commit to both-sideism on the question of Israel’s creation, a decision that naturally led to one massive and glaring historical omission.
As part of the report, senior foreign correspondent Mark Phillips interviewed London-based Palestinian author Ghada Karmi, who declared that, “You have the people of Gaza, either being bombed by Israel regularly, and blockaded, and whose lives are abnormal and are miserable really.”
Phillips then introduced Karmi as someone whose “family fled Jerusalem when Israel was founded in 1948.”
Somehow, Phillips never managed to mention that a coalition of Arab states invaded Israel on that very day.
Still, Karmi lamented, “The way the story has been presented by Israel and its supporters and friends is some kind of mindless act of terrorism, some crazy group called Hamas quite honestly could be from Mars from the kind of description that you get because they are evil or something. Decide that they’re going to go and kill a load of Jews. This is a travesty.”
“Or something”? Nobody thinks Hamas is mindless. They are of the mind that Israel shouldn’t exist and so that means they view killing Jews as a way to achieve that goal. It is also ironic that Karmi suggests Israel is just bombing and blockading Gaza for the fun of it while lamenting that people think Hamas, which just committed the greatest crime against the Jewish people since the Holocaust, is evil.
Nevertheless, Phillips continued with the theme of trying to rebut arguments nobody is making, “There are a lot of travesties and tragedies in the history here, even disagreement on when it starts. The two arguments you hear right now is some people drawing a line from the Hamas attack and others drawing a much longer historic line that brought us-- it's going back to 1948 and even before that. Which do you think this current crisis is most connected to?”
Yes, the current fighting is because of the Hamas attacks, but nobody’s dumb enough to believe that just happened out of nowhere. As for Karmi, she followed Phillip’s example of ignoring the Arab invasion of 1948, “It's connected to the history of this whole thing, how it arose. 1948 is a very important date in the history of both the Palestinians and the Israelis. It was the date when the state of Israel was set up and also the date when the vast majority of Palestine's population was forced out.”
After a news clip from 1948, Phillips narrated, “The Palestinians call it the Nakba, the catastrophe. When the Israeli state was founded in '48 and more than 700,000 of the Palestinians living there were forced out of their homes or fled. From the south of the country, they sought refuge in what was then the Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip, a dusty 25-mile long sliver of land along the Mediterranean coast. Of the more than 2 million residents of Gaza now, the U.N. considers 1.7 million of them still to be refugees.”
And how did Egypt come to control the Gaza Strip in 1948? Maybe one day CBS will find the answer.
Sandwhiched around clips of Karmi were clips of former Israeli ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, but he was limited to deploring Hamas and lamenting the Palestinians missed an opportunity to build a Middle Eastern version of Singapore after the Israeli withdrawal from The Strip.
Here is a transcript for the October 20 show:
A CBS News Special: The Israel-Hamas War: The World on Edge
10/20/2023
10:41 PM ET
GHADA KARMI: You have the people of Gaza, either being bombed by Israel regularly, and blockaded, and whose lives are abnormal and are miserable really.
MARK PHILLIPS: Ghada Karmi is a Palestinian author based in London. Her family fled Jerusalem when Israel was founded in 1948.
KARMI: The way the story has been presented by Israel and its supporters and friends is some kind of mindless act of terrorism, some crazy group called Hamas quite honestly could be from Mars from the kind of description that you get because they are evil or something. Decide that they’re going to go and kill a load of Jews. This is a travesty.
PHILLIPS: There are a lot of travesties and tragedies in the history here, even disagreement on when it starts. The two arguments you hear right now is some people drawing a line from the Hamas attack and others drawing a much longer historic line that brought us-- it's going back to 1948 and even before that. Which do you think this current crisis is most connected to?
KARMI: It's connected to the history of this whole thing, how it arose. 1948 is a very important date in the history of both the Palestinians and the Israelis. It was the date when the state of Israel was set up and also the date when the vast majority of Palestine's population was forced out.
1948 NEWS REPORTER: The city of Haifa and its harbor have become the center of bitter conflict as the new Jewish state is born in the tense atmosphere of civil war.
PHILLIPS: The Palestinians call it the Nakba, the catastrophe. When the Israeli state was founded in '48 and more than 700,000 of the Palestinians living there were forced out of their homes or fled.
From the south of the country, they sought refuge in what was then the Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip, a dusty 25-mile long sliver of land along the Mediterranean coast. Of the more than 2 million residents of Gaza now, the U.N. considers 1.7 million of them still to be refugees.
